Getting seriously sick of hearing “VillageReach beats cryonics” from people who don’t also say “VillageReach beats movies, cars, and dentists. spits out rotten teeth”. We do have a few heroes like that here (Rain and juliawise), but if you are not one quit it already.
That would be stupid. If I produce, say, $5,000/year for charity, and a dentist adds even a year of productive life to me, then it’s worth $5,000 to go see that dentist. At worst I break even.
I don’t have a car, but for most people a car probably allows them to get to their job to begin with, so that’s $50K+/year in income, vs a $10K used car every few years. Again, you’d have to be really stupid not to think this is a smart investment. A rational person should optimize by getting a high paying job and donating that income to charity, not by skipping the car and working at whatever happens to be otherwise reachable.
Movies? Well, I’m an emotional being. This is the place where we do get in to personalities, but for me, personally, if I’m unhappy, my productivity drops. Going to a movie refreshes my productivity. I do better work, don’t get fired, and might even make a raise. So for me, personally, it still works out. It’s not like I’m spending $1,000/month on these things.
And, all that aside, just because I’m not a perfect philanthropist doesn’t mean I should automatically default to cryonics. Maybe I should self-modify to sign up for cryonics, or maybe I should self-modify to be more like Rain and juliawise. It’s important to ask questions and try and determine an actual answer to that. It’s easy to push for cryonics when you genuinely ignore the opportunity costs, but for those of us actually stopping to consider them, a response of “shut up, you’re no Rain” is really, amazingly unhelpful.
Given that there are 2000 people in the world signed up for cryonics, I think there’s a lot more people who have open objections to it, too. If our community’s response to “But what about VillageReach?” is really “Oh, like you’re so selfless”, we are going to lose. Rationalists ought to win.
Even if we ignore the practicalities, even if we ignore my personal situation, it’s still a damned useful question if we actually care about the rest of the world. And if you want cryonics to be mainstream like Eliezer seems to hope for, you have to actually care about the mainstream.
So, if all you have is a witty ad hominen attack about how I’m not truly selfless, kindly quit already.
Anger seems to be existing so to get the emotional level out of the way: I’m not attacking you. I think you’re cool and I like you. I’m not accusing you of not being a perfect philanthropist, or saying that if you’re not one then you deserve blame.
I admit the argument is personality-dependent in an ad-hominem-ish way, but since I got upvoted I think I’m not exclusively being an asshole here. It goes like this: If you’re the kind of person who usually takes altruistic opportunity costs into account, then it makes perfect sense that you’d care about that of cryonics. If you’re not, then it’s more likely than you’re saying “VillageReach beats cryonics”, not because you tried to evaluate it and thought of altruistic opportunity costs, but because you rejected it for other reasons, then looked for plausible rejections and hit on altruistic opportunity costs.
Would a perfect philanthropist see a dentist, drive a car, and watch movies? Yes, probably and maybe. But the algorithms that Rain and MixedNuts use to decide to watch a movie are completely different, even if they both return “yes”. Rain asks “Will this help me make and donate enough money to offset the costs, and are there any better alternatives to make me relaxed and happy and generally productive?”. MixedNuts asks “Is this nifty, and will movie geeks like me better if I watch it?”. I can claim that watching movies makes me more productive, and it’ll probably be true; but still as a matter of fact it’s not what made me decide.
Is it possible that a perfect philanthropist would buy shiny stuff and expensive end-of-life treatments but not sign up for cryonics? Yes. For example, they could have tiny conformity demons in their brain that make them have to do what society likes (either by addiction-like mechanisms or by nuking their productivity if they don’t). Since cryonics is weird, the conformity demons don’t demand it, so the money it would have cost can go to charity. But that’s still a different state of mind from obeying the conformity demons without knowing it.
Conversely, there are possible states where you don’t usually care about altruistic opportunity costs, but start doing so for cryonics for strange reasons. But it’s still an unusual state of mind, and if you don’t say why you’re in it it’s going to prompt doubt about whether it’s your true rejection.
Also, the reason I was a snappy jerk is that I’ve heard the argument a lot before. Standard arguments happen over and over and over (I should know, I read atheist blogs), and you’ve got to be willing to have them many times if you want an idea to spread; but I’d prefer Less Wrong to address the question once and move on, with the standard debate rehappening elsewhere.
I’m not sure what your argument about the mainstream is. Is it “Lots of people have this objection a lot; they wouldn’t if it sucked”, or is it “Yeah, this objection sucks, but boy do you ever need a reply that doesn’t make you sound like a complete asshole”?
I’d prefer Less Wrong to address the question once and move on, with the standard debate rehappening elsewhere.
If someone had linked me to a “one and done” article, I’d feel a lot more confident that this is a standard argument with a good/interesting answer. Instead I mostly got responses that seemed to work out to “I’m not a terribly nice person so it was simple for me” and “you’re not a terribly nice person so it should be simple for you”.
If there is a “one and done” you want to link me to, I wouldn’t object at all. I’ve read most of LessWrong, but not much else out there. I don’t think I’ve seen this specific objection addressed before.
it’s still an unusual state of mind
My mind seems to be weird in a lot of ways. For cryonics, it seems to come down to: cryonics is a far-off future thing, therefore my Planning mode gets engaged. Planning mode goes “I have more money than I need to survive. Why am I being selfish and not donating this?”
I’m not real inclined to view this as problematic, because on a certain level charity does feel good, and I like making the world a better place. On the other hand, I also grew up with a lot of bad spending habits, so my short-term thinking is very much “ooh, shiny thing, mine now”.
I will say that the idea of a $28,000 operation that gives me six more months in a hospice really bothers me—it’s a horrifically irrational or selfish thing to think I’m worth that much. If push came to shove, I’m not sure I’d have the courage and energy to refuse social norms and pressure, but the idea bothers me.
Eliezer raises a good point, that one can do both, but it implies a certain degree of financial privilege. Thus, there’s still the open question of priorities. While psychologically we have “different budgets” for different things, all of those do fundamentally come out of one big budget.
When people say “I’d only accept that argument from Rain”, it makes me wonder if I should be pursuing cryonics or being more like Rain. It’s only very recently that I’ve had much of any financial flexibility in my life, so I’m trying to figure out what to do with it. I’m trying to figure out whether I want to become the sort of person who is signed up for cryonics, or the sort of person who funnels that extra money in to charity.
If you are currently donating everything you practically can to charity, fair enough, don’t sign up for cryonics.
If you think you should but haven’t yet, then sign up for cryonics first. As a person with one foot in the future, you’re more likely to do what the future will most benefit from. As someone who avoids thoughtful spending because you feel like you should spend it on charity, you’ll end up at XKCD 871.
Cryonics only makes the difference between your seeing the future and your not seeing the future if 1) sufficiently high tech eventually gets developed by human-friendly actors, 2) it happens only after you die, 3) cryonics works, 4) nothing else goes wrong or makes cryonics irrelevant. For the median LessWronger, I would put maybe a 10% probability on the first two combined and maybe at most a 50% probability on the last two combined. So maybe at best I’d say something like cryonics gives you two and a half toes in a future where you used to have two toes.
I mean “one foot in the future” to refer to your resulting psychological state, not to a fact related to your likely personal future. I think it’s pretty unlikely I’ll be suspended and reanimated—many other fates are more likely, including never being declared dead. But I think signing up is a move towards a different attitude to the future.
But I think signing up is a move towards a different attitude to the future.
Is this just a plausible guess, or do we have other evidence that it’s true, e.g. people spontaneously citing being signed up for cryonics as causing them to feel the future is real enough to help optimally philanthropize into existence?
(I just love that I can de-escalate drama on LW. This site rocks.)
I’ll concede that the previous discussions were insufficient. Let’s make this place the “one and done” thread.
Do you accept that singling out cryonics is rather unfair, not as opposed to all spending, but as opposed to other Far expenses? To do this right we have to look at “How heroic should my sacrifices be?” in general; if we conclude cryonics is not worth the cost in circumstances X we should conclude the same thing about, say, end-of-life treatments.
I’ve tried to capture my intuitions about sacrificing a life to save several; here are the criteria that seem relevant:
Most importantly, whether it pattern-matches giving one’s life to a cause, or regular suicide. Idealism is often a good move (reasons complicated and beyond the scope of this), whereas if someone’s fine with suicide they’re probably completely broken and unable to recognize a good cause. I expect people who run into burning orphanages just think about distressed orphans, and treat risk of death like an environmental feature (like risk the door will be blocked; that doesn’t affect the general plan, just makes them route through the window), as opposed to weighing risk to themselves against risk to orphans. I endorse this; the policy consequences are quite different even if they roughly agree on “Kill self to save more” (for example CronoDAS is waiting for his parents to croak instead of offing himself right away).
Whether the lives you trade for are framed as Near or Far.
Whether the life you trade away is framed as Near or Far. (I feel cryonics as Nearer than most would, for irrevelant reasons.)
Whether the lives you trade for are framed as preventing a loss, or reaching for a gain.
Whether the life you trade away is framed as accepting a loss, or refusing a gain.
Whether the life you trade away is mine or someone else’s, and who is getting the choice.
Note knock-on effects: If someone hears of the Resistance, and is inspired to give their life to a cause, I’m happy. (If the cause is Al-Qaeda, they’ve made a mistake, but an unrelated one.) If someone hears of people practicing Really Extreme Altruism and are driven to suicide as a result, I’m sad. Refusing cryonics strikes me as closer to the latter.
That’s why I brush and floss every night, and see the dentist every 6 months. Gum disease is linked with heart disease, and damaged teeth create pain. I like to be comfortable.
Though I perform routine maintenance on my life, I try to reduce the cost as much as possible, and when I spend money, I recognize and acknowledge the tradeoffs. It’s a simple exercise to create a graph of benefit from lowest to highest, and start plotting things. This makes it easier to remember there are more alternatives.
Getting seriously sick of hearing “VillageReach beats cryonics” from people who don’t also say “VillageReach beats movies, cars, and dentists. spits out rotten teeth”. We do have a few heroes like that here (Rain and juliawise), but if you are not one quit it already.
That would be stupid. If I produce, say, $5,000/year for charity, and a dentist adds even a year of productive life to me, then it’s worth $5,000 to go see that dentist. At worst I break even.
I don’t have a car, but for most people a car probably allows them to get to their job to begin with, so that’s $50K+/year in income, vs a $10K used car every few years. Again, you’d have to be really stupid not to think this is a smart investment. A rational person should optimize by getting a high paying job and donating that income to charity, not by skipping the car and working at whatever happens to be otherwise reachable.
Movies? Well, I’m an emotional being. This is the place where we do get in to personalities, but for me, personally, if I’m unhappy, my productivity drops. Going to a movie refreshes my productivity. I do better work, don’t get fired, and might even make a raise. So for me, personally, it still works out. It’s not like I’m spending $1,000/month on these things.
And, all that aside, just because I’m not a perfect philanthropist doesn’t mean I should automatically default to cryonics. Maybe I should self-modify to sign up for cryonics, or maybe I should self-modify to be more like Rain and juliawise. It’s important to ask questions and try and determine an actual answer to that. It’s easy to push for cryonics when you genuinely ignore the opportunity costs, but for those of us actually stopping to consider them, a response of “shut up, you’re no Rain” is really, amazingly unhelpful.
Given that there are 2000 people in the world signed up for cryonics, I think there’s a lot more people who have open objections to it, too. If our community’s response to “But what about VillageReach?” is really “Oh, like you’re so selfless”, we are going to lose. Rationalists ought to win.
Even if we ignore the practicalities, even if we ignore my personal situation, it’s still a damned useful question if we actually care about the rest of the world. And if you want cryonics to be mainstream like Eliezer seems to hope for, you have to actually care about the mainstream.
So, if all you have is a witty ad hominen attack about how I’m not truly selfless, kindly quit already.
Anger seems to be existing so to get the emotional level out of the way: I’m not attacking you. I think you’re cool and I like you. I’m not accusing you of not being a perfect philanthropist, or saying that if you’re not one then you deserve blame.
I admit the argument is personality-dependent in an ad-hominem-ish way, but since I got upvoted I think I’m not exclusively being an asshole here. It goes like this: If you’re the kind of person who usually takes altruistic opportunity costs into account, then it makes perfect sense that you’d care about that of cryonics. If you’re not, then it’s more likely than you’re saying “VillageReach beats cryonics”, not because you tried to evaluate it and thought of altruistic opportunity costs, but because you rejected it for other reasons, then looked for plausible rejections and hit on altruistic opportunity costs.
Would a perfect philanthropist see a dentist, drive a car, and watch movies? Yes, probably and maybe. But the algorithms that Rain and MixedNuts use to decide to watch a movie are completely different, even if they both return “yes”. Rain asks “Will this help me make and donate enough money to offset the costs, and are there any better alternatives to make me relaxed and happy and generally productive?”. MixedNuts asks “Is this nifty, and will movie geeks like me better if I watch it?”. I can claim that watching movies makes me more productive, and it’ll probably be true; but still as a matter of fact it’s not what made me decide.
Is it possible that a perfect philanthropist would buy shiny stuff and expensive end-of-life treatments but not sign up for cryonics? Yes. For example, they could have tiny conformity demons in their brain that make them have to do what society likes (either by addiction-like mechanisms or by nuking their productivity if they don’t). Since cryonics is weird, the conformity demons don’t demand it, so the money it would have cost can go to charity. But that’s still a different state of mind from obeying the conformity demons without knowing it.
Conversely, there are possible states where you don’t usually care about altruistic opportunity costs, but start doing so for cryonics for strange reasons. But it’s still an unusual state of mind, and if you don’t say why you’re in it it’s going to prompt doubt about whether it’s your true rejection.
Also, the reason I was a snappy jerk is that I’ve heard the argument a lot before. Standard arguments happen over and over and over (I should know, I read atheist blogs), and you’ve got to be willing to have them many times if you want an idea to spread; but I’d prefer Less Wrong to address the question once and move on, with the standard debate rehappening elsewhere.
I’m not sure what your argument about the mainstream is. Is it “Lots of people have this objection a lot; they wouldn’t if it sucked”, or is it “Yeah, this objection sucks, but boy do you ever need a reply that doesn’t make you sound like a complete asshole”?
Thank you for the calm, insightful response :)
If someone had linked me to a “one and done” article, I’d feel a lot more confident that this is a standard argument with a good/interesting answer. Instead I mostly got responses that seemed to work out to “I’m not a terribly nice person so it was simple for me” and “you’re not a terribly nice person so it should be simple for you”.
If there is a “one and done” you want to link me to, I wouldn’t object at all. I’ve read most of LessWrong, but not much else out there. I don’t think I’ve seen this specific objection addressed before.
My mind seems to be weird in a lot of ways. For cryonics, it seems to come down to: cryonics is a far-off future thing, therefore my Planning mode gets engaged. Planning mode goes “I have more money than I need to survive. Why am I being selfish and not donating this?”
I’m not real inclined to view this as problematic, because on a certain level charity does feel good, and I like making the world a better place. On the other hand, I also grew up with a lot of bad spending habits, so my short-term thinking is very much “ooh, shiny thing, mine now”.
I will say that the idea of a $28,000 operation that gives me six more months in a hospice really bothers me—it’s a horrifically irrational or selfish thing to think I’m worth that much. If push came to shove, I’m not sure I’d have the courage and energy to refuse social norms and pressure, but the idea bothers me.
Eliezer raises a good point, that one can do both, but it implies a certain degree of financial privilege. Thus, there’s still the open question of priorities. While psychologically we have “different budgets” for different things, all of those do fundamentally come out of one big budget.
When people say “I’d only accept that argument from Rain”, it makes me wonder if I should be pursuing cryonics or being more like Rain. It’s only very recently that I’ve had much of any financial flexibility in my life, so I’m trying to figure out what to do with it. I’m trying to figure out whether I want to become the sort of person who is signed up for cryonics, or the sort of person who funnels that extra money in to charity.
If you are currently donating everything you practically can to charity, fair enough, don’t sign up for cryonics.
If you think you should but haven’t yet, then sign up for cryonics first. As a person with one foot in the future, you’re more likely to do what the future will most benefit from. As someone who avoids thoughtful spending because you feel like you should spend it on charity, you’ll end up at XKCD 871.
Cryonics only makes the difference between your seeing the future and your not seeing the future if 1) sufficiently high tech eventually gets developed by human-friendly actors, 2) it happens only after you die, 3) cryonics works, 4) nothing else goes wrong or makes cryonics irrelevant. For the median LessWronger, I would put maybe a 10% probability on the first two combined and maybe at most a 50% probability on the last two combined. So maybe at best I’d say something like cryonics gives you two and a half toes in a future where you used to have two toes.
I mean “one foot in the future” to refer to your resulting psychological state, not to a fact related to your likely personal future. I think it’s pretty unlikely I’ll be suspended and reanimated—many other fates are more likely, including never being declared dead. But I think signing up is a move towards a different attitude to the future.
Is this just a plausible guess, or do we have other evidence that it’s true, e.g. people spontaneously citing being signed up for cryonics as causing them to feel the future is real enough to help optimally philanthropize into existence?
It’s a guess.
If there were a one-and-done answer, I think this’d be it.
(I just love that I can de-escalate drama on LW. This site rocks.)
I’ll concede that the previous discussions were insufficient. Let’s make this place the “one and done” thread.
Do you accept that singling out cryonics is rather unfair, not as opposed to all spending, but as opposed to other Far expenses? To do this right we have to look at “How heroic should my sacrifices be?” in general; if we conclude cryonics is not worth the cost in circumstances X we should conclude the same thing about, say, end-of-life treatments.
I’ve tried to capture my intuitions about sacrificing a life to save several; here are the criteria that seem relevant:
Most importantly, whether it pattern-matches giving one’s life to a cause, or regular suicide. Idealism is often a good move (reasons complicated and beyond the scope of this), whereas if someone’s fine with suicide they’re probably completely broken and unable to recognize a good cause. I expect people who run into burning orphanages just think about distressed orphans, and treat risk of death like an environmental feature (like risk the door will be blocked; that doesn’t affect the general plan, just makes them route through the window), as opposed to weighing risk to themselves against risk to orphans. I endorse this; the policy consequences are quite different even if they roughly agree on “Kill self to save more” (for example CronoDAS is waiting for his parents to croak instead of offing himself right away).
Whether the lives you trade for are framed as Near or Far.
Whether the life you trade away is framed as Near or Far. (I feel cryonics as Nearer than most would, for irrevelant reasons.)
Whether the lives you trade for are framed as preventing a loss, or reaching for a gain.
Whether the life you trade away is framed as accepting a loss, or refusing a gain.
Whether the life you trade away is mine or someone else’s, and who is getting the choice.
Note knock-on effects: If someone hears of the Resistance, and is inspired to give their life to a cause, I’m happy. (If the cause is Al-Qaeda, they’ve made a mistake, but an unrelated one.) If someone hears of people practicing Really Extreme Altruism and are driven to suicide as a result, I’m sad. Refusing cryonics strikes me as closer to the latter.
That’s why I brush and floss every night, and see the dentist every 6 months. Gum disease is linked with heart disease, and damaged teeth create pain. I like to be comfortable.
Though I perform routine maintenance on my life, I try to reduce the cost as much as possible, and when I spend money, I recognize and acknowledge the tradeoffs. It’s a simple exercise to create a graph of benefit from lowest to highest, and start plotting things. This makes it easier to remember there are more alternatives.
I just really really dislike the idea of dying. Singing up for cryonics refreshes my productivity.
Heh, I never thought of it that way. Neat :)
Actually, I started flossing just recently. Those little floss picks are inexpensive and work great.