r/SneerClub archives
newest
bestest
longest
Has effective altruism regressed to 2008 era rationality? Brain preservation aka cryogenics "as a possible cause area" (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/sRXQbZpCLDnBLXHAH/brain-preservation-to-prevent-involuntary-death-a-possible)
41

Cryonics is the study and practice of freezing people or animals with the intention of reviving them at a later date.

Cryogenics is the science and technology of systems operating below the coldest natural temperature on earth.

Source: am Engineer working on Cryogenic systems.

tfw your nft investment didn’t go too well, and you wake up in the future as an ai just be constantly outbidded for computing power by climate change simulations.

For example, Tucker Carlson called cryonics “obviously grotesque and ghoulish and kind of revolting”. This is a win from a neglectedness perspective because it suggests a clear reason why it is neglected that is orthogonal to its likelihood of success.

this is actually good news for bitcoin,

[deleted]

I think you might be slightly underestimating how many books there probably exist which just go 'cryonics is good' written by people who didn't really think that hard about the subject. And eventually they will just publish their own books and disappear up their own frozen navel. I think this is a bit of a general problem with self taught people, or groups of people who promote being self taught, you quickly end up in a situation where you don't know what you don't know. And it sucks if these unknown unknowns are about ethical concerns. Best case they reinvent the ethical wheel, worst case they reinvent Mengele. See also other posts by (what I assume is OP (based on them spamming the link all over the place)) on [r/ssc](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/tk2krv/brain_preservation_to_prevent_involuntary_death_a/i1qr4pw/) which has a silly statement: > I don’t think that nothing has happened in the field in the last 50 years. In my opinion, theoretical research in molecular nanotechnology, whole brain emulation, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence has made revival seem much more likely and plausible. Note that there are no actual references to these advances, but they are just in their opinion, and theorethical research. It all feels [a bit like this](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-want-to-believe).
The fact that these people call themselves "rationalists" is your first hint about how engaged they are with real philosophy.
> do these guys actually read books? Like, not just blog posts from edgy rationalists, but books from people who sat down for years and thought really hard about these subjects? absolutely not, under any circumstances. those guys were not enlightened to Bayesian Rationality, so they have nothing to say.
Told you about vegetarians, they feel dying for others is too unjust to even seriously think about.
wat

2008? what about 1961?

E: the book even argues that some religious people will be on their side because suicide is a sin. (And not freezing people is allowing them to commit suicide).

> not freezing people is allowing them to commit suicide Love how brazen this take is. It's admirable!
Not cryonicly freezing people is a dragon! do you want the dragon to win?
Yeah I dunno if the guy who wrote that thought of serfs doomed to toil for eternity or vicious feuds between immortal land-owning aristocrats. Or that him and his kind would most likely be in the first group rather than the second.
Someone who is that invested in cryonics probably thinks inequality will be fixed as science advances. Or they just think inequality is good. Could go either way.
It has a certain type of what I call libertarian logic, where you just make some wild assumptions and just think people will follow along with your crazy logical deductions from those assumptions, esp as people hate any form of being hypocritical about their beliefs. (at least the author above realized that not all religious people would agree with him here)
Please invest in my Cryo company that definitely isn't a scam. It is morally reprehensible not to
Cryo companies/charities have generally been surprisingly sincere. Just absolutely fucking disconnected from reality in every way. I remember Charles Platt's impassioned rants about the incredible difficulty Alcor had in running according to libertarian principles. Now, you might think that would tell him something.

The real question is whether it is better to freeze yourself now or work to the brink of death for our basalisk overlord and then get frozen?

Decide using a quantum random number generator to evenly distribute yourself across the Hilbert space.

I feel like these people really need to be made to confront the fact that they will die one day, brain preservation or no. Might help them weigh the value of investing so many resources in the slim chance of prolonging the deaths of the mega rich (read: not most of these guys, or us) vs. actually improving the lives of regular people…

Regressed?? They’ve always been there.

Exactly my tought?