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)
		

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