i haven't look into this for almost a couple of decades, i presume there was zero progress at that level? at one point i hear of something cool regarding drastically lowering the temperature of people who had an accident while they get transported or something in those lines, that seemed like a promising line of enquiry.
I mean, lowering some people's temperature while they are not conscious can be beneficial (my father had a stroke, and they did just that), but that's just nowhere near what cryonics is about. The central problems of cryonics are entirely unsolved, and at this point may very well prove to be unsolvable. Freezing people just isn't a solution.
> just nowhere near what cryonics is about.
eh, like, its a baby step in that direction maybe. was i implying it was much more than that?
>The central problems of cryonics are entirely unsolved, and at this point may very well prove to be unsolvable.
that take is too definitive for my taste, i rather be agnostic about it. who knows how things will develop within the next couple of hundred years. there is no need to wash your hands ofthe whole thing that quickly and eagerly.
> eh, like, its a baby step in that direction maybe. was i implying it was much more than that?
Oh don't worry, I'm not criticising you. It's just not even really a baby step - cooling people down and warming them up again just has surprisingly little to do with freezing and thawing them, other than involving cold.
> that take is too definitive for my taste, i rather be agnostic about it. who knows how things will develop within the next couple of hundred years. there is no need to wash your hands ofthe whole thing that quickly and eagerly.
Sure, but there are simply dead ends in science, and that's something we have to accept. There's no point in throwing resources after finding the Philosopher's Stone once it's pretty clear it's not *a thing*, and similarly, I think if Cryonics wasn't a pet project and involved immortality for rich people, we would have written it off by now.
> Do you think people are more likely to be revived in the future if they are cremated, or if they are preserved?
Preserved, obviously. Though the words "more likely" are doing a lot of work here, I don't think there's much of a chance at all that this happens.
> I'm not sure what future breakthroughs would allow us to repair the damage that is done by burial or cremation, but there has been a ton of progress in connectomics over the last year, and it's not tough to imagine future humans piecing together preserved human brains.
Okay, but realize that
A. information from "*brainpreservation.org"* is not going to be terribly reliable. It's led by people with a vested interest in claiming that it's a sure shot. It's like asking "the flying car foundation" wether flying cars are going to be a thing.
B. science is not a progress bar, and there being developments in one part does not mean a highly hopeful sci-fi-concept will come to life.
Because that's what it is: a sci-fi idea. And just because there technically is a chance that something may happen at some point ("recovering" people from preserved human brains) does not mean we should start preserving brains in the futile hope that this chance becomes real. There are ideas far more likely that we don't prepare for, and with good reason. Otherwise, we might as well start doing Rokko's Basilisk again. Please don't do that.
The reality of the situation is that brain preservation, cryogenics and the like only look more likely than they are because they're the pet projects of rich people. They get funded way more than is appropriate, and that bloats its significance.
> Actually, the BPF research is peer reviewed. The papers were published in very reputable scientific journals.
And you missed the point.
> Nobody is claiming that preserved people will definitely be revived in the future—just that it increases the odds.
Yeah and I never claimed you claimed that.
> The notion that more information can be gleaned from preserved biological artifacts than from cremated or rotting ones is not unscientific.
Yeah, and no-one disputed that, but this is clearly in bad faith.
Look, I'm not coming for your religion, but I also don't buy into the sales pitch.
> I suppose you don't consider peer-reviewed scientific journals to be a good source for information. That explains why you are so ignorant about brain preservation.
Yeah okay, you're muted, then. Not reading the rest of this.
Learn to talk to people in a way different from Jehova's Witnesses angrily trying to convert you.
Read this article, then come back to us about the "pseudoscience" claim:
'...the extent of mathematical investigation and application in cryonics is rather surprising, a bit more than you’d expect from the labeling of “pseudoscience” that those outside the field often attach to the practice.'
Mathematics and Modeling in Cryonics: Some Historical Highlights
[https://www.alcor.org/docs/mathematics-and-modeling-in-cryonics.pdf](https://www.alcor.org/docs/mathematics-and-modeling-in-cryonics.pdf)
It can't be pseudoscience unless it claims to be science. Cryonicists do not claim that cryonics is science.
Science requires - among other things - an experiment. Cryonicists haven't completed one yet.
It is faith-based technology.
Cryonics can't be a pseudoscience because it doesn't purport to be a "science" in the strict sense, that is, to contribute any new scientific claims or theories or dispute existing ones. Cryonics is a technological proposal based on established scientific facts and some reasonable speculation about future technology that may or may not be too optimistic but in any case it doesn't contradict any known scientific facts. I mean, of course, facts published in the peer-reviewed literature and generally accepted, not the casual opinions and rants of people who happen to be scientists.
Pointing to the lack of "revived" cryonicists or the disastrous effects of uncontrolled thawing is like saying Mars colonization efforts are somehow unscientific or psdeudoscientific because there are no Mars colonies, plus the Martian atmosphere is unbreathable.
What's more, if a reversible cryopreservation technology was developed right now, that wouldn't say much about the viability of current cryonics techniques anyway. And waiting for an actual revival would make the whole point of cryonics moot. If a revival technique is at some point proven and available, that's no longer some controversial proposal, that's just plain old mainstream medicine and the only question would be the logistics of making it available to everyone.
Keeping that in mind, the main way to give a reasonably confident scientific answer as to whether cryonics as currently performed "works" would be atomically precise microscopy of unaltered neural biopsies from cryonics patients, combined with a sufficiently detailed model of the healthy neuron. Then we could either say that the relevant information was preserved and it's only a matter of developing the repair technology (or direct mind uploading, but that's a whole other can of worms), or we could confirm that the original structure can't be inferred from what's left, and there would be little reason for hope.
But as things are, we can only tell with some confidence in extreme cases, either when tissues have been patently obliterated or when they have been preserved so well that even current electron microscopy shows a promising level of ultrastructure preservation, as it happens with [aldehyde-stabilized criopreservation](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001122401500245X). The problem with typical cryonics brains is that neurons are shrunken from dehydration (caused by quickly rising cryoprotectant concentrations) and become too tightly packed to discern with currently available microscopy.
Leaving aside the issue of whether the relevant information was preserved, some critics have also attacked the plausibility of proposed future revival technologies, like advanced nanomedicine derived from [molecular nanotechnology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molecular_nanotechnology). Again, while some of the devices and capabilities described in Nanosystems are way beyond anything available right now, AFAIK no serious flaws have been found in Drexler's detailed calculations and molecular simulations in all these years.
It's worth mentioning that [Kenneth Hayworth](https://www.brainpreservation.org/team/kenneth-hayworth/) and others at the [BPF](https://www.brainpreservation.org/) tend to envision a revival based on direct, destructive mind uploading, which obviates the need for anything like molecular nanotechnology, but on the other hand requires reliance on a model of personal identity which is controversial even among cryonicists. Also, they tend to position themselves as separate from the cryonics community, and there's some friction between the two regarding strategy, focus, attitude and so on, but I would say the commonalities weigh more than the differences.
This is an ok introduction to an actual piece about the current state
of cryonics research and its acceptance in the scientific community, but
where’s the rest of it?
In particular, why would someone decide to write and publish all this
and not think to include any actual citations pointing to the science in
favor of cryonics that they think isn’t getting enough attention? I know
these guys all hate the liberal arts, but this like, Essay Writing
101.
No, see, this is Bayesian reasoning. You start from your *priors*, then when you encounter experts who challenge them, you discredit those people's entire profession by pulling something out of your *posterior*.
It is almost as if he couldn't find any evidence that indicates cryonics actually works.
The following comment from the substack is spot on:
> Does it bother you at all that this particular line of reasoning would fit 1:1 on a site like NaturalNews if you replaced "Cryonics" with... basically any alternative medicine treatment?
Though typically woo alternative medicine articles usually cite fake or loosely related studies to promote whatever they are selling.
In reply to someone pointing this out in the comments, he added some links that prove cryonics is 100% highly scientific and so his reasoning is airtight. Also can I sell you these remarkable healing crystals
See, that almost makes it even worse to me. If you have these links, why not put them in your actual article, and write a little bit about your interpretation of them and how it fits into your argument? Good lord, these people would fail even a 6th grade writing assignment.
You're holding this guy to a weirdly high standard. He's not, like, a public figure with a big audience -- this is his third blog post on Substack.
He probably didn't expect a huge number of people to see it, especially people who were unfamiliar with cryonics. He even replied to a comment stating that this post was intended for people who already understood where he was coming from.
I know it's technically publicly accessible, but I doubt he sent it out to a general audience of people who were missing context on cryonics.
It would feel like incomplete if it were in a newspaper, but it's just a blog post by a new blogger.
Asking people to actually make a full argument and include citations for their arguments (which, its worth pointing out, are specifically about other people not making good arguments) is a weirdly high standard now? I'm not even the only one pointing out that he wrote half a piece, here or in the comments for his post.
> He even replied to a comment stating that this post was intended for people who already understood where he was coming from.
If your defense of your work is "well my audience knows what I'm saying without me saying it"...why are you saying anything to begin with? You're clearly not adding anything to the conversation.
>I'm not even the only one pointing out that he wrote half a piece, here or in the comments for his post.
I shared this post with my friends on Facebook. It's only Sneerclub participants and random people I've never met who are making these demands.
Yes, it is a weirdly high standard for something shared with friends! Do you back up everything you say with citations when you're posting on Facebook or Reddit? When you're speaking to people you already know?
Reminds me of Yudkowsky’s early writings about guillotining the head
into the bucket of liquid nitrogen…
Science: idk if you dont trust what I say will happen, maybe buy a
pig head and a bucket of liquid nitrogen? You’re in the bay area, there
is an air distillation plant in santa clara next to the old fabs. Liquid
nitrogen is cheap as dirt. Just make sure to do it outdoors so you don’t
suffocate…
Cryonics: nooo my belief in science is shattered by the thought
experiment that was based entirely on what liquid nitrogen does in the
movies!
Edit: I guess if you did that your belief in science would indeed get
shattered along with the rest of your head, after the outside freezes
while the inside takes something like tens of minutes to freeze.
What if you used lasers or really thin wires like in the cube or the resident evil movie to dice the head into the bucket? Im sure the. Singularity will put the pieces back in the right order and if they freeze too slow just use smaller chunks
Tbh in seriousness i think probably the best bet would be to ditch the skull and slice the brain and put it in formaldehyde and leave it at that. Just do it like any other specimen preservation.
The speed is not even the main issue, when you freeze water, you get pure water ice (which cuts everything up) then the concentrated brine soup freezes. So you get both the mechanical mixing up and proteins denaturing in the brine edit: and also all sorts of enzymes mixed together with all sorts of things they are kept apart from.
Scientists don't just throw mice into liquid nitrogen when preparing samples for electron microscopy - what fools.
Heh... yeah sugar is a pretty good preservative as well. In all seriousness reading about how alcor etc do it, there's absolutely no reason their bullshit would work any better than some candied brain cubes.
I think there's two ways to go about it. If we could actually cool mice down to liquid nitrogen temperatures and revive some, doing that would be obviously the best option, but we can't. Maybe some day we could, maybe never, who knows. So the only thing that's left is preservation for microscopy. For that you'd just cool it to near zero, cut it up, and store using best methods for specimen preservation, like ones that work the best for obtaining pictures from it with electron microscopy. (Freezing is used sometimes, albeit only on very thin slices).
Meanwhile cryonics is basically a cargo cult version of the first option, with all their arguments for why it might work relying on the second option being possible despite all the idiocy they do, due to some sort of advanced future un-shredding technologies. (And because they don't want to slice it, they usually don't end up saturating it sufficiently with chemicals to prevent crystallization).
Cryonics is absolutely what it says on the can: an elaborate burial ritual, and arising in western context, it can't involve cutting things into thin slices, because that would be inconsistent with western burial traditions. There's also As A Service billing model, hence it *has* to be frozen and require constant maintenance.
> Cryonics is absolutely what it says on the can: an elaborate burial ritual, and arising in western context, it can't involve cutting things into thin slices, because that would be inconsistent with western burial traditions. There's also As A Service billing model, hence it has to be frozen and require constant maintenance.
Canning! That's another option. Anything with a long shelf life, because from what I've heard of the cryonics guys, relying on them is out of the question.
probably less than a minute, I used to work with the stuff and it's hella cold. But less than a minute is *plenty* of time to form ice crystals that'll shred your neurons.
Better to perfuse with 0 degree C saline containing 10% DMSO first, that should help preserve your membranes. But when they thaw you, you have a head full of saline - oops, dead.
i dunno. There's a 200 deg C gradient between the LN and the inside. But if you put a turkey in an oven, there's a 200 deg C gradient between the heating element and the inside there too. And the inside doesn't cook in less than a minute.
I’ll calculate again for a spherical head... mostly the issue is that as you say its only 200 c, its cold but it isn’t cold the way a vat of molten metal is hot. And water has very high latent heat.
edit: specifically, water has latent heat of fusion of almost 80 calories per gram, same as for changing water's temperature by 80 degrees Celsius. So the turkey analogy works pretty well, assuming it starts at the internal temperature of 0° C and you want it to be at 80° C. There's some differences of course, not as much temperature gradient as it is warming up, and the boiling prevents turkey from getting above 100C, and the ice is several times more thermally conductive than water, but it also takes hours to cook turkey.
But see this is what the author was arguing even if badly. Cryonics doesn't just involve chucking people into liquid nitrogen there is an entire process to prevent freezing.
Depends on the company doing the freezing. The cheaper option is pretty much throwing brains in liquid nitrogen.
The more expensive option is akin to an embalming process followed by freezing; the idea is to pump their special brand of antifreeze through the circulatory system first, along with the chemicals required to make it permeate the membranes. In practice, reportedly, they fail to prevent crystalization.
Ultimately, neither actually allows say a mouse to be revived, and neither is how you’d make the best preserved sample for microscopy in say 100 years (or even in 1 year for that matter).
Was reminded a lot of Topher Hallquist’s old
article about LW’s anti-science attitudes. Matthew has essentially
the exact same gripes, even down to the people involved, as EY has had
for years:
Now, I don’t actually think “adopt the beliefs of other educated
people” is a bad heuristic. Granted, there seem to be a lot of issues
where a generic college degree doesn’t help much. Even a generic
Ph.D. may not help, if you’re not inclined to trust other experts when
you go outside your specialty. “Trust the experts” is the actual
heuristic I advocate–but in general, I don’t think these kind of
heuristics are inherently bad.
But back to Yudkowsky’s post. He thinks this is a problem, not
because he believes in UFOs or astrology, but because he thinks other
people are guilty of doing the same thing with regards to AI,
nanotechnology, and cryonics. And looking at that part, one sentence
really stood out: “Michael Shermer blew it by mocking molecular
nanotechnology.”
Matthew posted this on Facebook as well, which is public and can be
seen here.
Robin Hanson and Roko (of Roko’s Basilisk) make appearances in the
comments.
Unlike a lot of comment threads, this one is less quotable and more
of a … holistic experience, I guess you could say. The LW trademark of
having incredibly long discussions about minutiae that barely matter to
the original point/question is on full display here.
Some sympathetic but sceptical people show up to question the premise
that a good scientist has to take cryonics seriously. The cryonics
defenders very quickly move from discussing the merits of cryonics to
very standard talking points (again developed by EY) about what
subjective probabilities are acceptable to start betting on cryonics in
the far future, and about “unfair” social policing of the boundaries of
science. Roko also adds in a half-baked “signalling” theory about
cryonics seeming selfish.
The Facebook subthread thread arguing with the actual fucking neuroscientist is :chefkiss: The poster has absolutely no fucking idea about the science or the scientists he's pontificating on, and will absolutely keep posting through it.
Topher Hallquist is signed up for cryonics:
> Full disclosure: I’m signed up for cryonics. But the idea that nanomachines will one day be able to repair frozen brains strikes me as highly unlikely. I think there’s a better chance that it will be possible to use frozen brains as the basis for whole brain emulation, but I’m not even sure about that. Too much depends on guesses both about the effects of current freezing techniques and about future technology.
Citation needed. Searching for "Topher Hallquist cryonics" on Twitter yields nothing, so apparently I will need you to tell me his Twitter handle
It is rare for people to leave unless they lose their job and become poor.
Havig a strange sense of deja vu reading this. Some of the sentences
read like something i have read before.
But let me be clear: the mainstream is wrong.
I find your lack of citations disturbing.
E: About not having faith in scientists being above it all, there was
a book which I read when I was … dunno 14? Which also addressed that,
was a good
book to read and talk about in highschool about just this subject.
Sadly doesn’t seem it was ever translated out of dutch. It is about a
dusty old boring professor who suddenly wins the nobel prize, and then
people try to be all nice and friendly to him and other things. (because
funding).
Christ, he trying to show scientists are liars but the only time he
actually presents any evidence about anyone having gotten anything
wrong, the target is Michael Shermer, whose Ph.D. is in history of
science.
People who want to go deep on the cryonics debate might want to look
up Kenneth Hayworth, an ex-Alcor member who has actually relevant
qualifications and clearly wants something like cryonics to work, but
who has been quite clear that current technology isn’t up to the
task.
I think Kenneth Hayworth is great. :) I agree with his stance towards Alcor & CI. In particular, I think he's right to ask them to be more rigorous, and I think he's right to push in the direction of aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation.
I suppose my disagreement is whether the statement "the current cryonics organizations have limited technology" implies "cryonics is pseudoscience."
I think the scientific community is right on the vast majority of topics. Distrust is the wrong word here. There are naive ways of understanding the scientific community, and less naive ways. In the less naive version, people are human and are prone to having significant blindspots, often in ways that end up mattering a lot.
I think a large portion of the Scientific community hasn't thought much about it, and then when asked give arguments that show they don't understand what cryonicists are even doing much less trying to do. The sheer number of articles which mention the damage of freezing on tissue shows that. Freezing destroys cells in the brain which is why cryonics doesn't do that. No one is being frozen. If the articles can't get the most basic facts right about what cryonics is it's hard to treat the rest seriously.
Even Alcor doesn't claim this. They claim their methods "reduce freezing", and talk in terms of theoretical possibilities of recovering people with nanotechnology.
I also like how he says mainstream scientists have been against
cryonics because they are hacks and don’t like it, then sources quotes
from Michael Shermer in 2001 and research from 2018 and 2015 to show how
2001 man is biased
A candle is burning with a small flame. The candle's wax is about to run out - uh oh! I have an idea - let's flash freeze the burning candle, and when we thaw the candle out, the flame should light again on its own. The candle will remember that it was burning, and go back to its previous burning state once we un-freeze it. That is how chemical reactions work.
This is counting fairies by the number of fairy rings.
Just sayin’, I’m afraid my baby will be snatched up and replaced with
a dirty changeling, and would it be such a sin to vaccuum freeze the
poor tyke until the Church can purge the fairy scourge?
I’ve had a few run-ins with cryonics fanatics, they tend to be super
aggressive and unpleasant to deal with. Worse than militant vegans, not
quite as bad as anti-vaxxers. (Purely in my personal experience, of
course.)
Don’t get me wrong, I adore cryonics as a science fiction device, but
for the foreseeable future, that’s all it will ever be.
I don't really see any serious cryonics advocates promote it beyond "more likely to be revived than cremation/burial", which is a very low bar. I think that's a fair characterization, and I'd personally pay a decent chunk of cash for the chance at it. Of course, I hope that by the time I die, the technology is improved so that there's a significantly better chance of success, but even in its current state, I think it's worth a shot.
I've always been curious why you seem rather opposed to the rationalist community. You seem like a pretty nice, non-judgmental person, judging from your books (which I enjoyed, BTW!), and SneerClub (by definition) seems like a rather hateful, negative place.
Thank you, I'm glad you enjoyed my books!
So my biggest issue with cryonics is the industry, honestly- even ignoring any scientific viability questions, the average corporate lifespan is less than 30 years. Toy knowledge, every single one of the original cryonics corporations from the first generation of companies has collapsed save one, and all their frozen bodies thrown in the trash. The same will happen to just about all the current companies, too. Corporations just don't last, unless they're government subsidized or grocery stores. Science-wise, at this point... it's really not that much more plausible than reviving a jar of ashes. If you wanted to take that microscopic chance, fair, but it's people trying to make the odds look better than they really are that bug me.
Also, I've just had a bunch of cryonics fans be really unpleasant to me over the years, so, you know, less inclined to be charitable towards them these days. A little petty, yes, but as I always say, no better muse than petty spite. It's basically artistic jetfuel.
As for the Rationalists... well, I'm something of a philosophical empiricist, and Rationalism and empiricism have a more than a century (several centuries, arguably) feud. The Less Wrong Rationalists are cut from just about the same cloth as all the previous Rationalist movements. (Which is to say, their ideas are radically anti-science when you really delve into them.)
More importantly, the Rationalist movement is chock-full of racists and fascists. Not even joking, Neonazis like Steve Sailer regularly show up in their comment sections and are treated warmly, many of their most prominent members are eugenicists (Scott Alexander/Siskind, the second most prominent Rationalist, just got publicly outed as a eugenicist via leaked emails where he explicitly admits to it), and HBD pseudo-scientific racism is mainstream in Rationalist circles. It's a deeply fucked up movement that acts as a recruiting ground for various far right groups. (I don't think that was ever their original intent, but, as literally everyone who has ever interacted with Nazis and fascists will tell you, you can't interact with them in good faith, because they never reciprocate said good faith. They infiltrate your group, and then they take over. It's Karl Popper's Paradox of Tolerance, it's liberalism's early 20th century failures against fascism, and it's the Punk/Nazi bar wars.)
As for Sneer Club... It's not so bad. I mean, yeah, definitely a pretty negative place, but it's got surprisingly strict rules of conduct. No dehumanizing nicknames of Rationalists are allowed, no brigading, no racist/sexist/ableist language, no doxxing (using Scott Siskind's real name while he was still publicly Scott Alexander, for instance, would get you in a lot of trouble here, even though his real name was widely known already). This is fundamentally a bunch of (mostly) leftists hanging out and doing political critique of a group they oppose on philosophical, moral, and political grounds. (And I'm hardly the only novelist who hangs out here, or even the biggest- there's one considerably bigger-name SFF author than me who stops by here every now and then to comment, and I've talked to multiple other authors who lurk here.)
The jokes are pretty witty here sometimes, too.
Thanks for the long reply, much appreciated!
I agree with you about the fundamental problem with the cryonics industry under our economic system and I hope we somehow manage to fix it. Regarding the plausibility of revival, I'd nitpick and argue that cryonics today is many, many orders of magnitude better than cremation, but also orders of magnitude worse than sci-fi cryonics.
Unpleasant people are always a pain, and I've found it's best to avoid and ignore them. "\[...\] no better muse than petty spite. It's basically artistic jetfuel" Quotable :D
Regarding philosophy, I'd think that modern-day rationalists are closer to empiricists than old-school rationalism, judging by the emphasis placed on (empirical) evidence-based reasoning. I'm not sure that the modern-day rationalists have \_any\_ ideas, let alone ones that are "radically anti-science". I can only think of a couple that are popular in the community: cryonics (which is possible in principle \[insofar as in it doesn't obviously violate the laws of physics\], but severely implausible) and nootropics (which are fine if they work, I guess). In both cases, I don't see the rationalist community arguing against the scientific consensus, just having different risk-benefit calculations, which I can understand. Ignoring whether "the rationalists" practice what they preach, what they preach does seem to be quite empiricist. (I only have limited knowledge of philosophy, so I could be wrong, but FWIW, that's also the opinion of one of my professors who ought to know about this stuff).
I guess we have an ideological difference when it comes to the Paradox of Tolerance. I personally enter every discussion in good faith, and just silently ghost away if I feel it's becoming a bad-faith discussion. While I understand the urge to censor dissenting voices (especially ones that are racist/fascist/etc.), I still think that open debate and exposure to alternative opinions is better than echo chambers. Where else would far-right people experience more moderate views, if not for fora that allow them to participate? Also, I've never found that insulting them/their beliefs causes them to change their minds. They just double down and sink deeper into their beliefs. I honestly believe that coherent, calm discourse is the best way to reach them.
Regarding Scott Alexander, I am generally skeptical of any labels attributed to him that are so obviously negative (e.g. "eugenicist") because I've read a lot of his work that appears to be from a kind, nice, empathetic person. "Eugenicist" could range between (i) Hitler (kill "inferior" people and prevent them from reproducing), and (ii) some (partially genetically determined) traits are good and we should promote them (without harming others). If anything, I'd guess Scott is very close to (ii), which I personally support (do let me know if I'm mistaken about Scott's position). If we could raise IQ by 20 points or cure all genetic disorders or increase our lifespan by a few years through gene therapy, I'd be all for that. If people want to voluntarily have kids only with people who satisfy whatever constraints, so be it (we do that anyway). Yes, the second-order effects (increasing inequality, etc.) might be bad, but I think the first-order benefits outweigh them (and I'm optimistic that economies of scale and human niceness would cause the benefits to spread to the entire population given enough time). Do I think the government ought to have anything to do with it? No, that seems very risky and prone to terrible large-scale errors in judgment. As a grassroots movement, I think it's fine.
Regarding pseudo-scientific racism, I've definitely seen a decent chunk of comment sections devoted to it. I don't mind people (in good faith) asking the question "Does population X have a higher average lifespan/IQ/propensity for crime than Y and could that be explained by genes A, B, C?" That's a perfectly legitimate scientific question, and potentially very useful. What's NOT okay is using that answer to treat people differently, amplify systemic biases, and insult others, which of course racists do. :(
I personally don't see why so much of the community is interested in social science/politics/Culture-War-y topics, when the fields are rather unscientific. How do you apply any rational thought (or Bayes) to such situations? I definitely appreciate the sneers about misusing Bayes/confirmation bias, etc. (though I do think formalizing decision-making quantitatively ends up being a useful qualitative tool, a la putanumonit). Much better to be interested in the natural sciences, in my biased opinion.
Regarding /r/Sneerclub, I guess I'm just turned off by the blatant hatred/cancel-culture-y hivemind-ed-ness. No one takes arguments in good-faith or attempts to steelman them, which I find sad and generally off-putting. This Scott Aaronson post I found captures a lot of the sentiment ([https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4129](https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4129)). It really does feel getting bullied and being called names. I do think it's important to venture outside my comfort zone though, so I occasionally come here to see what critiques people have, and some are definitely interesting.
I guess the main distinction is that I see much of the community's discussion in good faith whereas you see them as co-opted by bad-faith actors. I can understand your position, but my experience with the community (at least in person in India) has been very positive. Most people familiar with the community (in my experience) are left-wing, democratic, progressive people who think that the ideas raised are valuable (I'm one of them).
We agree on one thing though: the internet ruins things for everyone :P
BTW, just noticed that The Siege of Skyhold is out, looking forward to reading it!
Sorry for the long reply, and I'm glad you responded! :)
As a Jew who lost family to the Holocaust, I've studied the history of far right movements, especially fascism and nazism, very, very closely. Engaging in serious conversation with them has universally been a failure on a group level, and works vanishingly rarely on the individual level. You're... just flat out wrong to engage with them as thought they're arguing in good faith, because they ALWAYS engage in bad faith.
The easier and more reliable way to defeat fascists isn't ARGUING with them, it's raising the social costs of belonging to their movements so high that people are afraid to join. We are talking about an ideology that is genuinely, unambiguously evil- one that, again, murdered a bunch of my family.
>I guess we have an ideological difference when it comes to the Paradox of Tolerance.
Not so much an ideological difference. More of a difference in the number of people in our families murdered by the people we're considering tolerating (or NOT tolerating, in my case.)
I don't bother differentiating different types of eugenicists. Not least because it's trash pseudoscience rejected by the entirety of the mainstream scientific community. I'll offer you the benefit of the doubt here and assume you just haven't delved into it deeply enough, but for a solid 101 explanation of why it's garbage pseudoscience that doesn't actually work, [check out geneticist Dr. Adam Rutherford's book on the topic](https://www.amazon.com/How-Argue-Racist-Genes-Difference-ebook/dp/B08222KZJV). And that trash science? It was a huge part of the fascist ideology that led to the murder of my family members and millions of others, so... yeah, no, fuck all eugenicists.
It's that very embracing of HBD, along with cryonics to a lesser degree, that makes the Rationalists so anti-science. Science is utterly united in their rejection of these things. (And don't even get me started on AI. Or Yudkowsky "solving" physics in favor of Many Worlds. Ugh.)
Oh, yeah, and as for Scott Alexander? [Read the leaked email](https://twitter.com/arsonatdennys/status/1362153191102677001?lang=en). He quite explicitly advocates for HBD (pseudoscientific racism) and the neoreactionaries (one of many far right fascist descendant groups). [Also, here's some gross eugenics advocacy!](https://twitter.com/ArsonAtDennys/status/1362187432863612931) He might be nice and empathetic, but that just... honestly doesn't matter in the face of such genuinely disgusting beliefs.
I'm really sorry to hear about your family, that's terrible :( I now have more context for your opinions and I'm sorry if my comments hurt you in any way (that was not my intention in the least).
I appreciate your point that engaging in good faith doesn't work and I guess it's much easier to systematically de-platform racists/fascists and refuse to engage at all.
You're right, I haven't delved into the pseudoscience being peddled by racist folks (I'll be sure to check out the book you linked, thanks!). I've read through the leaked email and the advocacy for incentivized sterilization (WTF) and I'm quite shocked: he definitely seems much more sympathetic to racist/fascist ideology than appears in his blog-writing.
The arguments in the rationalist community typically go along the lines of "big science is afraid to publish genetics studies that might harm progressive policy" followed by some plausible-sounding heritability score for some traits. I've always been skeptical of the large effect sizes, given that any signal they're claiming to have detected has to be disentangled from a bajillion sources of noise. I haven't fact-checked these assertions and I really should have. I went through some of the links in the leaked email and ewwww, that's terrible analysis on shitty blogs with a clear (racist) agenda to sell.
In my defense, I remember seeing a post by him that amounted to "even if [negative trait] turns out to be heritable and [discriminated population] has that trait, we obviously should correct for that discrimination and not treat them worse", which I agreed with entirely (and still do, of course). I assumed from that article that he wasn't an actual racist/fascist/eugenicist and that he'd give a fair treatment of the data, but your links have convinced me to update on that belief.
I still hope that he's been honestly misled by bad science and that he isn't trying to peddle racism in bad faith, but I'm now ~75% sure that's not true. :(
Thanks for the conversation, I'm glad I came to /r/SneerClub today! :)
Thank you, that apology means a lot!
Sorry for the late reply, I had a pretty monster headache yesterday.
I think a lot of people- in the Rationalist community in specific, but all over the place more generally- tend to forget that a lot of ideological and philosophical positions are wrong not for internal inconsistencies or the like, but for simple historical precendent. It's not about how well you can argue for or against fascism, but about all the monstrous deeds fascism has carried out in the past, and the pain it's brought to the world. To tolerate it even merely to argue with fascists deeply dishonors all the millions of victims of fascism. Same with eugenics- even ignoring what bad science it is, taking it seriously dishonors the tens of thousands of African Americans, indigenous peoples, convicted criminals, and many others sterilized in America (and other nations) in the name of eugenics. (Something that's gone on until the present day- there was a prominent case of a hospital in Canada [sterilizing First Nations women without their consent as recently as 2018](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/forced-sterilization-lawsuit-could-expand-1.5102981)!) Eugenics, fascism, and the hordes of fascism-adjacent ideologies are all deeply irredeemable movements with horrific crimes in their pasts, and they're running rampant through Rationalism- and not just its underbelly, as Scott's emails show.
Further reading I highly recommend- [this essay by Elizabeth Sandifer on Scott's writing](https://www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/the-beigeness-or-how-to-kill-people-with-bad-writing-the-scott-alexander-method), and [her book on the neoreactionary movement, which includes a section on Yudkowsky and Rationalism](https://www.amazon.com/Neoreaction-Basilisk-Essays-Around-Alt-Right-ebook/dp/B0782JDGVQ). (Fair warning, it's an absolutely scathing book, but a brilliant piece of scholarship. I'd probably read the Adam Rutherford book before Sandifer's book- it's shorter and quicker- but both are worth your time.)
But yeah, a lot of people have been sounding the alarm for years about Scott being a fascist and eugenicist sympathizer for years, even before the smoking gun of those emails. There was also a really nasty incident where he said some cruel things about a woman who committed suicide that raised a lot of hackles- I believe it's discussed in the Sandifer essay.
As for Rationalism's relationship with science- I was one of a lot of people who got drawn into Rationalism for a while, to the point of reading the Sequences after years of reading Slate Star Codex. And, while there were some points I disagreed with Scott on, I didn't catch onto his nastiness until much later. My breaking point was reaching the chapters in the Sequences where Yudkowsky claims to solve physics in favor of Many Worlds. While I'm also an advocate for Many Worlds, this is a debate that CANNOT be solved except via empirical means. Testing- and other empirical forms of study (testing isn't always possible- empirical observation often has to do instead. Hard to design a lab test for many astrophysics and geology questions, for instance, because, uh, stars and planets.) Solving physics by non-empirical means, as he attempted to do, violates the entire point of science. Kinda why the entirety of the parts of the physics community that are aware of him- even Many Worlds advocates- can't stand him. Yudkowsky's claims are deeply anti-scientific, and utterly unforgivable short of a complete public renunciation of the claims on his part. I immediately turned against Yudkowsky after reading those chapters, and began researching more heavily into issues with Rationalism, which is when I encountered people talking about Scott's fascism, all the Neonazis in the comment sections, etc.
I should note that my background is in geology, one of the most empirical of the hard sciences in practice. Armchair speculation is absurdly harder in geology than it is in most sciences- you just can't really do geology without going out and hitting some rocks with hammers. (Well, using "hitting rocks with a hammer" as a synecdoche for "examining empirical evidence".) And, unsurprisingly, geology is nearly unrepresented in Rationalism. On the other hand, speculation about economics is absolutely rampant among Rationalists. Economics is by far the most unempirical of the social sciences- it makes cultural anthropology look like astrophysics or mineralogy. (Seriously, the entire Austrian/Chicago/Virginia schools group, which was dominant in economics for decades, was founded as an explicitly non-empirical branch.) It's no coincidence that the amount of Rationalist speculation about various sciences is directly related to how empirical the subjects are. It's causation, not correlation. The choice of physics model isn't a particularly empirical question at the moment, hence why it remains unsolved- we're just not ready to test it yet, we need more data and new instruments. Hence why Yudkowsky thought he could get away with his claims. There is a deeply anti-empirical strain in the heart of Rationalism, for all the claims otherwise. It's the same strain that's existed in every prior iteration of Rationalism as well. (Yudkowsky continually claims to have nothing to do with those past movements, which he knew nothing of before founding the modern iteration. Hilariously, they all made the same claim about their own predecessors. I believe all of them, too.)
I also oppose the Rationalists on at least one grounds that is a little less awkward for Rationalists trying to engage with me, because it's a more straightforward philosophical debate- Reductionism is mainstream in Rationalism, but I'm a pretty fervent anti-reductionist, because, again, of my background in geology. Emergent properties are EVERYWHERE in the earth sciences, and emergence and reductionism are mutually exclusive, unless you're doing philosophical contortions that render one or both of the concepts fundamentally meaningless.
And definitely feel free to hit me up if you'd like more reading suggestions- I have SO many that oppose Rationalist stances that I think are worth your time. I don't make any claims about where I think Rationalists should go after Rationalism- that's a bit too philosophically evangelical for me- but there are a lot of, in the end, much more productive and substantive routes of inquiry.
this guy is an idiot: science is provisional knowledge, not
speculation. He’s intentionally confusing ‘theoretically possible’ with
‘practically achievable,’ which is precisely what you would expect from
a rationalist - reality doesn’t matter, after all.
And vitrification doesn’t work with large volumes, unless (maybe)
you’ve got a nice big vat of liquid helium to play with.
As someone who wants to work in life-extension I’m sympathetic to the
people who want to believe that cryogenic freezing will become a field
of medicine fit for humans. I don’t know why we can’t limit discussion
to non-quackery, tho? Stem cell therapies are real and hold real promise
for medicine, but that doesn’t mean that condemnation of the abundant
quacks in that field isn’t necessary- it’s very necessary! Don’t put the
cart before the horse.
Judging by the guy’s follow-up in the comment section, it doesn’t
sound like he actually believes in the ability to reanimate a frozen
body, but rather in preserving as much information as possible in order
to potentially reconstruct the mind on a possibly different
medium.
Which is also way in the realm of science fiction-y speculation, but
granted, it sounds a bit less quacky.
However, he calls it “reanimation” presumably because he buys into
that bit of LessWrong philosophy that says a simulation or copy of you
IS you.
I wonder how many of the folks who actually sign up for cryonics are
aware of this rhetorical sleight of hand on the part of people who
peddle it to them. And if they are aware, to what degree are they being
sold on the potential for actual physical revival, as opposed to the
potential for their mind getting copied?
Sneer at me hard if you want, there likely is some kind of cryonics
that we figure out that works, because the theoretical physics involved
make sense with what we know about the human brain. Is it possible with
today’s tech? It seems like it isn’t, and the field seems to be a bunch
of snake oil salesmen convincing rich people of a pipedream. Kind of
genius in its own way, fleecing dead rich people.
It seems our neurons and brain structure is a physical thing that has been stopped and restarted in limited fashion in traumatic medical events. Of course the person that has this done to them is never the same afterwards, and usually suffers from cognitive ability loss and memory loss.
Yeah, I think it's vaguely plausible that sometime in the future there'll be a method of preserving brains without loss of the kind of detailed microstructure that would be needed to create a realistic simulation of a given brain (simulating any physical system accurately [should be possible in principle](https://web.archive.org/web/20180721014039/https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~christos/classics/Deutsch_quantum_theory.pdf) with enough detailed information), but modern cryonic methods probably inherently involve way too much damage, plus a lot of extra damage due to sloppy implementation of those methods. A guy named Mike Darwin has written a lot about this, see [here](http://chronopause.com/chronopause.com/index.php/2011/05/29/a-visit-to-alcor/index.html) and [here](http://chronopause.com/chronopause.com/index.php/2011/02/23/does-personal-identity-survive-cryopreservation/index.html) for instance--that second one is long and technical, but in particular read the comment after the article where he talks about how badly the Cryonics Institute fails at the "vitrification" process referenced by the OP as a supposedly much better alternative to straight freezing (vitrification requires the "perfusion" of brain tissue with vitrification chemicals):
>It was a snotty, and probably inappropriate remark. Basically I was commenting on the operational paradigm at CI, which is pretty much “ritual.” You sign up, you get frozen and it’s pretty much kumbaya, no matter how badly things go. And they go pretty badly. Go to: http://cryonics.org/refs.html#cases and start reading the case reports posted there. That’s pretty much my working definition of horrible. It seems apparent to me that “just getting frozen” is now all that is necessary for a ticket to tomorrow, and that anything else that is done is “just gravy,” and probably unnecessary to a happy outcome.
>It works like this:
>1) If you are cryopreserved, hope is preserved that you will be reanimated.
>2) Since hope cannot be quantified, all hope is equal.
>3) Since the degree of hope is the same for everyone cryopreserved everyone cryopreserved has the same opportunity to be reanimated.
>4) Since being cryopreserved equals salvation, then how you are cryopreserved is no longer material.
>5) People who get cryopreserved ‘well’ have the right to more hope, however, since hope cannot be quantified this is meaningless.
>Even in cases that CI perfuses, things go horribly wrong – often – and usually for to me bizarre and unfathomable (and careless) reasons. My dear friend and mentor Curtis Henderson was little more than straight frozen because CI President Ben Best had this idea that adding polyethylene glycol to the CPA solution would inhibit edema. Now the thing is, Ben had been told by his own researchers that PEG was incompatible with DMSO containing solutions, and resulted in gel formation. Nevertheless, he decided he would try this out on Curtis Henderson. He did NOT do any bench experiments, or do test mixes of solutions, let alone any animal studies to validate that this approach would in fact help reduce edema (it doesn’t). Instead, he prepared a batch of this untested mixture, and AFTER it gelled, he tried to perfuse Curtis with it. See my introduction to Thus Spake Curtis Henderson on this blog for how this affected me psychologically and emotionally. Needless to say, as soon as he tried to perfuse this goop, perfusion came to a screeching halt. They have pumped air into patient’s circulatory systems… I could go on and on, but all you need to do is really look at those patient case reports and think about everything that is going on in those cases critically.
>Ethics aside, it is CI’s policies, structure and way of handling at-need patients that is causing the nightmare of straight frozen patients that have now come to predominate their case load. Years ago, I suggested an independent service that would act to respond in high quality, at need cases: stabilize/freeze the patient (7.5 M glycerol perfusion) and then hold, until the patient was cleared for long term funding. “Not practical,” I was told.
Cryonics is faith based pseudoscience.
This is an ok introduction to an actual piece about the current state of cryonics research and its acceptance in the scientific community, but where’s the rest of it?
In particular, why would someone decide to write and publish all this and not think to include any actual citations pointing to the science in favor of cryonics that they think isn’t getting enough attention? I know these guys all hate the liberal arts, but this like, Essay Writing 101.
Shattered? Like a giant block of improperly stored ice falling off a pallet?
Reminds me of Yudkowsky’s early writings about guillotining the head into the bucket of liquid nitrogen…
Science: idk if you dont trust what I say will happen, maybe buy a pig head and a bucket of liquid nitrogen? You’re in the bay area, there is an air distillation plant in santa clara next to the old fabs. Liquid nitrogen is cheap as dirt. Just make sure to do it outdoors so you don’t suffocate…
Cryonics: nooo my belief in science is shattered by the thought experiment that was based entirely on what liquid nitrogen does in the movies!
Edit: I guess if you did that your belief in science would indeed get shattered along with the rest of your head, after the outside freezes while the inside takes something like tens of minutes to freeze.
Was reminded a lot of Topher Hallquist’s old article about LW’s anti-science attitudes. Matthew has essentially the exact same gripes, even down to the people involved, as EY has had for years:
Matthew posted this on Facebook as well, which is public and can be seen here. Robin Hanson and Roko (of Roko’s Basilisk) make appearances in the comments.
Unlike a lot of comment threads, this one is less quotable and more of a … holistic experience, I guess you could say. The LW trademark of having incredibly long discussions about minutiae that barely matter to the original point/question is on full display here.
Some sympathetic but sceptical people show up to question the premise that a good scientist has to take cryonics seriously. The cryonics defenders very quickly move from discussing the merits of cryonics to very standard talking points (again developed by EY) about what subjective probabilities are acceptable to start betting on cryonics in the far future, and about “unfair” social policing of the boundaries of science. Roko also adds in a half-baked “signalling” theory about cryonics seeming selfish.
“No, it’s the who are wrong”
I feel like you could basically replace “cryonics” with “acupuncture” or “essential oils” and put this exact article up on Mercola.
Nowhere near enough blockchain
Havig a strange sense of deja vu reading this. Some of the sentences read like something i have read before.
I find your lack of citations disturbing.
E: About not having faith in scientists being above it all, there was a book which I read when I was … dunno 14? Which also addressed that, was a good book to read and talk about in highschool about just this subject. Sadly doesn’t seem it was ever translated out of dutch. It is about a dusty old boring professor who suddenly wins the nobel prize, and then people try to be all nice and friendly to him and other things. (because funding).
Christ, he trying to show scientists are liars but the only time he actually presents any evidence about anyone having gotten anything wrong, the target is Michael Shermer, whose Ph.D. is in history of science.
People who want to go deep on the cryonics debate might want to look up Kenneth Hayworth, an ex-Alcor member who has actually relevant qualifications and clearly wants something like cryonics to work, but who has been quite clear that current technology isn’t up to the task.
I also like how he says mainstream scientists have been against cryonics because they are hacks and don’t like it, then sources quotes from Michael Shermer in 2001 and research from 2018 and 2015 to show how 2001 man is biased
[deleted]
“I didn’t care to argue for the position. This post is more for people who understand where I’m coming from.”
This is counting fairies by the number of fairy rings.
Just sayin’, I’m afraid my baby will be snatched up and replaced with a dirty changeling, and would it be such a sin to vaccuum freeze the poor tyke until the Church can purge the fairy scourge?
I’ve had a few run-ins with cryonics fanatics, they tend to be super aggressive and unpleasant to deal with. Worse than militant vegans, not quite as bad as anti-vaxxers. (Purely in my personal experience, of course.)
Don’t get me wrong, I adore cryonics as a science fiction device, but for the foreseeable future, that’s all it will ever be.
this guy is an idiot: science is provisional knowledge, not speculation. He’s intentionally confusing ‘theoretically possible’ with ‘practically achievable,’ which is precisely what you would expect from a rationalist - reality doesn’t matter, after all.
And vitrification doesn’t work with large volumes, unless (maybe) you’ve got a nice big vat of liquid helium to play with.
being exactly 180° backwards on an issue is a kind of precision, though
As someone who wants to work in life-extension I’m sympathetic to the people who want to believe that cryogenic freezing will become a field of medicine fit for humans. I don’t know why we can’t limit discussion to non-quackery, tho? Stem cell therapies are real and hold real promise for medicine, but that doesn’t mean that condemnation of the abundant quacks in that field isn’t necessary- it’s very necessary! Don’t put the cart before the horse.
Judging by the guy’s follow-up in the comment section, it doesn’t sound like he actually believes in the ability to reanimate a frozen body, but rather in preserving as much information as possible in order to potentially reconstruct the mind on a possibly different medium.
Which is also way in the realm of science fiction-y speculation, but granted, it sounds a bit less quacky.
However, he calls it “reanimation” presumably because he buys into that bit of LessWrong philosophy that says a simulation or copy of you IS you.
I wonder how many of the folks who actually sign up for cryonics are aware of this rhetorical sleight of hand on the part of people who peddle it to them. And if they are aware, to what degree are they being sold on the potential for actual physical revival, as opposed to the potential for their mind getting copied?
Sneer at me hard if you want, there likely is some kind of cryonics that we figure out that works, because the theoretical physics involved make sense with what we know about the human brain. Is it possible with today’s tech? It seems like it isn’t, and the field seems to be a bunch of snake oil salesmen convincing rich people of a pipedream. Kind of genius in its own way, fleecing dead rich people.
LW and “scientific immortality so you and your friends can travel in space and live forever” is fantasy
shallow article….he may figure out what is going on in 20 years