Eliezer, I don’t think your story would have been appreciably weakened if you’d just deleted the words “to talk about the Singularity”. On the other hand, I also don’t see any reason why you should have to avoid mentioning Your Strange Beliefs either. Also: surely the conjunction fallacy is not a bias, but a symptom of a bias. (The bias in question being more or less a special case of the availability heuristic: the more detail we’re provided with, the easier it is to imagine whatever-it-is.)
burger flipper and Zubon, I think (1) Eliezer’s thought processes are quite unusual and (2) his claimed thought processes on the two occasions mentioned by bf are (no more than) quite unusual, which to my mind makes them unsurprising and unsuspicious.
Overcoming Cryonics, singularitarianism seems to me to lack a number of important characteristics that almost all things commonly called religions share, so however wrong or irrational it may be the term “religion” seems unhelpful. (I find that applying the term “religion” to things that aren’t commonly regarded as religions generally produces more heat than light.) Likewise for cryonics, life-extensionism and transhumanism more generally. All of which, incidentally, seem to me to be quite separate things, which I agree makes it interesting that they seem usually to get accepted or rejected as a group.
… If they do, that is; I realise that my evidence for this is very thin. Anyone have any figures, or even more extensive anecdotal evidence? Do people who sign up for cryonics believe in the Singularity more often than they should if the only factor is that the Singularity might make signing up for cryonics a better bet? (Etc.)
Eliezer, I don’t think your story would have been appreciably weakened if you’d just deleted the words “to talk about the Singularity”. On the other hand, I also don’t see any reason why you should have to avoid mentioning Your Strange Beliefs either. Also: surely the conjunction fallacy is not a bias, but a symptom of a bias. (The bias in question being more or less a special case of the availability heuristic: the more detail we’re provided with, the easier it is to imagine whatever-it-is.)
burger flipper and Zubon, I think (1) Eliezer’s thought processes are quite unusual and (2) his claimed thought processes on the two occasions mentioned by bf are (no more than) quite unusual, which to my mind makes them unsurprising and unsuspicious.
Overcoming Cryonics, singularitarianism seems to me to lack a number of important characteristics that almost all things commonly called religions share, so however wrong or irrational it may be the term “religion” seems unhelpful. (I find that applying the term “religion” to things that aren’t commonly regarded as religions generally produces more heat than light.) Likewise for cryonics, life-extensionism and transhumanism more generally. All of which, incidentally, seem to me to be quite separate things, which I agree makes it interesting that they seem usually to get accepted or rejected as a group.
… If they do, that is; I realise that my evidence for this is very thin. Anyone have any figures, or even more extensive anecdotal evidence? Do people who sign up for cryonics believe in the Singularity more often than they should if the only factor is that the Singularity might make signing up for cryonics a better bet? (Etc.)