Quite a bit is known about the neurology behind face recognition. No one understands the algorithm well enough to build a fusiform gyrus from scratch, but that doesn’t mean the fact that there is an algorithm is mysterious.
simpleton
Karma: 192
Each post under http://lesswrong.com/user/yourname/hidden/ should have an Unhide link.
Thanks, it looks like I misremembered—if they’re now doing perfusion after neuroseparation then it’s much more likely to be compatible with organ donation.
I’ve sent Alcor a question about this.
This is the only reason I haven’t signed up.
What I want to do is sign up for neuropreservation and donate any organs and tissues from the neck down, but as far as I can tell that’s not even remotely feasible. Alcor’s procedure involves cooling the whole body to 0C and injecting the cryoprotectant before removing the head (and I can understand why perfusion would be a lot easier while the head is still attached). Also, I think it’s doubtful that the cryonics team and the transplant team would coordinate with each other effectively, even if there were no technical obstacles.
Are we developing a new art of akrasia-fighting, or is this just repackaged garden-variety self-help?
Edit: I don’t mean to disparage anyone’s efforts to improve themselves. (My only objection to the field of “self-help” is that it’s dominated by charlatans.) But there is an existing body of science here, and I fear that if we go down this road the Art of Rationality will turn into nothing more than amateur behavioral psychology.
If in 1660 you’d asked the first members of the Royal Society to list the ways in which natural philosophy had tangibly improved their lives, you probably wouldn’t have gotten a very impressive list.
Looking over history, you would not have found any tendency for successful people to have made a formal study of natural philosophy.
Alcor says they have a >50% incidence of poor cases.
I strongly second the idea of using real science as a test. Jeffreyssai wouldn’t be satisfied with feeding his students—even the beginners—artificial puzzles all day. Artificial puzzles are shallow.
It wouldn’t even have to be historical science. Science is still young enough that there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit. I don’t think we have a shortage of scientific questions which are genuinely unanswered, but can be recognized as answerable in a moderate amount of time by a beginner or intermediate student.
There’s a heuristic at work here which isn’t completely unreasonable.
I buy $15 items on a daily basis. If I form a habit of ignoring a $5 savings on such purchases, I’ll be wasting a significant fraction of my income. I buy $125 items rarely enough that I can give myself permission to splurge and avoid the drive across town.
The percentage does matter—it’s a proxy for the rate at which the savings add up.
It’s also a proxy for the importance of the savings relative to other considerations, which are often proportional to the value of what you’re buying. If you were about to sign the papers on a $20000 car purchase, would you walk away at the last minute if you found out that an identical car was available from another dealer for $19995? Would you try to explicitly weigh the $5 against intangibles such as your level of trust in the first dealer compared to the second, or would you be right to regard the $5 as a distraction and ignore it?
lesswrong.com’s web server is in the US but both of its nameservers are in Australia, leading to very slow lookups for me—often slow enough that my resolver times out (and caches the failure).
I am my own DNS admin so I can work around this by forcing a cache flush when I need to, but I imagine this would be a more serious problem for people who rely on their ISPs’ DNS servers.