Agree with the absurdity bias. For most (even smart) people their exposure to cryonics is things like Woody Allen’s Sleeper and Futurama. I almost can’t blame them for only seeing the absurd… I’m still trying to come around to it myself.
Zachary_Kurtz
Karma: 146
AWesome, thanks!
Not completely defined at the moment since I’m a 1st year PhD student at NYU, and currently doing rotations. It’ll be something like comparative genomics/regulatory networks to study evolution of bacteria or perhaps communities of bacteria.
You’ll get more response from the NY group (we don’t all check LW and discussion board regularly) by making a post to the google group/listserve:
http://groups.google.com/group/overcomingbiasnyc/topics?start=
Thanks… this should come in handy in my computational research in systems biology
A broken clock is right twice per day. If value theory is incidentally correct, it doesn’t make folk theories valuable on the margins—unless of course, if people who hold folk theories do consistently better than rationalists, but then I’d question the rationalist label.
I wish I could take that much time to do this
Is that because if you treat probabilities of (God or not God) as maximum entropy without prior information you’d get 50/50?
Good on them! In my experience, whenever I sneak bayesian updating into the conversation, it’s well received by skeptics. When I try to introduce Bayes more formally or start supporting anti-mainstream ideas, such as cryonics, AI, etc, there’s much more resistance.
I know a lot of skeptics like this and I try to share with them EY’s post on “undiscriminating skepticism.” This post ‘saved’ me from a similar fate when I found myself going down this path.
Again, I like your characters but I think you’re missing one. The person who thinks that belief in [a] God is the result of rational and reasonable thought.
I’ll be there
could you write the program in your spare time and run the program while you’re there, while making it seem like you’re working?
this about maps with the issues I noticed. Looking forward to the next 2 days of this.
the archive password is listed before each external link in every example I’ve seen. Usually the password is either ebooksclub.org or library.nu
instead of buying textbooks check out library.nu
Largest collection of [illegal, mostly] free textbooks I’ve seen on the net.
My woo-dar is tingling a bit regarding this proposal. Can you refer me to this research?
From the perspective of a biomedical scientist-in-training here. I think you may be underestimating the role that other types of biology research, that’s not specifically labeled “longevity” will play in attaining ‘immortality.’
For example, it may be necessary to cure cancer before we can safely switch off the cellular aging process. The fact that cancer has such an impact on society makes cancer one of the best funded areas of research, but I don’t think you can accurately say that this comes at the opportunity cost of longevity knowledge, because they are really compliments. Most of our knowledge of human cell biology comes from studying cell lines isolated from cancer.
Meanwhile, specialized research increases our general knowledge that, purposeful or not, is leading to longevity if not immortality outright.
every so often I’ll decide to stop biting my nails and I can devote lots of mental energy to stop myself whenever I see it starting up again. On a really stressful day though, I can’t devote that energy and I wind up chewing them off again. Usually I stay on this wagon for a few weeks before I can re-dedicate myself to the non-nail biting mental effort. On the whole though, stop biting my nails is not that all that difficult, the problem is to be consistent about it.
It’s difficult to start doing things when the path of least resistance still takes a lot of mental energy. Checking lesswrong is easy, reading science papers for class is hard. Having a goal (not failing class the next day) is a big help though.
And Yudkowski.net is result #6