Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Thursday, August 30, 2012

Gaming the Refs in the Robot Cult

Upgraded and adapted from my continuing exchange with JimF, in which he said, among other worthy things:
**My** biggest beef with the >Hist crowd is that they are attempting to cloak a faith-based belief system in the authority of "science". That won't fly. BZZZT! The referee calls foul.
Of course this goes to the white hot center of the dispute in question.

More and Prisco are trying to game the refs when they bury the credulous in neologisms and phony distinctions (it's not immortality it's "indefinite lifespan"; it's not eugenicism it's "enhancement") and in-house publications with logrolling citations and so on.

I don't think you can actually engage in this sort of activity in a sustained way and still be treated with the kind of generosity you were inclined to extend to them about their con-artistry. Of course, I understand your inclination, knowing as I do and you do the extent to which a culture of criticism needs to be generous enough to let people explore and make mistakes and come clean and so on.

Of course, some of these Robot Cultists are just tragic techno-fetish fashionistas or sad True Believers looking for a guru and so on -- but when it comes to the high profile folks, and both Max More and Giulio Prisco qualify (tho' I doubt their "qualifications" would pass muster outside the Robot Cult) as high profile, well, they know what they are doing, deluded as they may be on so many questions as well, and we are wrong to pretend otherwise or facilitate their pretenses that they aren't doing what they are doing.

And another thing! (NOW you've got me started!) You know, Prisco just jumps on the trip wire about my "pre-emptive rejection" of all the in-house Alcor bullshit artistry More links to as though this just shows I am screaming na!na!na! in the face of their staid scientific seriousness. But if you actually read the post in which I answer More the fact is that although I clearly stand on the principle that one shouldn't allow charlatans the space to lower everybody's standards by treating their self-serving bloviating as worthy of the same consideration as real science, despite this, and despite being right about this, I actually DO go on to talk about the worthiness of research dollars to organ cryopreservation and so on.

The reason I brought that up is actually because despite myself I actually DID go and read More's crappy sciency dog and pony show, even though I had every reason not to do so. Temperate defense of intemperateness and all the rest aside, I actually DID give him the benefit of the doubt.

Why? Because I Can't Help Myself! I actually do give these clowns credit they never deserve and endlessly take advantage of precisely because I am not as much a hard ass as I say I am and have every right to be.

And if you do follow that link as More asks you to and as I did you get the impression that Brian Wowk is the only scientist in the world as far as these guys are concerned. Now, Brian Wowk may be the cat's meow, or not, but he isn't the only scientist in the world who is doing science relevant to the claims of techno-immortalists of the cryonics sect of the Robot Cult. He just isn't.

And how many of the pieces cited in this sales-pitch that actually pass muster as real science or at least mostly science are interesting to Robot Cultists in their actual science or instead in what Robot Cultists take them to justify in the way of their superlative aspirations? And how often do the actual scientists so deployed actually approve such deployments themselves? And how often do people outside the charmed circle of cryonicism and the Robot Cult cite these studies at all? Or cite them approvingly? Or use them in the service of actual research (rather than as examples of "some people say" in their general intro or concluding sections, for example)?

It's a goddamn scam and the actors involved are in on it, however they rationalize what they are doing.

We have to be able to call them out on this conduct, even when the people involved want us instead to debate the Robot God Odds on their terms or the salient informational selfhood retention in vitrified brain hamburgerization or whatever goddamn angels dancing on a pinhead they've decided is the Real Science here, as if Robot Cultists are the ones who make these decisions in front of the livid flickering of screens perched on their futons. We have to be able to critique the logical, topical, and tropological moves on which they depend (rhetorical and cultural analyses of the kind I'm trained in, for example) whether or not they themselves are fully aware of these operations or disapprove of such foci. We cannot allow these pseudo-scientists to circumscribe the terms on which we can critique them to their prejudicial benefit.

Even if it is true that Athena Andreadis and Richard Jones and PZ Myers and others like them (all of whom I cherish and respect more than I can say) really are able to demolish the would-be scientific claims made by superlative futurologists (transhumanoids, singularitarians, techno-immortalists, nano-cornucopiasts, and so on) on scientific grounds, I really do think there is also a vitally important sense in which such disputes themselves can perversely function to legitimize the pseudo-scientists, can yield for the true believers a kind of reality-effect that fuels and substantiates their fantasies.

In part this is because the Robot Cultists themselves are not qualified to grasp the scientific arguments on their merits anyway, awash as they are in pop-tech journalism, corporate think-tank futurological scenario-building, TED squawk self-promotional PowerPoints and cheesy computer animation treated as reality and so on, but it is also because "science" itself is not functioning scientifically for the faithful (as a public/published testing that warrants provisional but confident instrumental beliefs) but as a placeholder for a materiality generated by collective rituals of fervency better understood discursively and socioculturally when all is said and done.

3 comments:

jimf said...

> Even if it is true that Athena Andreadis and Richard Jones
> and PZ Myers and others like them (all of whom I cherish and
> respect more than I can say) really are able to demolish
> the would-be scientific claims made by superlative futurologists
> (transhumanoids, singularitarians, techno-immortalists,
> nano-cornucopiasts, and so on) on scientific grounds, I really
> do think there is also a vitally important sense in which
> such disputes themselves can perversely function to legitimize
> the pseudo-scientists, can yield for the true believers a kind
> of reality-effect that fuels and substantiates their fantasies.

Well, the true believers, as long as they remain true believers,
are out of reach anyway.

I, for one, am glad there is some publicly-searchable and -readable
pushback going on (and yes, **you** seem to be the center of it!).

I'm hoping that the days are over when a scam like Scientology
né Dianetics (which similarly enthralled much of the SF crowd
back in the 50's -- John W. Campbell, A. E. Van Vogt) can literally
terrorize the press and cow individual authors into remaining silent,
as Scientology was able to do for **decades** before the advent
of the Web made that kind of de facto suppression of free speech
simply impossible.

Do you remember six years ago, when somebody named John Bruce started
taking (not unreasonable) pot shots at the Singularitarian/
Transhumanist/Cryonicist crowd on his blog "In the Shadow of
Mt. Hollywood"? The >Hist spin-control folks (James Hughes
among them) actually wrote letters to him to attempt to
"educate" him out of his "misunderstandings" of the topics
he wrote about. As if **he** was the one who needed
educating! The smug fatuity of it!.

And, of course, when **you** decided it was time to enhance the --
frankness, shall we say? -- of your own criticism, there was
a time when folks like Michael Anissimov were buzzing around,
trying every tactic in the book ("I thought we were friends.",
"Why are you treating me like dirt?" "Singularitarianism
is **not** a cult! Stop it at once!") until he finally gave
up.

You know, when I was 11 or so I was introduced to a kind of
transhumanism (not long after seeing the old _Outer Limits_ episode
"The Sixth Finger" ;-> ) by a paperback edition of
Arthur C. Clarke's _Profiles of the Future_, which made a
big, big impression on me. It wasn't until quite recently
that I discovered that the man, at least in his older
years, held some -- shall we say, non-mainstream? -- views
about such things as cold fusion. I still don't know whether
to think he got a little crackpotty in his old age, or whether
he was **always** an out-and-out crackpot. That's the kind of
thing I never would have discovered before the advent of the
Web. But it's the kind of thing I **want** people who are
examining the contemporary >Hist organization(s) to be able
to find out about, **before** they've gotten too invested --
emotionally, socially, or financially -- in the movement.

Michael Anissimov said...

I'm still around, I love reading Dale's stuff. I have no problem with it.

jimf said...

> And if you do follow that link as More asks you to and as
> I did you get the impression that Brian Wowk is the only
> scientist in the world as far as these guys are concerned.
> Now, Brian Wowk may be the cat's meow, or not, but he isn't
> the only scientist in the world who is doing science relevant
> to the claims of techno-immortalists of the cryonics sect
> of the Robot Cult. He just isn't.

http://chronopause.com/index.php/2011/04/19/cryonics-nanotechnology-and-transhumanism-utopia-then-and-now
---------------------
It is important to understand that the nanotechnology folks didn’t
come to cryonicists and hitch a ride on our star. Quite the reverse
was the case. Eric Dexler was given a gift subscription to _Cryonics_
magazine by someone, still unknown, well before the publication of
_Engines of Creation_. When he completed his draft of _Engines_,
which was then called _The Future by Design_, he sent out copies
of the manuscript to a large cross-section of people – including
to us at Alcor. I can remember opening the package with dread;
by that time we were starting to receive truly terrible manuscripts
from Alcor members who believed that they had just written the
first best selling cryonics novel. These manuscripts had to be read. . .

Drexler was soliciting comments, and he got them – probably several
hundred pages worth from [us]. And he listened to those comments –
in fact, a robust correspondence began. I think that the ideas
in Eric’s book, and to large extent the way he presented them were
overwhelmingly positive, **and that they were very good for
cryonics**, in the bargain. As just one small example, a young
computer whiz kid, who was writing retail point-of-sale programs in
Kenora, Canada, was recruited mostly on the basis of Drexler’s
scenarios for nanotechnology and cell and tissue repair. His name,
by the way, was Brian Wowk. As an amusing aside, the brochure
that recruited Brian to cryonics is reproduced at the end of this
article; we thought it was cutting edge marketing at the time
(hokey though it was, it was indeed cutting edge, in terms of
content, if not artistic value).