X-Message-Number: 2903 From: (Thomas Donaldson) Subject: CRYONICS: Re: Cracking Date: Sun, 17 Jul 1994 13:29:51 -0700 (PDT) Hi yet once more! After reading Mike's comments about how cryonics reports should be written up in detail, I will have to say that I agree totally with them. If I had been the one to put this mailing up on the Net, perhaps I would have sent it to Bob Ettinger first ... but that is a matter of ettiquete rather than truth, and I would far rather have truth than ettiquete. And I will add that no one here is being dishonest or fraudulent in any way: it is simply that any kind of research requires discipline, and writing it up and documenting it is an essential part of that discipline. Others, who may have little experience with research, or for whom that experience happened many years ago, can easily forget that need for discipline. I have not yet been fortunate enough to become involved in cryonics research directly, but I have been involved in writing up reports of the research of others. Quite recently I put together many reports I had written years ago on anti-aging drugs, added reports for other drugs discovered since, and put them all together into a book. And along the way I could not help but notice all the OTHER reports of OTHER drugs what were "supposed to work": on the basis of the testimony of 5 people who took them, or on the belief of the person who wrote them up that they would work. That's NOT SCIENCE. And if the result is one you feel deeply about, yearn to be true, that's exactly the time to apply the discipline of writing everything up in detail. And I have definitely had a good deal of experience with mathematical research. The same discipline is needed, not that there are any experiments, but it's very very easy to THINK you have a proof of something --- until when you examine it closely in trying to write it up, you discover a LARGE GAP in your reasoning: an assumption, which you discover to be wrong, that proving X or Y will be so trivial you need not waste time thinking about it. Just because we are human beings, it's very easy to unwittingly delude ourselvesinto believing that something is true, especially when we want it to be true. And this discipline of writing it all up in detail is one way we can try to rise above this human failing and find out what we know objectively. So yes, Mike speaks well and deserves close attention in his message. Thomas Donaldson (incidentally, PhD math) Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=2903