Cryonicists' sunk costs reasoning about Drexler's "nanotech."

Apparently some cryonicists take exception to the blog post I've circulated by physicist Scott Locklin about what he calls Eric Drexler's "charlatanry." Drexler astounded the world a quarter century ago with his "vision" of human-designed self-replicating nanomachines which could do this and that, along the lines of bringing about the Millennium, including the resurrection of the people in frozen slumber. (Drexler figures prominently in Alcor's literature, which I suspect we'll regret from hindsight.)

Yet in our mysterious, far-future year 2010, we don't have one tangible nanomachine along Drexler's lines doing anything of the sort, and Locklin argues that Drexler's speculations haven't born fruit because they incorporate mistaken assumptions about physics. By contrast, many other technologies developed quickly because they got the physics right from the beginning. In an example that comes to my mind, the laser, weak cousin to science fiction's "death ray," went from a laboratory curiosity in 1960 to a powerful and versatile tool in science, medicine and engineering in a handful of years. How did this happen? Because the laser exploits correct principles of physics.

I wonder now if Drexlerism, if I may call it that, suffers from crank magnetism. Paraphrasing Mike Huben, Drexler's advocates may have gotten themselves into a bind, rather like Austrian economists and creationists, by rejecting criticisms from other scientists in favor of appeals to authority ("Read Nanosystems!") and pseudoscientific arguments.

I have no emotional investment in Drexler's reputation. If his ideas suck, we need to write off the bad investment into them and start to look for better ideas, especially regarding cryonics revival scenarios. Instead I detect some fallacious sunk costs reasoning in cryonicists who've come to Drexler's defense, which especially worries me at a time when cryonics has fallen under suspicion for other reasons.

Did Robert Heinlein abuse his junk?

William H. Patterson's biography of Heinlein goes into more detail than I cared to know about Robert Heinlein's genitourinary health problems during the first 40 years of his life: bladder cysts, urethral infections, prostatitis. some gonorrhea-like fluid oozing from his penis.

You have to wonder how much of that resulted from Heinlein's sexual promiscuity in an era with generally lower standards of health and hygiene. Or did Heinlein also engage in sadomasochistic practices, for example, like inserting unsterile foreign objects into his urethra?

Heinlein early on also displayed romantic and utopian aspects to his personality, for example by teaching himself Esperanto because he thought that that artificial language would become the dominant means of communication in what, to him, looked like Future World.

The biography deserves a fuller review than I can write at the moment; but I'll get around to writing the review once I finish the biography and take some notes.

You just can't make this stuff up.

Austrian economist Peter Boettke, a lickspittle employed by the Koch brothers through their front organization, George Mason University, acknowledges that his field suffers from crank magnetism:

Spreading Hayek, Spurning Keynes
Professor Leads an Austrian Revival

The resurgence of Austrian economics does have its hazards, Mr. Boettke says. The antigovernment fervor on cable-television shows and the Internet may have popularized its theories, but it also "reinforces the idea to critics that these are crackpot ideas," he said. He has tried to distance himself from conspiracy theorists and even dropped "Austrian" from the name of his blog. But he hasn't yet thought of a better term.

Gee, I wonder why Boettke feels that he has this problem, given the "Austrian economics and X" phenomenon, where X could stand for Christian Reconstructionism, conspiracy theories, quackery, The Wrong Side Won the Civil War and other weird beliefs.

George Orwell noticed a similar phenomenon on the left in the 1930's: "'Socialism' and 'Communism' draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, 'Nature Cure' quack, pacifist, and feminist in England." These totalistic, utopian fantasies about transforming society, regardless of the underlying political orientation, tend to bring out other forms of nuttiness in people. I've heard similar stories about the sorts of people drawn to the Zeitgeist Movement and Jacque Fresco's utopian vaporware called the Venus Project.

In fairness, cryonics suffers from this problem as well. But I've already noted some aspects of that.

Speaking of the devil.

I had a strange conversation with someone I know well this morning. Apparently this friend, another cryonicist, has bought into the hyperinflation propaganda and expects a social collapse which might necessitate the shooting of entire families who try to loot your supplies, and similar Mad Max/survivalist/zombie-uprising scenarios. We also discussed the currently popular survivalist shows on the Discovery Channel.

If life in the U.S. got to that point, it would make cryonics pointless, if not impossible. I prefer Thomas Donaldson's scenario where we don't necessarily have to share the fate of the rest of society. An intelligent, feasible plan to disengage cryonics from failed civilizations so that we can keep people in suspension, and get suspended ourselves, seems preferable to spending your last weeks or months sitting on a diminishing pile of MRE's and useless gold coins with your assault rifle. (Contra the Austrian economists, gold won't do you any good if the production of necessary commodities has collapsed.)

Coincidentally I've started to read an abridged version of Edward Gibbon's famous book. From Gibbon's perspective in late 18th Century England, he argued that the European elites had an option to protect them from social collapse which the elites of the declining Roman Empire lacked:

If a savage conqueror should issue from the deserts of Tartary, he must repeatedly vanquish the robust peasants of Russia, the numerous armies of Germany, the gallant nobles of France, and the intrepid freemen of Britain; who, perhaps, might confederate for their common defence. Should the victorious Barbarians carry slavery and desolation as far as the Atlantic Ocean, ten thousand vessels would transport beyond their pursuit the remains of civilized society; and Europe would revive and flourish in the American world which is already filled with her colonies and institutions.

What would correspond to that now for Americans? Australia? New Zealand? The Southern Cone nations? A number of science fiction writers have postulated that civilization survives and continues to function in the Southern Hemisphere after nuclear wars and other disasters destroy it in the Northern Hemisphere, so could cryonics organizations, following Donaldson's vision, relocate to a sufficiently friendly and developed Southern country if necessary?

As for "hyperinflation," I don't see the mechanism for getting that much paper money into circulation, especially because most transactions happen electronically these days and almost everyone I know has lost net worth and income. The union-busting that started under the Reagan Administration has similarly eroded the automatic cost-of-living raises unionized workers used to take for granted and which helped to ratchet up inflation in the 1970's. (If anything, wages currently want to fall to clear the job market.) People who talk about hyperinflation as a real possibility for the U.S. in the 2010+ decade sound to me like they still live mentally in 1975.

Webster Tarpley on Austrian economics

Again, take what Webster Tarpley writes with the proverbial grain of salt. He does raise interesting questions about Austrian economics versus empiricism:

“The Market” is a Reactionary Mystification: Reply to the Attack on Economic Populism from Franco Debenedetti and other Italian Economists

At the heart of the arguments put forward by Debenedetti and his friends is the notion that human reason is very weak indeed, and cannot attain a practical understanding or overview of how political economy works. Only the market, they claim, can do with this by totalizing so many separate facts. But they are not arguing from any empirical observation of how markets really work, but expressing the fetishism of an efficient market which was typical of von Hayek and other Austrians. They tried to portray markets as genuine epistemological tools, which provided knowledge which could not be obtained any other way. Even the Ayn Rand devotee Alan Greenspan has backed away from this extravagant claim in the wake of the catastrophic collapse of the New York banks in October 2008. When asked whether he had been led astray by his market ideology, Greenspan told a Congressional hearing: “Yes, I’ve found a flaw. I don’t know how significant or permanent it is. But I’ve been very distressed by that fact.” (New York Times, October 23, 2008) Debenedetti does not share this distress. At the same time, the successful history of the Bank of the United States under Alexander Hamilton, the French Commissariat du Plan under DeGaulle, and the Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI)) makes clear to human reason is indeed capable of determining the main priorities of national economies.

Market fetishism is radically anti-historical. Everyone is aware of speculative manias, bubbles, panics, and the other recurring psychoses which make the judgment of any market totally unreliable in many critical moments. And what if there are monopolies, duopolies, oligopolies, trusts, combinations, or cartels of the February 8 type? Then the market is permanently distorted, which is what we have been seeing for decades.

Debenedetti wants “the market” to be seen as objective and impersonal, but it is not. “The market” has names and faces. If we find that half a dozen of the largest US banks control about 60% of all assets in the entire United States economy, then we can make that exorbitant control very personal and concrete. The owners of a majority share of the United States are bankers like Jamie Dimon of J.P. Morgan Chase, Vikram Pandit of Citibank, Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs, John Mack of Morgan Stanley, and Brian Moynihan of Bank of America/Merrill Lynch, and their respective boards. We can even know how many billions each one has been given in the form of bailouts at public expense.

The Austrian school makes the market into a metaphysical abstraction, a force above the rest of history, because it needs this mystification in order to defend the very concrete privileges of some very sleazy individuals who are the speculators. Some early Protestants tried to argue that the success of the speculator had been instituted by God. When this idea lost traction, apologists for speculation tried to argue that the speculators were morally or intellectually superior to the rest of humanity. When that did not work either, the Austrian school hit upon the trick of removing the speculators from consideration altogether by hiding them from view behind the anonymous and impersonal abstraction of “the market.” As the case of Greenspan suggests, this argument has also become untenable, and the entire edifice of Austrian thought is falling to the ground.

Debenedetti and his co-thinkers suggest that “the market” is able to detect the secret financial weaknesses of nations. But surely the shoe is on the other foot. The major US banks listed above were all, without exception, bankrupt and insolvent before US government intervention in the form of the bailout of October 2008. Today, any objective appraisal would conclude that Greece is far more economically viable and solvent then Citibank. Portugal is more viable than Goldman Sachs. Italy has a brighter economic future by far than J.P. Morgan.

Screw Nietzsche.

I don't understand many transhumanists' obsession with Friedrich Nietzsche. If you want to admire a 19th Century figure who discovered something useful about expanding human abilities, why not look at Hermann Ebbinghaus?

From the perspicacious Thomas Donaldson.

In 1989 Thomas Donaldson, Ph.D in mathematics from the University of Chicago, published a criticism of efforts to calculate the alleged probability of cryonics' success, titled Responsibility, Probability, and Durability. Donaldson shows the fallacy of the assumption that we have zero control over the outcome by arguing as follows:

Here is an example of the problem I'm raising, with the issues raised to an absurd level just for clarity. A new gambling house sets up in Reno. The owner undertakes to bet with everyone about whether or not he, the owner, will do his laundry tomorrow. Bets are made today and close at 6 PM. (Perhaps gambling houses already operate this way?) Do we, then, expect a rush of clients?

The problem with this bet is that he, the owner, has some control over whether or not he does his laundry. Not only are the dice loaded, but he gets to pick, after all bets are laid, which loaded die to use. Computing probabilities only makes sense when the events bet upon are known to be random. [For some cryonicists who've made probability calculations], this means that our actions can have NO effect upon the outcome. I don't mean "only a very little." NO means none at all, zilch, zero. Why zero? Because our actions now are seeds, not just "observational errors" which lead nowhere. Once we admit that our actions can influence these events, how do we predict by how much and when?

How, indeed?

Within a very wide range, what happens to us is our responsibility. We are not passive betters on the outcome of events. I mean this both in the narrow sense of I, me, myself, and in the broader one of cryonicists generally. How can I (myself) affect my frozen fate 100 years from now? Well, for one thing I can choose my cryonics society. I can try to make its officers not only honest and competent as individuals, but operating within a constitution which keeps them honest and competent or throws them out of office. And I can provide enough resources so that evasive action is possible when any threat appears. Third, I can try to arrange that equipment, supplies, and competent people will be available when I'm declared legally dead. And of course last of all I can try to create other cryonicists.

But of course someday I will be frozen. What control do I have then? Not directly, but through other cryonicists who succeed me. We have all joined together for a journey across time. If anyone is revived 50 years from now, even with technology far in advance of ours and in another country, it will strengthen my chances. I believe the important part to remember about [other cryonicists' estimates of] social catastrophes is that every one of us is putting out effort to see that they do not occur to us.

That sounds good, but I don't see as much "effort" as I'd like into ensuring that "social catastrophes" don't destroy cryonics.

Donaldson continues:

It is wrong for us either individually, or as a class of people (cryonicists) to take occurrence of world-wide or even Solar System-wide events as necessarily our own personal fate. It is wrong and far worse than wrong. Habits of mind which identify ourselves with the general fate of humanity assume an abdication of that exact responsibility we must take over our own fate. Putting our fate into a model of passive probability assumes our own passivity.

. . . We want to choose a cryonics society agile enough that when the mobs come to loot the facility, they find only empty dewars and bare offices; when the nanotech beasties come for us, we meet them with a nanotechnological immune system which consumes them. We very much should not identify our own fate with that of "society" or "mankind" or even the Earth (cryonics societies should found offices off the Earth as soon as that becomes possible). Didn't we become cryonicists because we proposed to escape that which all the philosophers said was the common fate of all mankind? Floods, earthquakes, meteor impact, major war, mobs searching for us in every cranny, how could we be fazed by such trivialities having once adopted our major goal?

It is, after all, not as if we have only five minutes to prepare for such events. Haven't you noticed that cryonics is a very long term project? Every year we should all look up from our local cryonics tasks and think about dangers over the longer term. No cryonics society, for instance, has a constitution which satisfies me completely. There are other issues too. Part of our responsibility consists exactly of foreseeing problems which now look far away. To be immortal means to be farseeing.

Instead of "seeing far" along Donaldson's lines, I regularly encounter cryonicists who tend to mix cryonics up with: transient political grievances; fringe ideologies like Austrian economics; dubious proposals like seasteading (the political agenda behind it, not the doable technology); enthusiasms for useless/worthless popular culture like Avatar, Caprica, etc. as evidence that "transhumanism has already won"; and not to mention all the other transhumanist lint gathering around cryonics like mind uploading, "bridges to immortality" and the Singularity.

I turn 51 in a little over two months, and I've had some health problems this summer, so the mortality salience has reduced my tolerance for distractions from survival matters. For one thing, I've donated some money to help a couple of scientists studying cryonics-related perfusion problems in rats' brains. And I recently met a cryonicist who has applied to set up a 501(c)3 to hold donated money in trust, invest it in some relatively high yield ways and then pay the dividends to Alcor. The latter project interests me a great deal, though it will need a principal of several million dollars to generate enough income for Alcor to matter. (I'd also want to make sure that the project doesn't turn into a scam.) Alcor needs something very much like that to diversity its sources of funding instead of relying too much on a couple of patrons who, so I've heard, might pull out and instead exclusively support their Timeship allegedly getting built near San Antonio, Texas.

Donaldson's essay implies a defection and alienation from the petty interests of mankind in the quest for personal survival. That perspective suits my personality well, though apparently many other cryonicists haven't gotten to that level of awareness yet. Oh, bother, I guess I'll have to set an example for them, despite my limited influence in the cryonics community so far.

Sounds like a fun date.

I like the premise of Man, Woman, Wild:




It reminds me of Vernor Vinge's depiction of "survival sport," a minor plot element in his novel Marooned in Realtime:

Webster Tarpley on Jeff Rense's show, August 25.

I treat Webster Tarpley's pronouncements skeptically because of his LaRouchist background. But he does say some interesting things that I seldom hear elsewhere.

In this appearance on Jeff Rense's talkshow, Tarpley argues the need for a third political party in the U.S. which repudiates the 4 M's: Malthusianism, Mexophobia, Monetarism and Militarism, while offering a New Deal sort of policy to rebuild the American economy on a foundation of tangible production instead of the financial hocus-pocus for the elites and the humiliating servility jobs for everyone else which have blighted the past generation.

He also says that the Republican Party can redeem itself by becoming the advocate of heavy industry, along the lines of, "What's good for General Motors is good for America."

What do vegans eat in survival situations?

I notice from the survival shows on the Discovery Channel that the survival "experts" demonstrate how to eat various animals' bodies found in the wild. For example, consider Bear Grylls's Gollum impersonation:



You can find similar situations in other shows in this genre like Survivorman, Dual Survivor and Man, Woman, Wild.

So, does that mean that vegans just have to starve in survival emergencies?

The road to Koch-dom

The New Yorker website has an article about the billionaire brothers, David Koch and Charles Koch, now both in their 70's, who've apparently spent over $100 million from their personal fortunes to promote a libertarian counter-revolution in the U.S. through astroturfing and front organizations.

Naturally Austrian economics plays a role in the Koch brothers' agenda, though apparently they don't see the irony of pushing this doctrine on a market which has consistently rejected it. (Ayn Rand's novels, by contrast, sell on their own, despite their weirdness and low quality.) Even private universities generally don't hire Austrian economists as professors because Austrian economics has a reputation for crank magnetism, drawing unto itself people who promote urban legends, conspiracy theories and doomsday beliefs about political and economic matters. That doesn't mean other ways of thinking about economics don't also have their problems; but as the skeptic of libertarianism Mike Huben has pointed out:

Austrian economics and creationism both suffer from the same big problem. When you dismiss criticism from fellow economists or scientists in favor of authority and bad philosophy, you lose the ability to prevent other fools from larding up your system with numerous contradictory and stupid ideas.

Moreover, the Koch brothers have clearly disregarded their hero Hayek's doctrine that society as an evolved system develops spontaneously and organically, making it resistant to efforts to engineer its development in some other way according to the plan of man's limited reason. Why let that idea stop you when you have > $100 million at your disposal to build the road to Koch-dom?

I suspect Austrian economics would have passed into obscurity decades ago without efforts like the Koch brothers' to keep it on life support in defiance of market signals. When Ludwig von Mises, the L. Ron Hubbard of Austrian economics, migrated to the U.S., he couldn't get a real job at a university based on his merits as a scholar, so he found some American businessmen as patrons who put Mises on their payroll. The patrons then bribed New York University to give Mises an office and pretend that he worked there as a visiting professor. Otherwise Mises might have had to take the sort of job the market offered to other Jewish immigrants, like working in the garment trade or something.

BTW, the story about the Koch brothers reminds me of Alcor's over-dependence on subsidies from a couple of businessmen whom I won't name. Only unlike the case with the Koch brothers, Alcor's two major patrons can't plausibly build up an astroturfing support system for cryonics because the idea remains obscure and unpopular. I advocate a diversification of Alcor's sources of income, especially before one of the patrons has to go into the dewar and his heirs enact other plans for the income from his estate.

I have to admit: This made me laugh.

My parents took me to Southern Baptist Church until around the time I turned 14, and then we stopped going to church altogether for some reason. (I don't know why, but from hindsight I consider that a good thing.)

So I managed to avoid baptism, fortunately. For those of you who got strong-armed into this superstitious ritual at a young age, however, some atheists now offer the option of "debaptism" with a hair dryer:



In a rational society, by contrast, parents with adolescent children would worry more about their kids' healthy development and the acquisition of skills necessary for success in this world than whether they "accept Jesus" or not. I would include an organized sexual debut for the boys instead of leaving that in the realm of the unreliable and haphazard.

Wizards, shamans, gurus, priests? Same difference.

Now we know the source of the "Heinleinian woman."

Heinlein also apparently displayed natural aptitude for "game," early in life:

Calling bullshit on Buddhism

Transhumanists who endorse Buddhism tend to annoy me. Buddhism not only has the problems John Horgan points out, but the empirical evidence doesn't support its fans' claims about happiness.

Consider: The developed countries where Buddhism has had the least presence and influence, with the exception of Japan, now report the highest levels of happiness; while the poorer countries with Buddhist cultures report significantly lower levels of happiness. You can find this evidence for yourself by googling graphs about GDP versus happiness.

In other words, societies which have exerted themselves to create the wealth necessary to satisfy the material components of dukkha have shown that their efforts get the job done in raising the levels of happiness. (The advanced societies might also have satisfied many of the intangible components of dukkha by giving people more of a sense of control over their lives.) Culturally Buddhist populations still mired in poverty, by contrast, just don't have much happiness to show for their centuries of meditation and quests for "enlightenment."

Ironically the legends about the Buddha show that he depended on others' dukkha for his subsistence and cult building. Indian peasants had to labor in the fields, and run the risk of starving themselves, just so the Buddha and his growing band of unproductive followers could beg food from them. Given that system of economics, I can see why Buddhism would also appeal to people with socialist inclinations.

Bring on the "Jesus who?" era.

I read the text of a speech by sociologist Phil Zuckerman titled "The Goodness of Godlessness," which provides empirical evidence for the thesis that people can discard religion and often live better without it, thank you, despite the propaganda to the contrary about the atheistic "culture of death" and similar nonsense.

Of course, philosophers and other intellectuals have promoted this idea sporadically at least since the time of Epicurus, and continuously since the 17th Century as a product of the Enlightenment. It turns out that these early visionaries correctly intuited a possible future.

Some interesting graphs I've found:





Science fiction, another product of the Enlightenment, has also done its share in promoting the idea that we'll eventually forget Jesus, or at least not consider him important any more. The Star Trek franchise reflected Gene Roddenberry's secular humanism, as many know. I can think of a couple other examples off the top of my head:

"He was crucified, and crowned with a crown of thorns. Who had they done that to? Somebody long ago, on Terra." H. Beam Piper, Space Viking.

And, of course, the television series Stargate SG-1:



Unfortunately I grew up in an environment where I had to think about Jesus a lot more than I cared to, until I discovered That '70's Transhumanism and found more interesting ideas about possible futures to consider. I have to laugh at the bible prophecy hustlers now in their 80's, like Hal Lindsey, Tim LaHaye and Jack Chick, who've wasted their lives waiting for a visit from the rapture fairy.

The empirical evidence shows that people have only weak attachments to religion in general, and they lose interest in it when they attain adequate living conditions, though the process of "falling away" from religious traditions might take a generation or two, until a teenage boy can look at a crucifix and ask "'What is that guy doing hanging up there on the plus sign?"

I say: Bring it on. I entered the "Jesus who?" era in 1974, well ahead of the curve.

What I looked like a few weeks before my 18th birthday.

My mother chose my clothes for my senior yearbook photo.:

Did Ayn Rand understand logic?

"Conservatives” vs. “Liberals”, from the online Ayn Rand Lexicon:

Both [conservatives and liberals] hold the same premise—the mind-body dichotomy—but choose opposite sides of this lethal fallacy.

The conservatives want freedom to act in the material realm; they tend to oppose government control of production, of industry, of trade, of business, of physical goods, of material wealth. But they advocate government control of man’s spirit, i.e., man’s consciousness; they advocate the State’s right to impose censorship, to determine moral values, to create and enforce a governmental establishment of morality, to rule the intellect. The liberals want freedom to act in the spiritual realm; they oppose censorship, they oppose government control of ideas, of the arts, of the press, of education (note their concern with “academic freedom”). But they advocate government control of material production, of business, of employment, of wages, of profits, of all physical property—they advocate it all the way down to total expropriation.

The conservatives see man as a body freely roaming the earth, building sand piles or factories—with an electronic computer inside his skull, controlled from Washington. The liberals see man as a soul freewheeling to the farthest reaches of the universe—but wearing chains from nose to toes when he crosses the street to buy a loaf of bread.

Yet it is the conservatives who are predominantly religionists, who proclaim the superiority of the soul over the body, who represent what I call the “mystics of spirit.” And it is the liberals who are predominantly materialists, who regard man as an aggregate of meat, and who represent what I call the “mystics of muscle.”

This is merely a paradox, not a contradiction: each camp wants to control the realm it regards as metaphysically important; each grants freedom only to the activities it despises. Observe that the conservatives insult and demean the rich or those who succeed in material production, regarding them as morally inferior—and that the liberals treat ideas as a cynical con game. “Control,” to both camps, means the power to rule by physical force. Neither camp holds freedom as a value. The conservatives want to rule man’s consciousness; the liberals, his body.

Let me get this straight: People want to control the realm they consider "metaphysically important," and they "grant freedom" to the realm they "despise."

So, because Objectivists want to "grant freedom" to both realms, the material and the spiritual, doesn't it follow that they do so because they "despise" both realms?

BTW, since when did conservatives disrespect financially successful people, as Rand claims?

Hollywood's version of Alfred Kinsey

Despite a slow download speed, I managed to watch the bulk of the film Kinsey from some Asian video website the other night.

I didn't know much about the real Kinsey, but apparently he showed signs of Asperger's or high-functioning autism, which might account not only for his ability to collect and categorize over a million specimens of gall wasps (his "legitimate" specialty), but also his blindness to taboos about sex in the 1930's and 1940's when he performed his research into people's sexual behavior.

Kinsey reportedly also had some sexual kinks of his own, and that combined with his findings unwelcome by some ideological groups have led to an effort that I guess you could call "Kinsey denialism," namely people who want discredit what Kinsey claimed to have found by attacking him as a "sadomasochistic homosexual" and child molester.

Since I have Aspergerish tendencies myself, I take a different view of the situation. I, like other Aspies, often experience "ordinary" human behavior from a distant and even "alien" perspective, so that I sometimes notice the strangeness of things that neurotypicals take for granted. Kinsey probably viewed a lot of human behavior in a similar way, especially given his background in the evolutionary biology of the time, and he didn't see the justification for all the ignorance and superstitions surrounding harmless sexual practices.

The film's version of Kinsey portrays the sort of secular earthiness and humor I've seen in real college biology professors. A scene towards the end, where Kinsey and his wife wander through California's redwood forest, shows the connection between the natural world and our sexuality. I found that surprisingly life-affirming.

You can read about Kinsey's probable Asperger's here:

Reverse psychology

Chicks have no business getting into cryonics. Their minds can't handle the complex and visionary thinking required to understand the cryonics proposal. And why would a future society want to resuscitate a bunch of moms and housewives any way? To alleviate a shortage of cashiers at their future versions of Wal-Mart?

What happens if we keep drawing attention to "hostile wives"?

The "hostile wife phenomenon" in cryonics hasn't exactly "gone viral" yet, but it does get over 4,000 hits on Google as of this morning. The phrase might eventually rival in usage my coinage of "singularitarian." The New York Times article by Kerry Howley has introduced the phrase and the problem it represents to mainstream society.

I wonder what growing awareness of some women's hostility towards their men's involvement in cryonics could do to women's perception of cryonics in general. While many women recognize that the sexes need their respective social spaces (e.g., "man caves"), even if they live together, women also tend to resent it if they feel that men have shut them out from having some control over things which affect them, for example, access to education, property ownership, family planning, the job market, politics and other areas of common concern.

So how would women who don't personally know cryonicists react when they hear about "hostile wives"? Would that make them interested in learning why some men care so passionately about cryonics that they risk alienating their companion females? And could that have the paradoxical result of making these women willing to colonize this social space by signing up for cryonics themselves, the way they've entered into other formerly male-dominated areas?

We might help this along by framing cryonics (informally, of course, not as official policy) as a man's activity which has nothing to offer women. Move along girls, nothing to see here but a bunch of shiny cryogenic dewars storing people's loved ones. The perception of exclusion just might do the trick in correcting cryonics' demographic imbalance and making the future of cryonics organizations more stable and secure.

As for the idea that women dislike cryonics because they value conformity, I have my doubts about that. Young women, especially, have embraced cosmetic surgery, tattoos and piercings to make themselves look unusual; and they tend to ignore male ridicule of their obsessions like Twilight. So women don't necessarily organize their lives around avoiding humiliation and seeking others' approval. And what about the women who join controversial cults like the ones drawn to 19th Century Mormonism? Why do women draw the line currently at cryonics?

On the other hand, women seem more willing to follow cues from popular culture. What would happen if one of the vulgarian women in The Jersey Shore signed up for cryonics, for example?

"1999 A.D."

Setting aside the creepy music when the mom writes 1999 A.D. on the sand, the kid's ignorance about computers (boy did they get that wrong!) and some other absurdities, this film didn't do such a bad job of portraying "the future":

AT&T's version of "the future" from the early 1990's

Not bad, only AT&T didn't anticipate internet porn:

Atheist Russell Glasser on Objectivism

I wonder what Objectivism would look like if it came from someone emotionally stable, better read in philosophy, well read in science and willing to incorporate criticism.

Albert Ellis on Objectivism's "awfulizing" thinking.

From Albert Ellis's book, Are Capitalism, Objectivism, And Libertarianism Religions? Yes!: Greenspan And Ayn Rand Debunked



Notice the resemblance to much of the rhetoric about "starvation, death, and complete social disorganization" found on Austrian economics' websites.

I wonder what Ellis would say today about the right's embrace of Rand, a woman who had at least one abortion, despised family life, professed atheism and celebrated and practiced adultery. Does that signal that the right has moved towards a more secular world view?

Ignoring the right's doomsday cultism?

I found this interesting:

03. The general tendency in Europe is clearly oriented towards dystopia, as if the media on the Old Continent, not finding pleasant stories anymore, were sinking into a particularly sombre pessimism. How do you analyze this lack of dynamism and the sometimes regressive aspect of European societies?

No simple answer can adequately explain the tendency of Europe toward pessimism. I suggested several likely factors back in 1997 at a talk to The Big Fatigue conference in Munich. This pessimistic, dystopian attitude has always had influence also in the USA, and more strongly now than ever (except perhaps the 1970s). People seem to have an addiction to claims of disaster, catastrophe, and crisis. We can see the appeal of extreme, catastrophic scenarios in the cases of climate change, the Y2K apocalypse, mad cow disease, SARS, autism vaccinations, swine flu, cell phone tumors, DDT and cancer, population growth and famine, and many other largely manufactured scares.

What about the "claims of disaster, catastrophe, and crisis" coming from people associated with Austrian economics?

"Marriage and Men's Health"

From the July 2010 issue of Harvard Men's Health Watch:

Men, marriage, and mortality

A major survey of 127,545 American adults found that married men are healthier than men who were never married or whose marriages ended in divorce or widowhood. Men who have marital partners also live longer than men without spouses; men who marry after age 25 get more protection than those who tie the knot at a younger age, and the longer a man stays married, the greater his survival advantage over his unmarried peers. But is marriage itself responsible for better health and longer life?

Although it's hard to be sure, marriage seems to deserve at least part of the credit. Some have argued that self-selection would skew the results if healthy men are more likely to marry than men with health problems. But research shows the reverse is true: unhealthy men actually marry earlier, are less likely to divorce, and are more likely to remarry following divorce or bereavement than healthy men.

Another potential factor is loneliness; is the institution of marriage linked to better health, or is it simply a question of living with another person? Although studies vary, the answer seems to be a little of both. People living with unmarried partners tend to fare better than those living alone, but men living with their wives have the best health of all.

Numerous studies conducted over the past 150 years suggest that marriage is good for health. More recently, scientists have begun to understand why married men enjoy better health than their single, divorced, and widowed peers.

The article then examines some of the data, and concludes:

Explanations

Good marriages promote health and longevity, but stressful and shattered marriages have the opposite effect, especially for men. Why?

The explanations fall into three categories: biological, behavioral, and psychological.

The biological explanations center on stress. Martial conflicts produce elevated levels of stress hormones such as adrenaline, which raise blood pressure. Marital stress also triggers the production of cytokines, small proteins that set the inflammatory cascade in motion. Inflammation is a newly recognized cardiac risk factor, and divorced men have higher levels of inflammatory markers than married men.

The behavioral factors are no less important. Unmarried, divorced, and widowed men don't eat as well as married men. They are less likely to exercise but are more likely to smoke, drink excessively, and engage in other risky behaviors. In contrast, married men are more likely to get regular medical care and to benefit from a higher standard of living. But while senior citizens who live with a spouse get better preventive care than those who live alone, elders who live with an adult child do not get better care.

Loneliness, depression, and social isolation also contribute to the excess mortality associated with bereavement, divorce, or never having married. A Harvard study reported that socially isolated men have an 82% higher risk of dying from heart disease, compared with men who have strong interpersonal relationships. And the New England Research Institute reported that 66% of men rely on their wives for their primary social supports; only 21% rely on other people, and 10% have no such supports. Clearly, subtracting a wife greatly increases a man's risk of isolation.

Perspectives

Many men marry for love, some for money, and others for a variety of personal and family reasons. Until now, at least, few have married for health. Should that change?

Not really. Happily married men might add health to the things they thank their wives for. Unhappily married men should work with their wives to reduce stress and improve their relationship. But instead of marrying for health, unmarried men should try to achieve some of the health benefits they're missing. That means making wise choices about diet, exercise, alcohol, and other health behaviors. It means seeing your doctor even if you don't have a wife to drag you in, and it means seeking ways to reduce stress and build social ties and mutually supportive relationships. None of this will earn a marital deduction on your 1040 form, but it will improve your health.

This supports the view that our society credits modern medicine too much, when in fact social and environmental factors play a bigger role in our health and longevity than medical interventions, even in societies with uniform access to health care.

I'd still like to see experiments to test my conjecture that married, sexually active men display higher levels of DNA repair activity than unmarried men of the same age, especially the men with younger wives, because of sperm competition. The more efficient DNA maintenance, if it exists, could account for some of the observed health advantages of married men.