Posts

Comments

Comment by David_Allencourt on For me the Christianity deal-breaker was meekness · 2021-08-26T18:40:20.280Z · LW · GW

Not valuing meekness is how you get the ghetto, where men feel compelled to beat each other with their firsts over minor slights. 

Comment by David_Allencourt on Cryonics prices were more complicated when I double-clicked · 2021-08-26T16:25:49.446Z · LW · GW

My primary concern with cryonics is that by far the most complicated part will be memory restoration. Getting the brain up and working will likely be significantly easier than restoring your memories as they were. I could easily see a future organization deciding to do it "the cheap way", especially since there are no guarantees of memory restoration efforts with most cryonics organizations, and reviving you as a mostly blank slate.

This seems inefficient to me, as it effectively is just an expensive way of adding +1 to the population if your unique insights and experience from the past can't come with you. Plus...we don't know what the future holds. Looking at history, there is no guarantee of positive moral development in our countries. If they revive you as a blank slate, it could be an age of what would to us be moral monstrosities being routinely accepted by society and those values could be imparted to you as they educate and rehabilitate you. 

So it could just amount to making an expensive monster. I'm actually very confident in the odds of success for cryonics, but putting my very brain into the hands of a future culture with unknown values worries me. 

Of course, the opposite could also be true and they could well be even better than we are, they can restore your memory even better than it is now, and your insights from the past make you a valuable member of that future society.

It's a gamble and I see no way of reasonably calculating the odds on it. I'm extremely interested in cryonics and nearly had a policy in place for it myself at one point, but now I'm not sure I want to roll a dice when I don't even know how many sides it has.

Comment by David_Allencourt on Making Beliefs Pay Rent (in Anticipated Experiences) · 2021-08-26T06:18:55.098Z · LW · GW

I think his point isn't so much that what you're saying WILL have a practical impact on your sensory experiences, just that it has the potential to do so. What you "expect" to experience as a result. In real life we can't weld a pair of trillion-pound bars of gold to each other and then see how much they weigh, but because of mathematics, we know that if we were to place them on an accurate scale we would see a weight of two trillion pounds.