X-Message-Number: 18264
Date: Mon, 31 Dec 2001 23:06:54 -0500
From: <>
Subject: The Cryonics Biz

Dear Cryonet:


In these discussions of the marketing of cryonics I hope we're not to be caught 
between two hyper-polarized views: one in which packaging is held to be 
everything, and the other in which honesty demands that it be nothing. This is 
the real world, and there are many shades of gray between these extremes.


Our popular cultural image does seem to give us two extreme choices for life: 
one is the Madison Avenue / Warner Brothers approach, which is to give the 
"public" what it expects and wants, and damn the facts.  On the other, we have 
an equally romantic 1950's Holden Caulfield/ Richard Feynman approach, which 
holds that "phoniness" is the worst thing, and The Best People always see right 
through it.  The latter view is backed up, in our minds, by the success of 
science in the 20th century. Nature isn't fooled by bureaucrats, you see. 
Feynman, our hero, said that. The opposite view in science-thinking, as we know,
is held only by the social-constructionist philosophers of science, who are 
Evil. We recognize them as the bad guys in Ayn Rand novels, who don't believe 
that existence exists, and have mushy-sounding names to prove it.

And now, for my own view on the matter.


I believe things are much more complex. The reality is that the world, and 
nature, is a buzzing, blooming confusion, and we all have tiny little brains and
almost no time to make sense of it. Existence may exist, all right, but it's a 
bitch to figure out in real-time. We've monumentally stupid, and we die early. 
So we get along much as the lesser animals do, because when confronted by the 
infinite complexity of nature, we humans are in a fix not that much different 
than other animals are. The way lower animals deal with the world is largely on 
a first-impression basis, with binary division of decisions into "approach" or 
"run," with perhaps "ignore" as the third default when neither basic response 
has been triggered. Closer investigation of "approachable" or edible things is 
done when warranted, but otherwise time is not wasted. Fight is triggered when 
flight doesn't work. And so on.


We humans do it in much the same way. We need broad clues. We pay attention to 
very simple facts.  Down at the base, our nervous systems are constructed on two
poles, one which triggers fight/flight, and the other which triggers feeding 
and f... well, reproductive behavior.  The rest we ignore at first level, 
because we have little choice.  In scuba they say that the ocean contains three 
basic categories of animals: 1) Stuff you can eat, 2) Stuff that can eat YOU, 
and 3) Other. And scuba is a metaphor for life in general.  We swim with sharks 
all the time, of course-- even at the office. 


The result of all this is that we make most judgements at a superficial level, 
based on obvious proxy markers for (what we fondly hope are) deeper realities. 
And this works well enough to be a successful strategy. The pea-hen looks at the
peacock's tail and doesn't do that badly on that criterion alone, because the 
length and color of the tale gives information about health and strength. Humans
do similar things when it comes to looks, dress, and social position. If the 
schmuck can't figure out how to buy a coat that fits, perhaps he can't do other 
stuff, either-so we think.  Such snap judgments can be wrong, but they're not as
bad as random guessing, and they give at least some traction where there is no 
time to do better. So (yes) we judge books by their covers (the colors, the 
jacket blurbs, the typeface). We stereotype other people in many ways (some of 
which a neural network would do also). We see movies on the basis of a single 
bit of buzz. We're not "supposed" to do any!

 of this, according to some philosophies, but a little thought will show that in
 practice, we have no choice. The worst fools are not those who do it (for we 
 all do it), but those who don't think they do it. These are champion 
 rationalizers with whims of iron, and they can be a royal pain.


But what about science, you may ask?  What about this, the most precious 
epistemological tool we own?  Well, science does work to give probabilistic 
information of the future behavior of the world, which is the only workable 
objective definition of the word "knowledge" (the success of engineering is 
otherwise hard to explain). The problem is that science, like the legal system, 
is slow.  The wheels of scientific judgment grind so finely and so glacially 
that individual lives and endeavors are often lost in the works. The history of 
science is littered with notations and footnotes that this or that fact was 
actually discovered or first stated by Dr. X or Y who we've never heard of, but 
who had the bad luck or judgement to publish in some obscure place. Or in 
complicated language which wasn't understood until somebody else independently 
did it better, and allowed a clearer look at the past.


In the real world of science, it turns out, whether or not you're the first to a
discovery can depend on silly things. Like whether or not you develop 
photographic film in contact with dark fluorescent rocks when you shouldn't get 
anything, according to theory. Or whether you happen to do your experiments with
neutrons on an Italian marble table, instead of an ordinary wooden one. Or 
whether you happen to be in the same campus as another scientist who happens to 
have secret X-ray diffraction data from DNA, which you can steal.  All these 
things feel random, and are.  And some things in science which aren't random, 
are instead more akin to advertising. They are words or metaphors that stick, 
like Darwin's word "evolved" or his phrase "natural selection."  Or Gell-Mann's 
quarks.


So which is correct?  Is science the logical and inevitable search for an 
objective truth, which is independent of the foibles of individual scientists?  
Or is it more like the world of fashion or art, where things run on reputation, 
like something by Andy Warhol, and there is almost no objectivity at all?


The answer is, I think, that both views are true, but at different time scales. 
On the short time-scale (weeks or months) science looks very much like fashion 
or art, and social constructionists get their material here. On this scale, your
grant funding may depend on who you know, or how well you write, or what 
metaphor you pick. On the phases of the moon. However, on the very long scale 
(centuries) the individual details and lives cease to matter so much, and it 
becomes clear that science is self-correcting, and that it narrows in on reality
like a homing torpedo. And that if one scientist hadn't had some flash of 
insight, somebody else soon would have. Feynman, for all his griping about cargo
cult science, of course knew the realities of short-term competition of ideas. 
He was a consummate showman in lectures, and he did his last public 
demonstration of the thermal weakness of  space shuttle booster O-rings at a 
public hearing, using simple off-the-shelf hardware-store tools!

.  All of which got his picture in the national press, front page, as he knew it
would. Further, he had been set up to make the "discovery" by a General who 
already knew what the problem likely was, but who also knew that a Nobel 
physicist would be best presenter of  the data to the public.  Showmanship at 
every step.  
 

So how do we use this information personally? The worst difficulty with judging 
science as an objective enterprise comes on the time-scale of years or decades, 
which happens to be the one on which we live our lives (probably not 
coincidentally). On this scale, the human social enterprise of science is a 
mixture of both fashion and objectivity, and sometimes it seems that science 
proceeds only funeral by funeral (as Planck said).  This can be hard to deal 
with, but deal with it we must.


Example. Here on cryonet, we've recently had the suggestion that we should be 
forgetting Vanilla Sky, and seeing instead the movie _A Beautiful Mind_, based 
on the life of mathematician John F. Nash, Jr.  This is fine, but may we see the
hands of anybody who'd ever heard of Nobelist John Nash before this movie? 
Would we be interested without this movie of a documentary of Nash's real life?
Probably not. He doesn't look like the actor who plays him. In real life, his 
wife divorced him when he had had one too many psychotic breaks. Not very 
romantic. And Nash's real life wasn't so neatly illustrated. In the movie, our 
noses are rubbed in an example of win-win game theory involving a sweltering 
summer classroom with construction noise that prevents opening of the windows. 
(How do you get both silence and breeze? Answer: Throw a beautiful girl at the 
construction crew so they stop what they're doing).  Later we get the same 
message illustrated with the problem of picking up women!

 in a bar. Sexual dynamics gets our attention-aha, we understand this!  Had it 
 been presented in the movie as the dry math which it actually came packaged in 
 historically, even Russell Crowe couldn't have saved it.  That's all 
 showmanship. 


In the real world, it was much the same way. Lacking pretty girls for visual 
aids, nobody understood the theory in time to give Nash a Fields medal before he
went psychotic, and latter (when economists had prettied the idea up with lots 
of real-world examples) nobody dared. The truest part of the movie was the scene
in which the Nobel committee scopes out Nash to see if he's a madman still, or 
is fit to have on the stage to give the Nobel Prize to.  Concern for 
presentation is the key again. Nash, however, had gotten better.  So he got the 
prize. But if he hadn't been presentable, he would not have.  Without Nash's 
Nobel, there would have been no recent biography, and with no biography, no 
movie. And with no movie, most of us reading this would not know of Nash or his 
theories at all.  See how it works?


Finally (hope you're still with me) we come to cryonics. Cryonics is a powerful 
idea-- quite as powerful as any of Nash's-- but its time has not quite come. It 
is known broadly now as science fiction, like Star Trek's warp drive, but that 
is all. Eventually it will rock our society to the core, as a lot of people 
begin to realize that they've been taking the most precious things on this 
planet (human brains) and burying them like old garbage, when they could have 
been saved. Wups.  But the technology to make people understand that at a gut 
level, has not yet arrived.


Meanwhile, how long will it take?  In part, I propose that that's a matter of 
presentation.  Cryonics seems destined eventually be as much a part of our 
culture as any piece of modern medicine, but whether that happens in 20 years or
50 years is probably largely a matter of salesmanship.  That may not be fair, 
but that's the way it is. Do you want to see it happen in your life-times?  Then
you'd better start worrying about how it's sold.  The 1950's are over. No 
longer can you get away with just good service, quality, white shirts and dark 
ties, like IBM once did. In 1981 IBM started selling Personal Computers using 
Charlie Chaplin, remember?  Packaged with MS-DOS by Microsoft, because a year 
before, Bill Gates gave them a flashy show, which covered-up the fact that he 
had no operating system at the time, and had no idea how he was going to get 
one. But he did have a tie, because he'd bought one on the way from the airport.
And the end of that story is that he sold them someth!

ing he didn't have at the time, but was confident he could get. And did. And is 
in consequence now the richest man in the country, and gets to have a major say 
in the future. That's how it's done these days.  If you don't do it, somebody 
else will, and they'll eat your lunch.


And how do you do that with cryonics? Well, I can't tell you, of course. If I 
knew how to sell cryonics, I would have done it by now. But I do think we can 
see some clues in the movies. People apparently don't expect to see Timeship 
type pyramids. They do like the cryogen vapor and the capsules (windowed or 
not), and they expect a cryonics corporation to have a physical presence (and 
security presence) at least as imposing as that of a modern biotech or 
pharmaceutical development firm.  And we know that people do like to see a bit 
of Las Vegas/ Disneyland in everything public (as we see in our downtown cities,
which are all rapidly being Disney-fied.)  These are clues.


Timeship or no Timeship, I suggest only that we spend time finding out what 
people expect to see in a cryonics organization, and (so far as money permits) 
give people something of what they expect to see. Art imitates life (as we saw 
in this last movie), but life must imitate art also, to some extent. It's not 
enough to give people paperwork and scientific explanations. Let us have a focus
group or two, and see what else they are looking for. At minimum, we need 
attractive metaphors; even science cannot escape them.  "Knowledge must be 
adorned," says Lord Acton. "It must have luster as well as weight, lest it be 
mistaken for lead instead of gold." A nice self-illustrative statement. Listen 
up.

Steve Harris

And BTW, Happy New Year.  May 2002 C.E. suck less than 2001 did.

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