A speculation on Near and Far Modes

"Why not buy cryonics for others?"

I think cryonics advocates should consider this, not as a rhetorical question about society, but as a strategy for themselves.

Consider the history of vaccination. Like cryonics (for the moment I assume that cryonics works, though I personally am not sure about that) vaccination was a new technology that helped people live longer but met with popular resistance. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, after almost dying from smallpox, had her son inoculated in the Turkish method and wrote many letters to her friends in England, promoting and explaining the practice, and had many of her relatives inoculated. That's the stage cryonics is in today. A few individuals -- generally open to the idea because they're particularly well-educated and often because they've been touched by tragedy -- try to promote the practice by getting it done to themselves and perhaps also to relatives.

After Edward Jenner developed the smallpox vaccine, though, the landscape changed. He got grants from Parliament to continue his work, and founded a charitable organization -- the Jennerian Institution -- to promote vaccination. In other words, he made it a public health issue. Vaccination was no longer something that a rich, eccentric lady might buy for herself, but something respected scientists under the auspices of the government would offer to all. I think that making vaccination charitable made it respectable.

It is hard to appeal to someone's idealism by asking him to buy himself a useful item. Cryonics, as yet, is solitary and individual, not communal and charitable. A few people, like Mary Montagu, for some reason really do want this life-extending procedure for themselves and their relatives. But if they ever want it to catch on more broadly, they should set up their institutions so that they're mostly giving it away rather than consuming it. The public will sympathize better with someone trying to save lives than with someone trying to save her own life.

"Near mode people" vs "far mode people" sounds just like packers vs mappers, sons of Hermes vs Apollo's children, or any number of other distinctions that people invent to feel better about themselves.

Cryonics isn't a canary in the coal mine anymore than feminism or abolitionism were. All "far-mode" movements have a hard time gaining acceptance. So I don't think you've made a strong case that intelligentsia's ability to convince the masses is fading, but I'd be glad if it were true, because I live in Russia.

I worry that this kind of analysis tends to overestimate how many things have explanations in general human psychology. The main explanation for cryonics being unpopular could just be that it's associated with ideas, people, and cultural groups that for contingent historical reasons happen to be unhip. That's certainly the impression I get when I read stuff like this.

I'd love to see your thoughts.

First, your conclusion sounds very off-base. You are not only saying that society at large is failing to evaluate cryonics rationally, you are saying that this is a symptom of an incipient civilization-ending comprehensive failure of rationality, brought on by processes endogenous to cultural and institutional development.

I think we would agree that certain foreseeable future technologies are a civilization-ending threat in themselves. So what am I to make of your idea that on top of this, we are also facing, a la Spengler or Toynbee, doom from within? It could be an excessive gloomy supposition by someone depressed at society's failure to deal with the imminent concrete existential risks. It was always going to be difficult to deal with those technologies, on account of their complexity and historical novelty. There is no particular need to postulate unusual systemic blockages to rational innovation that are peculiar to the present.

Do you see what I'm saying? You're embracing an unnecessarily pessimistic perspective on the world's rationality - namely, that it's in a radically downward cycle, destroying itself, losing its "ability to respond coherently to threats" - and I think this is motivated largely by your own status as a mostly ignored advocate of certain innovative concepts. It's a little like people who think the world is ending because they personally are dying. Huge innovations never happen easily and there is no need to posit that today's big innovations are struggling because they're in a milieu of civilizational decline. There surely are phenomena specific to the present which are degrading collective rationality, but I don't believe that's one of them.

I also have some problems with this whole near-mode, far-mode theory (it's called "construal level theory", if anyone wants to look it up). It seems like it's partly a theoretical construct (a grouping of disparate tendencies under a single name), rather than a completely objective psychological reality.

Speaking of rationality litmus tests, how about choosing your baby's sex? It's ridiculous that most people act as if the expected utilities of the two sexes are close enough together that the inconvenience of screening makes it worth leaving the decision to chance.

A lot of these near mode/far mode claims would make me feel much better if they resulted in concrete, testable claims. If your hypothesis about why cryonics is not popular is correct, what predictions would you make that would be different from other a world where other proposed hypotheses are correct? (The general apparent lack of precise predictions from the near-far mode has been bugging me for a while so this isn't a problem unique to you)

Some people get stuck in a child-like behavioral pattern, probably due to a mix of neurological bugs which prevent near-mode from gelling (aspergers and schizotype)

The remark about Aspergers and schizotypal personalities seems implausible given that there's a fair bit of evidence that autism and schizophrenia are opposite ends of the same spectrum. See for example this paper in PNAS. If this notion of near mode/far mode has any validity, then this sort of claim is much more plausible for autism than for schizotypal disorders.

Math/analytic reasoning is near mode; far mode is more creative/analogy. Nevertheless, there may be some people who get more in the habit of applying analytic reasoning about typically far topics, and this tendency may depend on the type or level of "indoctrination", which might well change with time. Still, "may be" is pretty weak evidence.

Is it true that the correlation between social skill and IQ tops off at about 120? If so, this theory explains why most elites are about that smart and no smarter, despite what should be the obvious benefits in achieving that status that e.g. being able to develop new technology to found a company would bring.

On OB you mentioned you think cognitive reflection is largely inherited; how closely does high cognitive reflection correspond to being mostly in far mode?

Cryonics is a canary in the coal mine. At a certain stage of collapse, there has to be some idea that is transparently correct when one uses valid reasoning to analyze it but which is roundly rejected by everyone with near mode and is only accessible to people in extreme far mode.

Haven't there always been such transparently correct ideas that were widely derided?

I lack sufficient historical knowledge to be sure. Maybe someone can help me out. Was there ever a civilization that listened to reason over near-mode intuition? Maybe 18th and 19th century Britain listening to its engineers and scientists? But then we ignored the gifts they bestowed upon us in the two utterly key cases: Darwin and Babbage were ignored, and we failed to capitalize on either the computer or evolution; Silicon Valley is in California, and Craig Venter is in San Diego.

Maybe the founding of America is the example you were thinking of?

As usual, I'm not sure that an intellectual schema has covered all the possibilities.

My first thought was that you're leaving out the effects of home schooling, which is itself a side effect of liberalism as you define it. [1] Home schooling should mean that indoctrination isn't fully universal, so there will still be far mode thinkers.

Also, you're an interesting example of using far mode thinking to acquire near mode skills-- I don't know if you or anyone can make that a more common choice, but it's a conceivable path.

[1] I was shocked to find strong opposition to home schooling on the left, but maybe every movement has an illiberal side, no matter what it says on the label.

Some people get stuck in a child-like behavioral pattern, probably due to a mix of neurological bugs which prevent near-mode from gelling (aspergers and schizotype) and internalization of explicit (far mode) rules condemning near-mode (obsessive compulsive personality disorder).

I'm interested in your thoughts on the Schizotypal personality 'bug' and how you consider it related to near mode. The phenomenon you mention appears accurate as far as my intuitive understanding goes and yet there relationship isn't as obvious as it is with Asperger's. I have got the impression from your past discussions on interpersonal relations that your insights on related areas(including 'near mode') are worth paying particular attention to.

This is a fascinating and worthy subject; there are some links in your reasoning that I would like a more rigorous explanation of.

jump over low memetic fitness regions of the memetic fitness landscape and discover higher fitness technologies on the other side rather than leveling off at the 'golden age' level of Minoan Crete [or] the Abbasid and other advanced Caliphates

So, two questions here:

• What does it mean to 'level off' at a golden age rather than leap over a valley? I feel like there must be more than two dimensions here, and I'm having trouble visualizing your mixed metaphor.

• What are the relevant feature(s) that Minoan Crete holds in common with the Abbasid Caliphate? Do these two cultures really belong to a discrete area of culture-space? Why?

as civilizations reach a higher level of development, more effort is available for indoctrination

Sorry, what? Who is indoctrinating whom? With which resources? Why do we think these resources are disproportionately available in more-developed civilizations? Which avenues of development promote this kind of indoctrination? Might other avenues of development counteract the indoctrination? Do we have any reason to expect those other avenues to develop more slowly or less effectively?

Ultimately, the civilization systematically destroys the ability of its unreasonable men to compete for the slots in the society where rationality is required

Systematically? Really? Are there people affirmatively trying to wreak this sort of destruction, or does civilization just naturally destroy the political competitiveness of unreasonable people at such a uniform, high level as to have systematic effect?

Also, which slots in society require disproportionate amounts of rationality? Obviously, some jobs are more important than others, and some jobs carry so little autonomy that rationality is difficult to exploit, but wouldn't rationality be more or less equally useful as a fraction of the usefulness of the job in, e.g., real estate sales, a pediatrician's office, the US Senate, a police captain's desk, and the purchasing division of a global hotel chain?