"Why not buy cryonics for others?"
I think cryonics advocates should consider this, not as a rhetorical question about society, but as a strategy for themselves.
Consider the history of vaccination. Like cryonics (for the moment I assume that cryonics works, though I personally am not sure about that) vaccination was a new technology that helped people live longer but met with popular resistance. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, after almost dying from smallpox, had her son inoculated in the Turkish method and wrote many letters to her friends in England, promoting and explaining the practice, and had many of her relatives inoculated. That's the stage cryonics is in today. A few individuals -- generally open to the idea because they're particularly well-educated and often because they've been touched by tragedy -- try to promote the practice by getting it done to themselves and perhaps also to relatives.
After Edward Jenner developed the smallpox vaccine, though, the landscape changed. He got grants from Parliament to continue his work, and founded a charitable organization -- the Jennerian Institution -- to promote vaccination. In other words, he made it a public health iss...
But if they ever want it to catch on more broadly, they should set up their institutions so that they're mostly giving it away rather than consuming it. The public will sympathize better with someone trying to save lives than with someone trying to save her own life.
I support that. I posted (or was going to post? Can't remember if I did) a comment to that effect on one of Hanson's recent posts on cryonics, suggesting a charity offering cryonics to people with terminal illnesses, perhaps children especially. Something like the Make-A-Wish Foundation when the wish is to live. That would rate highly on both fuzzies and utility — indeed, when it comes to cryonics, the two are pretty intertwined for the time being, because the high level of antifuzzies currently associated with it prevents it from having the humanitarian impact it otherwise could. Reframing it as a lifesaving medical procedure that will give dying children a chance to live to see the future could do a lot toward making it seem like an acceptable, obvious decision.
"Near mode people" vs "far mode people" sounds just like packers vs mappers, sons of Hermes vs Apollo's children, or any number of other distinctions that people invent to feel better about themselves.
Cryonics isn't a canary in the coal mine anymore than feminism or abolitionism were. All "far-mode" movements have a hard time gaining acceptance. So I don't think you've made a strong case that intelligentsia's ability to convince the masses is fading, but I'd be glad if it were true, because I live in Russia.
I worry that this kind of analysis tends to overestimate how many things have explanations in general human psychology. The main explanation for cryonics being unpopular could just be that it's associated with ideas, people, and cultural groups that for contingent historical reasons happen to be unhip. That's certainly the impression I get when I read stuff like this.
I'd love to see your thoughts.
First, your conclusion sounds very off-base. You are not only saying that society at large is failing to evaluate cryonics rationally, you are saying that this is a symptom of an incipient civilization-ending comprehensive failure of rationality, brought on by processes endogenous to cultural and institutional development.
I think we would agree that certain foreseeable future technologies are a civilization-ending threat in themselves. So what am I to make of your idea that on top of this, we are also facing, a la Spengler or Toynbee, doom from within? It could be an excessive gloomy supposition by someone depressed at society's failure to deal with the imminent concrete existential risks. It was always going to be difficult to deal with those technologies, on account of their complexity and historical novelty. There is no particular need to postulate unusual systemic blockages to rational innovation that are peculiar to the present.
Do you see what I'm saying? You're embracing an unnecessarily pessimistic perspective on the world's rationality - namely, that it's in a radically downward cycle, destroying itself, losing its "ability to respon...
Speaking of rationality litmus tests, how about choosing your baby's sex? It's ridiculous that most people act as if the expected utilities of the two sexes are close enough together that the inconvenience of screening makes it worth leaving the decision to chance.
To me it seems obvious that the intended meaning is "most parents are sufficiently non-indifferent in some direction".
A lot of these near mode/far mode claims would make me feel much better if they resulted in concrete, testable claims. If your hypothesis about why cryonics is not popular is correct, what predictions would you make that would be different from other a world where other proposed hypotheses are correct? (The general apparent lack of precise predictions from the near-far mode has been bugging me for a while so this isn't a problem unique to you)
...Some people get stuck in a child-like behavioral pattern, probably due to a mix of neurological bugs which preven
Math/analytic reasoning is near mode; far mode is more creative/analogy. Nevertheless, there may be some people who get more in the habit of applying analytic reasoning about typically far topics, and this tendency may depend on the type or level of "indoctrination", which might well change with time. Still, "may be" is pretty weak evidence.
Is it true that the correlation between social skill and IQ tops off at about 120? If so, this theory explains why most elites are about that smart and no smarter, despite what should be the obvious benefits in achieving that status that e.g. being able to develop new technology to found a company would bring.
Cryonics is a canary in the coal mine. At a certain stage of collapse, there has to be some idea that is transparently correct when one uses valid reasoning to analyze it but which is roundly rejected by everyone with near mode and is only accessible to people in extreme far mode.
Haven't there always been such transparently correct ideas that were widely derided?
I lack sufficient historical knowledge to be sure. Maybe someone can help me out. Was there ever a civilization that listened to reason over near-mode intuition? Maybe 18th and 19th century Br...
Maybe 18th and 19th century Britain listening to its engineers and scientists? But then we ignored the gifts they bestowed upon us in the two utterly key cases: Darwin and Babbage were ignored
Neither was ignored. Babbage was given much attention and sponsorship by rich people. The main problem was the expense and precision required in making his machines. Darwin was not ignored at all. He was considered a first-rate scientist in Britain, and his theory of evolution while controversial, gained general acceptance in Britain. It is true, that natural selection as the primary means of evolution did not become accepted until the 1920s, but post-Darwin all people thinking seriously about these issues acknowledged that evolution had occurred and that natural selection was the most likely hypothesis (and even then the nature of the mechanism was an issue among scientists not just the general public). It isn't at all an accident that Darwin got buried in Westminster Abbey.
JoshuaZ:
I do however think that Victorian Great Britain did a very good job listening to their scientists, better than Great Britain or the United States does today.
The trouble nowadays is not that governments are not listening to scientists (in the sense of people officially and publicly recognized as such), but that the increased prominence of science in public affairs has subjected the very notion of "science" to a severe case of Goodhart's law. In other words, the fact that if something officially passes for "science," governments listen to it and are willing to pay for it has led to an awful debasement of the very concept of science in modern times.
Once governments started listening to scientists, it was only a matter of time before talented charlatans and bullshit-artists would figure out that they can sell their ideas to governments by presenting them in the form of plausible-looking pseudoscience. It seems to me that many areas have been completely overtaken by this sort of thing, and the fact that their output is being labeled as "scientific" and used to drive government policy is a major problem that poses frightful threats for the future.
As usual, I'm not sure that an intellectual schema has covered all the possibilities.
My first thought was that you're leaving out the effects of home schooling, which is itself a side effect of liberalism as you define it. [1] Home schooling should mean that indoctrination isn't fully universal, so there will still be far mode thinkers.
Also, you're an interesting example of using far mode thinking to acquire near mode skills-- I don't know if you or anyone can make that a more common choice, but it's a conceivable path.
[1] I was shocked to find strong opposition to home schooling on the left, but maybe every movement has an illiberal side, no matter what it says on the label.
I was shocked to find strong opposition to home schooling on the left, but maybe every movement has an illiberal side, no matter what it says on the label.
Homeschooling is opposed on the left in the US for a variety of reasons. One is simple influence in the Democratic party by the teachers unions. But there are also good arguments to oppose homeschooling. First, It is very difficult to tell whether kids being homeschooled are actually getting good educations. Some parents simply don't teach well even if they try to cover all the standard material. Second, many people who homeschool use it as an opportunity to push all sorts of religious and social agendas often to the detriment of science. For example, Christian homeschooling is very common and often includes a lot of creationism. Indeed, in some parts of the country it is difficult to find science textbooks that are geared to homeschooling that are not creationist.
Part of the issue with attitudes towards homeschooling is the tension between the concern we have for children as opposed to the general value of letting parents raise their children as they see fit. These values often come into conflict.
Some people get stuck in a child-like behavioral pattern, probably due to a mix of neurological bugs which prevent near-mode from gelling (aspergers and schizotype) and internalization of explicit (far mode) rules condemning near-mode (obsessive compulsive personality disorder).
I'm interested in your thoughts on the Schizotypal personality 'bug' and how you consider it related to near mode. The phenomenon you mention appears accurate as far as my intuitive understanding goes and yet there relationship isn't as obvious as it is with Asperger's. I have g...
This is a fascinating and worthy subject; there are some links in your reasoning that I would like a more rigorous explanation of.
jump over low memetic fitness regions of the memetic fitness landscape and discover higher fitness technologies on the other side rather than leveling off at the 'golden age' level of Minoan Crete [or] the Abbasid and other advanced Caliphates
So, two questions here:
What does it mean to 'level off' at a golden age rather than leap over a valley? I feel like there must be more than two dimensions here, and I'm having troub
Katja's recent post on cryonics elicited this comment from Steven Kaas,
"If cryonics is super-far and altruism is seen as more important in far mode, why isn’t buying cryonics for others seen as especially praiseworthy? Your list of ways in which cryo is far-mode seems too much of a coincidence unless cryo was somehow optimized for distance."
...a comment which finally caused the following hypothesis to click into sharp resolution for me.
My guess is that it's cryonics advocates who are optimized for distance. Most people are basically natives of near mode, using far mode only casually and occasionally for signaling, and never reasoning about its contents. Even those who reason about its contents usually do so and then ignore their reasoning, acting on near mode motivations and against their explicit beliefs. Children, however, actually need to use far mode to guide their actions because they lack the rich tacit knowledge that makes near mode functional.
Some people get stuck in a child-like behavioral pattern, probably due to a mix of neurological bugs which prevent near-mode from gelling (aspergers and schizotype) and internalization of explicit (far mode) rules condemning near-mode (obsessive compulsive personality disorder). They become Shaw's "unreasonable men" and push for the universal endorsement of far-mode ideas. Since other adults don't care about the contents of far mode much anyway except to avoid being condemned for saying the wrong things, others go along with this, and there's a long-term drift towards explicit societal endorsement of altruistic norms with an expanded circle. This does matter, in the long run, because such norms provide convenient nuclei for the emergence of forms of mostly-arbitrary identity markers.
Unreasonable men also develop artificial ways of reasoning, methods of rationality, which work even when the minds innate tendencies towards reason aren't engaged by near mode. These methods don't necessarily suffer from the bugs that near-mode reasoning suffers from. Once the right set of methods, most importantly math, science, nation-states, cosmopolitan liberalism (actions permitted by default rather than banned by default) and capitalism, are developed, they enable scientific and technological evolution to jump over low memetic fitness regions of the memetic fitness landscape and discover higher fitness technologies on the other side rather than leveling off at the 'golden age' level of Hellenistic Greece, Tang and Song China, the Roman late republic and empire, the Abbasid and other advanced Caliphates, Minoan Crete and probably many other pre-industrial civilizations.
Unfortunately, as civilizations reach a higher level of development, more effort is available for indoctrination, and the indoctrination methods are based on the introspection and intuitions of these 'unreasonable men', and are thus ineffective on normal people, who simply snap out of their indoctrination when they become adults. As the unreasonable men become further indoctrinated, they become less able to make effective use of near-mode reasoning, which their morality condemns, but the methods that make far-mode reasoning rational don't make it an adequate substitute for near-mode when dealing with situations where subtlety, competition or energy are required. Ultimately, the civilization systematically destroys the ability of its unreasonable men to compete for the slots in the society where rationality is required to maintain the society's energy and the society looses the ability to respond coherently to threats and collpases.
Cryonics is a canary in the coal mine. At a certain stage of collapse, there has to be some idea that is transparently correct when one uses valid reasoning to analyze it but which is roundly rejected by everyone with near mode and is only accessible to people in extreme far mode. Once the far mode people are too ineffective to promote their ideas to the status of even verbal endorsement by the general population this idea will never rise to prominence.
I'd love to see your thoughts.