Rationalists Are Less Credulous But Better At Taking Ideas Seriously

Maybe procrastinators are trying to over-estimate it to get themselves to do it...

The probabilities are nuts though. For the whole thing to be of use,

1: you must die in a right way to get frozen soon enough and well enough. (Rather unlikely for a young person, by the way).

2: cryonics must preserve enough data.

3: no event that causes you to lose cooling

4: the revival technology must arise and become cheap enough (before you are unfrozen)

5: someone should dispose of the frozen head by revival rather than by garbage disposal or something even nastier (someone uses frozen heads as expired-copyright data).

Note that it's the whole combined probability that matters for the decision to sign up. edit: and not just that, but compared to the alternatives - i.e. you can improve your chances by trying harder not to die, and you can use money/time for that instead of cryonics.

edit2: also, just 3 independent-ish components (freezing works, company doesn't bust, revival available) with high ignorance get you down to 12.5%

I am not a salesman.

I am, however, reasonably competent with technology. Growing up in a congregation of all age groups, this made me one of the go-to people whenever somebody had computer problems. I'm talking middle-aged and above, the kind of people who fall for blatant phishing scams, have 256mb of RAM, and don't know what right-clicking is.

Without fail, these people had been aware that losing all their data would be very painful, and that it could happen to them, and that backing up their data could prevent that. Their reaction was universally "this is embarrassing, I should've taken that more seriously", not "I didn't know a thing like this could happen/that I could have done something simple to prevent it". Procrastination, trivial inconveniences, and not-taking-the-idea-seriously-enough are the culprit in a large majority of cases.

In short, I think it requires some contortion to construe the typical customer as rational here.

Well, look, of course I'd prefer to sell the customer something. If, knowing this, you take everything out of my mouth to be a lie, then you are not, in fact, being rational. The fact that I would specifically say "buy it elsewhere if you like!", and offer to set the backup system up for free, ought to tell you something.

The other part of this is that the place where I worked was a small, privately owned shop, many of whose customers were local, and which made a large chunk (perhaps the majority) of its revenue from service. (Profit margins on Apple machines are very slim.) It was to our great advantage not to lie to people in the interest of selling them one more widget. Doing so would have been massively self-defeating. As a consequence of all of this, our regular customers generally trusted us, and were quite right to do so.

Finally, even if the customer decided that the chance was too great that I was trying to sell them something, and opted not to buy anything on the spot, it is still ridiculously foolish not to follow up on the salesperson's suggestion that you do something to protect yourself from losing months or years of work. If that is even a slight possibility, you ought to investigate, get second and third opinions, get your backup solution as cheaply as you like, and then take me up on my offer to install it for free (or have a friend install it). To not back up at all, because clearly the salesperson is lying and the truth must surely be the diametrical opposite of what they said, is a ludicrously bad plan.

Some hazards your online data are exposed to:

• Your account could be hacked.

• Their service could be hacked.

• They might decide that you're in breach of their ToS and close your account.

• They could go out of business.

Anywhere your data are, they are exposed to some risks. The trick is to have multiple copies, such that no event short of the collapse of civilisation will endanger all of them together.

Certainly not.

No.

It depends on your use case. My "life work" consists exclusively of things I've typed. These types of files tend to be small, and lend themselves to being written in Google Documents. If I use Emacs, then the files are tiny and I back them up to Google Drive in about 2 seconds. This costs me all of $0 and is very easy.

But maybe your life work also includes a bunch of pictures documenting your experiences. These, and other large files, will quickly exceed your 15 gigs of free storage. Then you're probably looking at an external hard drive or cloud storage. The better fit will depend on things like your internet connection, which USB standard your computer has, your tech level, how much stuff you need backed up, whether you travel a lot, whether you'll lose or damage the external hard drive, etc.

And then just use Yvain's method to find the best one.

Of course, there's more elaborate solutions for power users, but by the time you're high enough level for them, you're a power user and don't need to ask.

I don't use Windows nearly as much, but one idea (depending on use case, as zedzed said) is cloud storage. Dropbox is free up to 2 GB. Paid services exist. Synchronization is regular and automatic; some services keep some file history, as well.

Let's suppose my budget is $20 and 20 minutes. What should I do?

Others have mentioned Dropbox, but it's so wonderful I'll mention it again. Dropbox. It's almost as awesome in its just-works-ness as Time Machine (Apple's awesome backup solution). Free up to 2GB, $10/month gets you 100GB. Runs on everything.

Note that Dropbox isn't designed as a backup solution, it's really for sharing files across multiple devices. It only preserves the current version of a file, so offers no protection against deleting a file you didn't mean to. As soon as you edit a file, the changes are uploaded to the Dropbox cloud.

A point to remember is that every backup solution protects against some threats but not others, and you have to decide what you need to defend against. I have a Time Capsule (external drive for Time Machine backup), but it's in the same room as the computer, so it provides excellent protection against disc failure or accidental deletion, but none against theft. So I also have an external drive that I plug in once a week and the rest of the time leave hidden elsewhere. If the files on your computer are your livelihood, you need an off-site backup to survive risks such as your house burning down, or serious burglars doing a complete house clearance.

Although I still need to determine which folders are worth saving, and this is a continuous, ongoing chore

A backup solution that presents a continuous, ongoing chore is not going to work. It has to be something that once you set it up, Just Works. I don't know if there's anything as awesome as Time Machine in this respect for Windows. Ideally a solution should automatically backup everything, except possibly some things you specifically exclude. If you only back up things you specifically decide to, you will inevitably leave things out, that you'll only discover when you need the backup you don't have.

I take it you've got a Windows or Linux machine? Because if you have a Mac, there's a much easier solution. Edit: I mean easier than a continuous, ongoing chore of deciding what files to save, drag-and-dropping stuff, etc. You do still need to buy a device, though. For a $20 budget I recommend this 32 GB USB flash drive.

Because this

If I decided to do some investing, went to five financial experts, asked them what I should invest in, and they all said "Yep, index funds, definitely the way to go", then I would invest in index funds

probably wouldn't happen. If you asked uninvolved experts, it would, but the most accessible experts aren't uninvolved. What is much more likely is that you (the average American with some money to invest) go to invest your money with an investment firm. And that investment firm pushes you toward actively-managed funds, since that's where their incentives are. In order for the idea of investing solely in index funds to be available, you have to put in meaningful thought, if only enough to look for non-corporate advice on how to invest well.

Thank you. A couple of follow-up questions, if you don't mind:

1. Do most ordinary investors not do this?

2. If not, do you know why? Do most people not know about the advantage of index funds? Or do they know, but don't use them anyway?

3. If the latter, why don't they? That seems strange. What makes index funds the "non-default" idea, so to speak? If index funds are known by financial experts to be superior to mutual funds (or other investing strategies), where would an ordinary person get the idea that they should be using anything other than index funds?

For ordinary investors won't there still be an issue of buying these funds at the right time, so as not to buy when the market is unusually high?

ordinary investors should use low fee index funds

Two questions:

• Doesn't this ignore the very important question of "which indices?"

• Is this advice different from the "hold a sufficiently diversified portfolio" one?

Noted. And as for the other things I asked?

I don't think it does, actually. The following are three distinct scenarios (as pertain to my point #2):

1. Being entirely unaware of what options/possibilities exist in some domain.

Example: I don't do any investing, and so, prior to this thread, had no opinion on index funds whatsoever, nor on mutual funds, nor on anything related.

2. Being unaware of some particular (potentially counterintuitive) idea or option.

Example: I'd never had anyone recommend modafinil to me, or suggest that I should take it, or explain what benefits it might have.

3. Being aware of some idea or option, but not taking it seriously.

Example: I have no idea. Gaming poorly-designed lotteries? I suspect this example fails for other reasons, but it does fit the criterion #2.

The claim, as I understand it, was:

There are numerous cases like scenario 3 above, where the main thing that keeps people from taking advantage of an opportunity, and winning thusly, is not taking some idea seriously — despite being aware of that idea. Rationalists, on the other hand, do take the idea seriously, and win thusly.

Index funds are not a good example for people who have no knowledge of investing, because what kept me, for instance, from taking advantage of the profit opportunities offered by the idea "invest in index funds" was not having any knowledge of investing whatsoever, not some failure to take things seriously.

Modafinil is not a good example for people not aware of modafinil or its (alleged) positive effects, because what kept me, for instance, from taking advantage of the cognitive boosts offered by the idea "take modafinil" was not being aware of modafinil, not some failure to take things seriously.

I haven't gotten a good response about Bitcoin, so I won't comment on that.

Now, don't get me wrong: I think index funds are a good example in general, based on the very helpful and clear comments I've gotten on that topic (thank you, commenters!). (Modafinil is not as clearly a good example. I'm still researching.) But my case, and similar others, are not good evidence for those examples.

Thank you for the link, I will look into that.

If you are so inclined, I would be interested in hearing how you approached the "advice of a medical professional" aspect; did you go to your GP and say "So I'm considering taking modafinil"? (If you'd prefer not to answer, I entirely understand, no need to even respond to say no; thank you in any case for your comment.)

with no withdrawal or other drawbacks.

How much data is there behind this conclusion. Is it comparable to the centuries of experience we have with caffeine?

Moving to San Francisco has a lot of expenses other than housing expenses, including costs for movers, travel costs (and the costs of moving back if you fail), costs to stop and start utilities, storage costs to store your possessions for 9 weeks if you live in the office, and the excess everyday costs that come from living in an area where everything is expensive. It's also a significant disruption to your social life (which could itself decrease your chances of finding a job, and is a cost even if it doesn't.)

... huh. Could you elaborate on this, please? How's that work? Do they have actual housing? What is living at the office like?

And/or "shortage of programmers ticking all the boxes on this highly specific technology stack we're using". I get the impression that the greatest advantage of these development bootcamps from a hiring perspective is having a turnaround time short enough that they can focus narrowly on whatever technologies are trendy at the moment, as opposed to a traditional CS degree which is much more theory-centric and often a couple years out of date in its practical offerings.

It seems to me they already tend to offer quite high salaries.
Further increasing them could increase the number of available programmers, although there are going to be both short-term and long-term availability limits. And obviously, companies can't afford to pay arbitrary high salaries.

More specifically, I suppose that much of this labor demand comes from startups, which often operate on the brink of financial viability.
Startups have high failure rates, but a few of them generate a very high return on investment, which is what makes the whole startup industry viable: VCs are as risk averse as anybody else, but by diversifying their investments in many startups they reduce the variance of their return and thus obtain a positive expected utility. However, if failure rate goes up (for instance due to increased labor costs) without the other parameters changing, it would kill the whole industry, and I would expect this to occur in a very non-linear fashion, essentially as a threshold effect.

Few people have the mental starmina to just teach themselves 8 hours a day

It's actually a defining characteristic of hackers, except that it's more like 16 hours a day.

Few people have the mental starmina to just teach themselves 8 hours a day via reading a few tutorials and complete free online courses.

True, but I suspect that the effect of training time runs into diminishing returns well before you reach 8 hours a day, in particular after you have been doing it for a few days.

It also likely that the enviroment will make it easy to network with other programmers.

Agreed.

Their point about accreditation usually came up after I had cited their jobs statistics.

If their point about accreditation was meant to indicate that they are skeptical that the plan leads to useful skills or to getting a job, then having them bring it up when you cite the job statistics is entirely expected. They brought up evidence against getting a job when you gave them evidence for getting one.

(And if you're thinking that job statistics are such good evidence that even bringing up something correlated with lack of jobs doesn't affect the chances much, that's not true. There are a number of ways in which job statistics can be poor evidence, and those people were likely aware that such ways exist.)

I did, but the job I got was being a TA for App Academy, so that might not count in your eyes.

Indeed it does not. I don't count your experience as an example of the OP.

dissatisfied with their experience of job search.

That's... an awfully strange phrasing. Do you mean they all found a web development job as a result of attending App Academy? Or what?

Yes. Effect from convincing people that cryonics is socially acceptable far outweights lower success estimates.

It is certainly true that, independent of how likely you think cryonics is to work, most people stay unsubscribed not because they don't think it will work but because it's weird.

I'd imagine I'd like to live as long as life had the potential for those things, even if they weren't present at a given moment. My concern isn't necessarily that they'd run out, rather that they don't really exist in a world where immortality is an option.

And again, being conscious vs. not being conscious is not a world-ending difference to me. I think consciousness is just a localized emergence from a particalur meat-computer. I enjoy/tolerate a persistent illusion of "self" that can change drastically with injury or illness. It is a fragile little state of affairs and I think it is weird (though very natural) to seek to solidify it in a (literally) permanent state.

Do you think anything similar to the "end of novelty" could happen within a human's current lifespan?

I don't think that could practically happen. Though I suppose people do often end up feeling that is the case in their own lives.

Also, is novelty necessary to have a life with positive value? Could you not imagine yourself living a routine for x number of years (where x is less than the current human lifespan, but greater than 10) and being happy?

I do think novelty is a key component in happiness. Not necessarily that you have new stuff in every moment or day, but at least that their is the potential for novelty.

If so, why do you think this would change for a sufficiently large value of x, and why don't you think that you'd be able to find a new routine?

Perhaps for any non-infinite value of x, you'd be okay. Once x could be infinite, I think there could be the realization that everything is pretty meaningless. And I don't see much reason why any non-infinite years as a lifespan is better than any other. I suppose reaching an age where you could have kids or grandkids might be a good benchmark. But the difference between 100 years and 200 seems arbitrary. As does the difference between 1000 and 1,000,000.

Also, what would be artificial about a "perpetual invention of novelties" - what makes perpetual novelty artificial that isn't also the case for current novelty?

It's a good question. I don't know. I can just imagine coming to the realization that (a) I could live forever if I choose, and (b) everything could be done given enough time, of which I have a limitless supply. If these are the circumstances, every challenge would only appear to be a challenge.

I have to think about the first set of questions.

To the last two:

If potential new experiences are created faster than you can experience them, does the problem remain?

This is the concept I've read which makes me wonder if supply of novelty might always be able to exceed demand.

Also, why would immortality mean that you can't lose? You can't lose your life, but you can lose money, once-in-a-lifetime experiences, etc.

I'm not smart enough to think through what "money" would mean in an economy where immortality is available. As far as once-in-a-lifetime experiences, they'd be cheapened necessarily. What were once a once-in-a-million-lifetimes experiences would be become bound to happen eventually. One-in-a-billion odds would mean nothing.

By "can't lose" I meant that you couldn't "bet" your life on things (i.e. invest your time) since you have an inexhaustable source of time. Playing games and winning is fun because losing is an option. Winning is meaningless without losing.

Death isn't the end of the world in an objective sense, but it prevents you from enjoying anything you value - so, if someone said that they'd put you in a steel box with a lifetime supply of oxygen, food, and sleep medication (if you want to take it), then shoot you into space, would you object to that? It would be similar to death because the world would go on, but you wouldn't be able to enjoy it.

I mean death isn't the end of anyone else's conscious experience. It does end yours. As Hitchens said, "It isn't that the party is over. Rather, the party will continue, and you've been asked to leave." This end of my personal conscious experience is only as big as my ego makes it. It really isn't that big a deal.

I'm interested in the choices, and the factors that contribute to those choices, so I asked about them.

If you are specifically interested in the contexts of a person deciding that they do wish, or do not wish, to continue living in the current moment, then my comment wasn't relevant.

However, I interpreted your question as a Socratic challenge to realize that one values immortality because they do not wish to die in the present moment. (I think these are separate systems in some sense, perhaps far versus near).

As in the church, it isn't too terribly important to dogma that it has widespread acceptance among adherents to a particular faith in order to be dogma.

What is far more important to establishing dogma is having de facto authority and/or status leaders accept it and voice their support.

As a thought experiment: Most people would, if they could, take a pill that eliminated the effects of aging, but causes multiple organ failure at about their original life expectancy. You seem to agree that aging is inconvenient, so I assume you'd take this pill. Would you?

I think I would, yes.

But what if that pill also extended your lifespan indefinitely, as well as curing aging?

I don't think so, no.

stigma of suicide

More than a stigma, suicide is very consequential. It's a deep trauma for many people surrounding the victim. I think it is a net zero for the victim, however.

Overall, I still see the main argument as this: If you lived forever, you'd be able to accumulated ulimited fuzzies and utilons. And that is objectively better than fewer fuzzie and utilons. Therefore, death is bad.

I'm not "for" death. But life is an accident, an unintended side-effect of physical laws and processes. While I think you point out some good practical examples of advantages and disadvantages for the option of immortality, I sense my objections are of a bit different sort.

We, as living things, have evolved to fight to live, and live to fight. You want to live because nature has designed you to want to live. That is it. We glean some pleasure and meaning in the process of fighting/living/surviving, and that is cool. I sense the novelty of this will run out eventually.

Death isn't a problem. If future AI finds a way (and have some reason) to keep humans alive and torture them for eternity, then that is a big problem.

People all over the globe starving and enduring suffering via war, disease, etc. is a problem.

Aging leading to Alzheimer's, et al, is a problem.

Death is empty of any value. It is neither good or bad. It isn't a problem unless ego makes it one.

If everyone was immortal and healthy by default, do you think it would even occur to you suggest death as a harmless alternative?

Good question. I'd suggest death is a harmless alternative, and it would only be analogous with actual, literal, harmless alternatives. (Also, I notice you are conflating non-healthyness and mortality.)

If a reality like death didn't exist, I guess it would be like any other non-existent, yet imaginable state. In fact, death is a state of non-existence, it is imaginable, and it is harmless.

If someone tried to convince you that a 50 year lifespan is better than what we have now, what would be your reaction?

Most arguments for which exact lifespan is better would seem arbitrary to me. I can see some merit to a lifespan that allowed you to have kids, or grandkids. Maybe a lifespan where you reached full, mature adulthood makes some sense. But 50 years, 100 years, 1000 years... arbitrary.

Don't you find it interesting that your intuitions support a very narrow optimum that just happens to be what you already have?

Yes, very interesting. Though it is also your intuition, and intuition generally, that opposes (and fears?) death so intensely. It is part of our eons-evolved programming. This death-avoidance intuition exists so that we will be best equipped as vehicles for the replicators we carry. That is all is was designed for. The fact you are arguing for some intrinsic value to indefinitely extended consciousness beyond its instrumental value as a tool of the replicators is simply a glitch; a side-effect to the necessary importance every surviving organism and species must attach to surviving.

Do you argue that "death is just the end of your conscious experience" in the case of anyone who dies prematurely? Try to imagine actual deaths in real life and their outcomes.

I don't "argue" it. That seems tacky, since I would be arguing only with the deceased friends or loved ones... since the deceased themselves would be...dead.

I do, however, think it is a helpful meditation to ponder the implications of death, immortality, etc. I read and discuss my understanding of Buddhism with lots of people (these, for example), and I find explorations to better understand the human desire for permanence and striving for lasting satisfaction to be very insightful and helpful.

From your cited fable...

Stories about aging have traditionally focused on the need for graceful accommodation. The recommended solution to diminishing vigor and impending death was resignation coupled with an effort to achieve closure in practical affairs and personal relationships. Given that nothing could be done to prevent or retard aging, this focus made sense. Rather than fretting about the inevitable, one could aim for peace of mind.

Today we face a different situation. While we still lack effective and acceptable means for slowing the aging process, we can identify research directions that might lead to the development of such means in the foreseeable future. “Deathist” stories and ideologies, which counsel passive acceptance, are no longer harmless sources of consolation. They are fatal barriers to urgently needed action....

...The argument is not in favor or life-span extension per se. Adding extra years of sickness and debility at the end of life would be pointless. The argument is in favor of extending, as far as possible, the human health-span. By slowing or halting the aging process, the healthy human life span would be extended. Individuals would be able to remain healthy, vigorous, and productive at ages at which they would otherwise be dead.

I did not read the whole fable, though I skimmed it (I get it, I think) and read the moral of the story.

What I notice is that the author appears to be conflating the nasty parts of aging with death. They are not at all the same. They are not the same problem, and the should not be confused.

I am 100% for bringing about technologies that eliminate gratuitous suffering. That includes much of what happens we humans age. People often end up in horrible mental and physical states for years, or decades, near the end of their lives. I am all for getting rid of Alzheimer's, for instance. And, as a personal example, my grandmother spent the last eight years of her life effectively paralyzed and unable to speak due to a series of massive strokes -- I am 100% for technology that would make this never happen to anyone ever again.

None of that has anything to do with the end of a human's localized meat-computer-generated conscious experience. Healthyness does not = no death.

I love that he called it "Deathism", the "ideologies that counsel passive acceptance". I've often thought the sort of "stay alive at any cost" thinking I often encounter on LW could be appropriately labeled "Lifeism", and now I feel validated for thinking so.

Let me ask: Can you imagine any scenario, say, a billion years into your life, when you might opt for permanently switching off your consciousness (i.e. death)? Why or why not? What would be different at one billion years vs. one million? One million vs. 100,000? 100,000 vs. 10,000? (I'm not asking rhetorically...)