[ExI] [ZS] [cryo] Nick Bostrom, Anders Sandberg, Stuart Armstrong to be frozen after death

Florent Berthet florent.berthet at gmail.com
Mon Jun 10 16:42:49 UTC 2013


2013/6/10 Jeff Medina <analyticphilosophy at gmail.com>

>
> So you never buy any food beyond the most minimally expensive to keep you
> alive and functional?
>
> (And you never go see films, buy books, travel, put gas in a car, buy
> clothing beyond bare necessities, etc.?)
>

I try to do the good thing and I spend very little. It's not about being
perfect but about being reasonable. Now, it's hard to draw the line between
spending too little and spending too much, but just because it's hard
doesn't mean we shouldn't aim for it.

It's sad that when some people talk about how they make efforts to make the
world a better place (giving money or switching to veganism for example),
other people often jump to the extremes and say "AHA! You are not acting
perfectly! Therefore your argument is invalid!"

I'm not pointing fingers here, I want to know why several x-risk
researchers made the decision to allocate a non-negligible amount of money
on their cryopreservation. I highly respect these guys and it is their job
to think about the most important things in the world, so most likely I'm
missing something, I just want to know what. There are two possibilities:

- they did this to send a message to the public and to fuel research, in
which case it may be a smart move.
- they did for selfish reasons, in which case I wouldn't consider it
reasonable given the amounts involved.

I don't expect anybody to be perfect all the time - I'm certainly not - but
 spending £50,000 for selfish reasons is highly debatable, to say the
least, especially coming from people whose job is to raise awareness on
important issues (one issue being the underfunding of high-impact science).
I'm sure there is a better explanation. Anders?
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20130610/2542f45c/attachment.html>


More information about the extropy-chat mailing list