The girl who could come back from the dead: Toddler who died from a brain tumour is FROZEN by parents who hope she can one day be revived by medical advances
PZ Myers weighs in. I guess he got bored with inflicting damage on communion wafers and accusing Michael Shermer of sexually assaulting women, and now he wants to pick on cryonicists:
PZ Myers weighs in. I guess he got bored with inflicting damage on communion wafers and accusing Michael Shermer of sexually assaulting women, and now he wants to pick on cryonicists:
I am oscillating between “calm down, politics is the mindkiller” and “if the iron is hot, I want to believe it is hot”.
Is there any hope that if we bite our collective tongues and not feed the trolls, they will get bored and find a new victim? I am afraid that when the troll has sufficient power and allies in online media, the old advice of not feeding it is just not available anymore; whatever you do, someone else on the planet will feed the troll anyway.
It almost makes me think these guys are maximizing evil, but then I realize they are simply maximizing money, and the laws of the universe say that you generate most screaming when you poke in the place it hurts. It is nothing personal; it’s just that your tears are an important component in paperclip production. The Clippy does not hate you, it just calmly explores the places where your density of sensory receptors is highest. It could just as well try to make you laugh, but that is a less productive thing to do with humans.
Money? I think PZ types are mainly looking for narcissistic supply. Also, there was an article either here on on SSC about how people sometimes don’t want to be high status just feel high status, cannot find it anymore, but seems relevant.
EDIT found it I think this is what is going on here, not really money.
Yes, the link explains why some people may be obsessed by some ideas—because they generate feeling of status in their heads. Now other question is why this idea instead of some other idea. For example, you are looking for a “bad guy” whose reputation you can smash online, thus generating heroic feelings in yourself… so, from all the available options, why choose cryonics?
Well, I guess it is somehow similar to the previous “bad guys”, so whatever enemy-detection algorithm chose them, it also chose cryonics.
atheists… video game fans… cryonicists… -- complete the pattern
What do these have in common?
They are groups of people considered weird by most of the society.
They are predominantly male groups (which may be merely a consequence of the previous fact, but it takes 0.1 second to spin it as sexism).
Those people care about their group strongly, but outsiders do not empathise with them.
For a clickbait website, this is a perfect target. All they have to do is write: “Your way of life makes you hate women, therefore your way of life should be regulated by well-meaning outsiders. What is our proof for this? We have found this one women who feels uncomfortable with you. And since you have a minority of women, it must be a general rule. Now stop resisting and start obeying your new overlords!”
Well, for me the interesting question here is who are the next likely targets. Who else fits this pattern? Can we recognize them before they are attacked? And assuming we care about them, can we use this knowledge to somehow protect them?
My suspicion is that “rationalist” and “effective altruists” do fit this pattern; they were just not given sufficiently high priority yet. It may depend on how large wave of hate the attack on cryonicists can generate. (There is always a risk of choosing too weird group, so the outsiders will be too indifferent to join the wave.)
Of course there is always the chance that I am pattern-matching here too much. My only defense is that we could use this model to generate predictions about who will be attacked next, and then see whether those predictions were right. (On the other hand, it also feels like doing homework for PZ Myers, so maybe this is not a good topic for a public debate.)
I don’t think this is what is going here at all. The pattern match that is going on is cryonics and fringe science or pseudoscientific ideas that sound like they are promising things they cannot deliver. This much more about PZ thinking of himself as a skeptic and having just enough biology background to think he can comment on any biology related issue.
Yeah. The parent & sibling comments here got me curious about exactly what PZ wrote, and whether it’d be a transparently politically motivated fulmination against cryonicists.
But the post, as far as I can see, is just an unfavourable comparison of cryonics to ancient mummification, and Myers calling cryonicists frauds who practice “ritual” & “psuedo-scientific alteration of [a] corpse”, frauds sometimes defended with “the transhumanist technofetishist version of Pascal’s Wager”. Strong stuff, but I don’t see anything in the post about partisan politics, race, nerd culture (unless one counts “transhumanist technofetishist” as a dog-whistle meant to slam nerds in general...?), or sexism or feminism or gender (well, except the reference to the frozen girl as a “girl”).
I see several comments in the political categories I mentioned but they weren’t posted by PZ or cheered by PZ, so I’m a bit surprised by the comments here focusing on PZ to impute political motives to him and psychoanalyze him.
PZ’s post all but says he’s slamming cryonicists because (to his mind) they’re crooks & quacks. (Based on the reference to “tortur[ing] cadavers”, maybe there’s a purity-violation ick-reaction too. That’s still pretty distant from the motivations people are speculating about here.) I don’t understand why I’d need a special explanation for that, over & above the more common reasons why people tend to scoff at cryonics (absurdity heuristic, plus scepticism about future technological trends w.r.t. brain preservation & re-instantiation, plus over-generalization from everyday experience of how freezing affects food and the like).
The funny part is PZ being a nerdy white male atheist scientist so basically the perfect target for this. Could this partially be a preventive action i.e. if I shoot at my group, perhaps people don’t notice I am one of them?
That means, I think there is more than merely strategically shooting at one’s own phenotype to draw attention away from one’s own person. If drawing attention away would be the only goal, it would make more sense to try draw attention away towards some other group, also an easy target, but not including me. For example, white male nerds could shoot at white male jocks, since it is only being white and male that is considered a bad thing in certain circles. Similarly, white male atheists could shoot at white male Christians. So there must be some additional explanation.
(Not everyone is like this. There are also people who do not shoot at their own group, but at a different group, or at least at a much larger supergroup so that their own group gets a smaller fraction of attention. For example white male non-nerds shooting at white male nerds, or rich white people putting huge emphasis on whiteness and maleness and maybe also cissexuality but never ever mentioning class privilege. (Which is rather ironic, considering that the whole privileged/oppressed framwork was stolen from Marx. Here, Marx would be an example of a rich white male shooting at rich white males.))
So I guess in a way these people are trying to shoot at themselves—on some metaphorical level. It’s like they perceive something undesirable in themselves… then use typical mind fallacy to generalize it to their whole group (because being a member of a sinful group is less painful than being a sinful individual in otherwise mostly healthy group) … and then try to atone for their sins by attacking all the other members of their group (because it is less painful than trying to improve oneself). That is, on some level they are sincerely fighting against something they consider evil. They just completely lost control over the huge biases that govern their evil-detection mechanisms.
Here is an experimental prediction: Find a sample of über-politically-correct white men publicly shooting at their own group (not just a similar group or a huge superset). Explore their background, and the background of typical members of such group. I predict that among these online warriors you will find a higher percent than in general population of racists, rapists, etc. (Where by “racists” I don’t mean scoring non-zero on an implicit association test, but like actual neo-Nazis; etc.)
Agreed. Of course, calming down is hard enough by itself without people seemingly actively trying to prevent you from calming down—people like, say, the commenters in that particular blog post. (Major kudos to DataPacRat for managing to stay calm while he/she was being accused of believing in “godbots”; I would not have been able to do the same.) I’m inclined to apply the principle of charity here along with Hanlon’s Razor to conclude that they’re not actually deliberately trying to piss you off… but God, it sure feels like it sometimes.
Well, hats off to /u/DataPacRat for fighting the good fight in that comment section. I suspect most of the thread is people who just came in to post their little dig at the weird meat-popsicle cultists and then move on, so I’m not sure if he’s achieving much, but if nothing else he’s stopped me from feeling I need to go in there and join the fray to say what he ended up saying, except less well.
I also wonder what a future civilization would do if they inherited tanks of liquid nitrogen containing extracted blobs of diseased brains and decapitated heads. Does anyone really believe that they’d feel any obligation to resurrect them, even if they could?
Here’s a fun topic of conversation—if I happen across PZ Myers, and he’s having a heart attack, should I feel any obligation to perform CPR?
Does anyone really believe that they’d feel any obligation to resurrect them, even if they could?
Yes, if they have cryonics or its successor technologies for themselves and they can reason about consequences carefully. If you have an injury or pathology in the 24th Century that the health care providers don’t know how to treat, you could go into brain preservation to see if the health care providers in, say, the 26th Century would know how to help you. Some of those health care professionals active in the 26th Century might have been born in the 20th or 21st Centuries and have gone through a round or two of brain preservation themselves, and they entered the practice of medicine in the 26th Century as one of their new careers. “Hey, I know this guy. He helped to resuscitate me in 2327. I owe him so I’ll return the favor.”
I get that Myers’ article pisses a lot of people here off (myself included), but let’s try to refrain from mean-spirited-ness, neh? Mind-killing happens readily enough by itself without people helping the process along.
Normally, yes I think it wise to refrain from mean-spirited-ness. But when someone writes a hit piece against the parents of a recently deceased toddler because they dared to try to save her life in a weird way, well, in this case I’m going to make an exception.
Normally, yes I think it wise to refrain from mean-spirited-ness. But when someone writes a hit piece against the parents of a recently deceased toddler because they dared to try to save her life in a weird way, well, in this case I’m going to make an exception.
The fact that his behavior emotionally triggers you is no reason to engage in bad and unproductive behavior yourself. Even if it’s “justified”.
I think you are greatly missing the point. If you want to be effective in the world, sometimes that involves being politically smart. And sometimes the politically smart thing to do is a show of force. You should not jump from emotion straight to action. But sometimes after examining the evidence and weighing the possibilities, the best response is an angry toned rejection.
But sometimes after examining the evidence and weighing the possibilities, the best response is an angry toned rejection.
I have nothing against calculated actions that shows force.
Against a blogger who in the business of getting page views by stirring up controversy being mean-spirited isn’t showing force.
He’s not saying in that quote that they shouldn’t feel an obligation, he’s making a point focusing on doubting whether they’d want to resurrect them. I think they very likely would, and PZ is ignoring the entire first-in/last-out which cryonics plans on using to further encourage people to resurrect, but it helps to actually focus on what his criticism is.
If you can perform CPR with little cost to you, you should. If performing CPR has a large cost to you, or if there are so many people that need CPR that performing CPR on all of them is, in total, a large cost to you, you are not obliged to do anything.
How easy would it be for the future civilization to resurrect the brains?
I’m pretty sure cost of resurrection isn’t his true rejection, his true rejection is more like ‘point and laugh at weirdos’.
I’m guessing that any civilisation capable of resurrecting cryonics patients would be post-scarcity, and cost would therefore be irrelivent. But even if I am wrong on this point, well, to continue his mummified Egyptians analogy, can you imagine how much money you would make selling the TV rights to the first ever resurrection of a Pharaoh?
Additionally, don’t Alcor, and many individuals, have funds set up to cover the cost of resurrection?
I understand that there are plausible arguments against cryonics, such as technological feasibility. But the “why bother saving people?” argument is both stupid and repugnant.
I’m pretty sure cost of resurrection isn’t his true rejection, his true rejection is more like ‘point and laugh at weirdos’.
Also for a number of commenters in the linked thread, the true rejection seems to be, “By freezing yourself you are claiming that you deserve something no one else gets, in this case immortality.”
This is almost identical to the argument against free-market medical care “Why should you get better treatment just because you can afford it?”. I wonder how many commentators would agree with both arguments.
I find the idea of “true rejection” over-used. Many people, for many things, have more than one reason to reject them, and none of those reasons is the reason.
can you imagine how much money you would make selling the TV rights to the first ever resurrection of a Pharaoh?
That would only make money because it hasn’t been done before. Each successive Pharaoh resurrection would make less money. A question asking what a future civilization would do about a frozen head implies asking what they would do for a typical frozen head. Being one of the first frozen heads they run across is very atypical, and carries a higher profit only because it is atypical.
Each successive Pharaoh resurrection would make less money.
It might also cost less money, because most of the cost might be R&D to work out how to resurrect someone, after which resurrecting each person is easy.
Continuing the Egypt analogy, each additional Egyptian artefact is less interesting than the previous one, yet people continued digging them up rather than just digging up the first few.
I find the idea of “true rejection” over-used. Many people, for many things, have more than one reason to reject them, and none of those reasons is the reason.
This does not seem psychologically realistic. Humans aren’t built to arrive at conclusions through rational evaluation of multiple independent lines of evidence; rather, they choose their answer in advance for some reason or other (usually “this is weird” or “my tribe rejects this”), and only then begin cherry-picking arguments to support their conclusion.
That would only make money because it hasn’t been done before. Each successive Pharaoh resurrection would make less money. A question asking what a future civilization would do about a frozen head implies asking what they would do for a typical frozen head. Being one of the first frozen heads they run across is very atypical, and carries a higher profit only because it is atypical.
This is true, but ignores skeptical_lurker’s point that any civilization capable of resurrection is likely to be post-scarcity.
This does not seem psychologically realistic. Humans aren’t built to arrive at conclusions through rational evaluation of multiple independent lines of evidence
That seems to have an implied ”… so every time I argue with a human, I should never assume that the human has more than one reason for something”. I hope you can see how that will go seriously wrong when the human actually does have more than one reason, and particularly on LW-style topics.
This is true, but ignores skeptical_lurker’s point that any civilization capable of resurrection is likely to be post-scarcity.
If the civilization is post-scarcity, then making money from TV rights to the first Pharaoh is not useful as an analogy; the future civilization never does one thing because it gets them more of something than another thing does.
That seems to have an implied ”… so every time I argue with a human, I should never assume that the human has more than one reason for something”.
Absolute claims are almost never correct. Replace the “never” in your statement with “usually not, especially when discussing politically charged, or better yet, weird-sounding topics” and you’ve got yourself a deal.
You’re refusing to address someone’s stated argument, and in fact, are saying something that is nonresponsive if he means what he is actually saying.
Yes, sometimes you have to do that. But making it your default behavior when addressing all people in the real world who don’t agree with you is a bad idea.
But making it your default behavior when addressing all people in the real world who don’t agree with you is a bad idea.
Who said anything about making it your default behavior? There’s a difference between “many” and “most”, and an even bigger difference between “many” and “all”.
Presumably, the ease will change with time, tending easier until ceilings of possible economic and technological progress are reached. If it takes centuries for the procedure of resurrecting the cryopreserved to go from “experimental and expensive” to “cheap and routine”, the old 21st-century cryo-patients can wait, they aren’t getting any deader.
Is it wrong that I’m most saddened that they tore apart her brain for a year chasing that tumor, before they did the sensible thing and let her be cryopreserved?
Not that this is an open and shut case at all, but we need laws on the books regarding elective cryopreservation in the case of brain degenerative disease.
“Evolutionary developmental biology,” which means Myers tries to understand biology that happens on its own. The cryonics idea, by contrast, involves trying to get human biology, and specifically the human brain, to do something it didn’t evolve to do, namely, enter a state of preservation through vitrification. Basically Myers doesn’t think about cryonics as an engineering challenge because he doesn’t have experience or talent with that sort of practical problem solving.
Myers invokes his credentials as a neuroscientist to criticize cryonics; but then another neuroscientist, Kenneth Hayworth, started the Brain Preservation Foundation because he thinks that cryonics deserves a second look due to advances in organ vitrification. I would like to see these two go head to head (yeah, I see the pun potential there) in a debate.
PZ Myers weighs in. I guess he got bored with inflicting damage on communion wafers and accusing Michael Shermer of sexually assaulting women, and now he wants to pick on cryonicists:
How is he picking on cryonicists? On the contrary, he is “picking on” (ie pointing out the flaws in) cryonics. There is a world of difference. The bulk of the article is a compare and contrast between lengthy quotes of mummification and cryopreservation.
Yes, Myers is engaged more in mockery than detailed argumentation. If a view cannot stand up to mockery, it doesn’t deserve defenders.
Mockery is neither data nor reasoning: no update is epistemically required of the person attacked. The outcome is a matter of their fortitude, not the rights or wrongs of their case. The purpose of mockery is to crush the hated enemy by shouting loudly.
Mockery is neither data nor reasoning: no update is epistemically required of the person attacked.
That depends—mockery is just a form in which many things can be clothed, including data and reasoning.
But in any case, the original claim was
If a view cannot stand up to mockery, it doesn’t deserve defenders
which, without too much contortions, could be reformulated as “a view which cannot encourage sufficient fortitude in any of its defenders does not deserve to be defended”. And then you said
if you can bully someone out of defending their beliefs, you win
You do? What do you win? And how does that relate to whether the belief mocked was (epistemically) correct or not?
I think you’re confusing the issue of whether something is valued (and so worth defending) with whether something is empirically/scientifically correct (and so “true”).
I find it of significantly greater value to engage in detailed argumentation than in mockery. If cryonics has flaws in it, those flaws can be pointed out without resorting to sarcasm, and doing so simply raises the probability of mind-killing.
The big cryonics story of the week, about the Thai toddler Matheryn Naovaratpong:
The Girl Who Would Live Forever
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-girl-who-would-live-forever
Two-year-old cryogenically frozen by parents
http://www.cnet.com/news/two-year-old-cryogenically-frozen-by-parents/
The girl who could come back from the dead: Toddler who died from a brain tumour is FROZEN by parents who hope she can one day be revived by medical advances
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-3043272/The-girl-come-dead-Toddler-died-brain-tumour-FROZEN-parents-hope-one-day-revived-medical-advances.html#ixzz3XoNKDW00
PZ Myers weighs in. I guess he got bored with inflicting damage on communion wafers and accusing Michael Shermer of sexually assaulting women, and now he wants to pick on cryonicists:
How to live forever
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2015/04/16/how-to-live-forever/
I am oscillating between “calm down, politics is the mindkiller” and “if the iron is hot, I want to believe it is hot”.
Is there any hope that if we bite our collective tongues and not feed the trolls, they will get bored and find a new victim? I am afraid that when the troll has sufficient power and allies in online media, the old advice of not feeding it is just not available anymore; whatever you do, someone else on the planet will feed the troll anyway.
It almost makes me think these guys are maximizing evil, but then I realize they are simply maximizing money, and the laws of the universe say that you generate most screaming when you poke in the place it hurts. It is nothing personal; it’s just that your tears are an important component in paperclip production. The Clippy does not hate you, it just calmly explores the places where your density of sensory receptors is highest. It could just as well try to make you laugh, but that is a less productive thing to do with humans.
Money? I think PZ types are mainly looking for narcissistic supply. Also, there was an article either here on on SSC about how people sometimes don’t want to be high status just feel high status, cannot find it anymore, but seems relevant.
EDIT found it I think this is what is going on here, not really money.
Yes, the link explains why some people may be obsessed by some ideas—because they generate feeling of status in their heads. Now other question is why this idea instead of some other idea. For example, you are looking for a “bad guy” whose reputation you can smash online, thus generating heroic feelings in yourself… so, from all the available options, why choose cryonics?
Well, I guess it is somehow similar to the previous “bad guys”, so whatever enemy-detection algorithm chose them, it also chose cryonics.
atheists… video game fans… cryonicists… -- complete the pattern
What do these have in common?
They are groups of people considered weird by most of the society.
They are predominantly male groups (which may be merely a consequence of the previous fact, but it takes 0.1 second to spin it as sexism).
Those people care about their group strongly, but outsiders do not empathise with them.
For a clickbait website, this is a perfect target. All they have to do is write: “Your way of life makes you hate women, therefore your way of life should be regulated by well-meaning outsiders. What is our proof for this? We have found this one women who feels uncomfortable with you. And since you have a minority of women, it must be a general rule. Now stop resisting and start obeying your new overlords!”
Well, for me the interesting question here is who are the next likely targets. Who else fits this pattern? Can we recognize them before they are attacked? And assuming we care about them, can we use this knowledge to somehow protect them?
My suspicion is that “rationalist” and “effective altruists” do fit this pattern; they were just not given sufficiently high priority yet. It may depend on how large wave of hate the attack on cryonicists can generate. (There is always a risk of choosing too weird group, so the outsiders will be too indifferent to join the wave.)
Of course there is always the chance that I am pattern-matching here too much. My only defense is that we could use this model to generate predictions about who will be attacked next, and then see whether those predictions were right. (On the other hand, it also feels like doing homework for PZ Myers, so maybe this is not a good topic for a public debate.)
I don’t think this is what is going here at all. The pattern match that is going on is cryonics and fringe science or pseudoscientific ideas that sound like they are promising things they cannot deliver. This much more about PZ thinking of himself as a skeptic and having just enough biology background to think he can comment on any biology related issue.
Yeah. The parent & sibling comments here got me curious about exactly what PZ wrote, and whether it’d be a transparently politically motivated fulmination against cryonicists.
But the post, as far as I can see, is just an unfavourable comparison of cryonics to ancient mummification, and Myers calling cryonicists frauds who practice “ritual” & “psuedo-scientific alteration of [a] corpse”, frauds sometimes defended with “the transhumanist technofetishist version of Pascal’s Wager”. Strong stuff, but I don’t see anything in the post about partisan politics, race, nerd culture (unless one counts “transhumanist technofetishist” as a dog-whistle meant to slam nerds in general...?), or sexism or feminism or gender (well, except the reference to the frozen girl as a “girl”).
Ctrl-F-ing for “Myers” doesn’t reveal anything along those lines either.
I see several comments in the political categories I mentioned but they weren’t posted by PZ or cheered by PZ, so I’m a bit surprised by the comments here focusing on PZ to impute political motives to him and psychoanalyze him.
PZ’s post all but says he’s slamming cryonicists because (to his mind) they’re crooks & quacks. (Based on the reference to “tortur[ing] cadavers”, maybe there’s a purity-violation ick-reaction too. That’s still pretty distant from the motivations people are speculating about here.) I don’t understand why I’d need a special explanation for that, over & above the more common reasons why people tend to scoff at cryonics (absurdity heuristic, plus scepticism about future technological trends w.r.t. brain preservation & re-instantiation, plus over-generalization from everyday experience of how freezing affects food and the like).
The funny part is PZ being a nerdy white male atheist scientist so basically the perfect target for this. Could this partially be a preventive action i.e. if I shoot at my group, perhaps people don’t notice I am one of them?
In debates I read about similar people, “projection” is a word mentioned repeatedly. I would also suspect “reaction formation” (known as “the lady doth protest too much” outside of psychoanalysis) to play an important role.
That means, I think there is more than merely strategically shooting at one’s own phenotype to draw attention away from one’s own person. If drawing attention away would be the only goal, it would make more sense to try draw attention away towards some other group, also an easy target, but not including me. For example, white male nerds could shoot at white male jocks, since it is only being white and male that is considered a bad thing in certain circles. Similarly, white male atheists could shoot at white male Christians. So there must be some additional explanation.
(Not everyone is like this. There are also people who do not shoot at their own group, but at a different group, or at least at a much larger supergroup so that their own group gets a smaller fraction of attention. For example white male non-nerds shooting at white male nerds, or rich white people putting huge emphasis on whiteness and maleness and maybe also cissexuality but never ever mentioning class privilege. (Which is rather ironic, considering that the whole privileged/oppressed framwork was stolen from Marx. Here, Marx would be an example of a rich white male shooting at rich white males.))
So I guess in a way these people are trying to shoot at themselves—on some metaphorical level. It’s like they perceive something undesirable in themselves… then use typical mind fallacy to generalize it to their whole group (because being a member of a sinful group is less painful than being a sinful individual in otherwise mostly healthy group) … and then try to atone for their sins by attacking all the other members of their group (because it is less painful than trying to improve oneself). That is, on some level they are sincerely fighting against something they consider evil. They just completely lost control over the huge biases that govern their evil-detection mechanisms.
Here is an experimental prediction: Find a sample of über-politically-correct white men publicly shooting at their own group (not just a similar group or a huge superset). Explore their background, and the background of typical members of such group. I predict that among these online warriors you will find a higher percent than in general population of racists, rapists, etc. (Where by “racists” I don’t mean scoring non-zero on an implicit association test, but like actual neo-Nazis; etc.)
Agreed. Of course, calming down is hard enough by itself without people seemingly actively trying to prevent you from calming down—people like, say, the commenters in that particular blog post. (Major kudos to DataPacRat for managing to stay calm while he/she was being accused of believing in “godbots”; I would not have been able to do the same.) I’m inclined to apply the principle of charity here along with Hanlon’s Razor to conclude that they’re not actually deliberately trying to piss you off… but God, it sure feels like it sometimes.
Well, hats off to /u/DataPacRat for fighting the good fight in that comment section. I suspect most of the thread is people who just came in to post their little dig at the weird meat-popsicle cultists and then move on, so I’m not sure if he’s achieving much, but if nothing else he’s stopped me from feeling I need to go in there and join the fray to say what he ended up saying, except less well.
Lots of people employing the weirdness heuristic, as expected. Oh, and of course David Gerard’s over there too.
sigh
PZ Myers:
Here’s a fun topic of conversation—if I happen across PZ Myers, and he’s having a heart attack, should I feel any obligation to perform CPR?
Yes, if they have cryonics or its successor technologies for themselves and they can reason about consequences carefully. If you have an injury or pathology in the 24th Century that the health care providers don’t know how to treat, you could go into brain preservation to see if the health care providers in, say, the 26th Century would know how to help you. Some of those health care professionals active in the 26th Century might have been born in the 20th or 21st Centuries and have gone through a round or two of brain preservation themselves, and they entered the practice of medicine in the 26th Century as one of their new careers. “Hey, I know this guy. He helped to resuscitate me in 2327. I owe him so I’ll return the favor.”
I get that Myers’ article pisses a lot of people here off (myself included), but let’s try to refrain from mean-spirited-ness, neh? Mind-killing happens readily enough by itself without people helping the process along.
Normally, yes I think it wise to refrain from mean-spirited-ness. But when someone writes a hit piece against the parents of a recently deceased toddler because they dared to try to save her life in a weird way, well, in this case I’m going to make an exception.
The fact that his behavior emotionally triggers you is no reason to engage in bad and unproductive behavior yourself. Even if it’s “justified”.
I think you are greatly missing the point. If you want to be effective in the world, sometimes that involves being politically smart. And sometimes the politically smart thing to do is a show of force. You should not jump from emotion straight to action. But sometimes after examining the evidence and weighing the possibilities, the best response is an angry toned rejection.
I have nothing against calculated actions that shows force. Against a blogger who in the business of getting page views by stirring up controversy being mean-spirited isn’t showing force.
He’s not saying in that quote that they shouldn’t feel an obligation, he’s making a point focusing on doubting whether they’d want to resurrect them. I think they very likely would, and PZ is ignoring the entire first-in/last-out which cryonics plans on using to further encourage people to resurrect, but it helps to actually focus on what his criticism is.
If you can perform CPR with little cost to you, you should. If performing CPR has a large cost to you, or if there are so many people that need CPR that performing CPR on all of them is, in total, a large cost to you, you are not obliged to do anything.
How easy would it be for the future civilization to resurrect the brains?
I’m pretty sure cost of resurrection isn’t his true rejection, his true rejection is more like ‘point and laugh at weirdos’.
I’m guessing that any civilisation capable of resurrecting cryonics patients would be post-scarcity, and cost would therefore be irrelivent. But even if I am wrong on this point, well, to continue his mummified Egyptians analogy, can you imagine how much money you would make selling the TV rights to the first ever resurrection of a Pharaoh?
Additionally, don’t Alcor, and many individuals, have funds set up to cover the cost of resurrection?
I understand that there are plausible arguments against cryonics, such as technological feasibility. But the “why bother saving people?” argument is both stupid and repugnant.
Also for a number of commenters in the linked thread, the true rejection seems to be, “By freezing yourself you are claiming that you deserve something no one else gets, in this case immortality.”
This is almost identical to the argument against free-market medical care “Why should you get better treatment just because you can afford it?”. I wonder how many commentators would agree with both arguments.
Heh. Any true-believer Christian would laugh at cryonics and point out that the way to everlasting life is much simpler—just accept Jesus… X-D
Oh, and any true-believer Buddhist would be confused as to why would you want to linger on your way to enlightenment.
I find the idea of “true rejection” over-used. Many people, for many things, have more than one reason to reject them, and none of those reasons is the reason.
That would only make money because it hasn’t been done before. Each successive Pharaoh resurrection would make less money. A question asking what a future civilization would do about a frozen head implies asking what they would do for a typical frozen head. Being one of the first frozen heads they run across is very atypical, and carries a higher profit only because it is atypical.
It might also cost less money, because most of the cost might be R&D to work out how to resurrect someone, after which resurrecting each person is easy.
Continuing the Egypt analogy, each additional Egyptian artefact is less interesting than the previous one, yet people continued digging them up rather than just digging up the first few.
This does not seem psychologically realistic. Humans aren’t built to arrive at conclusions through rational evaluation of multiple independent lines of evidence; rather, they choose their answer in advance for some reason or other (usually “this is weird” or “my tribe rejects this”), and only then begin cherry-picking arguments to support their conclusion.
This is true, but ignores skeptical_lurker’s point that any civilization capable of resurrection is likely to be post-scarcity.
That seems to have an implied ”… so every time I argue with a human, I should never assume that the human has more than one reason for something”. I hope you can see how that will go seriously wrong when the human actually does have more than one reason, and particularly on LW-style topics.
If the civilization is post-scarcity, then making money from TV rights to the first Pharaoh is not useful as an analogy; the future civilization never does one thing because it gets them more of something than another thing does.
Absolute claims are almost never correct. Replace the “never” in your statement with “usually not, especially when discussing politically charged, or better yet, weird-sounding topics” and you’ve got yourself a deal.
You’re refusing to address someone’s stated argument, and in fact, are saying something that is nonresponsive if he means what he is actually saying.
Yes, sometimes you have to do that. But making it your default behavior when addressing all people in the real world who don’t agree with you is a bad idea.
Who said anything about making it your default behavior? There’s a difference between “many” and “most”, and an even bigger difference between “many” and “all”.
Okay, change that statement to include the word “most”.
Making it the default behavior for when addressing most people who don’t agree with you is still a bad idea.
Yes, that’s why Alcor is so expensive.
Presumably, the ease will change with time, tending easier until ceilings of possible economic and technological progress are reached. If it takes centuries for the procedure of resurrecting the cryopreserved to go from “experimental and expensive” to “cheap and routine”, the old 21st-century cryo-patients can wait, they aren’t getting any deader.
Is it wrong that I’m most saddened that they tore apart her brain for a year chasing that tumor, before they did the sensible thing and let her be cryopreserved?
Not that this is an open and shut case at all, but we need laws on the books regarding elective cryopreservation in the case of brain degenerative disease.
You know what he does for a living don’t you?
“Evolutionary developmental biology,” which means Myers tries to understand biology that happens on its own. The cryonics idea, by contrast, involves trying to get human biology, and specifically the human brain, to do something it didn’t evolve to do, namely, enter a state of preservation through vitrification. Basically Myers doesn’t think about cryonics as an engineering challenge because he doesn’t have experience or talent with that sort of practical problem solving.
Myers invokes his credentials as a neuroscientist to criticize cryonics; but then another neuroscientist, Kenneth Hayworth, started the Brain Preservation Foundation because he thinks that cryonics deserves a second look due to advances in organ vitrification. I would like to see these two go head to head (yeah, I see the pun potential there) in a debate.
How is he picking on cryonicists? On the contrary, he is “picking on” (ie pointing out the flaws in) cryonics. There is a world of difference. The bulk of the article is a compare and contrast between lengthy quotes of mummification and cryopreservation.
Yes, Myers is engaged more in mockery than detailed argumentation. If a view cannot stand up to mockery, it doesn’t deserve defenders.
Or in other words, if you can bully someone out of defending their beliefs, you win.
Really?
No, that does not follow. Your straw is very weak.
No straw, but purest steel. I stand by my words.
Mockery is neither data nor reasoning: no update is epistemically required of the person attacked. The outcome is a matter of their fortitude, not the rights or wrongs of their case. The purpose of mockery is to crush the hated enemy by shouting loudly.
That depends—mockery is just a form in which many things can be clothed, including data and reasoning.
But in any case, the original claim was
which, without too much contortions, could be reformulated as “a view which cannot encourage sufficient fortitude in any of its defenders does not deserve to be defended”. And then you said
You do? What do you win? And how does that relate to whether the belief mocked was (epistemically) correct or not?
I think you’re confusing the issue of whether something is valued (and so worth defending) with whether something is empirically/scientifically correct (and so “true”).
I find it of significantly greater value to engage in detailed argumentation than in mockery. If cryonics has flaws in it, those flaws can be pointed out without resorting to sarcasm, and doing so simply raises the probability of mind-killing.