Cryonics today has epsilon probability of success, maybe it is not worth its costs. If we disregard the costs, it is a good idea. (We could still subscribe to cryonics as an altruist act—even if our chances of being successfuly revived are epsilon, our contributions and example might support development of cryonics, and the next generations may have chances higher than epsilon.)
Mainstream science is slow, but I doubt people will generally be able to do better with Bayes. Pressures to publish, dishonesty, congnitive biases, politics etc. will make people choose wrong priors, filter evidence, etc. and then use Bayes to support their bottom line. But it could be a good idea for a group of x-rationalists to use scientific results and improve them by Bayes.
I think our intuitions about morality don’t scale well. Above some scale, it is all far mode, so I am not even sure there is a right answer. I think consequentialism is right, but computing all the consequences of a single act is almost impossible, so we have to use heuristics.
People in general are crazy, that’s sure. But maybe rationality does not have enough benefit to be better on average; especially in a world full of crazy people. Maybe, after we cross the valley of bad rationality as a community of rationalists, this could change.
Generally, Eliezer’s opinions are mostly correct, and considering the difficulty of topics he chose, this is very impressive. Also he is very good at explaining them. Mostly I like his attempt at creating a rationalist community, and the related articles—in a long term, this might be his greatest achievement.
EDIT: The chance of being revived in a biological body frozen by today’s cryonics are epsilon. (Seriously, pump your body with poison to prevent frost damage?) The chance of being uploaded could be greater than epsilon.
My opinions:
MWI seems obvious in hindsight.
Cryonics today has epsilon probability of success, maybe it is not worth its costs. If we disregard the costs, it is a good idea. (We could still subscribe to cryonics as an altruist act—even if our chances of being successfuly revived are epsilon, our contributions and example might support development of cryonics, and the next generations may have chances higher than epsilon.)
Mainstream science is slow, but I doubt people will generally be able to do better with Bayes. Pressures to publish, dishonesty, congnitive biases, politics etc. will make people choose wrong priors, filter evidence, etc. and then use Bayes to support their bottom line. But it could be a good idea for a group of x-rationalists to use scientific results and improve them by Bayes.
I think our intuitions about morality don’t scale well. Above some scale, it is all far mode, so I am not even sure there is a right answer. I think consequentialism is right, but computing all the consequences of a single act is almost impossible, so we have to use heuristics.
People in general are crazy, that’s sure. But maybe rationality does not have enough benefit to be better on average; especially in a world full of crazy people. Maybe, after we cross the valley of bad rationality as a community of rationalists, this could change.
Generally, Eliezer’s opinions are mostly correct, and considering the difficulty of topics he chose, this is very impressive. Also he is very good at explaining them. Mostly I like his attempt at creating a rationalist community, and the related articles—in a long term, this might be his greatest achievement.
EDIT: The chance of being revived in a biological body frozen by today’s cryonics are epsilon. (Seriously, pump your body with poison to prevent frost damage?) The chance of being uploaded could be greater than epsilon.