X-Message-Number: 15751
From: "Jeff Grimes" <>
Subject: past deeds
Date: Mon, 26 Feb 2001 17:46:53 +0000

Dan challenged me on my statement that what you've done in 
the past doesn't exempt you from criticism about what you 
do in the present. This is actually a very interesting 
point (to me anyway). 

In the long view, I agree if we look at someone's entire 
career, the imperfect parts can be overwhelmed by great 
achievements.

On the other hand in science I think if someone makes a 
statement, others should feel they can challenge it 
factually, no matter who the person is. In other words, 
truth is more important than past reputation.

> Professor Ettinger (and David Pascal and others in the CI effort).  The
> ostensibly inexcusable behavior in question is (i believe) excessive
> PR, which includes statements overly critical of another cryonics
> provider.  The offending statements are that there is no direct
> evidence that their current treatment actually vitrifies. 

That's not quite right. First, someone else already pointed 
out that Mr. Ettinger is not a Professor. Second, overly 
critical statements would not bother me so much if they 
were based on actual evidence. My problem was that I saw a 
campaign to discredit other organizations, by a process of 
creating doubts, which was quite convincing at first, but 
the more I followed this, the more I became convinced that 
the primary source in the campaign, Robert Ettinger, hadn't 
bothered to check the facts. He circulated his statements 
for many weeks before finally someone at Alcor said, no, 
that's not right at all. This suggested to me that Mr. 
Ettinger could have discovered this himself, if he had been 
really interested.

Regardless of Mr. Ettinger's past achievements, this just 
does not seem ethical to me, and since cryonics seems such 
a doubtful proposition to start with, ethics are rather 
important.

> But i do think that with him, and with me, and with other billions of
> people, there are unknown, non-rational processes at work which
> interfere with the effort of figuring out the best thing to do.

This is very true, fair enough, I get the point, and thanks 
for making it so reasonably and persuasively.

Jeff Grimes.

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