Entirely agreed.
I think that an approach by someone who Hitchens might already have some respect for would be best. Are there any suitable candidates?
I've observed that the world's most awesome people are pretty strongly connected, graph-theoretically. I would bet that there are well fewer than six degrees between, say, Eliezer and Hitchens under the relation "good friends with".
Thank you.
I'm guessing that if you do that, most of the things we could do over and above that would be positively counterproductive - would you agree?
Of course a different cluster of awesome people not strongly connected to the one we know about wouldn't be one we know about. For example, I can't think of any awesome people who are active principally in East Asia or India, and it's demographically unlikely that there aren't any.
Even worse, I'm not really aware of awesome people who are active primarily in Continental Europe as opposed to the Anglosphere. Europeans use English as a trade tongue, but not really for building cultural communities. So there isn't an easy way to figure out what's going on around Europe without knowing a bunch of languages.
This might be easier to investigate if you gave us an operational definition of "awesome." If it reduces to "those you admire," and it probably does, it shouldn't be surprising that they're all clustered together. You find new people to admire by the recommendations and name-droppings of those who have similar tastes to you.
They have sort-of adopted the label. I'm thinking of the lecture at which Dennett put his hand up and started a question with "I'm Dan Dennett, one of the four horsemen of atheism, and I'd like to ask..."
Hitchens is a well known author, journalist and militant atheist.
I don't think "militant" is the right word here. Militant christians shoot abortion doctors. Militant muslims employ suicide bombers. Militant leftists take hostages and hide in jungles, and militant authoritarians form lynch mobs.
Militant atheists, by comparison, write books and engage in debates & mockery (if Hitchens is any example).
Using this term to refer to unapologetic atheists is a tactic used by fundies who want to make the public fear and hate atheists as much as they fear and hate extremists who actually use deadly violence. I don't think we're well-served in adopting it.
In a recent piece for Vanity Fair, Christopher Hitchens makes the following comment:
somebody has written to me from a famous university to suggest that I have myself cryonically or cryogenically frozen against the day when the magic bullet, or whatever it is, has been devised. (When I failed to reply to this, I got a second missive, suggesting that I freeze at least my brain so that its cortex could be appreciated by posterity. Well, I mean to say, gosh, thanks awfully.)
The context (in which this is listed among various pieces of pseudoscientific treatment advice he has received) makes it clear that he is dismissive of the idea.
Which is a shame, needless to say.
I find it very much easier to imagine him being the sort of skeptic that considers cryonics on a par with homeopathy, though I would be delighted to be wrong.
Are you signed up, btw?
He can be highly skeptical, that's fine. Cryonics doesn't require faith for it to work.
He's probably already undergoing expensive and unpleasant treatments that he considers to have low probability of success.
Cryonics is expensive but painless. And if it works, we can be pretty certain it had nothing to do with the placebo effect.
How could he turn down a chance, however slight, to debate Christian theology after returning from the dead?
"How could he turn down a chance, however slight, to debate Christian theology after returning from the dead?"
My answer is: At some point, "however slight" is "too slight." I stand by my statement. Your initial statement implies that any non-zero chance is enough; that's not a proper risk analysis.
I'm seriously thinking of emailing Michael Shermer about it. He replied to my last email, and his position seems to be more sympathetic than it used to be; as a celebrated skeptic, he would have some credibility.
I have had the EXACT same idea!
However, my plan was to contact his publicist through Alcor or one of the other Cryonics companies (all one of them I think)
Update: Hitchens has died. Reading various obits and memorials, I see zero mention of cryonics.
AARGH! Someone needs to take him aside and tell him to sign up now - tomorrow could be too late. Cryocrastination is bad enough at any age, but at 82?
Are Skeptics known to ever change their minds?
Christopher Hitchens demonstrated a great ability to change his mind. He agreed to be waterboarded and it took him less than 10 seconds to change his mind about whether or not waterboarding was torture.
The question of whether waterboarding is torture has at least a little bit of factual underpinning-- that's why it's possible for the experience to change people's minds about it.
In particular, people who say that waterboarding isn't torture are apt to claim that it isn't painful enough for anyone reasonable to object to it being used.
Wait. "waterboarding isn't torture" is not a question on which changing one's belief is evidence of rationalism. Asking or answering the question at all is a political ploy only. The rationalist reaction is to taboo the word "torture" and reduce the question to something physical and testable.
Tabooing a word isn't the only response that's rational, especially because that is a not even well-known technique. In this circumstance, what Hitchens change of mind essentially meant is that he agreed afterwords that the experience was so unpleasant that any definition of "torture" that captured his intuition of the term would have to include waterboarding. Cyphergoth's point stands: Hitchens was willing to change his mind when confronted with evidence. Whether there might be a marginally more rationalist thing to do is somewhat besides the point.
I agree with your proposal to taboo the word "torture" here in order to properly understand the situation, and that its use is essentially political. Nonetheless Hitchens's expectation of what it might be like as an experience was very much violated, and instead of just giving us all bravura to appear consistent, knowing that he wouldn't have to do it again, he said so, and I respect that.
If I taboo the word "torture", I get: people would rather face the humiliation of a climbdown over their public statements on it than do it a second time.
Are Skeptics known to ever change their minds?
Will you change your mind if I self-identify as a skeptic who has changed their mind? In this earlier comment I listed three examples of recent updates.
I got a bit disappointed, when it seemed to be a group of people that shout basic level cached ideas about religion and new age around. How rational are they actually?
Pretty rational. These are cached thoughts often because they are generally correct. (ETA: Similarly, for example, when people make arguments here about why qualia should matter, fairly basic arguments are often presented about why they aren't mysterious. Reversed stupidity is not intelligence and all that.)
Indeed, I've found that if anything LW is more likely to take for granted simplistic negative views about religion than much of the skeptical movement. For example, see this thread where a user made a trivially wrong claim about Newton's religion and its impact on his work as a scientist. That claim got voted up to +6. Eliezer spotted that the claim was dubious enough to ask for a citation but didn't do the minimal thought that was required to correct it, and it took me to actually go through and explain why the ...
I'm not impressed by someone who changes their position because everyone else in their tribe has done the same. I am impressed by someone who changes their position for majoritarian reasons and says so explicitly.
I'm a big fan of Hitchens... I read pretty much everything he writes, and generally think he's pretty awesome.
But there is that little thing where he's a communist.
Yes, still.
Now I don't hold it against him, but I think its something worth keeping in mind before talking about him as if he was a great hero of rationalism.
Christopher Hitchens is probably dying of cancer. Hitchens is a well known author, journalist and militant atheist. Having read much of his work I believe he is also a very high IQ rationalist who enjoys being provocative. He has written "I am quietly resolved to resist bodily as best I can, even if only passively, and to seek the most advanced advice."
Hitchens should be extremely receptive to cryonics. Convincing him to signup would do much for the cryonics movement in part because he would immediately become our most articulate member.
I have written to him about cryonics, but I suspect he is getting tens of thousands of emails and probably won't ever even read mine. I propose that the Less Wrong community attempt to get Hitchens to at least seriously consider cryonics. We could do this by mass emailing him and by linking to this blogpost.
Here is an article in which he talks about his cancer. His email address is at the end of the article.