I will forever associate Larry King with the movie “Spin”. [1] It’s a rather brilliant indie documentary about the 1992 (Bill Clinton / HW Bush) election based on a fascinating technological element: back then, Satellite TV feeds would often just keep running during commercial breaks, or warmups.
So the director recorded a TON of footage from these moments where the politicians and news anchors acted themselves, seemingly unaware that anyone was watching.
The segments with Larry King are, um, memorable. Very candid moments.
Here's the part where the documentary explains how he got all the behind-the-scenes footage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PlJkgQZb0VU&t=3m58s. TLDR - raw video from remote studios were first beamed via satellite to the Network's HQ for editing and "packaging". But back in those days, people with satellite boxes could intercept and view the raw pre-packaged feeds.
Likely that Ted Turner was offering to have CNN serve as a propaganda machine for the Clinton Administration or the Democratic Party at large, due to their common political sympathies.
If you guys think "fuck it, we'll do it live" was bad, you should have seen Barbara Walters. I wish I recorded some of it. All these people in media have egos like you wouldn't believe.
I learned English watching Larry King Live, because that was my father's favourite talkshow during the 90s.
I didn't understand half of what was going on in those conversations, but what stuck with me was the broad spectrum of people he interviewed and how consistently respectful he was towards his interviewees.
Always enjoyed his interviews and his style. I happened to just watched a very short clip of him talking about his fear of death with Norm Macdonald last night. Guess we all have to face that moment, and even though he had a long and successful life i'm sorry for him and his family now.
I linked the clip[1] below, but it may be a bit disconcerting and too soon to view for some.
Many people see birth and death as a clearly defined ultimate boundary: the final infinite wall; a big blank room forever; the bookends of existence.
but our origin can be traced backwards forever: present day; yesterday; childhood; exiting the womb; formation in the womb; initial conception; individual cells split between two people; grandparents; formation of the elements of the solar system; beginning of the universe; etc.
Presently and onward we are also experiencing death: cells are dying and creating anew; elements breakdown and reform; etc.
In this way we can see life and death are convenience abstractions for speech, but neither are real. This is an endless process of transfiguration and change.
So what shakes me is the possibility that nonexistence and existence are an illusion, and this is just eternity
You don't fear it because it's an abstract thing to you. If you'll have an moment of facing impeding doom your primal instincts will rear it's head no doubt.
The survival instinct is the most basic drive in any living thing. If the idea of ceasing to exist truly doesn't make you uncomfortable then it might be worth talking to a professional...
There is a difference between survival instinct (would I swim up, jump to avoid getting hit by a car or duck if something is thrown at me) with fear of death.
I don't fear death, I fear the process of dying, I wouldn't want it to be painful or slow, but not existing, that I do not fear.
Many religions are all about not fearing death as a goal. If your immediate reaction to hearing someone doesn't fear death is talk to a professional you have an interesting take on what professionals are for.
Those belief systems also tend to have things in store for the individual after death, though. Why should one fear death itself if it's actually the means to travel to a place where 72 virgins are waiting for them? Not disagreeing with your second sentence.
The "ego in heaven" stuff is in the washed down religion for mass appeal, the actual mystical practices, whether islam christian or hindu/buddhist are overcoming attachment to your identity on earth, to identify your 'self' with the infinite unfolding of the universe so you know that 'you' never die, you just stop looking out this window.
I'm attached to this window. This idea from religion has always bothered me.
Yes, the cosmos remains intact even as the ego dies. But it seems dismissive to say the ego is less precious and can be calmly dismissed because the eternal universe which gave rise to it persists intact. It gives me no comfort at all to know that the eternal fire will always burn, and everything that constituted my fleeting ego will always exist as well. My self-awareness will be gone forever. That is a real and impending loss, although i'll be blissfully oblivious to that loss soon enough.
Some people say they don’t fear death because they think it makes them sound brave.
So I don’t usually believe what people say about themselves on this topic. Unless they’re quite old or lived through cancer or some similar situation where they had to confront their mortality, I won’t assume they know how they truly feel about their death. It’s just an idea when expressed with words, and simply thinking about it may not evoke real emotions.
I admire and want to learn from people who do not fear "not existing".
But I'm always turned off by the complete lack of empathy that such folks (including you) show those of us who DO fear it. Most of folks like you don't just act like you don't fear not existing, but you actively don't understand how OTHERS can fear it.
Which makes me think one of two things: 1) The type of person who can be comfortable and this pragmatic about it is the kind of cold unfeeling unempathetic person that I simply could never be, or 2) Your cold detached pragmatic attitude is ITSELF a coping strategy for dealing with mortality. I dwell in the fear of not existing. You deal with it by pretending it's not even something worth burning an ounce of energy on.
If I'm wrong, then I'm sorry. I'd love to see you explain that you understand the fear, and then explain why you personally believe it's something you can make peace with. But every explanation I've heard so far I just haven't been able to follow.
My consciousness and awareness is all I have. When that ends, so will every dream, fantasy, feeling, emotion, hope, aspiration, joy, fear, sadness, idea, invention, and creative outlet I've ever had. And I won't have any more after that. That is objectively terrifying.
Just because it's inescapable doesn't make it any less disturbing.
At some point, you get to fundamentals. "Why live?" is not, IMO answerable logically or by reference to other things.
That said, wanting not to die is fairly compatible with all our other beliefs and judgements. Murder is bad, for example. That's pretty compatible with not wanting to die.
Counterpoint: I am extremely scared of the fact that I don't exist on Antarctica and in the center of the Andromeda galaxy. And 10 meters below where I am. I'm just as dead on my roof right now. I'm dead in most of the universe RIGHT NOW and this is terrifying.
Update: I've just discovered I am not alone. Turns out Hannibal Hamlin, Abraham Lincoln's V.P., is just as dead/not in existence on my roof. This is very disconcerting and I hope there are no more ghosts like this in my vicinity.
Definitely more than just an off-hand comment, and, I think, quite a common fear among successful people. Bill Gates, Peter Thiel, Larry Ellison, and a handful of other tech execs have all shared how uncomfortable they are with death ("I don't understand how someone can stop existing", greatest fear is not being able to think, "death is a terrible, terrible thing", etc.).
When I was a kid growing up in a small town in the 1980's, radio was my way of finding out about the outside world. I would stay up late at night listening when I was supposed to be sleeping.
I often ended up listening to Larry King's late night radio show. Although unlikely for the medium and time slot, he was somehow able to attract amazing guests, and I learned about a lot of things. I especially remember his interviews with Isaac Asimov and Douglas Adams, which introduced me to those authors. RIP.
I never cared for his tv shows but I recall enjoying his late night am radio show that I listened to each night at my summer university semester in Texas back in 1992. He was pretty quick on his feet dealing w obnoxious callers. For some reason I still recall (and chuckle) him cutting down a nasty caller with, “you, sir, are lonely by the choice of others”. Amuses me 30 years later.
Part of the reason he was able to attract guests was because he didn't ask tough or technical questions. That's not a criticism, I think there's more than enough room for both the Larry Kings and Isaac Chotners of the world, and they're both important in their own ways.
> All of the US politicians who obstructed a proper pandemic response back in March have his and 350k others' blood on their hands.
What about all the other big EU countries that have comparable death rates? (The UK, France, Spain, Italy, etc.) And what about the countervailing economic devastation caused by lockdowns?
How much “blood” does Fauci and the CDC have on their hands for lying about masks early in the pandemic?
Moralizing public policy like this is one of the worst ideas we’ve had in the last few decades and we need to goddamn cut it out.
> Moralizing public policy like this is one of the worst ideas we’ve had in the last few decades
Amen. Politicizing and protesting mask wearing is the dumbest thing Republicans could have done to their own agenda of keeping the economy going. I really don’t get it. What our leaders should have been asking us to do is wear a mask to go out shopping safely. At least Fauci admitted it was a mistake to say early on not to get masks, at least his statements were aimed at protecting COVID responders, and at least he corrected it fairly early on.
The way I read that whole situation with Fauci, it seemed like there was a presidential order not to encourage mask wearing. The CDC should've know better; in fact, I think they did. I'm by no means involved in the medical field, but simple physics tells me that a layer of stuff between me and another person means less of my gems get to them. If you're a professional in that area of study, I imagine there's zero doubt that masks are the right choice. No downside, only upside. By similar logic, Fauci knew. Then at some point it seemed like he realized he would probably get fired no matter what he said, so he grew a pair and started speaking truth.
Yes, it was incredibly stupid. But so was people throwing around "blood on your hands" rhetoric every time someone mentioned the very legitimate need to reopen the economy. I remember American media flipping out over Trump saying we can't stay locked down forever, and then watching Germans nod soberly along while Angela Merkel said the exact same thing.
We've become addicted to moralizing political decisions. Reagan unfortunately is responsible for a lot of that, also Gingrich. But since Obama Democrats have run with that tactic too.
Angela Merkel is taken seriously because she's a serious person. Americans flipped out over Trump because he was in complete denial about the crisis. He had no credibility when he talked about reopening because he was also calling covid-19 the sniffles and inventing ridiculous new "treatments" on the spot. It wasn't wrong to be alarmed.
I take your point, but the pandemic is different from the economy as a whole†, with different incentives. It is probably possible to keep society running with total indifference to COVID-19, pretending that its death toll is essentially the same as a bad flu. Over a million people would die, but society can metabolize a million deaths without really skipping a beat.
Preventing as many of those deaths as is reasonably possible requires sacrifice and expenditure, and really the only incentive we have to undertake that is moral.
I don't think the problem is that "blood on their hands" is moralizing, but rather that it's hackneyed, shrill, and unpersuasive.
Sorry that you don't like my writing style. Next time I will rephrase "have blood on their hands" as: "have committed manslaughter through their wilful negligence in dealing with the pandemic back in March when it was obviously going to start killing people".
Really, I don't think it's hackneyed or shrill to decry so many deaths. Unless you also think memorializing the September 11 terrorist attacks is also hackneyed and shrill.
What about all the other big EU countries that have comparable death rates?
The US actually is fairly unique in that excess mortality never returned to baseline.
For example, Belgium is one of the European countries that was hit hardest: Mid-April, twice the number of people died per week than the average of 2015-19. The numbers were back to normal a month later (until the next wave hit in August).
In the US, deaths also peaked mid-April. But while deaths were up by a factor of 'only' 1.5, excess mortality never went back to normal for all of 2020.
There's widespread criticism of the pandemic response in England, France, etc.
Are you just objecting to the phrase? It seems obvious enough that Trump is responsible for much of the failure in the US, failure that exacerbated the death toll. If he had done sensible things instead of dancing around talking about injecting bleach, it's painfully likely it would have made a difference. And then the choices about who led the response. Why was Kushner involved at all? He had no obvious experience to suggest he should be making decisions (and had pretty much already demonstrated incompetence).
Yes, I am, which is why I referred to “moralizing” above. Public policies kill people directly or indirectly. If you reduce GDP growth by 0.5% you can convert that to a body count.
Rhetoric like saying people have “blood on their hands” is just an attempt to emotionalize the issue. And it destroys our political debate and discourse.
The people who make the policies have morals that leak into them.
Is it moral to force people into work without protection and no recourse against their employer when they get sick and their family member dies? Sounds like we should make a moral judgment against that policy and the ones who made it to me.
Covid death rates seem pretty uncorrelated with wealth the world over. As to the US being exceptional—it is in many respects, but quick and coordinated societal and government response has never been one of those things. There is a long-standing joke that “Americans will eventually do the right thing, after they’ve tried everything else.”
Fauci should've been fired for his original comments on masks. Outrageous! His backpedaling comment on why he chose those words was even worse. Given how long he's been in that role, I believe there are powers at work keeping him in, from Big Pharma or something else.
But I really want to know who decided to abandon HHS' plan to mail masks out to every household. If that person or team can be held accountable, I can overlook Fauci's addiction to being a TV star.
Decades ago, the news networks used to beam AV via satellite directly from the remote station in the field back to headquarters to be broadcast. They didn’t encrypt those signals, so anyone could pick them up if they knew how. This was raw footage, so there would often be candid segments showing people setting stuff up or getting ready for an interview.
Someone recorded a lot of these and later published a multi-hour compilation of them on YouTube. I forget the name of that compilation, but I can tell you that the following is by far the most interesting segment from it.
When I try to tell people about this segment, they don’t believe me. They write me off as being insane. Decide for yourself. Don’t believe what the news media tells you.
Edit: DanG, why is my comment being collapsed when it has ~20 upvotes?
And you would say the same thing if the same footage came out but it was Bill O Reilly, Rupert Murdoch and George Bush instead of Clinton, King and Turner?
In what context should billionaire media moguls be serving, colluding or collaborating with politicians of any kind, let alone a presidential candidate?
There is a long history of presidentially-appointed people saying they "serve at the pleasure of the President." It simply means that they hold the job only so long as the president wants them there.
This has extended "serving" to broader, more casual usage when speaking about people who work for the president as you can see here. It's not "serving" like working as a servant/a billionaire doing whatever the president says in a controlling/exploitative way, it just means that Larry King thinks that Ted Turner wouldn't turn down a cabinet appointment.
You can also infer from the way King says that "what's he got left in life to gain," and Clinton's surprised "you're kidding," that they both consider this kind of service to be a major downgrade from the billionaire life - King saying here that Ted Turner has nothing left to gain indicates a separation in his mind between personal gain and working for the Clinton administration. Clinton's surprised response tells us he feels the same way, surprise that a billionaire would want to work for the president.
"Deciding for yourself" doesn't mean jumping to conspiratorial conclusions based on an ambiguous, off-the-cuff remark from 1992, though. And just looking at the comments on that video you can see what sort of agenda these people are bringing to their judgments.
Most journalism has an editorial line, which is usually aligned with the people that pay the bills. It is the case for newspapers, radio, TV... even websites.
Very rarely you have journalism with neutral editorial lines.
There's no such thing as neutrality. Usually when people talk about neutrality, they really mean status quo, or worse giving equal weight to "both sides" (implying the major US political parties are the only possible views on a subject), without even trying to assertain the truth of the matter.
Journalism isn't simply putting facts down on paper, but it's also interpreting how it affects the reader. Even if you pretend to simply write the who what when and where of a story, you still have to choose what to cover. That in and of itself has no right answer, you inevitably make an idological choice.
You can argue "there's no such thing as neutrality"... but consider the following:
News Station A:
1. Heavily edited clip of political candidate saying something.
2. News anchor provides a 10 min opinion of what happened.
3. An analyst is invited to give their opinion about what happened for 30 min..
News Station B:
1. Video of what happened.
2. News anchor describes when it happened and where. No accompanying opinion is provided.
What is more neutral? News Station B, for sure. The first format is the only one available in the US, in my country that format is considered yellow journalism and is unacceptable.
If this hypothetical political candidate is saying something that's not true (or is disputed), and news station B just runs a raw video of their speech, you could argue it's favoring that candidate by allowing their message to spread without providing the appropriate context.
But in this scenario, the news station is not providing enough information for the citizen to develop an informed opinion. I guess there's room for a service like that that just has raw video (as one element of a wider media ecosystem), but it's also valuable for the news to actually explain events in a larger context.
No leaked videos are even necessary. It should be obvious to any critical thinker that CNN is the Democrat version of FOX news with a small amount of viewing.
I don't see anything wrong with this. I mean it's like I'm talking to Elon Musk. And I have a friend who really wants to work at Tesla. Yeah I'd be a good friend and mention him to Elon Musk.
yikes, what a sleazebag. Larry hit the anti-Semitic trifecta (Jews, Israel and media moguls in bed with politicians) in under a minute of just random chit chat. The mind reels at the shady backroom deals this man was responsible for.
Nothing especially bad. He talks about how incredible it is he reaches so many countries with his broadcast-- at the time a staggering thought-- and to illustrate tells a story of seeing a praying Rabbi at the Wailing/Western wall in Jerusalem who turns to ask king about domestic US politics (Ross Perot, who ran against Clinton and Bush).
Then he basically says Ted Turner, founder of CNN, is a nice guy to work for and is a fan of Clinton (as if he is not allowed to be?) and could "serve you" whatever that means which I guess could be as ominous as your imagination allows but probably means in his administration.
There is zero antisemitism expressed. Only Larry King and the Israeli rabbi interested in American politics are Jewish. Clinton, Perot, and Turner are not.
The way I interpret it, Mr. King is suggesting to Clinton he (Clinton) might be interested in establishing a reciprocal relationship with one of most prominent media moguls and politically influential billionaires, Ted Turner.
Teddy helps Billy with the optics on CNN, maybe funding various campaigns, and in turn Billy helps Teddy with his own projects, like I dunno, passing a bill to kill off competitors and so on.
Long and short of it: Ted Turner is the guy who created CNN, a very influential news source in the US. Many people consider CNN to be a "left-wing" news source, and in the clip King talks to Bill Clinton, a democratic politician, about Ted Turner "serving" Clinton after he was elected president.
The use of the word "serving" is the issue, as it sounds like a quid pro quo.
You have to see this through 90's lens: back then the media wasn't nearly as polarized, and the public had much greater trust in news networks, especially in CNN. "Fake news" was mostly relegated to the domain of conspiracy theories, and blatant promotions of political agendas as neutral news wouldn't fly back then (although, of course, the networks did have an agenda and did promote it, but they were... much more subtle and civil about the whole thing).
In the 90's the bias was shown in the stories they choose to cover and what they choose to ignore not in the coverage itself
this is still true today but now in addition to this bias there is almost zero "strait" reporting, everything has political commentary mixed in, some more subtle than others but it is still there. Even in places like APnews where it is more subtle
CNN is not really “left-wing” in a broad ideological sense. It’s the unofficial mouthpiece of the Democratic Party and the “liberal” side of the US culture war. Note for example how poorly they treated Sanders who was further left than any of the other mainstream candidates.
I'm tired of fact-based and reason-based news being painted as 'left-wing". CNN is just the news. I miss when we all watched the same news and it tried to be objective and half the country wasn't watching provably false news and wanting to split off into madness and domestic terror cells and make the human race go backwards.
If you believe CNN is "just the news" then you are suffering from reinforcing confirmation bias as well as echo chamber.
You agree with the positions CNN takes there for it is "news" and outlets that have differing positions to those you agree with are "fake news" and "want to make the human race go backwards"
There is a difference between “this news source strikes me as not being too politically extreme in either direction compared to my own views” and “this news source is completely neutral and objective with respect to all political views.”
How can you be sure you’re not seeing the former and calling it the latter?
It is 100% NOT the liberal side of the cultural war. There really is no liberal side
The right side is theological authoritarian, the Left side is illiberal Identitarianism which is ironic because identitarianism started out as a "far right" ideology but in a real world example of the horseshoe theory of politics has become far-left authoritarian
Tangentially related: the first time I got online with a 56k modem way back in mid ‘99, cnn.com was the first website I could think of pointing my browser (Netscape) to.
I remember being online around '98 and I remember playing starcraft but that's about it. I can't even remember what I read on the internet. I think cheatcc.com? Haha
Went online because I heard Nasa put up pictures of Mars so the first website I went to was nasa.gov
I typed out the entire url like nasa.gov/pathfinder/images or whatever it was after seeing it on TV and writing it down. It took a while to load and then was super underwhelming. I think I searched for Sonic The Hedgehog next.
First time was me and my dad going to the local library, really thinking on what the heck to do. I think we went for lego.com (I must've been around nine at the time?).
Later when we got internet at home we looked up "spelletjes" (Dutch for games) aaand ended up on a porn site. Thankfully not one with images on the front page.
I don't remember what the first site I visited was, but I remember the whole hype about "going online on the internet" and it being rather anticlimactic in the end.
> He has arranged to have his body frozen and then thawed out when researchers discover a cure for whatever killed him — the so-called cryonics approach. (Unlike Williams, King does not wish to have his dead head cut off.) King told me later that the people behind cryonics are ‘‘all nuts,’’ but at least if he knows he will be frozen he will die with a shred of hope. ‘‘Other people have no hope,’’ King said.
Neal Stephenson's most recent novel "Fall; or, Dodge in Hell" is about cryonics. As usual, it's sprawling and arguably too long, but as usual, there are interesting ideas in there on the economics and politics of the idea, on simulation vs resurrection, etc.
It seems that like with Stephen King that the more famous the author gets, the less power the editors get to push back.
In the case of Stephenson, this is counteracted a bit by Stephenson improving his craft somewhat over the years. His earlier novels all had very weak endings in my opinion, and that improved somewhat. But his never novels could use tightening.
Great book, but it was not about cryonics. You can move the "mind" into a computer. And those computerized minds start to create a world of their own. People outside can only watch this chaotic activity and grant more resources. Simply because it is truly entertaining.
"at least if he knows he will be frozen he will die with a shred of hope. ‘‘Other people have no hope,’’ King said."
I've always found it interesting how for most people and in most religions the hope is to be resurrected, go to heaven, and/or live forever, while in Buddhism the point is to escape the cycle of death and rebirth.
It's a completely different approach, which sees more life as something to be avoided rather than desired.
I'm Buddhist and I'm currently happy with the "cycle of death and rebirth" for now. I have infinite time, after all. And this Human game is fun for now.
Honestly I would be worried of it because of all the crazy distopia sci fi stuff one that always resonated to me as "I could see it happen" is those where bodies are donated / preserved by a private entity which ends up changing hands god knows how many time until you wake up in a nightmare later on.
What has historically happened is just that the company goes bankrupt, the bodies defrost in random warehouses and is finally disposed of in less-than-respectable fashion.
There is pretty much zero chance that a cryopreserved individual would be revived. They're frozen when dying or dead, the process itself causes significant damage (with every mitigation just trading in a different severe form of damage), and even if future technology could undo all that and somehow make this severely damaged body somewhat operational, why in the world would anyone bother?
The person is forgotten, replaced, and has nothing in their name any more. There is no gain for those reviving them.
> What has historically happened is just that the company goes bankrupt, the bodies defrost in random warehouses and is finally disposed of in less-than-respectable fashion.
Source? Based on my research, no cryonic institution has failed in this manner to date.
"... all but one of the documented cryonic preservations prior to 1973 ended in failure, and the thawing out and disposal of the bodies.". There are a decent number of articles and documentaries on the matter.
Even now it's a fringe psuedoscience with little support or even regulation. Expecting a company to be both able and willing to pay the bill to store and freeze your body in perpetuity seems... Naïve. Looking at average company lifetimes might be a useful metric here.
That's actually possible, because you're not resurrecting a specific, dead wooly mammoth, you're growing a new one. Natural reproductive processes are an effective way to create living things, unlike thawing corpses with what are almost certainly irrevocably damaged brains.
Would a dying person be able to set up a trust fund or a bank account/investment that would "live on" when they die. Issue I see here is that the law does not recognize "crypreservation" as continuation of life so all your assets are probably inherited.
I'm sure cryo companies offer this type of safekeeping of money or investment.
it's hard to have faith that such an account could exist long enough to pay for your revival many years in the future. it would be very tempting for the living to raid large funds that are earmarked for reviving dead people. who would stop them?
I know personally, if I had the opportunity, I would gladly spent time bringing someone frozen back to life. I don't gain anything, but I also don't gain anything when I donate to charity either. The simple chance to do something good in the world is all the motivation I need.
They may get lucky. In Heinlein’s The Door into Summer the protagonist only survives the long sleep because he ends up put into storage with the wrong repository, but that happened to be the one that kept the lights on for 30 years.
Cryonics simply assumes the eventual development of molecular nano-technology per Drexler is able to repair both the freezing damage and any medical problems too. Not at all unlikely in a few decades, and almost certain within a century.
As for who would want you back ... your children, hopefully. And if there's no repair before they die ... hopefully their children would want them back. Etc.
That's a solution to staying cold, not a solution to avoid getting severely damaged by the freezing process, already being weak/sick/dead at the time of freezing, and there being no realistic outcome other than being reduced to a sad meat popsicle.
> Why wouldn't you do this if you have the money? :-)
I've had these fantasies, too and then I thought, "Why wouldn't you just leave a few cells and then have someone re-clone you?"
The obvious answer is that your memories/experiences are wiped out and what I _really_ want is to continue on with my pre-existing memories/experiences. It would be more optimal if you could pickle your memories, clone yourself and then (at some appropriate time later in life) "re-implant" the memories into your clone. I think that's what people like Larry King are really hoping for.
But then there's all sorts of problems with this (e.g., your loved ones will presumably be gone, so who's going to give a shit about your memories? etc. etc.).
The prospect of death is frightening to most of us.
> what I _really_ want is to continue on with my pre-existing memories/experiences
This reminds me of an interesting philosophical question.
To state the obvious, even if the clone had an exact copy of your memories/experiences, that clone isn't you, you've died. If I had a teleportation machine that could "teleport" you to work by destroying you painlessly and instantly at the source location, and reconstruct you particle for particle at destination, how many would use it? I wouldn't, however irrational that may be, because "I" would be dead.
This bias is pretty interesting since by that definition we all die multiple times, as the particles that constitute our body are literally interchanging with the environment over time. But we don't feel uncomfortable about that fact.
> This bias is pretty interesting since by that definition we all die multiple times, as the particles that constitute our body are literally interchanging with the environment over time. But we don't feel uncomfortable about that fact.
I've wondered about that, is it strictly true? Aren't there heavy metals and other elements that are accumulated in the body over time? Or at least, they are eliminated so slowly that you'd never rid yourself of them completely before dying. I guess bones replace themselves every 10 years so any incorporated metals would have a chance to be eliminated on that timescale. But what's to stop a few of those elements making their way back into another structure after being ejected into the blood stream? Maybe we've all got a few persistent cadmium or lead atoms hanging out in our bodies from birth to death. Ship of Theseus crisis averted!
It's not really the Ship of Theseus. The question OP was referring to is about the self and the continuity of consciousness specifically. Derek Parfit first proposed it in his book Reasons and Persons.[1][2]
Question though: when that thought experiment is applied to the physical body of a person, aren’t our cells dying and being replaced constantly? Does that mean our identity changes over time and with new experiences? (Mind blown)
Agreed, but by that definition my consciousness in 15 years isn't me either, since most of the cells in my body will have been regenerated with different particles.
Here you have to choose a single company to freeze your head. If you choose the right company you get an afterlife, so you might as well choose one, even if they all seem like total bullshit. It is exactly Pascal's wager.
1. Choose the wrong religion or no religion and you may suffer a fate worse than simple nonexistence. Not so with cryopreservation.
2. Many religions logically exclude other religions, i.e. if they are correct then other religions are not. This is not the case with cryopreservation, where there is a nonzero chance that more than one company may successfully resurrect you.
3. Various monotheistic religions don't accept "I think it's total bullshit but I'm going to act as if I believe it anyway" as belief (opinions vary on what exactly is required), whereas cryopreservation companies are happy to take your money regardless of what you privately think.
1. You're comparing death to death here but the correct comparison is room-temperature death to Hell. Dead-but-cryopreserved is the pre-afterlife state equivalent to death in traditional religions.
2. How do you revive the frozen heads from companies that couldn't pay their freezer bills three decades ago? You don't. Those heads picked the wrong company. Expecting a just god from some other religion to let you into the afterlife anyway is a common response to Pascal's wager.
3. Is the word you're looking for here "faith"? I don't think that word helps your argument. I will concede that there's probably no condition where the company unfreezes you and then kills you because you're not up to their standards. Well, unless they find those old bad reviews you left...
Cryonics (I'm signed up with Alcor) can reduce the measure of you being tortured. Assume a multiverse where some versions of you are going to be tortured for a long time. If you sign up for cryonics, if you get brought back most likely you won't get tortured and so this might reduce the percent of you across the multiverse that is not being tortured.
Let's say that across the multiverse all versions of you are going to collectively live for 1 billion years. Unfortunately, some versions of you will be tortured and let's assume that collectively you will be tortured for 10,000 years meaning that the measure your torture is 10,000 / 1 billion. But if you sign up for cryonics you most likely only get brought back in a world that has cured death and isn't evil. If many versions of you do sign up for cryonics say you live collectively for 2 billion years and are only tortured for 11,000 of these years so the measure of you being tortured is 11,000/ 2 billion.
Ah, it was the “probably a non-torturous society will bring you back, since they are more likely to be altruistic” assumption that I was missing. Of course, it only takes one entity to bring you back for an eternity of torture to ruin this logic, as is the case in IHNMAIMS.
Infinity makes decision making really weird since infinity + 1 is the same as infinity so if you are going to be tortured for infinity years it wouldn't be irrational to volunteer to be tortured for an extra year.
If your don't want to be frozen and want to do something useful with your money.
If you care about preserving yourself, spread your genes or memes is a more effective way
Spreading your memes for money is known as advertising. Not particularly cheap or effective. Didn't hear about anything similar for genes. These two are much better done by investing your own time and your own effort.
Of the remaining important things that money can buy, I think cryogenics is a very decent gamble.
I believe the chance that anyone who is cryopreserved today will ever be revived is exceedingly small, so I look at the whole venture as futile and in the same way I might look at an overly expensive funeral. Personally, I would spend my money to enjoy my life more while I'm alive, or else to help others in some tangible way.
Actually it is important tech for living people as well. The technology De Greg Fahy is working on can be used to freeze and unfreeze organs. It may save your (living) life if you get an organ just at the right time.
Because it's profoundly selfish--you _might_ buy yourself more life in some unspecified future, or the same money today could definitely save and/or improve many, many lives now.
As long as the structure of his brain (at an appropriate level of detail--- how much is enough though?) is preserved for the duration of his ice nap, why couldn't something like a continuation of him be reconstituted some time in the future?
I remember a short movie (from "The Outer Limits?") where frozen bodies where entangled spiritually and there was a psychopath in the group that was making a hell of their lives.
I do not remember the exact story but the idea was interesting to the 22yo me at that time (some 25 years ago)
Some great stories in there including one about how in his early days he would play a game with his producer where he’d go in blind and try and figure out who his guest is. I guess this helped him develop his “average guy” style. While series is worth a listen if interview styles is of interest.
My favorite part of this interview about interviewing.
King: "I hate interviewers who don't ask questions but make statements"
Thorn: "Well that's just what I was going to say. One of things about your interview style that's special is you are a very modest interviewer. You're not afraid to ask a simple question.. uh what is this..."
King: then interrupts his statement and riffs as if Thorn had asked the question "Why do you ask simple questions". :D
I saw him several times at Dodger stadium. I never met him as I didn't want to go bother the guy.
For those that don't know, he was a massive baseball and Dodger fan and would sit right behind home plate. He could often be seen on TV.
He would often go to games and just sit at the bar watching from inside. Crazy but I guess he felt more comfortable there at the stadium instead of at home.
In my mind any good he's done was long erased by his informercials for scam supplements -- no wonder old folks hate the Government, most of what they see advertised on TV is fraud in plain site and nobody does anything about it.
It’s funny you should blame the government for this. In the 90s people actually died from shady supplements. In response the FDA tried to expand its authority to regulating these supplements. The industry started a scaremongering ad campaign telling people that they wouldn’t be able to get Vitamin C supplements unless they wrote their congressman. Many did. Reps received more letters from their constituents on this one Bill than the entire Vietnam War [1]. In response to pressure from constituents, government reversed course.
The unelected experts in Government tried to do the right thing. It’s the people who were so easily misled that forced the end of regulation for dietary supplements.
Paraphrasing what Terry Pratchett said, the problem here isn’t that we have the wrong sort of government, it’s that we have the wrong sort of people.
Former US Rep Henry Waxman has written about his efforts to regulate supplements. It won't surprise you that certain stake holders, like US Sen Orrin Hatch (Utah), ran interference. (Mormons love their vitamins.)
Older me has come to see these slap fights as generational, a la Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions. It's a really big deal. Until it isn't. Marriage equality, cannabis legalization, banning cigarette ads, yada yada.
One of my political friends worked EIGHTEEN YEARS to pass the most modest portion of some family medical leave legislation. These reforms take tenacity, undying optimism, and no small amount of nuttiness. (Normal people choose to do more normal things.)
The same people don't trust the media and I am sure that they lose many percentage points because of scammy ads, not because they think it through, but because the scam ad feelings blend over into the media ezperience.
As for the "wrong sort of people" - iirc, most dangerous ingredients and chemicals from the 90s were diet pills, calorie free sweeteners, appetite suppressants, etc. We'd rather die than have a little dad bod.
True, but it's a somewhat false dichotomy. More like "rather die than drink unsweetened drinks." A body to die for has a little glory to it. Dying for gluttony is closer to the mark.
Nothing is erased by other things, luckily. We just have to live with complexity. That's not to say nothing overshadows other things, but if one deed canceled another there would be nearly no deeds.
If you zero out everyone who ever worked for a filthy oil company, pharma, held bad beliefs, buys or sells harmful products, etc... there isn't much that's decent in the world.
High standards is a good thing, and we should strive to live our ideals but there is a gulf between our ideals and our present reality. "To hell with reality" is not a viable perspective.
If you are reborn born a pharaoh's prince tomorrow, is the only moral path fratricide?
“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them.
But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”
I laugh when I see so called progressives acting the same as puritanical early Americans in their infantile understanding of humanity.
Leonard Cohen's Anthem is about something similar:
Ah, the wars they will be fought again /
The holy dove, she will be caught again /
Bought and sold, and bought again /
The dove is never free
Ring the bells that still can ring /
Forget your perfect offering. /
There is a crack, a crack in everything /
That's how the light gets
George Martin quotes a William Faulkner all the time about fictional subject matter.
“The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself.”
It's why his fantasy stories have that gritty realism. The knights of Gondor riding against the evil horde of Sauron meme becomes parody. Good and evil is more subtle, cuts through the heart of every human being... regularly. The fantasy element is just about scale. It might be a choice between being kinda jerky and nice. Most people can be both. Novels get into a character's head. Stories where good and evil is a conflict within that head feel more real, because that's what it's like inside our heads.
There is actual objective good though, and objective evil.
Did you see the video of the chinese man beating Uygur children that were "given" to him because their parents were harvested off to whatever the fuck the chinese government are going to do to those parents.
As a father of three daughters, I would personally kill that motherfucker for what he did to those three little girls.
My actions would be an objectively GOOD thing for humanity by killing that piece of shit. His actions were objectively EVIL and if anyone can watch that video and think there is *anything* ok with it, then they are also objectively EVIL.
Government definitely shares the blame here but let's not forget business practices that humor the idea of directly lying to customers.
Statistically, that older population are the very population that votes for representatives pushing looser regulations/enforcement on businesses that enable these sort of behaviors. Representatives clearly looking out for business interests over the average voter's interest (the consumers) don't help matters.
R gets elected and proceeds to sabotage government
R: See government doesn’t work!
Example: Trump put Rick Perry in charge of the Department of Energy including our nuclear labs. Rick Perry had previously said the Department of Energy should be dismantled and should no longer exist.
King came from overnight talk radio, and scammy supplements have always a big part of that business.
Today it’s escalated... bs supplements are like a form of money laundering. How do you think every angry talk show host says the same exact thing at the same time?
One of the more amusing cultural intersections I've seen is Larry King on Snoop Dogg's YouTube channel... though I guess given the latter's collaborations with Martha Stewart it shouldn't be _that_ surprising. RIP.
Larry King was the OG interviewer. To the point, rational, always asking pointed questions, yet not shying from adding a dash of humor. Yet to find anyone on par with him.
>> News channels were always like this. We just have the internet to cross check now.
CNN was not in the beginning. They were a scrappy news channel that came to prominence with real reporting (most notably in the Iraq war). They got corrupted once it was clear they could not be ignored.
News sources have probably always had bias, but it was never such blatant characature back in the day.
Anecdotally, (and I am American) it was also somewhere between the Gulf War and the OJ Simpson trial that cable changed from some exotic thing that rich people paid for to something a lot of your friends had.
Bernard Shaw and a couple of other reporters from what I remember. I distinctly recall tuning in a few minutes after things started and listening to them hide in the hotel room as Iraqi security started to clear the hotel that all of the reporters were staying in at the time.
CNN launched in 1980.
The Gulf war was in 1990.
Larry King Live premiered on CNN in 1985.
CNN has long been a mix of news and opinion, like all news media ever. That’s why media exists: to push facts and interpretations of those facts.
Media is not a charity: William Randolph Hearst and Ted Turner want something for their money: they want to control the narrative.
It has always been blatant: you just haven’t been paying attention. Hearst started a war! He was such a reviled figure that one of the greatest movies ever made was made to dunk on him.
I distinctly remember when CNN jumped the shark. It was during the 2000 election coverage when they started introducing all these computer generated graphics.
I remember their coverage of Monica Lewinsky and related issues being pretty annoying, along with the rest of the networks.
I remember when Clinton tried to attack claimed al Qaeda infrastructure after the embassy bombings and made a speech about bin Laden (the first time I heard the name) they asked if it was to distract from Monica. Compared it to the film Wag the Dog.
News channels do not broadcast 24 hours of news. The majority of programming are personalities, opinions and "recaps." The actual news comes on in hour-long chunks once early in the morning, mid-day and at primetime.
I'm not going to say my news is perfect, but it's from a non-commercial / nonpartisan organization, they get money from the government / taxes (which is less than ideal, but their independence is codified I believe), etc. It sticks to the news, professional-like.
Switch to the commercial channels (we thankfully don't have major 24 hour news channels) and the news on there has much more er, Personalities, quirkiness, some silly background news, and a weatherman that travels the country to visit events and petting zoos and shit.
The trick is paying attention long enough to determine if sources stay consistent, issue proper corrections & retractions, are intellectually honest, etc.
Or if the purveyors are just hacking ratings, for more ad revenue.
In the 80s, I eschewed a career in broadcast media. I loved the gear, doing creative stuff, working in the studio. But absolutely hated the business. "If it bleeds, it leads."
We've been complaining about outrage engines since the beginning. Social media just made things much much worse.
State-funded media has it's own problems but at least there's some accountability which is effectively nonexistent for large media companies. As long as the free market rewards sensationalism, there will be profit driven "journalism." Ultimately, the general populace needs to be educated on the veracity of news in the digital age; how to spot a misleading headline, and how to corroborate actual expository works.
I think some news was always like this; but I think investigative journalism like Glenn Greenwald used to be given more time in the primetime news. Really shocking things were uncovered and actually spread (like Norman Gorin's 60 Minutes Report on 1976 swine flu). There is news that is fantastic now, but it is getting pushed further and further out.
"facts", when presented individually, can create almost any impression the fact presenter wants to create. and that's what we've been seeing so much of - people looking at "facts" outside of larger contexts, and (intentionally or not) drawing wrong conclusions.
You are correct there. It is easy to take two facts and extrapolate almost anything you want. I think the issue is that in a lot of modern news the facts are lost in the opinions and rhetoric and extrapolation to the party line. It is better to have lists of facts than lists of opinions; and even better to have a coherent collection of facts that all corroborate one another. It is good to have a variety of primary sources and hard data over a long time period. Too often the news just quotes a death figure without giving you context of how many people usually die in a year, or other information; presumably that data exists. It would be much better to have death rates for each year over the last hundred years, then be able to compare.
I had months of people telling me the 'fact' that "Fauci said not to wear a mask! That's a fact! Go read it here!"
When presented with "well, he also later said 'wear a mask' - which is also a fact"... I would get "fake news" or "he flip flops and therefore can't be trusted". When pointed out they were still 'trusting' the "don't wear a mask" fact... things usually ended there, with some profanity thrown my way.
When more information was presented, it was almost always countered with "that's just your opinion". Or... "I don't trust CNN", etc. At some point a switch flips with many people and "facts" only count when they match your internal belief system.
Al Jazeera English (can’t speak to the other streams) has 30-60 minute blocks of actual news throughout the day. Another benefit is that they have a more global perspective so those news blocks are a lot more likely to be covering the unrest in Darfur than a human interest story about a woman in Idaho who just ate her 10000th Big Mac
PBS News Hour? There isn’t enough of National or Global importance to fill a 24/7 broadcast so any channel that needs to fill that amount of time is doomed to have poor quality.
They’ll repeat, but it’s not clear why that is poor quality. It’s not a bad thing that there’s not true, honest to goodness, novel news at all hours of the day.
I wish more people would post primary sources & hard data. A lot of people will disagree with the content, but "The Last American Vagabond"[1] does a good job of presenting primary sources (usually medical journals/studies, gov't press releases, interviews, CDC, WHO etc.); includes links to all of them in all show notes so you can look through all of it. The main point here is that including primary sources is important, and I don't see most people doing that. I wish more news sources would include the primary sources and more hard data to support their position.
It's just as misleading to string together dozens of "sources" in an article to prop up a narrative. It appears to me that the website you've linked is just playing on peoples paranoia, a la YouTube "news" channels. If the actual content has to chase the dramatic headline the entire time, you can be sure that it's a whole lot of BS.
But even if news LOOKS like they stick to the facts, you should still look at them critically and get your news from multiple sources; they can still influence your opinion simply by omission or by emphasis (random example: put a muslim terrorist attack front and center, put a nazi terrorist attack in a byline or not publish it at all).
The news items themselves can be presented neutrally, but what news to present and how still matters.
Simple, do what they are doing with the Nashville bombing and the Las Vegas shooting before that. Don’t bother investigating any relatives, family members, or neighbors. Do a few fluff interviews with the FBI or the police and put it somewhere at the bottom of the page.
I used to watch CNN, but it just doesn't seem serious anymore. It's all about getting people into heated debates (inspired by Fox maybe?) or presenters having emotions or interviewers trying to corner people with their righteousness. Amanpour has very different approaches depending on who she interviews; her preferences are just too obvious.
The news channel I like best nowadays is Aljazeera. I like some shows on RT, but it is not really a news channel either.
Mostly CNN is sensationalistic and wants to develop an attachment to it's brand. CNN has to fill 24 hrs of TV and has less budget to do it then a network has for the half hour evening broadcast.
That means as little flying to flyover states as possible, never leave WDC or Atlanta, certainly dont send Anderson Cooper to Egypt where he could get beat up by government thugs.
Thus its a lot easier to make the news about yourself; reminds me of the ESPN morning SportsCenter from years ago -- when they ran out of sports lowlights the anchors would get caught abusing people on tape.
AC used to go to interesting places and do interesting things. After he got beat up they'd have him sit behind a desk and report on WDC politicians acting like children except he had to take them seriously instead of calling out their behavior.
Before Trump came on the scene you would hear them talk about themselves on a slow news Sunday, and the big problem they face was low ratings. You might think they just chased away people with saturation cover of school shootings and plane crashes, but they tried many different things and convinced themselves they were doing the optimal thing.
Probably the owners thought about shutting it down, but the presence of Fox News made that seem really irresponsible.
Trump came and it was great for ratings, like 9/11 every day. That's over now.
There are Arwa Damon and Clarissa Ward. Then another female anchor, who people-smuggled herself through Africa with a hidden camera. They are all serious badasses, I don't even watch movies that tense.
There will always be another storm season for Chris Cuomo and AC. :-)
Every organization has bias, period. Some have more, some have less. The sooner one recognizes and accepts it, the sooner one is able to have constructive conversations and consume media with the appropriate level of skepticism.
News is a business like any other. They require money, which is equal to clicks in the online world. Hate the game, not the player (unless they are purposefully distorting reality).
CNN is a warner media company and they're a for profit business. They will say anything to make money. If you're an expert in a topic, read how it's reported in CNN/media. You will see how much they lie and exaggerate.
If we are talking about the TV station, 20% of any given news clip are actual information, the remaining 80% are spins and opinion from the editor or host.
Watch recordings of the news coverage of 9/11. The news casters were sober and stunned of course, but they were emotionally calm and allowed for moments of silence. They tried to only reference what they considered facts, or were extremely explicit in stating that something was a rumor.
Look at them now. The emotionality of everything is amped up to 11. They reference Twitter constantly. Everything is an existential crisis, and when Trump was in office, everything was his fault. During the 2015 democratic primaries and 2016 election, CNN got the nickname "Clinton News Network" because of how one-sided the coverage was.
There's a reason that trust in news is decaying. Though this is kind of a tangent from the main topic.
They always leaned left. But there was an expectation of being neutral, or at least appearing so. Basically being professional.
That restraint has been lost. Watching young reporters is painful in his much they are tying to get jabs in.
Like a dog being rewarded for killing neighbors chickens.
I am pretty left wing but what I have seen from CNN lately was basically a left wing version of FoxNews. Lots of opinion mixed with a little amount of news and clearly geared against Trump. Definitely not the CNN from around 2000.
The danger in having so many extremist elements on the right side is, in part, breeding extremism on the left. The situation would be helped if the right side extremism became less extreme - either through lack of interest or conscious choice on their part.
"CNN lately was basically a left wing version of FoxNews. Lots of opinion mixed with a little amount of news and clearly geared against Trump."
You don't have to be on the left to be critical of Trump. Plenty of right wingers (including Bush Jr) are critical of him. He's made a lot of enemies all over the political spectrum.
To me CNN is basically a right-wing channel, just not as right-wing as FOX.
For real left-wing media, watch Democracy Now! or read The Nation.
Don’t parrot popular false narratives. CNN still has news today, though generally only on breaking news type situations. It turns out the Internet is better for headlines then a thirty-minute talking head loop.
And when on CNN Larry King wasn’t part of their news operation. He was a talk show radio host. Larry King Live was Oprah for old men. Larry King is big part of why CNN moved away from 100% news.
This has been a persistent issue for years. The obituaries are a really weird quirk of HN, which is otherwise not a general news site. Some public figure dies, no particular relevance to this site's users, nobody has anything especially interesting to say, but there's the post at the top of the page. Baffling.
So the director recorded a TON of footage from these moments where the politicians and news anchors acted themselves, seemingly unaware that anyone was watching.
The segments with Larry King are, um, memorable. Very candid moments.
1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spin_(1995_film)