belkarx's Shortform
post by belkarx · 2022-12-02T05:13:47.820Z · LW · GW · 9 comments9 comments
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comment by belkarx · 2023-11-30T21:08:48.895Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Do the people who contract things out because their time is worth $n/hr or whatever actually keep track of how many “extra” hours they work on top of their basic expenses such that they know how much work they can practically expense out? Or is this a thing that people just say and don’t stop to actually think through. Very much has the vibes of a family with 300k+ takehome or whatever living paycheck to paycheck cuz they’re too good for certain things
comment by belkarx · 2022-12-02T05:13:48.105Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
After reading LW more consistently for a couple weeks, I started recognizing rationalists in other parts of The Internet and wondered what were common social medias. My guesses are Twitter, Hacker News, StackExchange, and Quora in about that order, and I will eventually attempt to confirm this more rigorously, be it by demographic survey or username correlation (much less reliable).
For now, I was particularly interested in finding LW users that are also on Hacker News, so I quickly queried both sites and found ~25% of active LW users had Hacker News accounts (with a relatively large margin of error, due to the way I biased username selection to account for different naming conventions and given n=355). Here's the extremely quick script in case anyone has any methodological critiques or improvements: https://gist.github.com/belkarx/33cfdda5b6c52ea45198d0bc427fa990
comment by belkarx · 2023-08-19T18:24:17.129Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
How does cyronic neuropreservation consider the peripheral and enteric nervous systems? why do they assume CNS is enough?
Replies from: Viliam↑ comment by Viliam · 2023-08-19T19:49:02.332Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
As far as I know, you have both options, but freezing only the head is cheaper.
My guess would be that the head is not everything, but it is more than 90% of "everything". I may be wrong; there is a lot of guessing here.
I suspect that more people would freeze their entire bodies if cryonics became much cheaper.
Replies from: steve2152, pktechgirl↑ comment by Steven Byrnes (steve2152) · 2023-08-19T21:11:07.409Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Evidence that the head is mostly enough is the fact that people sometimes get upper spinal injuries that make them quadriplegic, and when that happens it sure sucks for them but we don't think of it as "they died and got replaced by a different person". Right? I might be misunderstanding spinal injuries.
↑ comment by Elizabeth (pktechgirl) · 2023-08-20T18:41:48.549Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
it's not just money- a severed head is considered medical waste, which has fewer regulations around handling than a whole body (source: talk I saw several years ago). So there are borderline situations where you can get a head frozen much faster than a whole body.
This comment finally prompted me to ask Alcor if I can do some sort of split decision, where I get body frozen if it's very convenient but head if not.
comment by belkarx · 2023-06-10T16:25:00.957Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
There is a strong analogy to be made between human psychopaths and misaligned AI
Replies from: rhollerith_dot_com↑ comment by RHollerith (rhollerith_dot_com) · 2023-06-10T18:21:23.550Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Eliezer warns against trying to use that analogy to reason about misaligned AI (for example in his appearance on the Bankless podcast).
comment by belkarx · 2022-12-16T18:43:56.276Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Bias is like turning your head to the side as you walk - if you don't pay attention, you will subconsciously start drifting to the direction you're looking. It's possible to stay on track, but you have to be vigilant about maintaining a straight line