April '17 I Care About Thread

To me, success would be the number of patient's signed up for cryonics, greater cultural acceptance and recognition of cryonics as a reasonable patient choice from the medical field and government.

I'm quite serious about this.

Are you? Well then, go make it happen.

Otherwise it sounds like entitled whining.

I agree that signing up for cryonics is far too complicated and this is one of the things that needs to be addressed. My friend and I have a number of ideas how that might be done.

While I'm not sure about late night basic cable infomercials, existing cryonics organizations certainly don't carry out much if any advertising. There are a number of good reasons that they are not advertising. Those can and should be addressed by any future cryonics organization.

Responding with a comment because a down-vote is not available...

This is a tired strawman argument that seems to rear its head in every discussion of cryonics. Cryonics patients are being stored for future revival, perhaps in the distant future. Successful revival is dependent on the technology existing in the future to reverse vitrification damage. It's of no relevance whether that technology exists today, just that it is within the realm of physical possibility to create such technology and that sufficient funds are provided up front for perpetual storage, since we don't know how long it will be until that technology exists. (But we know with near certainty that such technology is possible, by a number of different routes).

This is explained in the FAQs of all cryonics organizations I'm aware of.

The religious might also see it as an attempt to cheat God, which rarely ends well in the mythology.

I finished the book. It's not that long. I'll try to summarize the thesis.

Your capacity to work is based on three forces: motivation, willpower, and habit. Motivation is too unreliable: sometimes you have it, sometimes you don't. Habits are those behaviors that are easier to do than to not do; habits are the most reliable. But they have a chicken and egg problem. You can't use a habit you don't have. Willpower is the most useful, but you have a very limited supply of it; when willpower is overtaxed you can't use it until it recharges enough.

The mistake of most of the self help genre is to focus on motivation. Forget about motivation. You can't control it reliably. You should instead focus on willpower, but considering its limited supply, you must spend it efficiently by bootstrapping just a few habits at a time. Make a daily goal of "stupid simple" positive behaviors you can accomplish with little appreciable effort, that you can FORCE yourself to do even at the last minute, with a headache, while sleep deprived. The deadline is when you fall asleep. Something like reading just two pages of a book, or writing fifty words, or a single push up. If those sound too hard, think of something even easier. Maybe you just open the book. Maybe you just write a single word.

Your abstract goals may be lofty, but your concrete goals must be humble. When you've established a framework of habit, you are free to surf the waves of motivation to do "bonus reps". Read more pages, write more words, do more push ups. But only when you feel like it. It's very important psychologically to count the stupid simple behavior alone as a success. Because you've maintained the habit. Often the hardest part of work is starting. Your mini habit will set you in motion. At that point it's often easier to keep moving. Over time you'll entrench the habit, build willpower by exercising it, and accumulate some real accomplishment.

Once it's a real habit (i.e. easier to do than to not do), then it's no longer costing willpower and you try to add another one.

There are other details in the book. (And parts of it are probably worthless.) What the mindset looks like. How to avoid certain common failure modes. A particularly important one is about breaking your streak. If you accidentally miss a day, it can be very discouraging. Building a habit is like riding a bike up a hill. It's harder to do than to not do, until you reach the top. Don't think of a missed day as a broken link in the chain. Think of it as sliding down the hill, but not all the way down the hill. You've lost progress, but not all progress. This is not an excuse to skip days. It's an excuse to continue even if you miss one by accident. It's better to keep going.

Does the book seem worth reading? If you can't muster the willpower to check it out, just try the technique on one mini habit for a week. Let me know how it goes.

Working out has been too troublesome for me, but I do like endorphin boosts. Who needs drugs when you can get your brain to drug you for you?

Anytime you're feeling down, just do some kinda movement until your muscles burn a little then stop. It takes like 10 seconds of arm flapping or 3 crunches.

You can do it multiple times a day and keep a running tally to build up the initial affordance.

I'm focusing on something highly specific right now: a dirty, hack-riddled attempt at turning python into a usable live-programming environment. This is a far cry from my general interest of building an OS ( or "operating environment" ) which effectively has a reflective understanding of its own internals, programming language and operations.

This splits into many sub-problems; so the one I'm primarily fascinated by is how to construct a programming language that a computer not only can execute but understands the semantics of in various dimensions and at varying conceptual levels ( hence creating potential for manipulating the machine at using abstract concepts that are not necessarily rigorously defined beforehand ).

You mean living in suburbs is not appealing? ;)

Nothing particularly exciting comes to my mind

Property prices would fall. Sounds like a job for real-estate entrepreneurs.

I think it's a little bit worse than this.

A lot of people who gamble compulsively don't do it because the odds are beyond them. (It's really easy to play slots a bunch of times, lose a lot of money, and realize you lost a lot of money.) There's something neurologically strange about people who gamble frequently even though they lose, and it's hard to pinpoint it, but it seems like variable reinforcement is winning out over logic.

If you buy a large number of lottery tickets, you're pretty likely to win some sort of prize. Related example: slot machines are designed to generate a bonus round or a jackpot about once within each ~$100, and that's a pretty normal level of play for someone who does it compulsively. Also, like casino games like slots and blackjack, lottery tickets are pretty good at generating near misses and losses-disguised-as-wins, particularly scratcher and instant-ticket lotteries because those tend to involve a small pool of symbols and elaborate presentation.

There's also a giant sunk cost fallacy problem -- the problem is that understanding the sunk cost fallacy isn't enough to defeat it for a lot of people.

I would be willing to guess that a significant proportion of the people who play the lottery a lot probably have an accurate picture of the odds, but due to mental health problems they're going to continue to waste far too much money on it. I'd also be willing to guess that they generate most of the lottery proceeds just because even though they're numerically few, they buy more tickets than anyone else.

In a perfect world, the better math education would be funded by the proceeds from said state lotteries.