Most battles like this end in losses; I haven’t been able to convince any of my parents or grandparents to sign up. You are not alone, but in all probability, the ones who stand with you won’t include your biological family… that’s all I can say.
the ones who stand with you won’t include your biological family...
I have found that to be very true.
I think that I would not wish to have most of my family around if their lives were interrupted for 20, 50, or 100 years. Most of them have a hard enough time with living in a world that is moving at the pace of our current world, much less the drastic change that they would experience if they were to suddenly wake to a world to which they had no frame of reference.
I would not wish to be lonely in such a world, but, I already have friends with Alcor plans.
Now that would be a great extension of the LW community—a specific forum for people who want to make rationalist life decisions like that, to develop a more personal interaction and decrease subjective social costs.
I like it. Sure would beat the hell out of a lot of the advice I’ve heard, and if nothing else it would be good training in changing our minds and in aggregating evidence appropriately.
Can I help by pointing out flaws in your implied argument (“I believe cryonics is worthwhile, but without my family, I’d rather die, and they don’t want to”)?
Do you intend to kill yourself when some or all of your current family dies? If living beyond them is positive value, then cryonics seems a good bet even if no current family member has signed up.
Also, your arguments to them that they should sign up gets a LOT stronger with your family if you’re actually signed up and can help with the paperwork, insurance, and other practical barriers. In fact, some of your family might be willing to sign up if you set everything up for them, including paying, and they just have to sign.
In fact, cryonics as gift seems like a win all around. It’s a wonderful signal: I love you so much I’ll spend on your immortality. It gets more people signed up. It sidesteps most of the rationalization for non-action (it’s too much paperwork, I don’t know enough about what group to sign up, etc.).
Do you intend to kill yourself when some or all of your current family dies?
No. I do expect to create a new family of my own between now and then, though. It is the prospect of spending any substantial amount of time with no beloved company that I dread, and I can easily imagine being so lonely that I’d want to kill myself. (Viva la extroversion.) I would consider signing up with a fiancé(e) or spouse to be an adequate substitute (or even signing up one or more of my offspring) but currently have no such person(s).
Actually, shortly after posting the grandparent, I decided that limiting myself to family members was dumb and asked a couple of friends about it. My best friend has to talk to her fiancé first and doesn’t know when she’ll get around to that, but was generally receptive. Another friend seems very on-board with the idea. I might consider buying my sister a plan if I can get her to explain why she doesn’t like the idea (it might come down to finances; she’s being weird and mumbly about it), although I’m not sure what the legal issues surrounding her minority are.
Edit: Got a slightly more coherent response from my sister when I asked her if she’d cooperate with a cryonics plan if I bought her one. Freezing her when she dies “sounds really, really stupid”, and she’s not interested in talking about her “imminent death” and asks me to “please stop pestering her about it”. I linked her to this, and think that’s probably all I can safely do for a while. =/
You have best friends now, how did you meet them? In the worst case scenario where people you currently know don’t make it, do you doubt that you’ll be able to quickly make new friends?
Suppose that there are hundreds of people who would want to be your best friend, and that you would genuinely be good friends with. Your problem is that you don’t know who they are, or how to find them. Not to be too much of a technology optimist :-), but imagine if the super-Facebook-search engine of the future would be able to accurately put you in touch with those hundreds.
I met a significant percentage of my friends on a message board associated with a webcomic called The Order of the Stick. Others I met in school. One I met when she sent me a fan e-mail regarding my first webcomic. A majority of my friends, I met through people I already knew through one method or another.
When I pop out into the bright and glorious future, might they have a super-Facebook that would ferry me the cream of the friendship crop and have me re-ensconced in a comfy social net in a week tops? Maybe. But that’s adding one more if to the long string of ifs that cryonics already is, and that’s the if I can’t get over. What I do know is that my standard methods of making friends can’t be relied upon to work. I do not expect to wake up to fans of my webcomic eagerly awaiting my defrosting. I do not expect to wake up to find the Order of the Stick forum bustling with activity. I don’t expect to wake up to find myself enrolled in school. I certainly don’t expect that, if nobody I’m friends with gets frozen, I’ll be introduced to any of their friends.
In certain moods, that might be enough to push me to sign up, but the moods rarely last long enough that I could rely on the impetus from one to get through all the necessary paperwork.
Hmm, what about an outside view? That is, thinking about what it would be like for someone else. I’m a little too sleepy now to recall the exact reference, but there was something said here about how people make better estimates e.g. about how long a project will take if they think about how long similar projects have taken then how long they think this project will take. And, because you know about the present, let’s make our thought experiment happen in the present.
So, what if a woman was frozen a hundred years ago, and woke up today? Would she be able to make any friends? Would anyone care about anything she cared about? Would anyone be interested in her?
Another thought that occurs to me is that making friends is a skill that can be learned like any other skill. Perhaps you haven’t needed to be very skilled at making friends because you’ve grown up in this environment where friends have come to you fairly easily. So if you practice and become really good at that skill and have demonstrated to yourself that you can make friends easily in any situation, then you’d alleviate the worry that is causing you to feel conflicted about cryonics?
I imagine such a woman would be viewed as a worthwhile curiosity, but probably not a good prospective friend, by history geeks and journalists. I think she would find her sensibilities and skills poorly suited to letting her move comfortably about in mainstream society, which would inhibit her ability to pick up friends in other contexts. If there were other defrostees, she might connect with them in some sort of support group setting (now I’m imagining an episode of Futurama the title of which eludes me), which might provide the basis for collaboration and maybe, eventually, friendship, but it seems to me that that would take a while to develop if in fact it worked.
I would expect that it would be very natural to treat defrostees like foreign exchange students or refugees. They would be taken care of by a plain old mothering type like me, that are empathetic and understand what it’s like to wake up in a foreign place. I would show this 18th century woman places that she would relate to (the grocery store, the library, window shopping downtown) and introduce her to people, a little bit at a time. It would be a good 6-9 months before she felt quite acclimated, but by then she’d be finding a set of friends and her own interests. When she felt overwhelmed, I would tell her to take a bath and spend an evening reading a book.
I’ve stayed in foster homes in several countries for a variety of reasons, and this is quite usual.
Hmm, I wonder if you could leave instructions, kind of like a living will except in reverse, so to speak… e.g., “only unfreeze me if you know I’ll be able to make good friends and will be happy”. Perhaps with a bit more detail explaining what “good friends” and “being happy” means to you :-)
If I were in charge of defrosting people, I’d certainly respect their wishes to the best of my ability.
And, if your life does turn out to be miserable, you can, um, always commit suicide then… you don’t have to commit passive suicide now just in case… :-)
But it certainly is a huge leap in the dark, isn’t it? With most decisions, we have some idea of the possible outcomes and a sense of likelihoods...
Well, if everyone else they’ve revived so far has ended up a miserable outcast in an alien society, or some other consistent outcome, they might be able to take a guess at it.
If I’m in charge of unfreezing people, and I’m intelligent enough, it becomes a simple statistical analysis. I look at the totality of historical information available about the past life of frozen people: forum posts, blog postings, emails, youtube videos… and find out what correlates with the happiness or unhappiness of people who have been unfrozen. Then the decision depends what confidence level you’re looking for: do you want to be unfrozen if there’s a 80% chance that you’ll be happy? 90%? 95%? 99%? 99.9%?
Two, I might not be intelligent enough, or there might not be enough data available, or we might not be finding useful statistical correlates. Then if your instructions are to not unfreeze you if we don’t know, we don’t unfreeze you.
Three, I might be incompetent or mistaken so that I unfreeze you even if there isn’t any good evidence that you’re going to be happy with your new situation.
Since there is already only a slim chance of actually getting to the revival part (even though high payoff keeps the project interesting, like with insurance), after mixing in the requirement of reaching the necessary tech in (say) 70 years for someone alive today to still be around, and also managing to die before that, not a lot is left, so I wouldn’t call it something to be “expected”. “Conditional on you getting revived, there is a good chance some of your non-frozen relatives are still alive” is more like it (and maybe that’s what you meant).
Do you mean that a relative I have now, or one who will be born later, will probably be around at that time? Because the former would require that I die soon (while my relatives don’t) or that there’s an awfully rapid turnaround between my being frozen and my being defrosted.
Do it anyway. Lead by example. Over time, you might find they become more used to the idea, particularly if they have someone who can help them with the paperwork and organisational side of things. If you can help them financially, so much the better.
If you are successfully revived, you will have plenty of time to make new friends, and start a new family. I’m not meaning to sound callous, but its not unheard of for people to lose their families and eventually recover. I’m doing everything I can to persuade my family to sign up, but its up to them to make the final decision.
I’d give my life to save my family, but I wouldn’t kill myself if I found myself alone.
Did you become vegetarian, despite the fact that you couldn’t persuade anyone else? Did your decision at least make some people at least consider the option seriously?
Yes, because unlike with being alive, being a vegetarian is something I don’t need company to do happily. I probably wouldn’t have become a vegetarian if it involved being shipped to the Isle of the Vegetarians, population: a lot of strangers, unless I could convince people to join me. I don’t think my vegetarianism has made anyone give really serious thought to the diet; the person who has reacted with the most thoughtfulness upon my disclosure has a vegan mother and I’m inclined to credit her for all his respect for not eating animals.
Well, the future will certainly be full of mostly strangers. If you can’t convince any of your current friends/family to sign up, you might be better of making friends with those that have already signed up. There are bound to some you would get along with (I’ve read OOTS since it started :-) )
If I ever have any success in convincing anyone else to sign up for cryonics, I’ll let you know how I did it (in the unlikely event that this will help!).
It’s much easier to overcome your own aversion to signing up alone than to convince your family to sign up with you. Even assuming you can convince them that living longer is a good thing, there are a ton of prerequisites needed before one can accurately evaluate the viability of cryonics.
I think it’s great that you’ve taken the first steps, and would encourage you to go ahead and sign up.
In my experience, arguing with people who’ve decided they definitely don’t want to do something, especially if their reasons are irrational, is never productive. As Eliezer says, it may simply be that those who stand with you will be your friends and the family you create, not the family you came from. But I would guess the best chance of your sister signing up would be obtained by you going ahead right now, but not pushing the matter, so that in a few years the fact of your being signed up will have become more of an established state of affairs.
It’s a sobering demonstration of just how much the human mind relies on social proof for anything that can’t be settled by immediate personal experience. (Conjecture: any intelligence must at least initially work this way; a universe in which it were not necessary, would be too simple to evolve intelligence in the first place. But I digress.)
Is there anything that can be done to bend social instinct more in the right direction here? For example, I know there have been face-to-face gatherings for those who live within reach of them; would it help if several people at such a gathering showed up wearing ‘I’m signed up for cryonics’ badges?
My dad was the only one with any non-mumbling answer to the suggestion. I told him I wanted him to live forever and he told me I was selfish. He said some things about overpopulation and global warming and universalizability and no proven results from the procedure.
Well, if it is any consolation, I have had zero success and a bunch of ridicule from all friends and family I mentioned the idea to.
I’ve had the “selfish, overpopulation and global warming” objection from my mother, and I then reminded her that (a) she had a fair amount of personal wealth and wasn’t remotely interested in spending any of it on third world charities, charities who try to reduce population or efficient ways to combat global warming and (b) she wasn’t in favor of killing people to reduce population. Of course, this had no effect.
Do you think it’s worthwhile to argue with him rationally on the details, or that if you make him understand his reasons aren’t valid he’ll just mumble “no” like the rest of your family?
Arguing with my dad is profoundly unpleasant, and he is extremely stubborn. I may send him links to websites, especially if I need his cooperation to involve my sister because she’s 16, but I don’t anticipate a good result from continuing to engage him directly (at least if I’m the one doing it: our relationship history is such that the odds of me convincing him of anything he’s presently strongly against approach nil, and prolonged attempts to do so end in tears.)
I want to sign up. I don’t want to sign up alone. I can’t convince any of my family to sign up with me. Help.
Most battles like this end in losses; I haven’t been able to convince any of my parents or grandparents to sign up. You are not alone, but in all probability, the ones who stand with you won’t include your biological family… that’s all I can say.
I have found that to be very true.
I think that I would not wish to have most of my family around if their lives were interrupted for 20, 50, or 100 years. Most of them have a hard enough time with living in a world that is moving at the pace of our current world, much less the drastic change that they would experience if they were to suddenly wake to a world to which they had no frame of reference.
I would not wish to be lonely in such a world, but, I already have friends with Alcor plans.
Now that would be a great extension of the LW community—a specific forum for people who want to make rationalist life decisions like that, to develop a more personal interaction and decrease subjective social costs.
It could be a more general advice-giving forum. Come and describe your problem, and we’ll present solutions.
That might also be a useful way to track the performance of rationalist methods in the real world.
I like it. Sure would beat the hell out of a lot of the advice I’ve heard, and if nothing else it would be good training in changing our minds and in aggregating evidence appropriately.
Can I help by pointing out flaws in your implied argument (“I believe cryonics is worthwhile, but without my family, I’d rather die, and they don’t want to”)?
Do you intend to kill yourself when some or all of your current family dies? If living beyond them is positive value, then cryonics seems a good bet even if no current family member has signed up.
Also, your arguments to them that they should sign up gets a LOT stronger with your family if you’re actually signed up and can help with the paperwork, insurance, and other practical barriers. In fact, some of your family might be willing to sign up if you set everything up for them, including paying, and they just have to sign.
In fact, cryonics as gift seems like a win all around. It’s a wonderful signal: I love you so much I’ll spend on your immortality. It gets more people signed up. It sidesteps most of the rationalization for non-action (it’s too much paperwork, I don’t know enough about what group to sign up, etc.).
No. I do expect to create a new family of my own between now and then, though. It is the prospect of spending any substantial amount of time with no beloved company that I dread, and I can easily imagine being so lonely that I’d want to kill myself. (Viva la extroversion.) I would consider signing up with a fiancé(e) or spouse to be an adequate substitute (or even signing up one or more of my offspring) but currently have no such person(s).
Actually, shortly after posting the grandparent, I decided that limiting myself to family members was dumb and asked a couple of friends about it. My best friend has to talk to her fiancé first and doesn’t know when she’ll get around to that, but was generally receptive. Another friend seems very on-board with the idea. I might consider buying my sister a plan if I can get her to explain why she doesn’t like the idea (it might come down to finances; she’s being weird and mumbly about it), although I’m not sure what the legal issues surrounding her minority are.
Edit: Got a slightly more coherent response from my sister when I asked her if she’d cooperate with a cryonics plan if I bought her one. Freezing her when she dies “sounds really, really stupid”, and she’s not interested in talking about her “imminent death” and asks me to “please stop pestering her about it”. I linked her to this, and think that’s probably all I can safely do for a while. =/
You have best friends now, how did you meet them? In the worst case scenario where people you currently know don’t make it, do you doubt that you’ll be able to quickly make new friends?
Suppose that there are hundreds of people who would want to be your best friend, and that you would genuinely be good friends with. Your problem is that you don’t know who they are, or how to find them. Not to be too much of a technology optimist :-), but imagine if the super-Facebook-search engine of the future would be able to accurately put you in touch with those hundreds.
I met a significant percentage of my friends on a message board associated with a webcomic called The Order of the Stick. Others I met in school. One I met when she sent me a fan e-mail regarding my first webcomic. A majority of my friends, I met through people I already knew through one method or another.
When I pop out into the bright and glorious future, might they have a super-Facebook that would ferry me the cream of the friendship crop and have me re-ensconced in a comfy social net in a week tops? Maybe. But that’s adding one more if to the long string of ifs that cryonics already is, and that’s the if I can’t get over. What I do know is that my standard methods of making friends can’t be relied upon to work. I do not expect to wake up to fans of my webcomic eagerly awaiting my defrosting. I do not expect to wake up to find the Order of the Stick forum bustling with activity. I don’t expect to wake up to find myself enrolled in school. I certainly don’t expect that, if nobody I’m friends with gets frozen, I’ll be introduced to any of their friends.
Well, at least you’ll have the Less Wrong reunion.
In the vanishingly small fraction of worlds where the Earth is not destroyed.
I follow Nick Bostrom on anthropic reasoning as well as existential risk, so I expect to see you there.
In certain moods, that might be enough to push me to sign up, but the moods rarely last long enough that I could rely on the impetus from one to get through all the necessary paperwork.
Hmm, what about an outside view? That is, thinking about what it would be like for someone else. I’m a little too sleepy now to recall the exact reference, but there was something said here about how people make better estimates e.g. about how long a project will take if they think about how long similar projects have taken then how long they think this project will take. And, because you know about the present, let’s make our thought experiment happen in the present.
So, what if a woman was frozen a hundred years ago, and woke up today? Would she be able to make any friends? Would anyone care about anything she cared about? Would anyone be interested in her?
Another thought that occurs to me is that making friends is a skill that can be learned like any other skill. Perhaps you haven’t needed to be very skilled at making friends because you’ve grown up in this environment where friends have come to you fairly easily. So if you practice and become really good at that skill and have demonstrated to yourself that you can make friends easily in any situation, then you’d alleviate the worry that is causing you to feel conflicted about cryonics?
I imagine such a woman would be viewed as a worthwhile curiosity, but probably not a good prospective friend, by history geeks and journalists. I think she would find her sensibilities and skills poorly suited to letting her move comfortably about in mainstream society, which would inhibit her ability to pick up friends in other contexts. If there were other defrostees, she might connect with them in some sort of support group setting (now I’m imagining an episode of Futurama the title of which eludes me), which might provide the basis for collaboration and maybe, eventually, friendship, but it seems to me that that would take a while to develop if in fact it worked.
(Meta) I wish byrnema had not deleted their comment which was in this position.
I would expect that it would be very natural to treat defrostees like foreign exchange students or refugees. They would be taken care of by a plain old mothering type like me, that are empathetic and understand what it’s like to wake up in a foreign place. I would show this 18th century woman places that she would relate to (the grocery store, the library, window shopping downtown) and introduce her to people, a little bit at a time. It would be a good 6-9 months before she felt quite acclimated, but by then she’d be finding a set of friends and her own interests. When she felt overwhelmed, I would tell her to take a bath and spend an evening reading a book.
I’ve stayed in foster homes in several countries for a variety of reasons, and this is quite usual.
Hmm, I wonder if you could leave instructions, kind of like a living will except in reverse, so to speak… e.g., “only unfreeze me if you know I’ll be able to make good friends and will be happy”. Perhaps with a bit more detail explaining what “good friends” and “being happy” means to you :-)
If I were in charge of defrosting people, I’d certainly respect their wishes to the best of my ability.
And, if your life does turn out to be miserable, you can, um, always commit suicide then… you don’t have to commit passive suicide now just in case… :-)
But it certainly is a huge leap in the dark, isn’t it? With most decisions, we have some idea of the possible outcomes and a sense of likelihoods...
Why would they be in a position to know that I’d be able to make good friends and be happy?
Well, if everyone else they’ve revived so far has ended up a miserable outcast in an alien society, or some other consistent outcome, they might be able to take a guess at it.
Bit of a gap between “not a miserable outcast in an alien society” and “has good close friends”.
I can think of three possibilities...
If I’m in charge of unfreezing people, and I’m intelligent enough, it becomes a simple statistical analysis. I look at the totality of historical information available about the past life of frozen people: forum posts, blog postings, emails, youtube videos… and find out what correlates with the happiness or unhappiness of people who have been unfrozen. Then the decision depends what confidence level you’re looking for: do you want to be unfrozen if there’s a 80% chance that you’ll be happy? 90%? 95%? 99%? 99.9%?
Two, I might not be intelligent enough, or there might not be enough data available, or we might not be finding useful statistical correlates. Then if your instructions are to not unfreeze you if we don’t know, we don’t unfreeze you.
Three, I might be incompetent or mistaken so that I unfreeze you even if there isn’t any good evidence that you’re going to be happy with your new situation.
Even if none of your relatives sign up for cryonics, I would expect some of them to still be alive when you are revived.
Since there is already only a slim chance of actually getting to the revival part (even though high payoff keeps the project interesting, like with insurance), after mixing in the requirement of reaching the necessary tech in (say) 70 years for someone alive today to still be around, and also managing to die before that, not a lot is left, so I wouldn’t call it something to be “expected”. “Conditional on you getting revived, there is a good chance some of your non-frozen relatives are still alive” is more like it (and maybe that’s what you meant).
Do you mean that a relative I have now, or one who will be born later, will probably be around at that time? Because the former would require that I die soon (while my relatives don’t) or that there’s an awfully rapid turnaround between my being frozen and my being defrosted.
Well the whole point of signing up now is that you might die soon.
So sign up now. If you get to be old And still have no young family And the singularity doesn’t seem close, then cancel.
Do it anyway. Lead by example. Over time, you might find they become more used to the idea, particularly if they have someone who can help them with the paperwork and organisational side of things. If you can help them financially, so much the better.
If you are successfully revived, you will have plenty of time to make new friends, and start a new family. I’m not meaning to sound callous, but its not unheard of for people to lose their families and eventually recover. I’m doing everything I can to persuade my family to sign up, but its up to them to make the final decision.
I’d give my life to save my family, but I wouldn’t kill myself if I found myself alone.
I’d be more convinced of my ability to lead by example if I’d ever convinced anyone to become a vegetarian.
Did you become vegetarian, despite the fact that you couldn’t persuade anyone else? Did your decision at least make some people at least consider the option seriously?
Yes, because unlike with being alive, being a vegetarian is something I don’t need company to do happily. I probably wouldn’t have become a vegetarian if it involved being shipped to the Isle of the Vegetarians, population: a lot of strangers, unless I could convince people to join me. I don’t think my vegetarianism has made anyone give really serious thought to the diet; the person who has reacted with the most thoughtfulness upon my disclosure has a vegan mother and I’m inclined to credit her for all his respect for not eating animals.
Well, the future will certainly be full of mostly strangers. If you can’t convince any of your current friends/family to sign up, you might be better of making friends with those that have already signed up. There are bound to some you would get along with (I’ve read OOTS since it started :-) )
If I ever have any success in convincing anyone else to sign up for cryonics, I’ll let you know how I did it (in the unlikely event that this will help!).
It’s much easier to overcome your own aversion to signing up alone than to convince your family to sign up with you. Even assuming you can convince them that living longer is a good thing, there are a ton of prerequisites needed before one can accurately evaluate the viability of cryonics.
I think it’s great that you’ve taken the first steps, and would encourage you to go ahead and sign up.
In my experience, arguing with people who’ve decided they definitely don’t want to do something, especially if their reasons are irrational, is never productive. As Eliezer says, it may simply be that those who stand with you will be your friends and the family you create, not the family you came from. But I would guess the best chance of your sister signing up would be obtained by you going ahead right now, but not pushing the matter, so that in a few years the fact of your being signed up will have become more of an established state of affairs.
It’s a sobering demonstration of just how much the human mind relies on social proof for anything that can’t be settled by immediate personal experience. (Conjecture: any intelligence must at least initially work this way; a universe in which it were not necessary, would be too simple to evolve intelligence in the first place. But I digress.)
Is there anything that can be done to bend social instinct more in the right direction here? For example, I know there have been face-to-face gatherings for those who live within reach of them; would it help if several people at such a gathering showed up wearing ‘I’m signed up for cryonics’ badges?
What do you perceive as the main barrier to their signing up?
My dad was the only one with any non-mumbling answer to the suggestion. I told him I wanted him to live forever and he told me I was selfish. He said some things about overpopulation and global warming and universalizability and no proven results from the procedure.
Well, if it is any consolation, I have had zero success and a bunch of ridicule from all friends and family I mentioned the idea to.
I’ve had the “selfish, overpopulation and global warming” objection from my mother, and I then reminded her that (a) she had a fair amount of personal wealth and wasn’t remotely interested in spending any of it on third world charities, charities who try to reduce population or efficient ways to combat global warming and (b) she wasn’t in favor of killing people to reduce population. Of course, this had no effect.
Do you think it’s worthwhile to argue with him rationally on the details, or that if you make him understand his reasons aren’t valid he’ll just mumble “no” like the rest of your family?
Arguing with my dad is profoundly unpleasant, and he is extremely stubborn. I may send him links to websites, especially if I need his cooperation to involve my sister because she’s 16, but I don’t anticipate a good result from continuing to engage him directly (at least if I’m the one doing it: our relationship history is such that the odds of me convincing him of anything he’s presently strongly against approach nil, and prolonged attempts to do so end in tears.)