I think cryonics compares unfavourably in financial terms to the more conventional route to immortality—namely having babies—for most people.
There will be a few exceptions - elderly men with no kids who can’t get a date, post-menopasual women with no kids, the otherwise infertile, rich people locked into unproductive marriages—etc.
No doubt this contributes to cryonics’s lack of popularity.
In biology 101 one learns that most organisms value having kids over living for a long time.
It appears to be fairly easy to trade kids for longer life—adopt a regime of dietary energy restriction.
Very few people do that. I figure they mostly value kids over a long life.
Also, check out the “cryonics wives” effect. It looks as though some people are not happy about the resource-investment conflict between ice and offspring.
Prospective sleepers no-doubt have their own values. I am describing one reason why most people don’t sign up for cryonics. It’s partly because it makes little economic sense.
“In biology 101 one learns that most organisms value having kids over living for a long time.”
This is very definitely a confusion over what evolution values versus what organisms value. Suppose you were faced with a choice: get sterilized now, or get shot in ten years. Evolution would favor B but the vast majority of people themselves would favor A.
“Very few people do that. I figure they mostly value kids over a long life.”
Most people don’t know about CR and don’t know what they want very clearly anyway.
This is very definitely a confusion over what evolution values versus what organisms value. Suppose you were faced with a choice: get sterilized now, or get shot in ten years. Evolution would favor B but the vast majority of people themselves would favor A.
Interestingly though, if the choice is: get shot now or one of your children gets shot now most people would choose the former.
Your example is pathological. “Painless sterilisation” and “being shot in ten years” are uncommon as choices to be made in the ancestral environment. By contrast, most organisms constantly face decisions regarding whether to expend resources on body maintenance programs or courtship, mating and reproduction.
Like I said, most organisms value having kids over living for a long time. That is because nature is concerned with reproduction—and not longevity. If you still do not “get” that, try sitting in on the class I mentioned.
“Your example is pathological. “Painless sterilisation” and “being shot in ten years” are uncommon in the ancestral environment.”
Yes, that’s why the two are different- because evolution did a lousy job at making an organism’s desires match its own desires.
“Like I said, most organisms value having kids over living for a long time. That is because nature is concerned with reproduction—and not longevity. If you still do not “get” that, try sitting in on the class I mentioned.”
You seem to be having difficulty with reading what I wrote. I never claimed that “what evolution wants” and “what an organism wants” referred to the same thing in the first place. You appear to be criticising a straw man of your own making.
You are saying, “Evolution would want organisms to value X, therefore organisms really do value X”. I pointed out that this is not valid logic, and gave a case where the logic breaks down. What is your reply? From your comment “For “lousy” read “excellent”″ it seems to be faith in the ability of evolution, to which my reply is http://lesswrong.com/lw/ks/the_wonder_of_evolution/.
I do also think is is generally true that most people value having kids over living for a long time—though I wasn’t making a logical generalisation from “most organisms” to “most people” in the absence of other observations.
Biology has reproduction as an ultimate goal, and longevity as an instrumental one—and most people’s actions seem broadly consistent with that to me—though obviously there are a few methusalahites.
“I said MOST organisms—and referred to a specific example: kids vs lifespan.”
You were obviously not excluding humans, since you then said immediately afterward:
“It appears to be fairly easy to trade kids for longer life—adopt a regime of dietary energy restriction. Very few people do that. I figure they mostly value kids over a long life.”
If you had said “most organisms would prefer to die in a few years rather than be sterilized, but humans are different because we have more complex value systems” you might at least have a case, but you’re very clearly trying to extent your argument from biology to humans (at least most humans) and it very clearly fails.
Humans are organisms too. They appear to do a pretty good job of reproducing to me. Check with the 6.9 billion humans. Looking at their actions, it seems fairly evident that most humans value kids pretty highly—otherwise they wouldn’t consistently raise so many of them.
This is a complete non-sequitur. Most people, I think, want to have kids, but this says nothing about whether people want kids or not dying more. I, after all, have always wanted a pony.
Humans are organisms. But it does not follow that if something applies to most organisms, it applies to most humans; after all, most organisms cannot learn to read. This kind of inference would only follow if instead of “most organisms X” the claim was “most members of all species of organisms X”.
It’s true. You did not use those exact words. However, you made the claim about most organisms, and went on to talk about humans. If you did not mean to imply an inference, you a) failed and b) were talking even worse nonsense than I thought.
Not inference: analogy with supporting statements.
I made a statement about biology, then I made an observation about humans and said that this observation was consistent with the statement made about biology.
Then, pray tell, why do so many people work so hard to go from the Third World to the First World, when the Third World has higher population growth and so a higher chance for more surviving grandchildren?
“In biology 101 one learns that most organisms value having kids over living for a long time.”
This is a bit more advanced than you imply; I learned about the trade-off between long life and reproductive fitness in a second year dedicated evolution class.
If vasectomy and tubal ligation performed before having kids had the side effect of physical immortality, would you expect these procedures to be more or less popular than they are currently?
It appears to be fairly easy to trade kids for longer life—adopt a regime of dietary energy restriction.
Why couldn’t you have kids and restrict calories? And correct me if I’m wrong, but I had thought that there was still very little evidence on caloric restriction actually extending life in humans.
I don’t know if calorie restriction is the same thing or how this applies to men, but underweight women will stop menstruating, and presumably can’t reproduce.
I still don’t understand why you can’t restrict calories and have kids, especially if you take a short break from calorie reduction to devote more energy to semen production or periods, and then resume the caloric restriction.
Hmm. Do you mean if you ignore the evidence about how it does that in lots of other species—and that it produces similar short-term health improvements and metabolic changes in humans and other animals—and instead insist on only counting studies directly involving human longevity as evidence?
Yes. I’m one of those crazy people who wants to see calorie reduction actually extend human lives before I believe that calorie reduction extends human lives.
But I would be interested in seeing evidence that caloric reduction leads to “short-term health improvements” in humans.
Caloric restriction clearly can benefit the average American. The verdict is out on whether this is only because the average American has such an awful diet that decreasing consumption necessarily decreases consumption of an awful diet; however, the additional evidence from other species combines to be pretty compelling in my mind.
I don’t partake in chronic caloric restriction, but I fast occasionally, ideally as much as I can while maintaining the amount of muscle that I like to keep, and without dropping my productivity levels. The evidence in favor of the health benefits of intermittent fasting seems slightly better than CR, although I believe it is only beginning to get more attention in research.
“At present, although only limited information is available on the effect of CR on humans, credible data exist that allow us to make some reasonable predictions. For example, a 1994 European clinical study on non-obese, middle-aged subjects under a 10-week, 20% energy reduction (Velthuis-te Wierik et al. 1994), and the 2-year Biosphere experience (Walford et al. 1999, 2002)), produced promising human data on CR’s efficacies (Rae 2004). Further, a recent report (Fontana et al. 2004) shows CR’s beneficial effects, including the suppression of an atherosclerosis and inflammation biomarker in humans, solidifying the possibility of CR’s extension of human longevity. One clear-cut and most immediate sign of CR’s effect in human subjects is body weight reduction, as in the case of rodents. It is important to realize how simple weight reduction (mainly from loss of fat mass, particularly visceral adiposity) could have a strong impact on inflammation, insulin resistance, and diabetes in humans as reported recently (Dandona et al. 2004; Ferroni et al. 2004). If obesity is a state of inflammation and obesity-related insulin resistance is a chronic inflammatory disease, as indicated by biomarkers, then a reduction of adiposity by CR alone could exert a great improvement on human health and functional longevity, which is already widely accepted by many biomedical researchers.”
timtyler has actually already refused to respond to a direct inquiry as to how he goes about fulfilling this biological imperative (too lazy to find the link). File it under things that make you go “hmm...”.
Your actual argument concerns how much money it takes to raise a kid. I claim expertise in this domain, having sired three. You have not established yours.
The price I’m quoted for cryonics is far less than I spend on “the conventional route to immortality” which, by the way, isn’t that. What it is is creating persons.
There’s a p(success) needed in this argument. The cost of raising kids is not up for debate here—we all have access to a lot of information about that.
I concede that your (and my) life choices are not relevant to establishing the “cost” side of the equation. I mistakenly assumed you were comparing the unweighted costs.
If we want to reason about p(success), we have to define clearly what “success” means. We’re comparing apples to oranges if we multiply the cost of a child by p(immortality through children) on one side, and the cost of funding suspension by p(immortality through not dying) on the other.
One of the more obvious and simple approaches would be to calculate the expected delta in gene copies in (say) 2100 - as a result of investing a dollar in cryonics vs investing a dollar in kids. p(cryonics success) is the biggest unknown here.
I don’t care about gene copies, I care about persons. And I care about not dying. Uploading counts as a success as far as I’m concerned.
I don’t love my kids for their genes. I don’t raise my kids for their genes. If I did, I would try to marry them off right after puberty, and hold it as moral to do so, and damn their education and all that. Breed them like rabbits; count that as success. So much for obvious and simple; more like obvious, simple and wrong.
What I value about my kids is the persons they are, and my pride in them and love for them is bound up in the fact that their personhood is a joint project, a creation of myself, my wife and each of them.
(EDIT: shoot, I ought to move this thread from here where it doesn’t belong. Any idea where it does belong?)
I was presenting what you get if you model people as fitness maximisers. That is a nice, simple and neat model. Feel free to calculate results using a different model if you like.
I am rather puzzled by your description of how you think a fitnesss maximiser would behave in a modern society. This is assuming you are not constrained by contractual obligations to your wife, I take it. Even then, are you sure that is best? In particular: if everyone else in society is following a K-selected strategy, is an r-selected strategy really very likely to work?
None of that is really very relevant to a thread which itself started out off-topic. (I’ll just note that my question upthread which offended you so much does turn out to have some relevance.)
If and when we get around to discussing which, of immortality through children or immortality through not dying, someone ought to want, we can take up r/K again in one of the leaf nodes. For now, I’m signing out.
I think cryonics compares unfavourably in financial terms to the more conventional route to immortality—namely having babies—for most people.
There will be a few exceptions - elderly men with no kids who can’t get a date, post-menopasual women with no kids, the otherwise infertile, rich people locked into unproductive marriages—etc.
No doubt this contributes to cryonics’s lack of popularity.
“I don’t want to be immortal by having kids; I want to be immortal by not dying.”
- Woody Allen, mutatis mutandis
In biology 101 one learns that most organisms value having kids over living for a long time.
It appears to be fairly easy to trade kids for longer life—adopt a regime of dietary energy restriction.
Very few people do that. I figure they mostly value kids over a long life.
Also, check out the “cryonics wives” effect. It looks as though some people are not happy about the resource-investment conflict between ice and offspring.
Prospective sleepers no-doubt have their own values. I am describing one reason why most people don’t sign up for cryonics. It’s partly because it makes little economic sense.
“In biology 101 one learns that most organisms value having kids over living for a long time.”
This is very definitely a confusion over what evolution values versus what organisms value. Suppose you were faced with a choice: get sterilized now, or get shot in ten years. Evolution would favor B but the vast majority of people themselves would favor A.
“Very few people do that. I figure they mostly value kids over a long life.”
Most people don’t know about CR and don’t know what they want very clearly anyway.
Interestingly though, if the choice is: get shot now or one of your children gets shot now most people would choose the former.
Your example is pathological. “Painless sterilisation” and “being shot in ten years” are uncommon as choices to be made in the ancestral environment. By contrast, most organisms constantly face decisions regarding whether to expend resources on body maintenance programs or courtship, mating and reproduction.
Like I said, most organisms value having kids over living for a long time. That is because nature is concerned with reproduction—and not longevity. If you still do not “get” that, try sitting in on the class I mentioned.
“Your example is pathological. “Painless sterilisation” and “being shot in ten years” are uncommon in the ancestral environment.”
Yes, that’s why the two are different- because evolution did a lousy job at making an organism’s desires match its own desires.
“Like I said, most organisms value having kids over living for a long time. That is because nature is concerned with reproduction—and not longevity. If you still do not “get” that, try sitting in on the class I mentioned.”
You do not understand the difference between what evolution wants and what an organism wants. They are not the same thing. See http://lesswrong.com/lw/l0/adaptationexecuters_not_fitnessmaximizers/.
For “lousy” read “excellent”.
You seem to be having difficulty with reading what I wrote. I never claimed that “what evolution wants” and “what an organism wants” referred to the same thing in the first place. You appear to be criticising a straw man of your own making.
You are saying, “Evolution would want organisms to value X, therefore organisms really do value X”. I pointed out that this is not valid logic, and gave a case where the logic breaks down. What is your reply? From your comment “For “lousy” read “excellent”″ it seems to be faith in the ability of evolution, to which my reply is http://lesswrong.com/lw/ks/the_wonder_of_evolution/.
What I originally said was:
“most organisms value having kids over living for a long time.”
I said MOST organisms—and referred to a specific example: kids vs lifespan.
Your representation of my position drops the qualifying word “most” and generalises it. That is not a legitimate operation in an argument.
Also, perhaps best to stop using quotation marks when attributing distorted versions of my views to me.
You appeared to be generalizing in this case from ‘most organisms’ to ‘most people’ which doesn’t seem valid to me.
I do also think is is generally true that most people value having kids over living for a long time—though I wasn’t making a logical generalisation from “most organisms” to “most people” in the absence of other observations.
Biology has reproduction as an ultimate goal, and longevity as an instrumental one—and most people’s actions seem broadly consistent with that to me—though obviously there are a few methusalahites.
“I said MOST organisms—and referred to a specific example: kids vs lifespan.”
You were obviously not excluding humans, since you then said immediately afterward:
“It appears to be fairly easy to trade kids for longer life—adopt a regime of dietary energy restriction. Very few people do that. I figure they mostly value kids over a long life.”
If you had said “most organisms would prefer to die in a few years rather than be sterilized, but humans are different because we have more complex value systems” you might at least have a case, but you’re very clearly trying to extent your argument from biology to humans (at least most humans) and it very clearly fails.
Humans are organisms too. They appear to do a pretty good job of reproducing to me. Check with the 6.9 billion humans. Looking at their actions, it seems fairly evident that most humans value kids pretty highly—otherwise they wouldn’t consistently raise so many of them.
This is a complete non-sequitur. Most people, I think, want to have kids, but this says nothing about whether people want kids or not dying more. I, after all, have always wanted a pony.
That just looks like this to me:
Tom: “you’re very clearly trying to extent your argument from biology to humans”
Tim: “Humans are organisms too”
Tom: “This is a complete non-sequitur”
Tim: It seems as though you missed some connections.
Humans are organisms. But it does not follow that if something applies to most organisms, it applies to most humans; after all, most organisms cannot learn to read. This kind of inference would only follow if instead of “most organisms X” the claim was “most members of all species of organisms X”.
Riiight. However, note that I never claimed that “if something applies to most organisms, it applies to most humans” in the first place.
It’s true. You did not use those exact words. However, you made the claim about most organisms, and went on to talk about humans. If you did not mean to imply an inference, you a) failed and b) were talking even worse nonsense than I thought.
Not inference: analogy with supporting statements.
I made a statement about biology, then I made an observation about humans and said that this observation was consistent with the statement made about biology.
“For “lousy” read “excellent”.”
Then, pray tell, why do so many people work so hard to go from the Third World to the First World, when the Third World has higher population growth and so a higher chance for more surviving grandchildren?
“In biology 101 one learns that most organisms value having kids over living for a long time.”
This is a bit more advanced than you imply; I learned about the trade-off between long life and reproductive fitness in a second year dedicated evolution class.
If vasectomy and tubal ligation performed before having kids had the side effect of physical immortality, would you expect these procedures to be more or less popular than they are currently?
Why couldn’t you have kids and restrict calories? And correct me if I’m wrong, but I had thought that there was still very little evidence on caloric restriction actually extending life in humans.
I don’t know if calorie restriction is the same thing or how this applies to men, but underweight women will stop menstruating, and presumably can’t reproduce.
For your “why” question, perhaps see: http://cr.timtyler.org/why/
I still don’t understand why you can’t restrict calories and have kids, especially if you take a short break from calorie reduction to devote more energy to semen production or periods, and then resume the caloric restriction.
Think of how many calories it must take to be a bodybuilder or grow ginormous peacocks.
Hmm. Do you mean if you ignore the evidence about how it does that in lots of other species—and that it produces similar short-term health improvements and metabolic changes in humans and other animals—and instead insist on only counting studies directly involving human longevity as evidence?
Yes. I’m one of those crazy people who wants to see calorie reduction actually extend human lives before I believe that calorie reduction extends human lives.
But I would be interested in seeing evidence that caloric reduction leads to “short-term health improvements” in humans.
See here.
Caloric restriction clearly can benefit the average American. The verdict is out on whether this is only because the average American has such an awful diet that decreasing consumption necessarily decreases consumption of an awful diet; however, the additional evidence from other species combines to be pretty compelling in my mind.
I don’t partake in chronic caloric restriction, but I fast occasionally, ideally as much as I can while maintaining the amount of muscle that I like to keep, and without dropping my productivity levels. The evidence in favor of the health benefits of intermittent fasting seems slightly better than CR, although I believe it is only beginning to get more attention in research.
E.g.:
“At present, although only limited information is available on the effect of CR on humans, credible data exist that allow us to make some reasonable predictions. For example, a 1994 European clinical study on non-obese, middle-aged subjects under a 10-week, 20% energy reduction (Velthuis-te Wierik et al. 1994), and the 2-year Biosphere experience (Walford et al. 1999, 2002)), produced promising human data on CR’s efficacies (Rae 2004). Further, a recent report (Fontana et al. 2004) shows CR’s beneficial effects, including the suppression of an atherosclerosis and inflammation biomarker in humans, solidifying the possibility of CR’s extension of human longevity. One clear-cut and most immediate sign of CR’s effect in human subjects is body weight reduction, as in the case of rodents. It is important to realize how simple weight reduction (mainly from loss of fat mass, particularly visceral adiposity) could have a strong impact on inflammation, insulin resistance, and diabetes in humans as reported recently (Dandona et al. 2004; Ferroni et al. 2004). If obesity is a state of inflammation and obesity-related insulin resistance is a chronic inflammatory disease, as indicated by biomarkers, then a reduction of adiposity by CR alone could exert a great improvement on human health and functional longevity, which is already widely accepted by many biomedical researchers.”
http://www.springerlink.com/content/y4v8476763644335/fulltext.pdf
How many children do you have?
timtyler has actually already refused to respond to a direct inquiry as to how he goes about fulfilling this biological imperative (too lazy to find the link). File it under things that make you go “hmm...”.
Upvoted for humor, but please, don’t encourage him… Imagine having Tim Tyler as your dad…
Right, so: the ad hominen section. I hope you have fun probing into my personal life.
Meanwhile, perhaps try to remember to address the actual arguments while you are at it.
Your actual argument concerns how much money it takes to raise a kid. I claim expertise in this domain, having sired three. You have not established yours.
The price I’m quoted for cryonics is far less than I spend on “the conventional route to immortality” which, by the way, isn’t that. What it is is creating persons.
There’s a p(success) needed in this argument. The cost of raising kids is not up for debate here—we all have access to a lot of information about that.
For genetic immortality, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immortality#Physical
I concede that your (and my) life choices are not relevant to establishing the “cost” side of the equation. I mistakenly assumed you were comparing the unweighted costs.
If we want to reason about p(success), we have to define clearly what “success” means. We’re comparing apples to oranges if we multiply the cost of a child by p(immortality through children) on one side, and the cost of funding suspension by p(immortality through not dying) on the other.
One of the more obvious and simple approaches would be to calculate the expected delta in gene copies in (say) 2100 - as a result of investing a dollar in cryonics vs investing a dollar in kids. p(cryonics success) is the biggest unknown here.
If we believe the salesman’s figures, http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/WillCryonicsWork.html gives 0.15 and 0.0023 as optimistic and pessimistic estimates. I figure kids would win either way under many circumstances.
I don’t care about gene copies, I care about persons. And I care about not dying. Uploading counts as a success as far as I’m concerned.
I don’t love my kids for their genes. I don’t raise my kids for their genes. If I did, I would try to marry them off right after puberty, and hold it as moral to do so, and damn their education and all that. Breed them like rabbits; count that as success. So much for obvious and simple; more like obvious, simple and wrong.
What I value about my kids is the persons they are, and my pride in them and love for them is bound up in the fact that their personhood is a joint project, a creation of myself, my wife and each of them.
(EDIT: shoot, I ought to move this thread from here where it doesn’t belong. Any idea where it does belong?)
I was presenting what you get if you model people as fitness maximisers. That is a nice, simple and neat model. Feel free to calculate results using a different model if you like.
I am rather puzzled by your description of how you think a fitnesss maximiser would behave in a modern society. This is assuming you are not constrained by contractual obligations to your wife, I take it. Even then, are you sure that is best? In particular: if everyone else in society is following a K-selected strategy, is an r-selected strategy really very likely to work?
None of that is really very relevant to a thread which itself started out off-topic. (I’ll just note that my question upthread which offended you so much does turn out to have some relevance.)
If and when we get around to discussing which, of immortality through children or immortality through not dying, someone ought to want, we can take up r/K again in one of the leaf nodes. For now, I’m signing out.