Overall this paper is about as good as I’d expect from sincere, intelligent, knowledgable people who made a real effort to engage properly with the arguments but didn’t come away convinced, so my confidence in cryonics is about the same
Shouldn’t that sort of thing make one less confident given that one cryonic meme is that people who grapple with the arguments become convinced?
Interesting point! But is this proof of “at least two bio students grappled with the arguments and weren’t convinced” (not surprising) or “two curious (but otherwise random) bio students grappled with the arguments and weren’t convinced” (surprising, should lead to a downward revision)?
I’m not sure they would be allowed to reach a pro-cryonics position. The acknowledgments say “Finally, we would like to thank our opponent group for their pertinent and helpful comments on our work.”
You think this may have been a “two groups discuss the two sides of an issue” assignment? I searched “cryonics” at the site with the full paper and found 2 other results, but they’re both in Dutch. Google translates one of the titles as “People technosphere—Transhumanism and naturalness” and is about the ethical issues of uploading, and the other is about freezing stem cells.
Their English is pretty good, so I would be surprised if this were some sort of translation error where the line should be more like ‘we thank our peer reviewers/copyeditors/reference-checkers/etc.’ Taking it at face value, that’s what it sounds like—some sort of adversarial process, likely with the others writing in favor (although it’s possible the opponent group was only assigned criticism and maybe made up by criticizing multiple paper-groups?).
Someone really should ask, since apparently some of them are on Facebook.
Shouldn’t that sort of thing make one less confident given that one cryonic meme is that people who grapple with the arguments become convinced?
Interesting point! But is this proof of “at least two bio students grappled with the arguments and weren’t convinced” (not surprising) or “two curious (but otherwise random) bio students grappled with the arguments and weren’t convinced” (surprising, should lead to a downward revision)?
I’m not sure they would be allowed to reach a pro-cryonics position. The acknowledgments say “Finally, we would like to thank our opponent group for their pertinent and helpful comments on our work.”
EDIT: OK, apparently not.
They clarify this in their reply.
It’s possible that the examiners of the report are termed ‘opponents’.
You think this may have been a “two groups discuss the two sides of an issue” assignment? I searched “cryonics” at the site with the full paper and found 2 other results, but they’re both in Dutch. Google translates one of the titles as “People technosphere—Transhumanism and naturalness” and is about the ethical issues of uploading, and the other is about freezing stem cells.
Their English is pretty good, so I would be surprised if this were some sort of translation error where the line should be more like ‘we thank our peer reviewers/copyeditors/reference-checkers/etc.’ Taking it at face value, that’s what it sounds like—some sort of adversarial process, likely with the others writing in favor (although it’s possible the opponent group was only assigned criticism and maybe made up by criticizing multiple paper-groups?).
Someone really should ask, since apparently some of them are on Facebook.