That Magical Click

My best guess is that clickiness has something to do with failure to compartmentalize - missing, or failing to use, the mental gear that lets human beings believe two contradictory things at the same time. Clicky people would tend to be people who take all of their beliefs at face value.

One of the things that I've noticed about this is that most people do not expect to understand things. For most people, the universe is a mysterious place filled with random events beyond their ability to comprehend or control. Think "guessing the teacher's password", but not just in school or knowledge, but about everything.

Such people have no problem with the idea of magic, because everything is magic to them, even science.

An anecdote: once, when I still worked as software developer/department manager in a corporation, my boss was congratulating me on a million dollar project (revenue, not cost) that my team had just turned in precisely on time with no crises.

Well, not congratulating me, exactly. He was saying, "wow, that turned out really well", and I felt oddly uncomfortable. After getting off the phone, I realized a day or so later that he was talking about it like it was luck, like, "wow, what nice weather we had."

So I called him back and had a little chat about it. The idea that the project had succeeded because I designed it that way had not occurred to him, and the idea that I had done it by the way I negotiated the requirements in the first place -- as opposed to heroic efforts during the project -- was quite an eye opener for him.

Fortunately, he (and his boss) were "clicky" enough in other areas (i.e., they didn't believe computers were magic, for example) that I was able to make the math of what I was doing click for them at that "teachable moment".

Unfortunately, most people, in most areas of their lives treat everything as magic. They're not used to being able to understand or control anything but the simplest of things, so it doesn't occur to them to even try. Instead, they just go along with whatever everybody else is thinking or doing.

For such (most) people, reality is social, rather than something you understand/ control.

(Side note: I find myself often trying to find a way to express grasp/control as a pair, because really the two are the same. If you really grasp something, you should be able to control it, at least in principle.)

Once upon a time, I had a job where most of what I did involved signing up people for cryonics. I'm guessing that few other people on this site can say they've ever made a salary off that (unless you're reading this, Derek), and so I can speak with some small authority. Over those four excruciating years at Alcor, I spent hundreds of hours discussing the subject with hundreds of people.

Obviously I never came up with a definitive answer as to why some people get it and most don't. But I developed a working map of the conceptual space. Rather than a single "click," I found that there were a series of memetic filters.

The first and largest by far tended to be religious, which is to say, afterlife mythology. If you thought you were going to Heaven, Kolob, another plane of existence, or another body, you wouldn't bother investing the money or emotional effort in cryonics.

Only then came the intellectual barriers, but the boundary could be extremely vague. I think that the vast majority of people didnt have any trouble grasping the basic scientific arguments for cryonics; the actual logic filter always seemed relatively thin to me. Instead, people used their intellect to rationalize against cryonics, either motivated by existing beliefs (from one end) or by resulting anxieties (from the other).

Anxieties relating to cryonics tended to revolve around social situation and/or death. Some people identified so deeply with their current social situation, the idea of losing that situation (family, friends, standing, culture, etc.) was unthinkable. Others were afflicted by a sort of hypothetical survivor guilt; why did they deserve to live, when so many of their loved ones had died? Perhaps the majority were simply repulsed by any thought of death itself; most of them spent their lives trying not to think about the fact that we would die, and found it extremely depressing or disorienting when forced to confront that fact.

I don't think I could categorize the stages of approach to cryonics quite as neatly (and questionably) as the Kubler-Ross stages of dying. Clearly there was nothing inevitable about coming to accept cryonics, and approximately 90-95% of everyone I met never made it past the first filter. Even when people passed all of the memetic filters I've mentioned, they still had a tendency to become mired at the beginning or middle of their cryonics arrangements, floating in some sort of metastable emotional fog (starting cryonics arrangements felt like retreating from death, proceeding with them felt like approaching it).

Oh well, I haven't thought about this subject much since 1999. This is just my off-the-cuff memory of how I used to make a living.

Is that really just it? Is there no special sanity to add, but only ordinary madness to take away?

I think this is the primary factor. I've got a pretty amusing story about this.

Last week I met a relatively distant relative, a 15 year old guy who's in a sports oriented high school. He plays football, has not much scientific, literary or intellectual background, and is quite average and normal in most conceivable ways. Some TV program on Discovery was about "robots", and in a shortly unfolding 15 minute spontaneous conversation I've managed to explain him the core problems of FAI, without him getting stuck at any points of my arguments. I'm fairly sure that he had no previous knowledge about the subject.

First I made a remark in connection to the TV program's poetic question about what if robots will be able to get most human work done; I said that if robots get the low wage jobs, humans would eventually get paid more on average, and the problem is only there when robots can do everything humans can and somehow end up actually doing all those things.

Then he asked if I think they'll get that smart, and I answered that it's quite possible in this century. I explained recursive self-improvement in two sentences, to illustrate the reasons why they could potentially get very, very smart in a small amount of time. I talked about the technology that would probably allow AIs to act upon the world with great efficiency and power. Next, he said something like "that's good, wouldn't AI's would be a big help, like, they will invent new medicine?" At this point I was pretty amused. I assured him that AIs indeed have great potentials. I talked then very shortly about most basic AI topics, providing the usual illustrations like Hollywood AIs, smiley-tiled solar systems and foolish programmers overlooking the complexity of value. I delineated CEV in a simplified "redux" manner, focusing on the idea that we should optimally just extract all relevant information from human brains by scanning them, to make sure nothing we care about is left out. "That should be a huge technical problem, to scan that much brains", he said.

And now:

"But if the AI gets so potent, would not it be a problem anyway, even if it's perfectly friendly, that it can do everything much better than humans, and we'll get bored?"

"Hahh, not at all. If you think that getting all bored and unneeded is bad, then it is a real preference inside your head. It'll be taken into account by the AI, and it will make sure it'll not pamper you excessively."

"Ah, that sounds pretty reasonable".

Now, all of this happened in the course of roughly 15 minutes. No absurdity heuristic, no getting lost, no objections; he just took everything I said at face value, assuming that I'm more knowledgeable on these matters, and I was in general convinced that nothing I explained was particularly hard to grasp. He asked relevant questions and was very interested in what I said.

Some thoughts why this was possible:

• The guy belongs to a certain social strata in Hungary, namely to those who newly entered the middle class by free entrepreneurship that became a possibility after the country switched to capitalism. At first, the socialist regime repressed religion and just about every human rights, then eased up, softened, and became what's known as the "happiest barrack". People became unconcerned with politics (which they could not influence) and religion (which was though of as a highly personal matter that should not be taken to public), they just focused on their own wealth and well-being. I'm convinced that the parents of the guy care zero about any religion, the absence of religion, doctrine, ideology or whatever. They just work to make a living and don't think about lofty matters, leaving their son ideologically perfectly intact. Just like my own parents.

• Actually, AI is not intrinsically abstract or hard to digest; my interlocutor knew what an AI is, even if from movies, and probably watched just enough Discovery to have a sketchy picture about future technologies. The mind design space argument is not that hard (he had known about evolution because it's taught in school. He immediately agreed that AIs can be much smarter than humans because if we wait a million years, maybe humans can also become much smarter, so it's technically possible), and the smiley-tiled solar system is an entertaining and effective explanation about morality. I think that Eliezer has put extreme amounts of effort to maximize the chance that his AI ideas will get transmitted even to people who are primed or biased against AI or at risk of motivated skepticism. So far, I've had great success using his parables, analogues and ways of explanation.

• My perceived status as an "intellectual" made him accept my explanations at face value. He's a football player in a smallish countryside city and I'm a serious college student in the capital city (it's good he doesn't know how lousy a student I am). Still, I do not think this was a significant factor. He probably does not talk about AI among football players, but being a male he has some basic interests in futuristic or gadgety subjects.

In the end, it probably all comes down to lacking some specific ways of craziness. Cryonics seemed normal on that convention Eliezer attended, and I'm sure every idea that is epistemically and morally correct can in principle be a so-called normal thing. Besides this guy, I've even had full success lecturing a 17 year old metal drummer on AI and SIAI - and he was situated socioeconomically very similarly to the first guy, and neither he had any previous knowledge.

There's this magical click that some people get and some people don't, and I don't understand what's in the click. There's the consequentialist/utilitarian click, and the intelligence explosion click, and the life-is-good/death-is-bad click, and the cryonics click.

I think it's a mistake to put all the opinions you agree with in a special category. Why do some people come quickly to beliefs you agree with? There is no reason, except that sometimes people come quickly to beliefs, and some beliefs happen to match yours.

People who share one belief with you are more likely to share others, so you're anecdotally finding people who agree with you about non-cryonics things at a cryonics conference. Young people might be more likely to change their mind quickly because they're more likely to hear something for the first time.

Thank you for writing this post. It's one of the topics that has kept me from participating in the discussion here - I click on things very often, as a trained and sustained act of rationality, and often find it difficult to verbalize why I feel I am right and others wrong. But when I feel that I have clicked, then I have very high confidence in my rightness, as determined by observation and many years of evidence that my clicks are, indeed, right.

I use the phrase, "My subconscious is way smarter than I am," to describe this event. My best guess is that my subconscious has built-in pathways to notice logical flaws, lack of evidence, and has already chewed through problems over many years of thought ("creating a path"?), and I have trained myself to follow these "feelings" and form them into conscious words/thoughts/actions. It seems to be related to memory and number of facts in some ways, as the more reading I have done on a topic, the better I'm able to click on related topics. I do not use the word "feeling" lightly - it really does feel like something, and it gives me a sort of built-in filter.

I click on people (small movements, small statements leading to huge understanding gains, to the point where I can literally say what they're thinking from the slightest gesture), I click on tests (memorization), I click on big topics (X-risks, shut-up-and-multiply), philosophy, etc. Quantum mechanics, I have failed to click anything, and have been avoiding.

What I've found is that my click decisions, when thought is applied, have dozens of reasons behind them, all unrealized at the time I was able to make the decision. Writing them all out afterward makes for an incredibly powerful argument in favor of my decision, and oftentimes shows that I really did weigh all the positives and negatives, just not in a rigorous 'proof'. Like not showing your work on a math problem, but still being able to look at the numbers and know the result.

One of the things I had to eliminate for my clickiness to become truly powerful was the desire to hold onto current beliefs. Openness to change is essential to letting the click take over your thoughts and lead you in a new direction. People get frustrated when arguing with me on occasion, as I will be a strong proponent of a specific position, then they present to me a single fact that demolishes it, and I will immediately begin arguing a new position using that fact as support. They typically laugh and shake their head, as if I had never supported my previous position and am now just arguing for argument's sake, when in reality, I clicked on the new fact and realized the implications, adjusting my beliefs accordingly, all in an instant.

Another thing which I've noticed I do which helps greatly with click thinking is absorb a huge amount of information on a specific topic. When I need to make an important decision, I get books from the library, I hit up google and click links out to 25+ pages of results, I check for authoritative forums and lurk there, reading, learning, rarely asking questions but picking up as much as I can none-the-less. I did this for WoW, for audio tech, for financial investment, for Singularity and rationality topics... and after I've spent a few months at integrating myself with that information center, I'm able to click like crazy on all the important things. Some topics, once I've clicked, I drop it and move on, but others I continue to practice and read, like first order philosophy. Thought experiments (roleplaying, etc.) tend to help if the topic is complex enough. I play a character in my head, or in a game, for a month or so, then when I need to ask a really important question about the topic the character was designed around, I just click to the answer without consciously thinking, because I just know. For clicking on people, this involves observation and spending time around that person, and asking lots of questions about what they're thinking (I've gotten very good at asking without seeming annoying).

In addition to being open to change and gorging on data, I've found it very important to trust yourself. And by this I don't mean, 'trust that you're making the right decision', but as an almost 'trust that other person who used your name at the time but who you don't even remember or think like any more'. In a sense, trust Rain-2007, even though I am now Rain-2010. I realize this will be counter to Eliezer's standard, "Do not listen to Eliezer-2001 - he was wrong," but that's not how I mean it. Instead, I'm saying that, at the point of information-glut and focus on a topic, I'm far more clickable than at some distant point in the future. I should trust that decision unless I'm willing to go through the same process of gather, read, learn, focus, and decide anew. That past click will be more right than any decision I make removed from that focus. It also means that you should trust your "instincts" - heresy, I know, considering the inherent biases, but a click really does "feel" different from a template-bias response.

One other thing I do, but which I'm not sure contributes to clickability, is avoid deep jargon or too-specific thinking. The click seems related to generalized thought processes rather than specific verbiage. So, for example, rather than reading and learning what Kolomogorov complexity is (probably spelled wrong - as I said, I'm avoiding this stuff), I'd rather do a roleplaying exercise where my character exists at various technology levels, and generalize the universe around them. This step may seem at odds with the information-glut step, but I combine the two - when reading, every link I check often has only one or two sentences, maybe a paragraph or a whole page, that I actually "use" as in try to retain. The rest of it, I consider useless/worthless, and discard as best I can.

Which reminds me, I also ignore / forget information in order to more carefully focus on what I'm thinking about in the present (this is part of why I have to trust my past self so much). I try not to overload myself with knowledge or memories that don't help me make decisions now or in the anticipated future. Some people find this frustrating, as I don't remember I pushed them down the stairs when I was 10, but that thing in my childhood was so different from me that I found no point in remembering much of it.

I think the click is a result of years of gathering information and thinking on (potentially general) topics, the ability to rapidly change, the ability to recognize how it feels to click, and to place the trust in that feeling that it deserves. It seems to be a trained skill, starting with (prerequisite of?) a good memory.

The one thing I'm getting out of writing this post is that the 'click' you describe is, in my opinion, not simple or a single effect, but rather a complex interaction of events, abilities, and predispositions. It may not be reproducible or trainable.

Sorry this post is late. Another part of the information-gathering strategy is to let conversations resolve themselves (wait a few days after a post) and read it all at once so points and counterpoints are all neatly together at the same time.

I had a funny click with my girlfriend earlier this evening. I suggested that she should sign up for cryonics at some point soon, and I was surprised that she was against the idea. In response to her objections, I explained it was vitrification and not freezing, etc. etc. but she wasn't giving me any rational answers, until she said that she really wanted to see the future, but she also wanted to watch the future unfold.

She thought by cryonics that I meant right now, Futurama style. After a much needed clarification she immediately agreed that cryonics was a good idea.

Mmm... I am a click-hunter. I keep pestering a topic and returning over and over until I feel it click. I can understand something well enough to start accurately predicting results but still refuse to be satisfied until I feel it click. Once it clicks I move on.

You and I may be describing different types of clicks, however. Here is a short list of things I have observed about the clicks in my life.

• The minor step from not having a subject click and having a subject click is enormous. It is the single greatest leap in knowledge I will likely experience in a subject matter. I may learn more in one click than with a whole semester of absorbing knowledge from a book.

• Clicks don't translate well. It is hard to describe the actual path up to and through a click.

• What causes a subject to click for me will not cause it to click for another. Clicks seem to be very personal experiences, which is probably why it is so hard to translate.

• Clicks tend to be most noticeable with large amounts of critical study. I assume that day-in-day-out clicks are not terribly noticeable but I suspect that they exist. A simple example I can think of is suddenly discovering a quicker route through town.

• Clicks do not require large amounts of critical study, however, as I have had clicks drop on me from nowhere with all of the answers to a particular problem laying around in plain sight.

• Once a click happens, the extra perspective appears obviously true. Clicks are often accompanied with phrases like, "Oh!" or "Why didn't I see this before?!"

• Even for complicated subjects, it takes trivial amounts of conversation to learn if the subject has clicked in another person. Once you "get it," other people who get it know you got it.

• Some people are much better at producing clicks in others.

• Some people have no idea what a click is and have never felt one. Some of these people are very smart, but I seem to notice that they have a weakness for abstract thought or are more likely to be satisfied with stopping once they have accurate predictors. Perhaps learning why the model ended up being that particular model is extraneous and not needed to predict and so is an unwanted extra step.

• Mind-dumping helps things click. I find that if I just blah on a page, start over and blah again, and repeat the process a click will probably happen at some point in the cycle.

• There are topics that have not clicked for me yet but I suspect they would if I kept pushing them.

• Perspectives from other people help clicks happen. Listening to someone else struggle to understand the concept helps clicks happen.

I propose the term "clack" to denote the opposite of "click" -- that is, resisting an obviously correct conclusion.

Interesting. Eliezer took some X years to recognize that even "normal looking" persons can be quick on the uptake? ;)

My best guess is that clickiness has something to do with failure to compartmentalize - missing, or failing to use, the mental gear that lets human beings believe two contradictory things at the same time. Clicky people would tend to be people who take all of their beliefs at face value.

I guess it has a bit deeper explanation than that. I think clickiness happens if two people managed to build very similar mental models and they are ready to manipulate and modify models incrementally. Once the models are roughly in sync, it takes very little time to communicate and just slight hints can create the right change in the conversation partner's model, if he is ready to update.

I think a lot of us has been trained hard to stop model building at certain points. There is definitely a personal difference between people on how much do they care about taboos the society imposes on them which can result in mental red lights: "Don't continue building that model! It's dangerous!" This is what I think Eliezer's notion of "compartmentalization" refers to.

A lot of intelligent people have much less brakes and generally used to model building and do this uninhibitedly, can maintain several models and have fun doing that.

But in general, most people are lazy model builder, they build their models once and stick to it, or just find rationalizations to cut down on "mental effort" of generating and incrementally updating models.

However, I don't think that brakes are the only reason people don't click. If I just don't know how to build the right model (miss the know-how, experience, etc.) I won't click regardless.

For example I am not a musician and if I found it hard to have conversations with experienced musicians over music. Musicians among themselves can build very quickly models of musical concepts and click with each other. I can try to be maximally open minded, I won't manage to click. I simply fail the necessary skills to build the required models.

What the hell is in that click?

I'm not seeing that there's anything so mysterious here. From your description, to click is to realize an implication of your beliefs so quickly that you aren't conscious of the process of inference as it happens. You add that this inference should be one that most people fail to draw, even if the reasoning is presented to them explicitly.

I expect that, for this to happen, the relevant beliefs must happen to be

1. cached in a rapidly-accessible part of your mind,

2. stored in a form such that the conclusion is a very short inferential step beyond them, and

3. free of any obstructing beliefs.

By an obstructing belief, I don't mean a belief contradicting the other beliefs. I mean a belief that lowers you estimate of the conditional probability of the conclusion that you would otherwise have reached.

When you are trying to induce other people to click, you can do something about (1) and (2) above. You can format the relevant beliefs in the most transparent way possible, and you can use emphasis and repetition to get the beliefs cached.

But if your interlocutors still fail to click, it's probably because (3) didn't happen. That is, it's probably just a special case of the usual reason why people fail to be convinced by an argument, even when they grant the premises. People fail to be convinced because they have other beliefs, which, when taken into account, seem to lower the overall probability of your conclusion. So, typically, a failure to click is no more mysterious than a general failure to be convinced by arguments.

On a more cynical note, I'm pretty sure that the "click" is almost the only decision procedure for the vast majority of people*. When a question arises, one answer will seem to be manifestly the right answer, and the rest will seem obviously wrong. When they change their mind, it will be because another answer abruptly seems to be manifestly the right answer. If no answer clicks for them, they will just chalk the problem up as "mysterious".

*Here I'm using "click" to include inferences that aren't necessarily rare, and which might in fact be very common.

This post, in addition to being a joy to read, contains one particular awesome insight:

My best guess is that clickiness has something to do with failure to compartmentalize - missing, or failing to use, the mental gear that lets human beings believe two contradictory things at the same time. Clicky people would tend to be people who take all of their beliefs at face value.

Here's some confirmation: I must have at least some clickiness, since I "got" the intelligence explosion/FAI/transhumanism stuff pretty much immediately, despite not having been raised on science fiction.

And, it turns out: I hate, hate, HATE compartmentalization. Just hate it -- in pretty much all its forms. For example, I have always despised the way schools divide up learning into different "classes", which you're not supposed to relate to each other. (It's particularly bad at the middle/high school level, where, if you dare to ask why you shouldn't be able to study both music and drama, or both French and Spanish, they look at you with a puzzled expression, as though such thoughts had occurred to no human being before.) I hate C.P. Snow's goddamned "Two Cultures". I hate the way mathematicians in different areas use the exact same concepts and pretend they don't by employing different notation and terminology. I hate the way music theorists invent separate theoretical universes for different historical periods.

In general, don't get me started on "separate magisteria"....

Eliezer, you're seriously onto something here.

At the risk of revealing my stupidity...

In my experience, people who don't compartmentalize tend to be cranks.

Because the world appears to contradict itself, most people act as if it does. Evolution has created many, many algorithms and hacks to help us navigate the physical and social worlds, to survive, and to reproduce. Even if we know the world doesn't really contradict itself, most of us don't have good enough meta-judgement about how to resolve the apparent inconsistencies (and don't care).

Most people who try to make all their beliefs fit with all their other beliefs, end up forcing some of the puzzle pieces into wrong-shaped holes. Their favorite part of their mental map of the world is locally consistent, but the farther-out parts are now WAY off, thus the crank-ism.

And that's just the physical world. When we get to human values, some of them REALLY ARE in conflict with others, so not only is it impossible to try to force them all to agree, but we shouldn't try (too hard). Value systems are not axiomatic. Violence to important parts of our value system can have repercussions even worse than violence to parts of our world view.

FWIW, I'm not interested in cryonics. I think it's not possible, but even if it were, I think I would not bother. Introspecting now, I'm not sure I can explain why. But it seems that natural death seems like a good point to say "enough is enough." In other words, letting what's been given be enough. And I am guessing that something similar will keep most of us uninterested in cryonics forever.

Now that I think of it, I see interest in cryonics as a kind of crankish pastime. It takes the mostly correct idea "life is good, death is bad" to such an extreme that it does violence to other valuable parts of our humanity (sorry, but I can't be more specific).

To try to head off some objections:

• I would certainly never dream of curtailing anyone else's freedom to be cryo-preserved, and I recognize I might change my mind (I just don't think it's likely, nor worth much thought).
• Yes, I recognize how wonderful medical science is, but I see a qualitative difference between living longer and living forever.
• No, I don't think I will change my mind about this as my own death approaches (but I'll probably find out). Nor do I think I would change my mind if/when the death of a loved one becomes a reality.

I offer this comment, not in an attempt to change anyone's mind, but to go a little way to answer the question "Why are some people not interested in cryonics?"

Thanks!

There's also the valuable trait where, between being presented with an argument and going "click", one's brain cleanly goes "duhhh", rather than producing something that sounds superficially like reasoning.

I am puzzled by Eliezer's confidence in the rationality of signing up for cryonics given he thinks it would be characteristic of a "GODDAMNED SANE CIVILIZATION". I am even more puzzled by the commenters overwhelming agreement with Eliezer. I am personally uncomfortable with cryonics for the two following reasons and am surprised that no one seems to bring these up.

1. I can see it being very plausible that somewhere along the line I would be subject to immense suffering, over which death would have been a far better option, but that I would be either potentially unable to take my life due to physical constraints or would lack the courage to do so (it takes quite some courage and persistent suffering to be driven to suicide IMO). I see this as analogous to a case where I am very near death and am faced with the two following options.

(a) Have my life support system turned off and die peacefully.

(b) Keep the life support system going but subsequently give up all autonomy over my life and body and place it entirely in the hands of others who are likely not even my immediate kin. I could be made to put up with immense suffering either due to technical glitches which are very likely since this is a very nascent area, or due to willful malevolence. In this case I would very likely choose (a).

1. Note that in addition to prolonged suffering where I am effectively incapable of pulling the plug on myself, there is also the chance that I would be an oddity as far as future generations are concerned. Perhaps I would be made a circus or museum exhibit to entertain that generation. Our race is highly speciesist and I would not trust the future generations with their bionic implants and so on to even necessarily consider me to be of the same species and offer me the same rights and moral consideration.

2. Last but not the least is a point I made as a comment in response to Robin Hanson's post. Robin Hanson expressed a preference for a world filled with more people with scarce per-capita resources compared to a world with fewer people with significantly better living conditions. His point was that this gives many people the opportunity to "be born" who would not have come into existence. And that this was for some reason a good thing. I suspect that Eliezer too has a similar opinion on this, and this is probably another place we widely differ.

   I couldn't care less if I weren't born. As the saying goes, I have been dead/not existed for billions of years and haven't suffered the slightest inconvenience. I see cryonics and a successful recovery as no different from dying and being re-born. Thus I assign virtually zero positives to being re-born, while I assign huge negatives to 1 and 2 above.

   We are evolutionarily driven to dislike dying and try to postpone it for as long as possible. However I don't think we are particularly hardwired to prefer this form of weird cryonic rebirth over never waking up at all. Given that our general preference to not die has nothing fundamental about it, but is rather a case of us following our evolutionary leanings, what makes it so obvious that cryonic rebirth is a good thing. Some form of longetivity research which extends our life to say 200 years without going the cryonic route with all the above risks especially for the first few generations of cryonic guinea pigs, seems much harder to argue against.

   Unfortunately all the discussion on this forum including the writings by Eliezer seem to draw absolutely no distinction between the two scenarios:

A. Signing up for cryonics now, with all the associated risks/benefits that I just discussed.

B. Some form of payment for some experimental longetivity research that you need to make upfront when you are 30. If the research succeeds and is tested safe, you can use the drugs for free and live to be 200. If not, you live your regular lifespan and merely forfeit the money that you paid to sponsor the research.

I can readily see myself choosing (B) if the rates were affordable and if the probability of success seemed reasonable to justify that rate. I find it astounding that repeated shallow arguments are made on this blog which address scenario (A) as though it were identical to scenario (B).

and with molecular nanotechnology you could go through the whole vitrified brain atom by atom and do the same sort of information-theoretical tricks that people do to recover hard drive information after "erasure" by any means less extreme than a blowtorch...

As far as I know, the idea that there are organizations capable of reading overwritten data off of a hard drive is an urban legend. See http://www.nber.org/sys-admin/overwritten-data-gutmann.html

I have what I hope is an interesting perspective here - I'm a super-not-clicker. I had to be dragged through most of the sequences, chipping away one dumb idea after another, until I Got It. I recognize this as basically my number one handicap. Introspecting about what causes it, I'll back Eliezer's compartmentalization idea.

For me, input flows into categorized and contextual storage. I can access it, but I have to look (and know to look, which I won't if it's not triggered). This is severe enough to impact my memory; I find I'm relying on almost-stigmergy, to-do-list cues activated by context, and I can literally slip out of doing one thing and into another if my contextual cues are off.

I think this is just my problem, but I wonder if it's an exaggerated form of the way other people can just divert facts into a box and sit on them.

I've often described learning in terms of 'clicking'.

It's most memorable to me when thinking about hard problems that I can't solve right away. It feels like something finally puts the last piece of the puzzle in place and for the first time I can 'see' the answer.

When trying to teach people, I've noticed that some people have a very obvious 'click response'- they'll light up at a distinct moment and just get it from then on.

Other people show no sign of this, yet claim to learn. I still haven't figured out what is going on here. The possibilities I can think of are: 1) Their learning process involves no clicking 2) They hide the click to make it sound like they've known it all along because they'd be embarassed at how late their click is 3) They're faking it, and don't really get it.

For me though, learning about cryonics and the intelligence explosion idea didn't seem very 'click like' since it just seemed obviously true the first time I heard about it, rather than there being a delay that makes the evaporation of confusion more satisfying. I suspect the learning mechanism is actually the same though.

I've met very few people for whom the concept "simulating consciousness is analogous to simulating arithmetic" is obvious-in-retrospect, even among atheists. A special case of a "generalized anti-zombie" click?

life-is-good/death-is-bad

Widespread failure to understand this most basic principle ever drives me crazy and leaves me feeling physically sick. I'd appreciate efforts to raise the sanity waterline for this reason alone.

Oddly, I self identify as both being very good at "clicking", and very able to compartmentalize. I'm used to roleplaying an elf in WOW, a religious person at church, and a rationalist here. It makes it very easy to "click" because I can go "oh, of course, in the world that an elf inhabits, in that world view, this just makes sense", and because I have a lot of practice absorbing very odd ideas (I've worked out agricultural requirements for keeping a pet dragon...)

The big perk is that, say, my religious objections to cryonics don't even come up when I'm playing a rationalist and working it out there. So even if cryonics clashes with a lot of what I believe, I can still evaluate the idea. I don't have any commitment to being right or wrong, because my actual opinion is in a separate box.

Of course, it only works if I'm ensuring that the right mode/self/compartment is handling the right situation. If I'm debating cryonics, I want to be playing as a 12th level Rationalist, not my 3rd level Elven Ranger! :)

Beware the double illusion of transparency ?

That click is cultural. It seems magical because you've acclimated yourself to not encountering shared values with people very often, and so this cryonics gathering was a feast of connections.

I think "clicky" people are people who are not emotionally vested in their beliefs.

Many people need their beliefs to be true in order to feel like they are valuable and worthwhile people.

Clicky people simply don't need that (or at least need that to a lesser extent). Instead, clicky people need to be right whether or not that means they were initially wrong.

Was there some particular bright line at which cryonics flipped from "impossible given current technology" to "failure to have universal cryonics is a sign of an insane society"? That is a sign change, not just a change in magnitude.

If we go back 50 or 100 years, we should be at a point where then-present preservation techniques were clearly inadequate. Maybe vitrification was the bright line, I do not pretend that preserving brains is a specialty of mine. I just empathize with those who still doubt that the technology is good enough to fulfill its claims prior to seeing a brain revived. We have a bold history of technological claims that turned out to be not all that, but we promise that it will work fine in twenty years.

That seems like a perfectly sane outside view: every (?) previous human preservation technique was found inadequate over a span of a few years or decades, so we assume against the latest one until proven otherwise.

We must still have large areas of the planet where it is still sane not to sign up your kids, notably where the per capita income is below $300/year.

I think that this post should be linked prominently here for those who haven't been around on LW/OB for long and who might not follow all the back-links:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/wq/you_only_live_twice/

Hah, "Magic Click" --I see that all the time, people who don't know cryonics is real-or have not met anyone actually signed up. Left and right, every day kids and adults think it is a "cool" idea, they express interest--but they don't go through the steps to become a signed cryonicist. I'm not sure what causes one person to go through all the paperwork and another just thinks they might want to do that some day--from what I've seen, people who sign up for cryonics have had a brush with death and seem more motivated--it could come down to a person's personality and their level of planning things in life too. Thank you for your comment bshock. Some religions could take the stance that you must be signed up for cryonics, because if it works then it is your purpose to do more good for your faith. I could imagine how frustrating it would be to work at Alcor, the paperwork truly needs to be simplified-but cryonics is not yet large enough to be safely accepted, they have to cover every angle possible that could come up. CI is a lot easier to sign up with paperwork, but they don't have a higher success rate--I think that you are right-at first cryonics is fun because it seems like a way to escape death possibly, then finalizing it is acknowledging that you will die.

Does anyone know if Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking is a good book?

http://www.amazon.com/Blink-Power-Thinking-Without/dp/0316172324

Amazon.com Review

Blink is about the first two seconds of looking--the decisive glance that knows in an instant. Gladwell, the best-selling author of The Tipping Point, campaigns for snap judgments and mind reading with a gift for translating research into splendid storytelling. Building his case with scenes from a marriage, heart attack triage, speed dating, choking on the golf course, selling cars, and military maneuvers, he persuades readers to think small and focus on the meaning of "thin slices" of behavior. The key is to rely on our "adaptive unconscious"--a 24/7 mental valet--that provides us with instant and sophisticated information to warn of danger, read a stranger, or react to a new idea.

Gladwell includes caveats about leaping to conclusions: marketers can manipulate our first impressions, high arousal moments make us "mind blind," focusing on the wrong cue leaves us vulnerable to "the Warren Harding Effect" (i.e., voting for a handsome but hapless president). In a provocative chapter that exposes the "dark side of blink," he illuminates the failure of rapid cognition in the tragic stakeout and murder of Amadou Diallo in the Bronx. He underlines studies about autism, facial reading and cardio uptick to urge training that enhances high-stakes decision-making. In this brilliant, cage-rattling book, one can only wish for a thicker slice of Gladwell's ideas about what Blink Camp might look like. --Barbara Mackoff

Interesting. I remember my brother saying, "I want to be frozen when I die, so I can be brought back to life in the future," when he was child (somewhere between ages 9-14, I would guess). Probably got the idea from a cartoon show. I think the idea lost favor with him when he realized how difficult a proposition reanimating a corpse really was (he never thought about the information capture aspect of it.)

Isin't it more sane to donate money to organizations fighting against existential risks rather than spending money on cryonics?

Anecdotally, when I was a child I was a super-clicker. (I often wonder what child-Ialdabaoth would have accomplished, if not for sub-100 IQ parents, a fearfully fundamentalist Christian upbringing, and a cliche'd-bad experience with the public school system.)

As an adult, I find that it is much, much harder for me to just "click" on things - and it is invariably due to a panic reaction when presented with information that might cause me to lose status among an imagined group of violent authoritarians.

It would be interesting to see how many more "clicks" can occur among people given muscle relaxants and anti-anxiety drugs before being given a particular logos-based "clickable" pitch, vs. an ethos-based "control" pitch.

In some piece of fiction (I think it was Orion's Arm, but the closest I can find is http://www.orionsarm.com/eg-topic/45b3daabb2329 and the reference to "the Herimann-Glauer-Yudkowski relation of inclusive retrospective obviousness") I saw the idea that one could order qualitatively-smarter things on the basis of what you're calling "clicks". Specifically, that if humans are level 1, then the next level above that is the level where if you handed the being the data on which our science is built, all the results would click immediately/be obvious.

I've seen it asserted that humans are essentially "Turing complete" with respect to intelligence; anything that can be understood by any intelligence can be understood by a non-broken human, given enough time and attention. I'm on the fence about that, frankly; there's a lot of stuff that I have real trouble understanding, despite being decently bright by most standards. But if there's such a thing as real quantitative (rather than qualitative) differences in intelligence, it seems to me that "clicks" are at the core of what such a thing would look like from the outside (not what it would be internally; no idea about that, of course).

-Robin

It seems odd to refer to a "magical click" leading to understanding the incoherence of the idea of magic.

Say you were playing a real-time strategy game, with limited forces to allocate among possible targets to attack and potential vulnerabilities to defend. You can see all sorts of information about a given target, but the really important stuff either requires resources to discover or is hidden outright. The game's bootlegged and you can't find a copy of the manual, so even for the visible numbers you don't know exactly what they mean.

Poking around, you notice that some targets require a protracted and expensive siege to capture, others seemingly can't be captured at all with the resources and technologies available to you, while still others start flying your flag and paying your taxes after the most perfunctory attempt at capture.

My guess would be that the latter category is neutral/uncontested territory, that which has not been claimed and garrisoned by a rival of similar geopolitical ambition.

that if you wake up in the Future, it's probably going to be a nicer place to live than the Present.

Careful, man. If you bang too hard on this drum, people are going to start thinking "hey, why slog through the boring pre-FAI era? I'll just sign up for cryo, head over to the preservation facility, and down a bottle of Nembutal. Before long I'll be relaxing on a beach with super-intelligent robot sex dolls bringing me martinis!"

With an unforgivable naivete, a childish stupidity, we all still think history is leading us towards good, that some happiness awaits us ahead; but it will bring us to blood and fire, such blood and such fire as we haven't seen yet.

-- Nikolai Strakhov, 1870s

I wonder if it ties in to some kind of confidence in your understanding.* If you don't trust your ability to understand a simple argument, you're really quite likely to overrate the strength of your heuristics relative to your reason.

...which sounds a lot like why I'm suspicious of cryonics, on introspection. I really need to run the numbers and see if I can afford it.

* Oh noes! Have I become one of those people with one idea they go back to for everything?

It would have been convenient if I'd discovered some particular key insight that convinced people. If people had said, "Oh, well, I used to think that cryonics couldn't be plausible if no one else was doing it, but then I read about Asch's conformity experiment and pluralistic ignorance." Then I could just emphasize that argument, and people would sign up.

But the average experience I heard was more like, "Oh, I saw a movie that involved cryonics, and I went on Google to see if there was anything like that in real life, and found Alcor."

Given this data, and assuming that the goal state is to have as many people signed up for cryonics as possible, wouldn't an example of a sensible action be to rent a few billboards and put up some notices to get peoples' attention? You'd have to come up with a slogan or something, but that wouldn't be hard; you'd probably have hundreds more people merely seeing the billboard than reading your best argument.

when they told me that I didn't have to understand the prayers in order for them to work so long as I said them in Hebrew

I am not defending OJ in general, but your objection, while philosophically valid, was misplaced. It's ok, you were only 5 :)

Talmudic law is let's say a "ritual law" where performance of certain acts is "fulfilled", in a pure legalistic sense. There is a long standing argument whether mitzhot (commandments) require intentional performance to be fulfilled. E.g. if you "hear the shofar" by accident, you do not have to hear it again. Given that prayer is a ritual act the same kind of technical question arises: whether understanding the words is required for fulfilling the commandment to pray 3 times a day. This is all completely orthogonal to philosophy. There is even a talmudic expression "vile person with Torah's permission", which means he observes all the laws. Your objection was philosophical, while the law is purely technical and internally consistent that way.

Sorry, this may be a stupid question, but why is it a good for people to get cyonically frozen? Obviously if they don't they won't make it to the future - but other people will be born or duplicated in the future and the total number of people will be the same.

Why care more about people who live now than future potential people?

There's the consequentialist/utilitarian click, and the intelligence explosion click, and the life-is-good/death-is-bad click, and the cryonics click.

I can find a number of blog posts from you clearly laying out the arguments in favor of each of those clicks except the consequentialism/utilitarianism one.

What do you mean by "consequentialism" and "utilitarianism" and why do you think they are not just right but obviously right?

Oooh, but people can be wrong in so many ways. It's not a single extra crazy circuit. We've got redundancies: in most people, perhaps the 'main' circuits are never quite laid down right, but the redundant parts take over. This is so common people don't agree what the main circuits are; in Japan, dyslexia is more common than, err, what is neurotypical in USA.

Some people over think it, some under think it. Under think it, and you think, "Bah, Walt Disney is wacky to freeze his head!" and never get past that. Overthink it and you may never actually sign up because you leech out all the emotional impetus (this thought process is more adaptive for getting rid of bad memories).

Cryonics does not prevent you from dying. Humans are afraid of dying. Cryonics does not address the problem (fear of death). It instead offers a possible second life.

I'm afraid of dying, because I know that when I am dying I will be very afraid. So I'm afraid of being afraid. Cryonics would offer very little to me right now in terms of alleviating this fear. Sure it might work; but I won't know that it will while I'm dying, and so my fear while dying will not be mitigated.

You might say hey wait jhuff- isn't actually being dead, and not have a chance at a second life a problem (or at least a missed opportunity)? Well I don't see how it is once I'm dead. Heck the expression "I'm dead" doesn't even make sense - there is no consciousness or awareness of being dead - if I really wanted to be a pedant I'd argue there is no ego that is dead; only egos that have died.

So anyway until I have died the overwhelming problem with death is my fear of it. After I have died, I don't exist. So certainly no problems there for me (I can't have problems if I don't exist). Cryonics doesn't seem to offer me much utility value.

if you wake up in the Future, it's probably going to be a nicer place to live than the Present.

How do we know this? How can we possibly think it's possible to know this? I can think of at least three scenarios that seem much more likely than this sunny view that things will just keep progressing while you're dead and when you wake up you'll slip right into a nicer society:

1) We run out of cheap energy and hence cheap food; tensions rise; most of the world turns into what Haiti looks like now.

2) Somebody sets off a nuclear weapon, leading to worldwide retaliation.

3) Humans do keep progressing . . . and evolving, and when you wake up, you'll be in the same position as an ape in today's society. Society is indeed nicer today for us than if we were apes, but it's not necessarily nicer for the actual ape.

Is that really just it?  Is there no special sanity to add, but only ordinary madness to take away?  Where do superclickers come from - are they just born lacking a whole lot of distractions?

What the hell is in that click?

Noesis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nous

Is this "click" you mention epiphany)?

Whether something seems "reasonable" or "implausible" can depend on how one's brain happens to be wired, perhaps due to a stroke, mental illness, or even just genetics. As your former blog post about [asognostics] (http://lesswrong.com/lw/12s/the_strangest_thing_an_ai_could_tell_you/) shows, the human brain can come to some silly conclusions with the input it's given. How do you know if what "clicks" for you matches reality or is due to a faulty circuit? Personally I require evidence and I'll sign up for cryonics when the first dead mouse is brought back to life after dying and being frozen. People believe in all sorts of things because they seem "reasonable". How do you account for the fact that about 10% of top scientists (Nobel Prize winners, members of National Academy of Science, etc) belief in god? By comparison for the same group, I wonder what the percentage is who believe in cryonics?

I model clicks as moments where my subconscious mind notices a shortcut, and forces my conscious mind to take it.

Depending on a variety of factors (how tired I am, or whether I am in danger, for example), my subconscious mind may be able to force more or fewer shortcuts onto my conscious.

The "clicks" are not always ones that, after careful analysis, I follow up on. They have, however, come in very useful in high pressure/low time availability situations.

I suspect you need to travel some (most?) of the inferential distance to becoming a rationalist (one way or another) before you can start clicking on ideas and concepts you're hearing for the first time.

Maybe you could devise a click-test and give it to different groups to see what kinds of people click more often?

Is this "click" you mention epiphany?

Looks like clickability is an important quality in startup founders.

Whether something seems "reasonable" or "implausible" can depend on how one's brain happens to be wired, perhaps due to a stroke, mental illness, or even just genetics. As your former blog post about asognostics shows, the human brain can come to some silly conclusions with the input it's given. How do you know if what "clicks" for you matches reality or is due to a faulty circuit?

Personally I require evidence and I'll sign up for cryonics when the first dead mouse is brought back to life after dying and being frozen. People believe in all sorts of things because they seem "reasonable". How do you account for the fact that about 10% of top scientists (Nobel Prize winners, members of National Academy of Science, etc) belief in god? By comparison for the same group, I wonder what the percentage is who believe in cryonics?

Here's a prediction. The cryonics facilities of the present will end up being the terrifying haunted ruins of the far future.

"many couples with kids - THAT HAD BEEN SIGNED UP FOR CRYONICS FROM BIRTH LIKE A GODDAMNED SANE CIVILIZATION WOULD REQUIRE" -shouts E. Yudkowsky in dramatic ALL CAPS to show that this is VERY IMPORTANT.

To which I reply, Fuck you, bitch.

You have every right to throw every dime you have away on the head-freezing religion. You have no right to demand anyone else participate in or subsidize your wretched faith against their will. And if everybody has to be signed up for this fraudulent crap, everybody obviously has to pay for everyone else. So where's your money, you loudmouthed idiot? Hey, I'll sign up for cryonics myself, if you send me a money order or cashier's check for the proper amount. (Sorry, I don't accept personal checks from Bayesians.)

You seem impatient to skip over formulating the boring theology of the head-freezing religion, or to speculate on the exact nature of the magical resurrectionary beings that will bring you back to life (how sad for you if they turned out to be Joseph Curwen) and get right to persecutin'

Is this because of the obvious strains that must accompany being a "theorist" who accomplishes nothing, proves nothing, predicts nothing and who works for the Institute of Nothing itself, the Singularity Institute?