X-Message-Number: 26486 From: Tim Freeman <> Date: Sun, 3 Jul 2005 07:03:31 -0700 Subject: More important battle; crowd-following equilibrium (was Re: [CN] reply) References: <> From: <> X-Ref: Message #26469 >As long as the problem and conclusion my argument identifies >continues to exist, millions or billions of people are losing their >chance to avoid death. Agreed so far. Lots of people are going to certain death who don't have to. Failure to do cryonics isn't the only issue of this type, by the way; lots of people consume junk food, lots of people consume cigarettes, lots of people don't exercise, etc. These simpler tangible things have less extreme consequences than cryonics, but they're easier to understand and they have real scientific evidence behind them. Because of the increased chances of success, the net benefit trying to get the remaining smokers to quit (for example) might be greater than the net benefit of trying to get the remaining people attached to inessential cryonics-preventing aspects of religion-as-commonly-practiced to let go of it. The previous paragraph might be construed as a suggestion that you undertake one of those other projects instead, such as getting the smokers to quit. There are some problems with that. First, it's not for me to tell you what kind of charity to do. Second, I'm not doing any of the above, so my behavior shows that I don't find the other projects worthwhile either. I'll say why in a moment. >There is no more important battle for mankind. I don't make decisions for mankind; the relevant question is whether there's a more important battle for me, right now. Doing what I can to try to keep myself alive is (in my opinion) more important than trying to change the outcome for the crowd, mostly because I'm much more likely to control my own actions than I am to successfully influence a crowd. (I might feel different if I've maxed-out my contributions to my own longevity, but I'm quite far from that.) Trying to persuade large groups of people to think for themselves (as opposed to imitating someone else) is much like trying to corner the world oil market. Free markets have an equilibrium, and they're bigger than you, so straightforward attempts to manipulate them usually backfire. The same is true for crowd-following behavior. There is an equilibrium between imitating others and thinking for oneself because the relative merit of independent thought vs. imitation depends on the set of people available to imitate. Let's look at the pros and cons of the alternatives: Thinking for yourself has one main advantage: you might do the right thing when the crowd has made a collective mistake. Hopefully willingness to do cryonics is an example of this advantage. Disadvantages of thinking for yourself include: 1. The effort required. 2. The social consequences when the crowd notices that you aren't part of the group. (Hansen's "Are Beliefs Like Clothes" essay at http://hanson.gmu.edu/belieflikeclothes.html is relevant here.) 3. Implementations of new ideas tend to be buggy, so there can be bad personal consequences from doing something new even if on the whole it's a good idea. Some people don't think for themselves and imitate someone else. This strategy avoids all the costs of independent thought, but it increases the risk of following someone to some dysfunctional destination. This risk can be controlled by trying to choose a leader who seems to be succeeding, or by choosing a leader who was chosen by someone else who might have made the decision more carefully than you. If everyone else is an independent thinker, it makes sense for me to watch several of them, sit back and let them suffer from debugging their new ideas, and imitate them when they seem to be stably suceeding. If everyone else is a follower, then the group will wander off in some random probably-bad direction, so it makes sense for me to be an independent thinker so I don't suffer their fate. The equilibrium is therefore somewhere in the middle; from experience it's pretty clear that in the equilibrium state, most people will be followers. Thus you can't change the equilibrium number of independent thinkers by exhorting individuals to think independently. In the argument above I spoke as though each individual is either an independent thinker or a follower. Actually, the choice is made per behavior, not per individual. I'm a follower in most things: I'm typing on a keyboard that is identical to what's owned by hundreds of other people, I eat food made from ingredients identical to what's available to millions of other people, I don't independently reproduce any results from physics experiments, and so forth. I have enough energy to attempt independent thought on very few aspects of my life. If this model is valid, then it's clear how to effectively recruit people to cryonics. Recruiting the independent thinkers requires a reasoned argument and technically competent cryonics organizations. Recruiting the followers requires us to be obviously successful in our everyday lives and to have stable social groups where enough of the people in the group are interested in cryonics. The crowd-followers in the minority will then feel compelled to adopt cryonics. Then we bring in a few more non-cryonicist followers and repeat. This has worked in my personal life. Note that this model provides a small role for independent thinkers who specialize in cynically exploiting the followers. I'll call these people con-men. If there are too few con-men, the followers will be highly trusting so I can make a good living by being a con-man. If there are too many con-men, the followers will have been exploited or will know people who have been exploited, so they will think for themselves more and it won't be productive for me to be a con-man. Thus there is an equilbrium number of con-men and it's hopeless to change their overall number by directly confronting individual con-men. The con-men sometimes react to their obvious incentive to prevent theft of sheep from their herd. Keith Henson's experience supports this. If this model is valid, what has to happen to get anywhere by suing a religion? You need a judge and a jury who are independent thinkers (which isn't their job). If you win the first round, you need a legislature that doesn't immediately revise the law to make you lose, so you need a legislature composed mostly of independent thinkers (which isn't their job). (This is ignoring Pizer's claim that his goal is PR rather than victory. I think he needs a chance of winning to get much PR, so I don't think that's a useful distinction.) -- Tim Freeman http://www.fungible.com Programmer/consultant in the Sunnyvale, CA area. Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=26486