2008-05-15 When Science Can't Help

2008-05-15 Less Wrong Eliezer Yudkowsky \science\cryonics\inductive reasoning\skepticism http://lesswrong.com/lw/qc/when_science_cant_help/ When Science Can't Help &ldquo;In any case, right now you've got people dismissing cryonics out of hand as "not scientific", like it was some kind of pharmaceutical you could easily administer to 1000 patients and see what happened. "Call me when cryonicists actually revive someone," they say; which, as Mike Li observes, is like saying "I refuse to get into this ambulance; call me when it's actually at the hospital".&rdquo;  In any case, right now you've got people dismissing cryonics out of hand as "not scientific", like it was some kind of pharmaceutical you could easily administer to 1000 patients and see what happened. "Call me when cryonicists actually revive someone," they say; which, as Mike Li observes, is like saying "I refuse to get into this ambulance; call me when it's actually at the hospital". Maybe Martin Gardner warned them against believing in strange things without experimental evidence. So they wait for the definite unmistakable verdict of Science, while their family and friends and 150,000 people per day are dying right now, and might or might not be savable – - a calculated bet you could only make rationally.

The drive of Science is to obtain a mountain of evidence so huge that not even fallible human scientists can misread it. But even that sometimes goes wrong, when people become confused about which theory predicts what, or bake extremely-hard-to-test components into an early version of their theory. And sometimes you just can't get clear experimental evidence at all. .. Either way, you have to try to do the thing that Science doesn't trust anyone to do - think rationally, and figure out the answer before you get clubbed over the head with it. originally posted in Overcoming Bias   