Over-generalizing from our youthful experiences

In a way, Ludwig von Mises and Ayn Rand show the dangers of over-generalizing from the contingent historical situations we witness in our youth. The First World War and Germany's and Austria's hyperinflationary episodes in the 1920's spooked Mises into an arguably irrational aversion to statism and fiat money, which he managed to transmit to his students; and Rand's experiences in the Russian Revolution and the early Soviet period led to her creation of an ideology which advocated the complete opposite of what she hated about her life in Russia, including even biological reality like motherhood and aging.* I doubt either of these world views will hold much appeal to people living in later historical periods who didn't experience anything like the respective authors' traumas.

You see that still in libertarian rhetoric which claims that governments get their way by threatening to murder the noncompliant. Some dictatorships in the 20th Century did kill appalling numbers of people to secure the survivors' obedience. Modern libertarianism arose in the mid 20th Century as an understandable opposition to that abuse of government power.

But libertarians still use that sort of framing against the legitimacy of government in the early 21st Century, when the governments in nearly 100 countries, including Russia's, have abolished capital punishment. How do these government collect taxes, regulate businesses and put some restrictions on freedom if they can no longer threaten their citizens' lives? The argument would make more empirical sense if, for example, many governments today executed tax evaders, something which they clearly don't do.

I've thought about the over-generalization problem in the cryonics context as well, considering that many of us witnessed the so-called "space age" in the 1960's and have assumed in our thinking about "the future" that it would lead to bigger and more impressive space adventures, indefinitely. The empirical evidence since 1970 or so doesn't support that extrapolation about space exploration and settlement. The same goes for cryonicists' other gee-whiz thinking about wealth, medicine, technological abilities and political trends. Things don't necessarily have to "progress" in the way we expect, especially if societies tend to develop more in a drunkard's walk fashion than we realize.

Given that tens of millions of Americans have grown up historically later than the period which led to the formulation of the cryonics idea, I wonder if their different experiences make older cryonicists' assumptions about "the future" sound too unlikely to take seriously, even if they seemed plausible to us in the 1960's and 1970's. Ironically some of that "future" has become our recent past, or even this year, and now sounds absurd compared to the observed reality.

Of course, society could drunkenly walk back into the territory of cryonics' plausibility. The people living in, say, the 2060's, might rediscover the cryonics idea, marvel that it didn't catch on a century earlier, and then apply themselves towards making it work with vastly better resources at their disposal. That wouldn't do us any good now, especially if all the current cryonic suspensions terminate for some reason or other. It would suck if we arrived on the scene with the cryonics idea generations before the historical conditions existed for making it a practical means of survival.

* Rand displayed a weird denial about the reproductive function of sex, the importance of family relationships in most people's lives and even her own aging, given how she harassed Nathaniel Branden to resume his sexual relationship with her post-menopausal, 60-ish body. Nathaniel didn't have the perspective offered by evolutionary psychology, but he must have realized on some level the absurdity of Rand's demands on his reproductive prospects. His organic "yuck" response also served a prophylactic purpose, given the evidence that the young man/old woman combination tends to shorten men's lives. Instead he probably improved his health by starting a sexual relationship with a younger, more reproductively fit woman who also happened not to make him feel like a beaten dog.

"Bicentennial Man" ending

I caught the tail end of this movie last night on some cable channel:



These Hollywood goofs talk a good game about their vision, edginess and sophistication. But in reality they display socially conventional, if not conservative, outlooks just like the ordinary people they want to distinguish themselves from.

Seriously, how many films have postulated "immortality" as a realistic option, only to show it as a bad thing? That involves creative thinking?

Cryonics' communication failures

I posted this to one of my mailing lists a few weeks back, but I received little response:

I've gotten the impression lately that the cryonics idea no longer communicates as effectively as it used to.

Not that it ever communicated spectacularly well. Robert Ettinger did a fair job of presenting the cryonics proposal, as well as anticipating many of the possible objections to it, in the context of the science and culture of the 1960's. He even received invitations to appear on the major talk shows of the time, back when the U.S. had only three commercial TV networks and each show received larger shares of the audience. From what I've heard, the hosts treated him respectfully, something I have trouble imagining now for a cryonics advocate given recent events. Ettinger's two older books, "The Prospect of Immortality" and "Man Into Superman," still reward the effort to consult them today. (I can't say the same of Ettinger's recent "Youniverse," however.)

The style and content of Ettinger's presentation didn't translate into a mass cryonics movement; but his argument exerted enough of an influence to create an apostolic succession which has kept cryonics in business despite the obstacles.

But as the "Frozen" nuisance and the recent New Yorker article about Ettinger suggest, something about the traditional way to argue for cryonics works even less well than it did 20 years ago. Eric Drexler's futurology in the 1980's created renewed interest in cryonics for about a decade, but that seems to have expended itself by now, probably because of improgression towards Drexler's "assembler breakthrough." (And, of course, many of Drexler's ideas just might not be feasible for physical reasons.)

David Stodolsky, if he subscribes to the list, would probably jump in with his social science conjectures about cryonics' lack of appeal; and they might even shed light on the problem.

Progress in resolving the hard, empirical problems of cryonics, for example improved brain preservation, might help in making it communicate better. But I notice now that cryonics has acquired a paleofuture reputation, like flying cars and jetpacks, a dream of aging futurists who are about ready for suspension themselves. Perhaps we should consider ways to "rebrand" cryonics so that it sounds like something that comes from a time ahead of the world of iPads and Kindles, and not from a generation behind it. One of my correspondents jokingly suggested that we rename it iFreeze.

At the very least I'd like to see a fresh presentation of the cryonics idea which addresses the current state of the science and addresses the "soft" objections to it in an accessible way. By "soft" objections, I mean the ones which usually come up in discussions about the political, social, economic, psychological and even religious aspects of the cryonics project, assuming that it succeeds.

Many of these objections, in my opinion, sound like variations on social anxiety projected into the future. People come up with rationalizations against wanting to revive in Future World which sound like a kid's fears about going to a new school: "What if the kids at the new school don't like me? What if they won't let me play with them? What if they make fun of me?"

I'm tempted to tell these people that they should sign up for cryonics any way and view it as an opportunity for personal growth. ;)

I wrote this because I keep seeing the same misconceptions about cryonics on the internet, over and over again, for example that only rich people can afford it, or that the people who run cryonics organizations do so cynically to exploit the elderly and dying for their money, and so forth.

The latter claim doesn't make sense, BTW, because cryonics organizations accept people in their 20's as members, provided they fill out the paperwork, get the life insurance and pay the dues. Actuarially speaking, on average 20-something people alive now probably won't die until like, what, the 2060's or 2070's? They would certainly outlive the middle aged people who currently serve on the boards of cryonics organizations. I've never heard of a scam artist who arranged the payoff to happen to somebody else after he had a reasonable expectation of dying.

"That's not happiness to see me," part 3.

Re: Yale researchers develop test to identify 'best' sperm

I bet this could provide a way to test my conjecture about sperm competition as the source of the greater longevity enjoyed by men who marry younger women. The fear that your wife will cuckold you with younger men increases DNA repair activity to improve your sperm quality. This also results in more DNA repair activity in your somatic cells, including your mitochondria which apparently play a role in the aging process. Sperm quality measured by this test could serve as a proxy for your overall health in a given marriage situation.

You would just have to construct a suitable experiment where you compare the sperm quality of (1) men with wives of the same age (the control group); (2) men with younger wives; and (3) men with older wives. I predict that group (2) will show better sperm quality than group (3), and possibly even better than group (1).

"Incredulous, Hayes blurted out, 'Wait! This is a full-body suspension!'"

Alcor reported recently the suspension, under adverse circumstances, of David Hayes, a long time member who lived in Florida, died suddenly and became a coroner's case. Apparently his brain had suffered about three and a half days of ischemia, at room temperature(?), before Alcor took custody.

I don't recall ever having met Hayes, but he did play a role in Ted Williams's controversial cryonic suspension. (Refer to pp. 190 ff in Larry Johnson's book.)

According to Larry Johnson's version of events in Frozen, Hayes, serving as an Alcor contractor, witnessed the posthumous suspension paperwork signed by Williams's son, John Henry Williams in his capacity as power of attorney for his father, even though that power ended immediately after Williams had died. Johnson claims that not only did John Henry not have the authority to sign such paperwork on his deceased father's behalf, but also that Hayes had violated Alcor's own policy by witnessing it as an Alcor agent.

Hayes then accompanied Ted Williams's body from Florida back to Alcor in Scottsdale, AZ. Later, an apparent miscommunication about the paperwork happened. John Henry had signed a whole body contract for his father, but the suspension team thought he had signed up Williams as a neuro. Hayes came into the operating room, after another Alcor contractor had nearly completed removing Williams's head, and according to Johnson: "Incredulous, Hayes blurted out, 'Wait! This is a full-body suspension!'"

Alcor's president at the time, nearly in a state of panic, then allegedly stepped out into the parking lot with his cell phone to call John Henry in Florida to explain the mishap, and returned a few minutes later to say that he had smoothed things out. Johnson claims that nobody overheard this phone call, so we don't know what really transpired.

Now, Johnson admits he didn't witness any of this, since he started to work for Alcor a few months after Ted Williams's suspension. He claims he pieced it together from conversations with Alcor employees, a study of Alcor's files, and conversations with Ted Williams's relatives and friends.

However, Johnson's account sounds nearly plausible to me. Alcor's president at the time gave me a bad vibe even before I got to meet him in person because of strange things he had published on Cryonet and in Cryonics magazine, his claim that he found Noah's Ark, and some other issues I had heard about in his professional and business background. I could just see him getting celebrity-struck by the prospect of cryosuspending a major sports figure, breaking Alcor's explicit rules to make that happen, botching up the situation and imperiling the future of cryonics in the U.S. in the process. That John Henry also had trouble providing the money for his father's suspension adds to the sense of clusterfuck about the whole episode. David Hayes also doesn't come across well as an accomplice in a series of bad decisions, though he might not have seen the bigger picture at the time as someone who received orders to do things which violated both company policy and good judgment.

I hope it didn't happen that way. I also remain agnostic about Ted Williams's desire for cryonic suspension. But if I had any say in the incident, I would have refused to accept Williams as a suspendee without his explicit statement that he wanted it, and without tangible assurance that Alcor would get paid efficiently. With two of the main witnesses -- John Henry Williams himself, and David Hayes -- currently in suspension, their incommunicado state makes it harder now to find out what really happened to Ted Williams.

Humphrey Bogart's "Fuck You Fund."

Some celebrities in the old days lived frugally and saved their money. A biography about Frank Sinatra mentions that Humphrey Bogart had built up a "Fuck You Fund" so he could keep his independence from bad Hollywood situations:

That whole "status and mates" thing never worked out for me.

It doesn't mean I've lost interest in "mates," however. ;)

10 Things Every Woman Should Know About a Man's Brain

Number 4:

The mature male brain

Over the course of evolution, men have needed to compete for status and mates while young and emphasize bonding and cooperation when mature, Mehta said.

Men seem to agree; and psychological studies have shown that one-upmanship holds less appeal for older men. Instead, they pay more attention to relationships and bettering the community, Brizendine said.

The change is likely aided by the slow natural decline in testosterone as a man ages. Mehta and colleagues found that men with high testosterone levels tend to be better at one-on-one competition, while those with lower levels excel at competitions requiring team cooperation. The study was published in the journal Hormones and Behavior in 2009.

Yet, puzzlingly, a number of women over the years have told me they like my voice, though it hasn't helped me with them where it counts. Even men have told me that I should have gone into talk radio.

The Larry Johnson affair, part 1.

Oh, I guess I'd have to write about Larry Johnson eventually.

I just bought and download a digital copy of his book Frozen to make the copying and pasting easier. Somebody has to address the absurd things he says about certain cryonicists. (As Craig Venter probably wants to say, "Well, somebody has to 'play god!'") Though in fairness some of Johnson's descriptions of our personalities also come close enough to the truth that they made me laugh when I first read them.

I've never met the guy, BTW, and I don't appear in Johnson book, though in some of my online exchanges with him he has expressed hostility towards me and has even accused me of cyber-stalking him. I use Google Alerts to find new mentions of cryonics on the internet, some of which have originated from him, so that probably accounts for my ability to notice when he has posted things about cryonics and Alcor on various forums. I don't have some special ability to track his every move.

Any how, in this post I'd like to address something he writes about Alcor Board Member Michael Riskin, who has a Ph.D, holds MFT Lic. #8768, runs a practice as a psychotherapist and sex therapist in Orange County, California, and to the best of my knowledge remains in good professional standing.

Upon first meeting Charles Platt and Michael Riskin at Phoenix's Sky Harbor Airport, Larry Johnson writes the following about Michael on p. 12 of Frozen:

Riskin was just about the sleaziest-looking person I had ever met. He easily could have made a living bouncing around the various Law & Order and CSI shows playing "Criminal #1."

I don't know Michael that well, but I did consult with him, in his professional capacity, about a personal matter in 1997. I've never gotten a "bad vibe" off of him, though my years in the hospitality business have given me plenty of experience in profiling troublesome people from first impressions of them.

Michael also appears in a documentary about his wife Anita's suspension a few years ago. He comes across to me as a sympathetic character, looking and sounding more like an avuncular Carl Sagan than Criminal #1. You can judge for yourself:



The fact that Johnson immediately wants to bias you against certain figures at Alcor implies a lot about his honesty and integrity right there. I have many things to say about this book, but I also have a busy holiday week end ahead of me. I'll get around to writing these things when feasible.

Cryonicist Rob Michels's non-suspension

While looking through archives of Cryonics magazine, I found a reference to the non-suspension of philosophy graduate student Rob Michels back in 1995. Apparently he lived alone, died in his apartment and remained unnoticed for several days, and then went into the ground.

Something similar happened to my friend David Zubkoff in 2004, but Alcor froze what they could salvage of him any way.

I vaguely recall meeting Michels in the early 1990's. He fits the pattern of the cryonicist who uses relationships facultatively, since the story about him mentions an ex-wife (possibly cryonics-hostile):

Rob Michaels Case

His fellow philosophy grad students Max More and Tom Bell also reminisce about Michels:

Max More on Rob Michels

I suppose the death apologists, upon reading of this belatedly, will sigh in relief over Michels's good fortune: Michels doesn't have to face the horror now of waking up in Future World where he wouldn’t have any relationships or ties to that time.

Frogs? Locusts? The death of the first born?

Has Dr. Phibes has returned from the Egyptian underworld or something?

Frogs Still Causing Traffic Jams in Greece

West Poised for Worst Grasshopper Outbreak in 30 Years

BTW, back in 1996, She Who Must Not Be Named reportedly got married in Alcor's Patient Care Bay to the man who recently announced his intention to divorce her. (Yes, the room where Alcor keeps the dewars with the cryonauts frozen in liquid nitrogen!)



Even I found that weird. At the time I compared the couple to Dr. and Mrs. Phibes.

Spin magazine article about cryonics from 1995

Predictably the author draws attention to the unusual sorts of people attracted to cryonics:



I haven't heard lately from some of the people mentioned in the article: Rhonda Iacuzzo, Derek Ryan, Ralph Whelan, David Krieger. So I don't know what has happened to them in the past 15 years.

Tanya Jones has landed a new job related to life extension, however.

"Selfish and weird" cryonicists?

One of my cryonicist correspondents takes exception to Tiffany Romain's paper because, in her opinion, it makes cryonicists look "selfish and weird."

A more careful reading of the paper suggests other interpretations, however. Romain points out that:

At first glance, cryonics appears to be far from routine biomedicine: non-medically trained people perform operations on dead bodies, store them in warehouses, and hope that future scientists will give them new life. However, cryonics is firmly situated within biomedical configurations of death. Medical science is increasingly able to manage death and to redefine life’s end points . . . , and the moments at which a doctor makes ‘‘the call’’ can be slippery, as evident by the creation of the Uniform Determination of Death Act. In their own particular remaking of life and death, cryonicists understand that none of us—lay people, doctors, scientists, philosophers, clergy—know when death is or at what point it is too late to retrieve a person from progression toward death.

So in that respect, cryonicists' view of "death" hasn't drifted that far out of the mainstream to fall into total weirdness, though some of us display personalities or express beliefs which might make us come across as "weird" in other ways.

As for our "selfishness," Romain shows the continuity of cryonicists' values with mainstream American ones:

Cryonics is a technology that enables a sort of saving, planning, and extension of people into material and corporeal objects that are accumulated and, literally, banked for future use and animation. In this way, cryonics fits neatly within neoliberal cultural frameworks in which individuals must help themselves rather than turn to the government and in which the free market is seen as efficient and progressive. Predicated on the fear of scarcity and loss, capitalism asks people to consider themselves through possessions, materials, savings, and plans. To counter the possibility of loss—loss of life—cryonics allows for (possible, further) accumulation. However, unlike the mundane putting away of money for the future, preserving parts of oneself— potential life—has the allure of exceptionalism. Cryonics is very much a capitalist form that is similar to other types of insurance and speculative investment, but it is endowed with a layer of significance that is one’s own personhood and life itself. Consumers buy the privilege to imagine a utopian future and abundant life, and they orient themselves toward this future; yet this is a privilege few can afford and even fewer think—or feel entitled—to purchase. Cryonics, and the imaginings it inspires in those who purchase services, is based on the hope that death will be defeated and thus time will become irrelevant.

Among the middle- and upper-classes in post-industrialized settings where, arguably, health is optimized, biological time is increasingly rendered as a problem—time is limited by biological function. Cryonics is a uniquely American strategy for transcending the limits of time. This transcendence is accomplished through the banking of one’s body—investing it—with the potential return of future life. Through cryosuspension, bodies are protected from decay while the anticipated steady progress of science, technology, and medicine can continue. The community—this biosocial grouping—therefore places great value in prospective thinking. The past, for this community, is only a referent for the future. It is something to look back on to measure human progress.

Romain confuses her explanation with words like "utopian" and "transcendence," unless she intends to imply that cryonics incorporates a religious outlook as well as pragmatic concerns about survival. But she does suggest the interpretation that cryonicists view our efforts as a speculative investment into our future human capital (since dead people can't produce anything, much less enjoy the fruits of their production), like more familiar forms of self-development, but extended over a longer time scale.

So whether you view cryonicists' assumptions and values as "selfish and weird" depends on how you frame them, not on the nature of the assumptions and values themselves.

Death apologists need to try harder.

Aschwin de Wolf criticizes Paula Kirby's exercise in humanist death apologetics, which I drew his attention to in an email a few weeks back. I'd like to add an observation:

Death apologists, especially the secular ones, need to try harder.

I've participated in cryonics advocacy off and on for about 20 years now, and I have yet to encounter what I call the "soft" objections to cryonics and its life extension goals which we don't already have well thought out answers for, some of them formulated by Robert Ettinger in his original writings in the 1960's and 1970's. By "soft" objections, I mean ones involving social, psychological, economic, political or even theological reasons against cryonics. (The "hard" objections, involving scientific and technological matters, still require a lot of work to address, by people who have the expertise to do so.)

For example, I've read the following attributed to Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at some university or other:

Proponents say cryonics is the one chance people have to live again, but Arthur Caplan, a bioethics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, said those considering it should think about what it would be like to come back.

For example, a person revived in the future wouldn’t have any relationships or ties to that time.

“Who we are isn’t just defined by what’s in our heads; it’s also by our relationships,” Caplan said.

First of all, a lot of cryonicists already know each other, including married couples like Aschwin and Chana de Wolf. If cryonics works and we awaken in Future World with memories of our previous relationships with other revived cryonauts, that destroys Caplan's objection from the beginning. We could just band together to help each other get established in our new environment. The immigration experience in countries like the U.S. provides a model for how that could succeed.

Two, cryonics so far has tended to attract loners like myself and some others I could name, and other individuals who treat their intimacies facultatively, including a willingness in some instances to dump hostile companion females. (I've also head of cryonicists in polyamorous households, which I guess means they have "insurance" in case the relationship with one of the partners ends. *) Saying that we "wouldn't have any relationships or ties" to Future World doesn't sound significantly different from our current lives. Anthropologist Tiffany Romain notes the prevalence of relatively ingregarious individuals in cryonics in her field work among us, which supports my own observations. That could change if cryonics becomes mainstream and starts to attract people who naturally travel in packs and experience depression and anxiety without them; but then, if troop-oriented hominids sign up together and survive cryotransport to Future World, wouldn't they also obviate Caplan's objection?

Three, assuming Caplan's worst-case scenario, how long would we have that problem any way? Caplan underestimates people's ability to make friends in new situations, even elderly ones. I've seen my father do this after placing him in a nursing home. Not only would you have your own resources for befriending strangers, but our resuscitators probably would have thought about this problem beforehand and provided means to help us get up to speed in our new environment. With the advanced psychology and neuroscience in Future World, they could have some very effective techniques indeed for helping us to adapt emotionally.

And four, how about turning the situation on its head: What if our resuscitators, with their enhanced social intelligence, worry that we won't like them?

Basically objections like Caplan's sound like expressions of social anxiety thrown into the future, rather like a child's fears about going to a new school: "What if the kids at the new school don't like me? What if they don't want to play with me? What if they make fun of me?" We recognize the immaturity of these objections when a child articulates them, but apparently not when a bioethics professor expresses the grown-up versions.

* I've also heard a "What a cool dad!" story about one of those polyamorous male cryonicists. Apparently he, his wife, their two teenaged sons and his mistress (to use an old-fashioned but appropriate term) live in the same household; and he arranged for his older teen son's sexual debut with the mistress!

Not the sort of science fictional adventure I'd want to have now.

Someone on the Life After the Oil Crash Forum has started a rumor based on allegedly privileged information about recently observed changes in Betelgeuse which suggest -- what, exactly? Astrophysical models predict that Betelgeuse will collapse and then explode into a supernova some day, but given the uncertainties about conditions in that star and our short history of studying stellar evolution, the Fermi-type estimates of its future result in enormous error bars. We could observe Betelgeuse's explosion tomorrow, or someone on Earth could observe it literally thousands of years from now.

The supernova's brightness estimates visible on Earth also vary from something moonlike to a blowtorch comparable in magnitude to our sun's luminosity -- and we definitely do not want to double up on the sun's illumination of our planet, even for a few weeks. But these lower and upper bounds cover about five orders of magnitude, again underscoring our ignorance of Betelgeuse's fate, and what it might portend for ours.

What do you do with this information, assuming it holds up and the astrophysicists publicly announce their worries about our immediate future? To give you some perspective on the relative sizes of stars observable from Earth, consider the following illustration:

In progressive-speak, "empathy" often means "taxes."

Or perhaps "tax" or "taxation," depending on the context.

Consider the following exercise, taken from a Google search of the word "empathy" on the progressive website Alternet. Just sample the first five hits:

1. Why We Need to Have Empathy for Tea Party Lunatics

Hm, "Why We Need to Have Taxes for Tea Party Lunatics" sounds a bit awkward. But wait, it gets better.

2. Conservatives Are Waging a War on Empathy -- We Can't Let Them Win

"Conservatives Are Waging a War on Taxes -- We Can't Let Them Win" makes excellent sense as well as something progressives complain about.

3. As Justice Sotomayor Hits the High Court, A Defense of Empathy

"A Defense of Taxation" also looks like a plausible substitution.

4. Empathy is the First Ingredient

Yes, "Taxation is the First Ingredient" in the progressives' political agenda as well.

5. Ecstasy Begets Empathy

This seems like a miss, unless the author proposes MDMA use as a way to make people "empathic" to paying higher taxes.

But the association of "empathy" with the criticism of people who resist paying taxes comes up often enough that I suspect the two concepts lie close together in the minds of Lakoff's Nurturant Parents.

Enough with the Ayn Rand biographies.

One, the more we learn about Rand, the crazier she sounds.

Two, I think biographers have pretty much extracted all they'll find about her from the surviving records and the reminiscences of the people who knew her, many of whom have died already.

Three, her philosophy doesn't work in the real world. Even Reason magazine, of all sources, admits that:

In its pure form, Rand's philosophy would work very well indeed if human beings were never helpless and dependent through no fault of their own. Thus, it's hardly surprising that so many people become infatuated with Objectivism as teenagers and "grow out of it" later, when concerns of family, children, and old age--their own and their families'--make that fantasy seem more and more impossible.

Four, she doesn't set a good example any way. She lied about her self-reliance in the U.S.; she lied about her difficulties in getting The Fountainhead published; she failed to thank and acknowledge people who helped her, like her relatives in Chicago, or who taught her things she didn't know, like Isabel Paterson; she lied about the Brandens; she indicated that she didn't respect the sort of work "the folks next door" have to do, even though their labor made her life comfortable when she became wealthy; she displayed horrible judgment in what she expected from the people close to her; etc.

And five, her blunt-force attempts at philosophy make for painful reading. If you want to argue for a free society, you'll do better by not inviting Rand to the conversation.

Some people pair Ayn Rand with Robert Heinlein as influences in their lives, for example, the libertarian science fiction writer L. Neil Smith. Heinlein, like Rand, apparently had some major screws loose; I also suspect he resembled Rand in having some irregular things going on in his private life based on a rejection of traditional views of marriage and sexual fidelity. But at least in his favor Heinlein had a sense of humor, he didn't try to start a cult around himself, he displayed a broader cognitive range than Rand's, and he wrote better in a lot of ways. I don't care to read another biography of Ayn Rand, but I do look forward to reading the new biography about Heinlein coming out later this summer.

OMG! as the Millennial girls text these days.

This sounds suspiciously like the apparently phony story a few years ago that Paris Hilton had made cryonics arrangements, not to mention the story about Simon Cowell a year or two later. Celebrity tabloids display little regard for the truth about celebrities' interest in cryonics, from what I've seen of them:

It's a little Brit chilly

BRITNEY SPEARS wants to be FROZEN after her death - so she can be brought back to life later.

The eccentric star wants her body preserved in LIQUID NITROGEN so future generations can enjoy her dance routines in red plastic catsuits.

Britney is so enamoured by the idea - "cryogenic" freezing - that she's investing in a firm specialising in it.

The Alcor Life Extension Foundation is one of the oldest companies of its kind, founded in 1972. On its website, the Arizona-based firm gives its aim as: "Using ultra-cold temperature to preserve human life with the intent of restoring good health when technology becomes available to do so."

A pal of the star said: "Brit gets these obsessions and this is the latest.

"It started when someone told her Walt Disney had been preserved by cryogenics to be revived in the future. That was a myth but it got her researching the foundation and she became convinced it was worth a shot.

"Brit found the whole thing so interesting she spent most of her Mother's Day trip to Disneyland researching the subject on the internet while a nanny took the boys round the park.

"She looked into having her ashes turned into diamonds after she is gone but settled on the chance of getting to live in the future."

But before she invests loads of cash, she has to convince her dad Jamie, who currently holds the purse strings.

The source went on: "Jamie is quite happy to let Brit have her little obsessions, especially when it means she's holed up on the internet safely or watching the Discovery Channel.

"And if she wants to invest her money in cryogenics that's fine, we're only talking $350,000 tops. However, much more than that and he may change his mind."

I don't know where the $350,000 figure comes from, because Alcor lists $150,000 for whole body on its website. Miss Spears doesn't have to provide that amount of cash up front any way. She could just use a trivial amount of money from her allowance to buy life insurance to pay for her suspension, like most cryonicists.

While this story provides some plausible details, apart from the bit about the cost, I'd like to see corroboration before I publicly welcome Miss Spears into the cryonics community. Which "pal of the star" talked to a reporter for a British tabloid about Miss Spears's cryonics plans, for example?

Utopian Objectivist "myriad cities"

Frederick Cookinham writes about utopian Objectivist "myriad cities," 100 miles on a side (covering 10,000 square miles), in his book The Age of Rand: Imagining an Objectivist Future World:



Setting aside the fact that a Rand cultist advocates this, Cookinham does make an interesting case for expanding settlements into areas currently considered undesirable.

I don't know about Cookinham's claim that these new cities would generate creative cultures competitive with, say, New York City's, much less surpassing them. He postulates the following about a myriad city in North Africa:

Sahara City might have Artparks many square miles in extent. An Artpark might have three 6,000-seat opera houses, six 1,000-seat Broadway-type theaters, nine 450-seat Off-Broadway-type theaters, twelve 150-seat Off-off-Broadwaytype theaters, and fifteen 50-seat triple-offs, all running six nights a week. An awful lot of people want to be on the stage. There will have to be a lot of stages. Who will fill the seats? Other actors: Sahara City’s show biz population might run into the millions. And simply the general public; the tourists coming to the big city from little New York and little Mexico City and Shanghai, and wanting to see a show, as they do now when they come to Times Square. As many people as can’t get to Times Square and can’t afford a Broadway ticket today, the Square is nevertheless filled to sardine-can density almost all the time today. What will happen when every human in the world, undistracted by war and tyranny, can afford to see a hundred first-run shows a year? In short, how much more crowded will Times Square get in a normal world?

For an historical analogy, the Roman Empire contributed to the growth of existing cities and the building of new ones during its most energetic period. The Roman ruling classes admired Greek culture and spread an exposure of it to parts of the world previously unfamiliar with it, along with their own newer literature in Latin. As Edward Gibbon notes, "The love of letters, almost inseparable from peace and refinement, was fashionable among the subjects of Hadrian and the Antonines, who were themselves men of learning and curiosity. It was diffused over the whole extent of their empire; the most northern tribes of Britons had acquired a taste for rhetoric; Homer as well as Virgil were transcribed and studied on the banks of the Rhine and Danube. . ." Yet the influence of that culture remained superficial, imitative and derivative; knowledge of the Greek language itself nearly disappeared in the Western Empire after its fall to less civilized peoples. Nothing comparable to a new Athens during its golden age arose under the best conditions the Romans could maintain in their empire, in other words, even if the empire succeeded economically given what the people of the time had to work with.

So I wonder if these myriad cities would just reproduce conditions similar to relatively vulgar and uncultured cities in the U.S. like, say, Phoenix. You can acquire many of the products of high culture in Phoenix, if you want them. But the city has to import them from elsewhere instead of producing them locally (unless you want to read novels about 100 year old teenage vampires who go to high school in Forks, Washington).

The Chinese have reportedly engaged in a lot of city expansion and new city building as part of their industrialization. Given the language barriers, I don't know if any of this new urbanization has resulted in cultural renaissances, though I would like to find out. Some of the results might translate adequately into Western culture and expand our opportunities for stimulating conversations with people we previously hadn't heard from much.

But then again, it wouldn't surprise me if a Chinese cultural renaissance doesn't happen. Cities can serve people's material and social needs without necessarily improving the human mind, a quite different sort of project.

Hypatia, the Danica McKellar of her time.

Only Hypatia entered and left history way too early to make TV trash like Inspector Mom and show off her 35-year-old body in photo shoots for Maxim magazine:



Also refer to:

Science vs. Zealots, 1,500 Years Ago

Martin Seligman, charlatan?

Barbara Ehrenreich certainly gives that impression in an excerpt from her book Bright-sided, where she recounts a meeting with Seligman, a leading academic advocate of positive psychology:

Only when we returned to his office, away from the mood-elevating Monets, did things take a nasty turn. Going back to his Authentic Happiness Inventory, I remarked that many of the questions seemed a bit arbitrary, leading him to snap, "That's a cheap shot and shows your failure to understand test development. It doesn't matter what the questions are so long as they have predictive value. It could be a question about butterscotch ice cream and whether you like it. The issue is how well it predicts." Well, no. First you come up with a test that seems to measure happiness as generally defined, and then you can look for things that happiness seems to correlate with, such as liking butterscotch ice cream. But you cannot fold the ice cream into the definition of happiness itself. Instead of saying this, I moved on to one of the most irritatingly pseudoscientific assertions in his book, the "happiness equation," which he introduces with the coy promise that it "is the only equation I ask you to consider," as if positive psychology rests on whole thickets of equations from which the reader will mercifully be spared. The equation is:

H = S + C + V

H is "your enduring level of happiness, S is your set range, C is the circumstances of your life, and V represents factors under your voluntary control," such as, for example, whether you engage in "optimism training" to suppress negative or pessimistic thoughts. I understand what he is trying to say: that a person's happiness is determined in some way by his or her innate disposition (S), immediate circumstances (C), like a recent job loss or bereavement, and by the efforts (V) that the person makes to improve his or her outlook. This could be stated unobjectionably as:

H = f(S, C, V)

Or, in words: H is a function of S, C, V, where the exact nature of that function is yet to be determined. But to express it as an equation is to invite ridicule. I asked the question that would occur to any first-year physics student: "What are the units of measurement?" Because if you're going to add these things up, you will have to have the same units for H (happy thoughts per day?) as for V, S, and C. "Well, you'd need some constant in front of each," he said, and when I pressed on, he responded that "C is going to decompose into twenty different things, like religion and marriage," referring to the fact that positive psychologists have found that married and religious people are likely to be happier than single and skeptical people. So how, I ask, do you boil C into a single number? Again, his face twisted into a scowl, and he told me that I didn't understand "beta weighting" and should go home and Google it.

So, just to be sure, I did, finding that "beta weights" are the coefficients of the "predictors" in a regression equation used to find statistical correlations between variables. But Seligman had presented his formula as an ordinary equation, like E = mc2, not as an oversimplified regression analysis, leaving himself open to literal-minded questions like: How do we know H is a simple sum of the variables, rather than some more complicated relationship, possibly involving "second order" effects such as CV, or C times V? But clearly Seligman wanted an equation, because equations add a veneer of science, and he wanted it quickly, so he fell back on simple addition. No doubt equations make a book look weightier and full of mathematical rigor, but this one also makes Seligman look like the Wizard of Oz.

Ehrenreich, who received a Ph.D. in cellular biology back in the 1960's, knows the techniques of scientific reasoning and her way around the scientific literature. The research findings in positive psychology leave her underwhelmed:

In contrast to the flimsy research linking attitude to cancer survival, there are scores of studies showing that happy or optimistic people are likely to be healthier than those who are sour-tempered and pessimistic. Most of these studies, however, only establish correlations and tell us nothing about causality: Are people healthy because they're happy or happy because they're healthy?

Adding further ambiguity to the "picture of happiness as a prolonger of life and improver of health" are a number of studies showing that happiness or other positive emotional states may have no effect on one's health. An improved mental outlook—generated in support groups or through psychotherapy—does not extend the lives of breast cancer patients, and the same has been found for those suffering from throat and neck cancer. Nor, it turns out, does optimism add to the longevity of lung cancer patients. The evidence that positive emotions can protect against coronary heart disease seems sturdier, although I am not in a position to evaluate it. At least a list of articles on heart disease and emotional states compiled for me by Seligman included a number of studies finding that optimism and other positive states can both protect against heart disease and hasten recovery from it. But others on Seligman's list were more equivocal, and one study cited by Barbara Held of Bowdoin College found that people high in "trait negative affect" do more complaining about angina but are at no greater risk of pathology than cheerful people.

Some of the studies Held has reviewed even conclude that negative traits like pessimism can be healthier in the long run than optimism and happiness. For example, a 2002 study found that women who are mildly depressed are more likely to live longer than nondepressed or very depressed women. Somewhat alarmingly, a longitudinal study of more than a thousand California schoolchildren concluded that optimism was likely to lead to an earlier death in middle or old age, possibly because the optimistic people took more risks. Another, more recent, study found that preteenagers who were realistic about their standing among their peers were less likely to become depressed than those who held positive illusions about their popularity. But the most surprising case for pessimism comes from a 2001 study coauthored by Seligman himself, finding that, among older people, pessimists were less likely to fall into depression following a negative life event such as the death of a family member. This study goes unmentioned in Authentic Happiness, but at the time it led Seligman to comment to the New York Times that "it's important that optimism not be footless [probably meaning "footloose"] and unwarranted." So realism has its uses after all.

Ehrenreich also claims that positive psychology displays Calvinist and conservative biases:

The central claim of positive psychology, as of positive thinking generally, is that happiness—or optimism, positive emotions, positive affect, or positive something—is not only desirable in and of itself but actually useful, leading to better health and greater success. One book on positive psychology states that "happiness . . . is more than pleasant, it is beneficial," and Seligman begins Authentic Happiness by summarizing a few studies showing that happy (or positive) people live longer than unhappy ones. In other words, you should make an effort to be happy, if only because the consequences of unhappiness may include poor health and lower achievement. Would happiness stop being an appealing goal if it turned out to be associated with illness and failure? Isn't it possible to imagine being gloriously contented with a life spent indulging unhealthy habits, like the proverbially happy "pigs in shit"? Nothing underscores the lingering Calvinism of positive psychology more than this need to put happiness to work—as a means to health and achievement, or what the positive thinkers call "success."

And:

The real conservativism of positive psychology lies in its attachment to the status quo, with all its inequalities and abuses of power. Positive psychologists' tests of happiness and well-being, for example, rest heavily on measures of personal contentment with things as they are. . .

One could imagine positive psychology, or a more liberal version thereof, spawning a movement to alter social arrangements in the direction of greater happiness—by advocating more democratically organized workplaces, to suggest just one example. Instead, positive psychology seems to have weighed in on the side of the employers, with Seligman collaborator Chris Peterson telling the Cleveland Plain Dealer in 2008 that business executives are particularly enthused about the new happiness science: "Hardheaded corporate culture is becoming interested in how to get more work out of fewer workers. They're realizing that if their workers are happy, they will work harder and more productively. So they're leading the charge." As for social action against societal injustice, the American Psychological Association's Monitor reported in 1998: "Seligman asserts that . . . those who reproach others and side with the underdog may feel better in the short term, . . . but such good feelings are transient." Why social activism should produce only fleeting good feelings—compared with performing other virtuous deeds, viewing Monets, or reading Richard Russo—is not explained.

It turns out that a conservative outlook does seem to make people happier, after all. And would "democratically organized workplaces" really increase the world's happiness, if the change results in more business failures and the loss of jobs?

But I can understand Ehrenreich's concerns about the use of pseudoscientific ideas to rationalize an obedience and conformity ethic, something we saw a lot of in the 20th Century. Positive psychology needs a stronger empirical foundation and an effort to remove its proponents' biases before it becomes scientifically respectable.

2 + 2 = 5

More than one correspondent has accused me of "sexism," a mid 20th Century neologism which, according to Wikipedia, means:

the belief or attitude that one gender or sex is inferior to, less competent, or less valuable than the other. It can also refer to hatred of, or prejudice towards, either sex as a whole (see misogyny and misandry), or the application of stereotypes of masculinity in relation to men, or of femininity in relation to women. It is also called male and female chauvinism.

I don't see how this applies to me in its literal meaning. I have clearly stated that I respect some women a lot more than other women. I have also met a few mathematically capable women, despite mathematics' reputation as a "masculine" domain, so I don't characterize women as a whole as intellectually incompetent or inferior.

(I even crossed paths with math prodigy Danica McKellar in 1999, though I don't approve of her career as an actor in TV garbage like Inspector Mom and movies on the SyFy Channel, given her mathematical abilities. I would also submit that she has better things to do with her life in her 30's than to appear in photo shoots for the laddie magazine Maxim. Does that make me a "sexist"?)

I also support the variety of feminism which encourages women to develop marketable skills and support themselves, as opposed to that other variety of feminism which looks to the state's redistributive power as a substitute for beta male providers.

I have even had friendships with a few women, though not the sort of relationships with them I would have preferred.

I do, however, refuse to play the game of supporting many women's illusions about themselves when these conflict with my experiences and observations. The now widely noted, politically incorrect essay about "hostile wives" in cryonics appealed to me so strongly for that reason. (Ironically one of the cryonics activists who wrote that essay, an openly gay man, apparently receives a dispensation for writing "sexist" things about women because of his sexual orientation. In private conversations I have heard him say even harsher things about them.)

I also question the idea of framing "sexism" as an irrational stance, when it seems more likely that it incorporates tacit and dispersed knowledge of men's and women's real behavior, some of which has empirical support like the story about blonde women's economic advantages.

Moreover, plenty of women seek out and thrive in "sexist" environments, as the success of the Mormon church shows. I don't assume the "ratcheting" model of social development where things can go in only one direction called "progress," and I expect to see the return of conservatism in future societies where sexist, or as I like to say, Strict Father, cultural models predominate. Future World might look more like the world of our great-grandfathers, socially speaking, than the utopian fantasies of sexual equality and self-actualization through fucking multiple partners which dominated late 20th Century speculations about "the future."

And on top of that, I don't incur any costs for expressing what I really think about women. What could they do to retaliate against me? Withhold sex?

Cryonicist women in Romain's paper

Tiffany Romain notes that:

Less than 25 percent of Alcor’s members were women, and only a small fraction of these women joined purely out of their own interest; most female Alcor members were the wives, partners, daughters, or mothers of a man who joined first.

While I can appreciate, vicariously, the example of a woman who does something to please the man in her life, in the case of cryonics, I tend to hold the female men-pleasers in suspicion. I've known of cases where a man-pleaser drops her suspension arrangements when the relationship with cryonicist man ends, or at least deteriorates. And that doesn't even start to cover all of the "hostile wives" who have plagued cryonics throughout its history. You can just never tell when today's man-pleaser will turn into tomorrow's hostile wife.

I've met several women in cryonics like the ones mentioned by Romain who've signed up on their own initiative, and I tend to respect them more than the other women. (Yes, even that one, but grudgingly.) Because man-pleasing considerations don't seem to operate in their decision to arrange for their own cryotransport - they want to try to survive for their own sakes, thank you - they strike me as the more interesting and worthwhile women in cryonics to know. As an added bonus, they may want relationships with cryonicist men.

You'd think that the single, self-valuing women in cryonics would find themselves in a seller's market, given their scarcity. But according to one I've talked to, she has had trouble holding on to a boyfriend because of her involvement in cryonics, and the male cryonics community itself presents her with something like the Alaskan marriage market, which has disproportionately more single men than single women: "The odds are good, but the goods are odd."

In fact, the demographics of cryonics doesn't fit the profile of a "cult," given that almost all the cults I've read about tend to attract plenty of young women and often use the promise of their sexual availability to recruit young men. From what I've read, that happened even in Ayn Rand's cult, the Nathaniel Branden Institute (NBI), despite Objectivism's reputation for geekiness; apparently a lot of Rand's fangirls in the early 1960's went to NBI's events because they considered Rand something like a romance novelist. They provided Rand's fanboys, who read her novels for other reasons, with a pool of prescreened potential mates.

So guys, don't sign up for cryonics for the purpose of meeting hot single chicks, because you won't find very many; and the handful you do meet might not like the thought of getting naked with you.

Despite the literature of sexual freedom and emotional fulfillment which cryonicists use to furnish their minds and fill their bookshelves (Heinlein's and Rand's novels, which Romain noticed in our personal libraries, certainly promote that agenda), many of us seem chronically "unrelationshipped," for want of a better term. Romain observes that "cryonicists imagine possibilities for their lives in a very distant future, an imagined future that is distinct from the life they intend to live until they are frozen." Unfortunately some of our before-freezing lives involve sexual and emotional deficiencies. Cryonics, if it works, might enable us to experience "time enough for love," to coin a phrase.

And yes, I know how sad that sounds, especially if you don't approve of cryonics, so don't bother me with your chiding replies.

"That's not happiness to see me," part 2.

More regarding: Downside of Marriage for Women: The Greater a Wife’s Age Gap from Her Husband, the Lower Her Life Expectancy

If it makes sense to tax behavior or forms of consumption which tend to damage your health, like cigarettes and sugary sodas, why not also tax men who marry older women, and women who marry men either older or younger than themselves? That might encourage men and women to marry more age-appropriate partners. I suspect you could perform some kind of actuarial calculation to come up with an appropriate formula for the tax based on the spread of ages between the spouses.

And why not give men who marry younger women tax relief for making a healthy lifestyle choice, from their perspective?

The Americo-Bactrian kingdom?

Tiffany Romain notes that cryonicists like to speculate about the remote future. I certainly do my share of that, though I tend to wonder how things would look to Future People without assuming any science-fictional transformations like the Singularity.

For example, a friend of mine speculated one time that in a few thousand years, historians might view America's two wars with Iraq, in 1991 and 2003, as basically an extension of the Crusades, just as we now view the Second World War as a result of bad decisions made in trying to resolve the First World War. The passage of enough centuries has the effect of collapsing temporal differences which seem vast to the people living through them at the time.

So, for another example, I wonder what might happen to Americans, both military and civilian, stationed in Afghanistan and adjacent countries, if the American empire implodes and leaves them literally stranded there. If these Americans can't get back home in an Anabasis-like adventure, the ones who wanted to survive would have to "go native," take over some territory and create their own political regime. The men would marry local Afghan women and start families, and over the next few generations we'd see the emergence of a hybrid culture and possibly new creoles based on early 21st Century American English. Something like this has happened several times in Central Asia, most notably in the wake of Alexander the Great's conquests and the failure of his successors to keep the eastern parts of his empire under control from capitals near the Mediterranean. Consider, for example, the Greco-Bactrian kingdom, which included much of modern Afghanistan from 250 through 125 BCE.

When historians in Future World chronicle the decline of the American empire which happened in their "ancient history," would they call the American colonies in Central Asia left behind by the empire's collapse something like the Americo-Bactrian kingdoms?

Stereotypes have a basis in reality.

Or as I like to say, "Sexism? I prefer the term 'human-nature realism'."

Do Blondes Have More Funds?

. . . a new study suggests that blondes are the ones having the last laugh. Research by David W. Johnston, a postdoctoral fellow at the Queensland University of Technology, School of Economics and Finance, indicates that there is a “pretty premium” for blondes in the work force.

As the stereotype goes, blond women are thought to be more attractive but less intelligent than other women. Johnston wondered if these perceived traits had an impact, positive or negative, on blondes’ wages.

Using the 1979 cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, which interviewed 12,686 Americans annually from 1979 to 1994 and biennially from 1994 to 2006, Johnston looked at the incomes of Caucasian women over the age of 25 who self-identified as naturally light blond or blond. He found that naturally blond women (regardless of their current hair colors) both make more than other women and marry richer than other women.

In fact, blondes make on average 7 percent more than non-blondes, about equal to the income boost attained by an extra year of education. And blondes marry people who make approximately 6 percent more than the spouses of women with other hair colors.

I prefer brunettes and redheads myself. Unfortunately they don't reciprocate.

As for stereotypes in general, I suspect the popularity of Mad Men derives in part from its portrayal of spontaneous human preferences in the years just before affirmative action and political correctness tried to shame us into saying that 2 + 2 = 5.

My un-Hayekian banking experience

I have a checking account with a bank which bothers to keep a branch in the town of Mayer, AZ. That should indicate something about the bank's relative size.

A few months back I made two or three transactions on the same day with my debit card, totaling perhaps $200, which the bank's computer (located I don't know where) raised an alarm about because some program it ran decided that they didn't fit my usual pattern of spending.

So on that very day I got a call on my cell phone from a real, live person with an American accent from a boiler room somewhere who said she represented my bank and asked me to confirm the recent transactions. I did so and had no further problems.

But then it struck me just how fine-grained a level of information-gathering about the economy this represented. I mean, seriously, a bank's computer pays attention to my trivial purchases in rural Arizona?

I have to wonder what Friedrich Hayek would say now about limits to the centralization of knowledge of economic activity.

I do know that Hayek would have to change his scenario about political trends. Libertarians who claim that governments get their way by threatening to murder the noncompliant have to explain how nearly 100 governments in the world, including Russia's, manage to collect taxes and regulate businesses after they've renounced the use of capital punishment:

Cryonicists and children

Tiffany Romain writes:

This anti-deathist stance—this problematization of death—also challenges normative American notions of kinship, the life course, and time. As self-proclaimed non-traditionalists, cryonicists understand kinship and even the lifespan as evolving categories subject to change. Most members of the cryonics community are childless, and while in many cases this may be coincidental, many choose not to have children as a matter of principle based on the importance of tending to the self through ongoing education, financial achievement, and other forms of self-improvement. In a rather Foucauldian sense of shaping of the subject and the self . . . , cryonicists tend to adopt particular values, ethics, and goals. For many cryonicists, having children is considered an unnecessary diversion of resources that can and should be devoted to the self, especially if one is to achieve immortality. Phil, one of the few cryonicists I know with children, once said to me, ‘‘They’re good kids. But if their moms hadn’t wanted them, they wouldn’t exist.’’ He did not see much value in passing on genes or creating new generations and preferred to work toward a world in which people no longer need to procreate since the extension of human lifespans would maintain the human species. Indeed, I have heard some in the community theorize that having children is an evolutionary byproduct that could very well become vestigial as humans come closer and closer to becoming immortal. I have also heard several lay theories within the cryonics community about genetic or brain structure differences between men and women that cause men to favor life-extension philosophies and women to favor procreation and the conservative maintenance of cultural traditions.

As Romain suggests, children can conflict with cryonicists' goals on a practical, financial level, though I know of a few cryonicists with children, including one who overly mothers hers and gave them unusual first names. (We have some empirical reasons to consider that a bad idea, especially for boys.)

But Romain fails to mention another risk a cryonicist's children pose when they grow up and can attain power of attorney over you when you become too ill or disabled to make decisions for yourself: A commitment to cryonics resists generational transmission. I know of several cases where the adult children of cryonicists have interfered with, or objected to, their cryonicist parent's suspension, often successfully. Some of these cases have even made the national news.

I can understand how that could happen if the parent becomes interested in cryonics after the children have grown and the teachable moment has passed. But it also happened to Marce Johnson, a literal pioneer from the paleo-cryonics era in the 1960's who had over 40 years to show her children through precept and example how much she wanted cryonic suspension for herself. For complicated reasons she let her cryonics arrangements lapse in the chaos following the collapse of CryoCare in the late 1990's, developed Alzheimer's and wound up in a nursing home where one of her daughters, I've heard, assumed power of attorney and interfered with her cryonicist friends' efforts to suspend her with the Cryonics Institute by raising money for it so that the family wouldn't bear the expense. (I donated about a week's pay towards that effort, and kept the books for others' donations, in my capacity as an official with the Venturists.) Apparently the daughter had Marce cremated after her death, then informed Marce's cryonicist friends after the fact in a way which suggests the daughter felt contemptuous of them, despite their long acquaintance with her mother and their willingness to come up with the money to carry out Marce's explicit, life-long wish for herself.

So why should it surprise anyone that even a cryonicist with the financial means to breed would look at this and similiar situations and decide against starting a family? Some cryonicists might argue against having children as an ideological stance, an interpretation Romain makes of our low incidence of child bearing; but I suspect it really reflects pragmatic considerations which some of us try to rationalize to make us sound less cynical.

Somebody finally understands cryonicists, sort of.

Anthropologist Tiffany Romain has published an article about the culture of cryonicists in the journal Medical Anthropology, 29(2), under the title "Extreme Life Extension: Investing in Cryonics for the Long, Long Term" (apparently not available free online).

She observes the following about us:

Like any group, the cryonics community is by no means uniform in demography, thought, or opinion. The majority of cryonicists I met were, indeed, software or mechanical engineers. But I also encountered venture capitalists, traders, homemakers, a shaman, a journalist, a university professor, cryobiologists, an insurance broker, artificial intelligence designers, a musician, men, women, children, people of color, people in perfect health, and people who were terminally ill. Nevertheless, a sort of Weberian ‘‘ideal type’’ . . . of the typical cryonicist has emerged, and this is how cryonicists recognize themselves and one another. In the spring of 2001, I attended a meeting and potluck of cryonics members in the San Francisco Bay Area. After several topics were discussed in a very orderly fashion—introductions of new members, a recent suspension, and a report on Alcor’s recent board meeting—several men got into a heated technical debate. One member proposed that an existing technology that monitors heart rate and body temperature could be tweaked for usage by cryonicists. Several men got into a friendly but rather aggressive argument about how best to write a computer program that would interface the device and Alcor’s communication systems. In an effort to bring the quite passionate technical discussion to a close, one member made a public aside to me, the anthropologist, loud enough for the benefit of everyone in the room. He said, ‘‘You know that a typical cryonicist is a male computer programmer, don’t you?’’ Everyone laughed. Another member shouted out, ‘‘And a Libertarian!’’ Everyone laughed harder. Everyone appeared to enjoy the joke, which seemed to reaffirm the group’s identity and to promote a kind of solidarity among them. Not all members need to fit this ideal type perfectly, but some dominant characteristics that the majority of the people in the room embodied define which types of people, passions, and behaviors belonged and which did not.

Beyond membership at the practical level, this group shares moral, ethical, and political ideas about a biomedically produced, radically extended life in the future. I find it useful to employ the term ‘‘biosociality’’ to describe this group . . . . Biosociality takes into account the impact of biotechnoscience indices while also allowing for enquiry into their productive capacities. While Rabinow and others have used his term to describe identities configured by particular biomedically defined conditions such as genetic disease or physical disability . . . , my application is somewhat different. I apply it to a group that collectively recasts mortality as a failing of health. The biosociality that I identify among cryonicists is co-constitutive of an emerging social world that consists of imaginaries of biomedically mediated immortal life and an identity formed in relationship to these projections. Cryonicists begin with biomedical definitions and approaches, but then jointly imagine particular sets of far-reaching possibilities through which immortal subjectivities are forged.

Members value uniqueness, ‘‘maverick’’ sensibilities, and a willingness to embrace ‘‘new ideas’’ that include not only cryonics but also fantasies of space colonization and bodily transformation. Many cryonicists also self-describe as ‘‘outsiders,’’ ‘‘completely independent,’’ or ‘‘self-reliant,’’ and most often and most importantly, as ‘‘individualists.’’ I have heard many cryonicists point out the complete irony of joining a cryonics organization but claim, always with a laugh, ‘‘You can’t freeze yourself!’’ Such a dispersed community, isolated by geography and by personal choice, is bound by shared magazines, books, listservs, and websites, through which imaginaries are circulated. The many imaginaries of human life post-reanimation are quite wide-ranging and include waking in the future in an optimized version of one’s current physical self (no need for glasses, restored full head of hair); waking in an 18-year-old version of oneself; minimal or radical changes in physical appearance and continual alteration of appearance and/or gender for the sake of experience; living in a fully cyborg, better-than-human body; cloning oneself and transferring memories to the clone in order to make ‘‘back-up copies’’; uploading oneself into a computer and living virtually; uploading consciousness and sending out remote controlled robot proxies to unfriendly environments. The importance of individual choice is always emphasized in discussions of these possibilities, as it is also in discussions of the future of society.

Apparently the sociological term "imaginary," used as a noun, means "the set of values, institutions, laws, and symbols common to a particular social group and the corresponding society."

In a footnote Romain writes the following, based on her inspection of cryonicists' personal libraries:

During my field research I enjoyed looking through informants’ bookshelves, which were always dominated by science fiction, especially the work of Robert Heinlein, Frederick Pohl, and Vernor Vinge. Collections also usually included Ayn Rand, Richard Dawkin’s The Selfish Gene, texts on nanotechnology, historical and biographical work, and texts that have been produced by other cryonicists.

I also found it interesting that she observed:

Many of the cryonicists’ homes I visited appeared as if the inhabitants had just moved in, often open spaces with sparse, functional furniture, one or more computers, a small display of photographs, a television, and, often, a large collection of books. These spaces hint at a life lived in the virtual space of the computer and in the imagined space of literature.

I guess Romain hadn't visited the homes of cryonicists who engage in compulsive hoarding.

Romain's article provides plenty for me to think about, and I'll probably blog more about it in coming days.

No doubt the libertarians will talk up Matt Ridley's new book.

John Tierney, who apparently has libertarian endorsement, writes an approving review of The Rational Optimist, a Julian-Simonish sort of tract, in The New York Times. It wouldn't surprise me if Ronald Bailey publishes another positive review on the Reason magazine website in a few days.

Of course, calling the skeptics of ideas like Simon's and Ridley's "doomsayers" frames the debate in a misleading way, like the skeptics come at the problem with a mystical or religious orientation. If your accountant examines your finances and informs you that you face bankruptcy on your current course, do you dismiss him as a "doomsayer"? Or do you instead heed his advice, change the behavior which has caused your problems, and thereby improve your chances of staying solvent? The impersonal logic of measurement, something the Peak Oil advocates have tried to adhere to, gets about as far away from apocalypticism as possible.

In fact, I recommend that skeptics of cornucopianism support their arguments with quantitative data and start to call themselves "environmental accountants," or something to that effect, in their discussions with cornucopians, to see if that changes how people receive their arguments.

And, as I predict, nobody with any influence, especially among libertarians, will point out how Austrian economists have their own history of discredited doomsaying.

BTW, nothing about the Strict Father Model assumes cornucopianism, that I can see. We live in a harsh and competitive world; we have to exert ourselves to produce, accumulate and protect wealth; and we can't assume that we always have enough life support to go around.

"Human chow" shows up in interesting places.

I like the idea of "human chow," based on the analogy to nutritionally complete pet foods which our dogs and cats can eat every day for months or years at a time and stay healthy. An affordable human chow could come in handy when you have more pressing things to do than prepare food, or as something to take along when you go camping or traveling, or as rations to sustain people in emergency situations, like the Haitians after their earthquake, for example.

I've read that some people use commercial monkey chow for that purpose; and historically people could survive without getting scurvy for quite awhile from eating pemmican, depending on the recipes used to make it.

I recently recalled that one of the self-experimenters in cognitive enhancing drugs Margaret Talbot interviewed for her essay in The New Yorker from a year ago, had also experimented with human chow. Nicholas Seltzer, who has some kind of job as a policy wonk in Virginia and hangs around transhumanist forums on the internet, reportedly does the following:

For breakfast every morning, he concocted a slurry of oatmeal, berries, soy milk, pomegranate juice, flaxseed, almond meal, raw eggs, and protein powder. The goal behind the recipe was efficiency: to rely on “one goop you could eat or drink that would have everything you need nutritionally for your brain and body.” He explained, “Taste was the last thing on my mind; I wanted to be able to keep it down—that was it.”

I question the wisdom of eating raw eggs. You might substitute those pasteurized, uncooked egg mixes which come in cartons.

Buckminster Fuller also reportedly experimented with his attempt at human chow, subsisting on a diet of steak, prunes, gelatin and tea for a number of years, rather like the high protein diets popular these days.

And the idea of human chow also shows up in science fiction. H. Beam Piper mentions "Terran Federation Space Forces Emergency Ration, Extraterrestrial, Type Three," shortened to "Extee Three," in his novel Little Fuzzy.

I can see why efficiency-oriented people would seek out something like human chow. Since I suspect we'll eventually have food rationing in the U.S. as a result of declining oil supplies for agriculture, food processing and transportation of food to market, human chow from relatively cheap ingredients might wind up on all our plates sooner than we anticipate. The U.S. government imposed food rationing during the Second World War, and the Brits had it from the beginning of the war through the 1950's (with the unplanned result of also improving their health); so food rationing can happen, and work successfully, in developed countries. A renewed rationing system might also incorporate mass produced human chow to simplify things.

So what happens to happiness beyond the data?

The empirical evidence shows that people tend to become happier past middle age. For example:


It's getting better all the time: Happiness, wellbeing increase after 50

Despite weighty concerns, such as aging, planning for retirement or caring for older friends and family, people in the U.S. seem to get happier with age. A new study reports that these changes are consistent regardless of whether individuals were employed, had young children at home or lived with a partner.

General wellbeing (characterized by how people currently felt about their life) fell sharply through the age of 25 and tapered more gradually overall until the ages of 50 to 53. And by the early 70s, that wellbeing was back up to late-teen levels.

So what would happen to our happiness if we live beyond current life expectancies in good health? If this trend scales up with longer lives, then the experience of extended life would tend to falsify philosophical arguments, like Peter Singer's, that radical life extension results in suboptimal lifetime happiness.

Maturity also apparently synergizes well with the Strict Father Model, providing further evidence that conservatism fits human nature better than progressive fantasies.

Forget "heaven," how about stealing "Earth" (reality)?

I've seen most of Stealing Heaven on DVD. I haven't run across many films which portray physically attractive intellectuals, in this case the philosopher Peter Abelard and his student Héloïse, engaging in passionate sex. This clip shows some of the foreplay:



The skeptical discussions in the film about the bible and theology seem a bit sophomoric to me; but by the standards of the 12th Century, they probably blew people's minds.

The historical Héloïse also gave birth to Abelard's child, a boy she named Astrolabe, like the scientific instrument. You couldn't get much geekier than that in the 12th Century.

Real invention doesn't work like Intelligent Design.

I read and collect books and stories about inventors. I've noticed that inventors frequently come up with solutions to their current problems through random things they notice around them, often while thinking about something unrelated.

For example, in the story about the death of bazooka inventor Edward G. Uhl, I read:

Uhl faced two immediate problems: How would a soldier aim the weapon and how would the burning powder be kept from coming into contact with his face?

"One day I was walking by this scrap pile, and there was a tube that was 5 feet long and 60 mm in diameter, which happened to be the same size as the grenade that we were turning into a rocket," Uhl said in the interview. "I said, 'That's the answer! Put the tube on a soldier's shoulder with the rocket inside and away it goes.' "

A study of the literature could come up with many examples like Uhl's, regarding nontrivial breakthroughs in inventive problem solving. Even Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla had insights like this from adventitious observations.

Once you see how real inventors work, you realize the problem it poses for the identity in kind Intelligent Design advocates want to force between human inventions and a god's alleged "inventions" in, say, molecular biology. Human inventors don't come up with their ideas from nothing, but rather by constructing analogies from structures and information already in the environment. Per the hypothesis, the god of Intelligent Design would have to do the same, which raises the question of who or what in turn designed those structures and information. The Intelligent Design argument, in other words, implies an infinite regression like other varieties of theistic arguments for origins.

"That's not happiness to see me."

This study has generated some discussions on the internet:

Downside of Marriage for Women: The Greater a Wife’s Age Gap from Her Husband, the Lower Her Life Expectancy

Marriage is more beneficial for men than for women -- at least for those who want a long life. Previous studies have shown that men with younger wives live longer. While it had long been assumed that women with younger husbands also live longer, in a new study Sven Drefahl from the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) in Rostock, Germany, has shown that this is not the case. Instead, the greater the age difference from the husband, the lower the wife's life expectancy. This is the case irrespective of whether the woman is younger or older than her spouse.

Related to life expectancy choosing a wife is easy for men -- the younger the better. The mortality risk of a husband who is seven to nine years older than his wife is reduced by eleven percent compared to couples where both partners are the same age. Conversely, a man dies earlier when he is younger than his spouse.

For years, researchers have thought that this data holds true for both sexes. They assumed an effect called "health selection" was in play; those who select younger partners are able to do so because they are healthier and thus already have a higher life expectancy. It was also thought that a younger spouse has a positive psychological and social effect on an older partner and can be a better caretaker in old age, thereby helping to extend the partner's life.

"These theories now have to be reconsidered," says Drefahl. "It appears that the reasons for mortality differences due to the age gap of the spouses remain unclear." Using data from almost two million Danish couples, Drefahl was able to eliminate the statistical shortcomings of earlier research, and showed that the best choice for a woman is to marry a man of exactly the same age; an older husband shortens her life, and a younger one even more so.

A couple of things I've thought about after reading this:

1. Despite all the propaganda about the wonders of modern medicine, this study supports the view that access to health care in developed countries (in this case, in social-democratic Denmark, where everyone receives health coverage) matters less for your health and longevity than social, environmental and lifestyle factors. The wellness scolds already tell us to eat more fruits and vegetables, exercise, lose weight and so forth; will they also start to nag us about marrying people with "unhealthy" age differences from us?

2. I wonder if sperm competition accounts for the asymmetry in the results. In the young husband/old wife scenario, does the man's body produce sperm which his wife's body processes as a toxin, thereby damaging her health? That might make evolutionary sense if it tends to eliminate the old wife sooner so that the man can find younger mates to replace her.

Conversely, in the old husband/young wife scenario, does the threat of sperm competition with younger men, the theme of countless stories in our culture from ancient myths to today's soap operas, activate DNA repair mechanisms in the man so that he can produce better quality sperm? The sperm from older men might also have some toxic effects on young women's bodies, but less so than the sperm from men younger than the women. The more efficient DNA maintenance in the reproductive cells might also happen in the man's somatic cells and result in improving his health.

Of course, causality can also run the other way: Men in younger physiological conditions than their chronological ages might attract chronologically younger women, especially if the men still have the energy to earn above average incomes and maintain a high status in their social circles.

Interestingly enough, Lazarus Long in Robert Heinlein's stories got to the point where he had nothing but vastly younger women, centuries and even millennia younger, as sex partners and wives. No wonder these women kept dying off, even with rejuvenation technology. Given Heinlein's world view, I don't think he could handle the idea of a female competitor to Lazarus Long in terms of longevity and life experiences.