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. Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=15751