“The Credibility Paradox: Violence as a Double-Edged Sword in International Politics”, Abrahms 2013 (excerpts; Why does terrorism so rarely succeed in policy goals compared to guerrilla warfare, and trigger backfire effects? Because use of terrorist tactics triggers the horns effect; given the same hypothetical, they are perceived as fundamentally hateful, unable to keep negotiated commitments, & intrinsically preferring violence.)
I found this disappointing because it seems like I read similar articles about imminent breakthroughs in anti-aging back in the 1990′s, only the names of the elixirs have changed. Remember the hype about melatonin a few years ago?
At least Guarente understands that it takes a baseline of many decades to see if these experiments make a difference. He doesn’t go for this “immortality in 30 years” nonsense that plagues folk transhumanism.
Dr. Bruce Ames did something like this several years ago to promote the use of the combination of acetyl-l-carnitine and alpha lipoic acid as an experiment to decelerate aging in human mitochondria:
Ishtvan’s entire approach is so ethically disturbing and PR-toxic, it really doesn’t help the transhumanist movement to promote him. The first and second of his “Transhumanist Laws” basically amount to just screaming “I defect!” repeatedly. This is unfortunate because he’s a decent writer and he also does on occasion make interesting points that I haven’t seen elsewhere.
Istvan’s constant self-promotion bothers me. I never heard of this guy until two years ago, when he published The Transhumanist Wager. I read that and reviewed in Cryonics magazine because it involves cryonics as a subplot.
Then I started to see his writings in several places. And last summer he got on one of John Stossel’s specials on the Fox network, where both he and Stossel represented him as a leader in the cryonics community.
Again, I signed up with Alcor a quarter century ago, and I never heard of Istvan until early in 2013. Who made him a “leader” in the cryonics movement, and based on what criteria?
Now he has started a “Transhumanist Party” and he wants to insert himself into American national politics. We could see him in one of those debates with the other off-brand Presidential candidates from the Green Party, the Libertarian Party and other fringe groups.
Now, I approve of the fact that he wants to draw attention to some ideas for technological progress that we should push on a lot harder than we have so far. But what has he really offered us other than telling us about his action-hero life on the sailboat, how he doesn’t want to die, please read his novel (he often discounts his Kindle version, or even offers it for free), and vote for him for President?
Istvan claims he was born in L.A., grew up there and then went to Columbia University. But something about his accent doesn’t sound right to me. I lived in Southern California during the years 1991-2004, so I’ve had plenty of exposure to how people in the Southland talk.
I think “Transhumanism” is a political non-starter as it just has too many weird/negative mental associations. A serious attempt at a pro-science/pro-technology political party should start by shedding the term “transhumanism” and some of its associated themes, like cyborgs and strange/unnecessary human modification.
There is a huge amount of enthusiasm for technology and science among the Millennials and even some Gen Xers, but most of it is just frittered away on worthless projects like Solar Freakin Roadways and enthusiasm for consumer electronics.
There is a huge amount of enthusiasm for technology and science among the Millennials and even some Gen Xers, but most of it is just frittered away on worthless projects like Solar Freakin Roadways and enthusiasm for consumer electronics.
I think there is a huge amount of enthusiasm for consumer electronics which is misinterpreted as enthusiasm for technology and science.
Radical Muslims have embraced social media, for example. And I’ve gathered that the snuff film of the Jordanian prisoner shows good production values, though I don’t care to watch that because I’ll just hear the Middle English song “Sumer is icumen in” in my head.
Short Online Texts Thread
Everything is heritable:
“Are Political Orientations Genetically Transmitted?”, Alford et al 2005 (excerpts)
“Paternal Antisocial Behavior and Sons’ Cognitive Ability: A Population-Based Quasiexperimental Study”, Latvala et al 2014 (excerpts)
“Rabbit genome analysis reveals a polygenic basis for phenotypic change during domestication”, Carneiro et al 2014 (the power of selection—complex behaviors influenced by many small changes; excerpts)
Politics/religion:
“Reactionary Philosophy In An Enormous, Planet-Sized Nutshell”
“The Credibility Paradox: Violence as a Double-Edged Sword in International Politics”, Abrahms 2013 (excerpts; Why does terrorism so rarely succeed in policy goals compared to guerrilla warfare, and trigger backfire effects? Because use of terrorist tactics triggers the horns effect; given the same hypothetical, they are perceived as fundamentally hateful, unable to keep negotiated commitments, & intrinsically preferring violence.)
“Blonde cargoes: Finnish children in the slave markets of medieval Crimea”
“New poll finds majority of Americans believe torture justified after 9/11 attacks”
“Jihadi Radicalization of Muslim Clerics”, Nielsen 2012 (excerpts)
Statistics/AI/meta-science:
“Framing For Light Instead Of Heat” (What do we mean by ‘controlling’ in statistics and is it what we think it means?)
“Site Selection Bias in Program Evaluation”, Allcott 2014 (on one reason programs ‘fade out’; of particular concern in effective altruism; excerpts)
“Probable Points and Credible Intervals, Part 2: Decision Theory”
“Bayes’ rule in Haskell, or why drug tests don’t work”
“Kalkalash! Pinpointing the Moments The Simpsons became less Cromulent”
Psychology/biology:
“Artificial Selection on Relative Brain Size in the Guppy Reveals Costs and Benefits of Evolving a Larger Brain”, Kotrschal et al 2013 (excerpts; fascinating little experiment—it’s odd the males showed no intelligence gain, and selecting on volume isn’t exactly what you want to select on, but I’d love to see what a larger experiment ran for more generations showed.)
“Clinical outcome of preimplantation genetic diagnosis and screening using next generation sequencing”, Tan et al 2014 (excerpts)
Alexander Shulgin obituary
“Wireheading: Towards a Consumer Market?” (excerpts)
“Secrets of the Magus: Ricky Jay does closeup magic that flouts reality”
Technology:
“Bitcoin and Me”, Hal Finney
“Programming Sucks”
“The explosion of No. 5 Blast Furnace, Corus UK Ltd, Port Talbot”, 2001 (excerpts)
“The Darkhotel APT: A Story of Unusual Hospitality” (cyberwarfare)
“Statistical Basis for Predicting Technological Progress”, Nagy et al 2013
“Found on the Web, With DNA: a Boy’s Father”
“Tokyo Polytechnic University Publishes Results of VOCALOID Study”
A Linux audio tweak to compensate for hearing loss
Economics:
“A colourful history of progress” (the Industrial Revolution, synthetic dyes, and the environment)
“Forget It!”, Isaac Asimov (on the benefits of standardization, illustrated by an old practical mathematics textbook.)
“Study of Men’s Falling Income Cites Single Parents” (2013)o
“Redistributing from Capitalists to Workers: The Chamley-Judd Impossibility Theorem”
“Net benefits: How to quantify the gains that the internet has brought to consumers”
“Beware of the survivorship bias: Investors may have developed too rosy a view of equity returns”
Philosophy:
“A Philosopher Walks Into A Coffee Shop” (humor)
Article on Philip Tetlock’s new research on predictions in Harvard Business Review
Eternal Youth for All! by Ronald Bailey:
http://reason.com/archives/2015/02/06/eternal-youth-for-all
I found this disappointing because it seems like I read similar articles about imminent breakthroughs in anti-aging back in the 1990′s, only the names of the elixirs have changed. Remember the hype about melatonin a few years ago?
You have indeed read similar articles. It’s never that simple.
MIT”s Leonard Guarente has gone to market with:
The Anti-Aging Pill Facing a long wait for evidence, a longevity researcher takes an unusual path to market.
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/534636/the-anti-aging-pill/
Guarente’s website: http://www.elysiumhealth.com/
At least Guarente understands that it takes a baseline of many decades to see if these experiments make a difference. He doesn’t go for this “immortality in 30 years” nonsense that plagues folk transhumanism.
Dr. Bruce Ames did something like this several years ago to promote the use of the combination of acetyl-l-carnitine and alpha lipoic acid as an experiment to decelerate aging in human mitochondria:
http://www.juvenon.com/
What Can Supporters Do for Transhumanism? by Zoltan Istvan:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/zoltan-istvan/what-can-supporters-do-fo_b_6564536.html
Zoltan suggests changing careers, assuming that you can find ones which allow for feasible transhumanist-sounding projects to work on.
But I would add the fallback one of just figuring out how to make and save a lot more money to give you the resources to do some of these things.
Ishtvan’s entire approach is so ethically disturbing and PR-toxic, it really doesn’t help the transhumanist movement to promote him. The first and second of his “Transhumanist Laws” basically amount to just screaming “I defect!” repeatedly. This is unfortunate because he’s a decent writer and he also does on occasion make interesting points that I haven’t seen elsewhere.
Istvan’s constant self-promotion bothers me. I never heard of this guy until two years ago, when he published The Transhumanist Wager. I read that and reviewed in Cryonics magazine because it involves cryonics as a subplot.
Then I started to see his writings in several places. And last summer he got on one of John Stossel’s specials on the Fox network, where both he and Stossel represented him as a leader in the cryonics community.
Again, I signed up with Alcor a quarter century ago, and I never heard of Istvan until early in 2013. Who made him a “leader” in the cryonics movement, and based on what criteria?
Now he has started a “Transhumanist Party” and he wants to insert himself into American national politics. We could see him in one of those debates with the other off-brand Presidential candidates from the Green Party, the Libertarian Party and other fringe groups.
Now, I approve of the fact that he wants to draw attention to some ideas for technological progress that we should push on a lot harder than we have so far. But what has he really offered us other than telling us about his action-hero life on the sailboat, how he doesn’t want to die, please read his novel (he often discounts his Kindle version, or even offers it for free), and vote for him for President?
Leadership?
It’s a rare quality. I didn’t like his book, but I did like him in interviews he’s done. People have a tendency to rally behind anyone who leads.
Istvan claims he was born in L.A., grew up there and then went to Columbia University. But something about his accent doesn’t sound right to me. I lived in Southern California during the years 1991-2004, so I’ve had plenty of exposure to how people in the Southland talk.
Yeah, I think it is pretty clear that he’s a shameless self-promoter. Maybe he’d argue that it is consistent with his Second Law of Transhumanism?
I think “Transhumanism” is a political non-starter as it just has too many weird/negative mental associations. A serious attempt at a pro-science/pro-technology political party should start by shedding the term “transhumanism” and some of its associated themes, like cyborgs and strange/unnecessary human modification.
There is a huge amount of enthusiasm for technology and science among the Millennials and even some Gen Xers, but most of it is just frittered away on worthless projects like Solar Freakin Roadways and enthusiasm for consumer electronics.
I think there is a huge amount of enthusiasm for consumer electronics which is misinterpreted as enthusiasm for technology and science.
Radical Muslims have embraced social media, for example. And I’ve gathered that the snuff film of the Jordanian prisoner shows good production values, though I don’t care to watch that because I’ll just hear the Middle English song “Sumer is icumen in” in my head.
A Humanist Approach To Environmental Issues, by an Objectivist named Alex Epstein:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexepstein/2015/01/29/a-humanist-approach-to-environmental-issues/
Science’s Biggest Fail