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.)
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.)