Yes, the refined carbohydrates are the real killer here. Eat as much meat as you want but no more white bread!
The complete notes are a fantastic summary.
AndrewH
Karma: 198
I put in ~1000 or so over a few months. For a better world!
I don’t smoke, but I made the mistake of starting a can of Pringles yesterday. If you >asked me my favorite food, there are dozens of things I would say before “Pringles”. >Right now, and for the vast majority of my life, I feel no desire to go and get Pringles. >But once I’ve had that first chip, my motivation for a second chip goes through the >roof, without my subjective assessment of how tasty Pringles are changing one bit.
What is missing from this is the effort (which eats up the limited willpower budget) required to get the second Pringle chip. Your motivation for a second Pringle chip would be much lower if you only brought one bag of Pringle chips, and all bags contained one chip. However, your motivation to have another classof(Pringle) = potato chip no doubt rises—due to the fact that chips are on your thoughts rather than iPhones.
Talking about effort allows us to bring in habits into the discussion, which you might define as sets of actions that, due to their frequent use, are much less effort to perform.
The difference between enjoyment and motivation provides an argument that could >rescue these people. It may be that a person really does enjoy spending time with >their family more than they enjoy their iPhone, but they’re more motivated to work >and buy iPhones than they are to spend time with their family.
Alternatively, for potentially good reasons before (working hard to buy a house for said family), work has become habitual while spending time with the family has not. Hence, work is the default set of actions, the default no-effort state, and anything that takes time off work requires effort. Spending time with the family could do this, yet buying an iPhone with the tons of money this person has would not.
A way of summarizing the effect of effort is that it is a function of a particular persons set of no-effort (no willpower) actions. This function defines how much ‘wanting’ is required to do that action—less effort actions of the same amount of ‘wanting’ are more ‘desirable’ to be done.
Willpower plays a big role in this in that you can spend willpower to pull yourself out of the default state (a default state such as being in New York), but it only last so long.
I am also a New Zealander, AND I am signed up with Cryonics Institute. You might be interested in contacting the Cryonics Association of Australasia but I’m sure there is no actual suspension and storage nearby.
Besides you are missing the main point, if you don’t sign up now and you die tomorrow, you are annihilated—no questions asked. I would be wary of this question as it can be an excuse to not sign up.
A turn out of 3 including myself, which is quite a success for a small place such as Auckland. We agreed that in mid December we should meet again. So for anyone who considered coming but did not, please come next time!; these meet-ups are excellent motivators for studying rationality.
Auckland meet up Saturday Nov 28th
If you are talking about pretty pictures, then this looks much better.
Automatically, If I did it by hand, it would have looked nicer. I’m working on this project again, so I hope to have some much more user friendly things coded soon. Ill make what you mentioned as well.
Robin Hanson’s lists of Overcoming Bias Posts
Agreed, pain overwhelming your entire thoughts is too extreme, though understandable how it evolved this way.
In Getting Things Done, after the first step of simply writing down each task you want to accomplish (can be of any level of difficult and time), and then you do a seperate processing step after that.
That is when you decide how long each task takes, and if it takes less than 5 minutes you do it now. When you get into the GTD system of life organization, trivial impetuses you put down in the initial collection phase, and when you get around to processing them, you have habits that say “do task now if takes less than 5 minutes”. GTD is (apparently, I tried to get it working for me but to little success so far) a life changing thing.
You could make voting a post mandatory to comment on that post, so to submit a comment you get prompted to vote it up or down (or maybe neutral)
Or maybe just by having the vote up/down/neutral buttons next to the comment submit button, right in peoples faces, would make them more likely to vote.
Neat! I did not think of generalizing my arguments; we could call it the resource commit fallacy. We need techniques to help us solve this problem.
One strategy that comes to mind is precommitting to allocate the resources to the most efficient place before you optimize yourself. Then taking a bet with someone that if you fail to follow through with your commitment, you take a penalty of resources.
I reiterated the cost analysis from my perspective because it is essential to my argument of why people see cryonics is super beneficial, but still fail to do anything about it. All the while sitting on a potential gold mine of money they are wasting away which could be used to get cryonics!
I don’t even drink coffee so I’m going to have to think hard on what part of my life I should optimize. I picked it because many people drink starbucks coffee (we even have then in my little island country) and I presume you can do it cheaper if you buy your own.
Well, there are a great many factors I am glossing over, but if you are pessimistic about cryonics to that degree, you are probably pessimistic about other future technologies like medical and anti-aging technologies. You will die eventually unless actuarial escape velocity occurs when you are alive. Assuming this is not the case, if you don’t have cryonics you wont take advantage of the future indefinite lifespans humans will possess, old age will kill you.
You could very well be worth more than 200 million, you just need to live long enough!.
Now the real costs are between $25,000 and $155,000 in addition to annual membership fees, signup fees, transportation fees after death etc. That’s how much you have to save during your lifetime to get cryopreserved.
The real costs per day of not bothering to optimized how you purchase food also add up over time. Most people I would be willing to bet could save quite a substantial amount of money with some careful thought and planning simply in how they purchase food. $7 a week over an average lifespan is $27,000.
The point of cryonics is that just a bit of optimization gives you a potential second chance at life if you screw up somewhere (sneeze when driving for example), given reasonable probabilities over the chances of dying, the likelihood of successful cryopreservation and revival, that amount of money is ridiculously cheap.
An observation on cryocrastination
Does the absence of people around me pointing towards my arm insisting it does not move, while believing that I have done plenty of activities in which I used 2 arms mean I am an extreme Anosognosic. One who rewrites massive quantities of 1 arm experiences to 2 arm experiences on the fly?
I noticed. I’ll be setting up a new meet up soon due to someone else requesting it. Auckland is positively on fire with rationality it seems! bring water buckets.
You are doing computer science now? that’s most interesting. Are you taking any stage 1 compsci papers this semester?