More seriously, not only is the question the same, the answer is the same too: “Why yes, you can live forever! And it’s easy! Just pay this reasonable fee to the Organization, and we will take care of it.”
If religion teaches us anything, it is that people really don’t want to die, and will happily be convinced by very poor arguments that they aren’t going to.
Therefore, the fact that a given person is convinced that cryonics will work is much weaker evidence about whether cryonics will work or not than if that that person were convinced it will not, since it would require less high-quality evidence to convince him or her in the “yes” direction.
This argument holds even if the person is yourself—we should be more doubtful about our convictions if they happen to be the kind of thing that we are inherently predisposed to believe.
Therefore, the fact that a given person is convinced that cryonics will work is much weaker evidence about whether cryonics will work or not than if that that person were convinced it will not, since it would require less high-quality evidence to convince him or her in the “yes” direction.
No it isn’t. The similarity to religion means that people will be more easily convinced it will not work, unless it happens to be the mainstream belief.
Very true! So a clever man will know that the cryonist was convinced against the odds, and so the fact that the cryonist was convinced is strong evidence; clearly the clever man should believe also. But! this must have been how the cryonist reasoned, which explains why he was easily convinced with a minimum of evidence. That means that it is actually very easy to be convinced about effectiveness of cryonics, so other peoples’ belief is weak evidence after all. So I can clearly not believe in cryonics!
Yes, getting hugely tangled up in meta-level arguments instead of looking at the actual arguments and evidence and object-level way-the-world-is would indeed be a classic blunder.
More seriously, not only is the question the same, the answer is the same too: “Why yes, you can live forever! And it’s easy! Just pay this reasonable fee to the Organization, and we will take care of it.”
If religion teaches us anything, it is that people really don’t want to die, and will happily be convinced by very poor arguments that they aren’t going to.
Therefore, the fact that a given person is convinced that cryonics will work is much weaker evidence about whether cryonics will work or not than if that that person were convinced it will not, since it would require less high-quality evidence to convince him or her in the “yes” direction.
This argument holds even if the person is yourself—we should be more doubtful about our convictions if they happen to be the kind of thing that we are inherently predisposed to believe.
No it isn’t. The similarity to religion means that people will be more easily convinced it will not work, unless it happens to be the mainstream belief.
Very true! So a clever man will know that the cryonist was convinced against the odds, and so the fact that the cryonist was convinced is strong evidence; clearly the clever man should believe also. But! this must have been how the cryonist reasoned, which explains why he was easily convinced with a minimum of evidence. That means that it is actually very easy to be convinced about effectiveness of cryonics, so other peoples’ belief is weak evidence after all. So I can clearly not believe in cryonics!
A classic blunder!
Yes, getting hugely tangled up in meta-level arguments instead of looking at the actual arguments and evidence and object-level way-the-world-is would indeed be a classic blunder.