Definitely not wrong, the petitions almost certainly won't change anything. Change.org is not where one goes to actually change things.

I had a quasi-romantic relationship with a fictional character that lived in my head during my worst year, in college. I could sometimes even "see" him. I knew he wasn't real. It did help me out during the darkest times. Probably woulda been even better to be able to have chat conversations that were run by an AI. And I did outgrow that in a few months, when life got better. 

So, basically, this sounds great and I love this perspective. Thank you.

answer:

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I have a secret desire for this to become real which I fear may destroy me and/or everything I know.

The graph image is broken. Does anyone have a copy of the image file? I remember what it looked like, and it was super-useful for demonstrating the concept.

Asimov’s Science Fiction has published one of my stories! "Red Legacy," on page 48 of the current issue. Details on how to get it at my blog if you're interested. I think it's a rational story, but I'm interested in opinions if anyone here ends up reading it.

Taught early in high school: How to do sex, in real life. Not STI education, not pregnancy/fertility, not how to be safe, or the biology of penises and vagines. How to go into sex and do it so that it's fun and feels good, how to listen to your body and your partner, maybe how to attract the opposite sex, and so on. Dunno about elsewhere, but in the US guys get all their sex education from porn, and girls used to get none at all. (now... also porn?) Porn is fun, but it's Kabuki Sex, and it only vaguely relates to real-life sex. It'd be like giving a 16-year-old a driver's licence when the entirety of his/her driving education consisted of watch Hollywood Car Chase movies.

Of everything useful I ever learned about sex, 50% of it was from Dan Savage and 50% of it was from my fiance, both many years after I had actually started trying to do sex on my own. This is stupid.

Every single episode seems to have the deep underlying message of "Humans are fucked up, on a fundamental level. This is what it means to be human, and it cannot be changed. Let us revel in it." Sometimes it's melancholy, sometimes it's straight-up sad-as-hell, but there's never a feeling of "things can get better." It's always of "these problems are too large to change, nothing can be done but to embrace and accept it." It is the loss of all hope that makes me want to just give up on everything and crawl into a dark corner for the rest of the day.

It does seem to be there now, so I guess that was it. Thanks!

Hm. Denver meetup isn't showing up on the map on the front page. Is this the write place to mention that? Should someone else be messaged? Thanks,

There is a Starbucks, and last time I was there it had lots of chairs. :) I plan on bringing a large wizard's hat for ease of recognition.

Wanted to mention that the Denver Area meet-up next week is basically new. It's the second of a soon-to-be regular event that TheStevenator is starting up from scratch (mad props to him!). He just moved here and I believe there's no connection to the previous sporadic ones. Sounds like the goal is for these to become regular monthly meets. I'm looking forward to them. :)

Seconded! I literally laughed out loud, which doesn't happen from reading text very often. :)

Taken, in full

I had to stop listening to TAL because I was tired of wanting to kill myself after every episode.

1-2 mg of Melatonin ~20min before you wish to fall asleep

2 hours per day seems like way too much. I work out 3x per week, 1 hour each time. (Though I did start 4x per week, 1 hour each, when I was initially losing weight). Just make sure to keep it high intensity. When I'm tempted to slack off I ask myself if I'm here to kill some time by moving around, or if I'm here to achieve a damn objective as efficiently as I can so I can get back to doing other things. If after an hour is up I'm physically capable of continuing for another hour, I obviously was just wasting my time.

Planet Money is fantastic, I never miss it. Savage Love is equally fantastic, and on a topic too many people neglect because they don't think there's much to learn.

Welcome to Night Vale is quirky and fun. Plus quite popular, so gives you something to talk about with other geeks you run into at random.

This reminds me quite a bit of The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect

Barring catastrophe, I shall indeed be there!

Has anyone posted about Seth Dickinson yet? I don't keep up on the open threads as much as I'd like, but my google-fu says no.

Last year I was blown away by a short story by Seth Dickinson called A Plant (Whose Name is Destroyed). Recently I went and checked out Seth Dickinson's other works. I've read over half of them now, and I gotta say - I STRONGLY recommend this author. Many of his works have a very strong transhumanist message, and some could be called rationalist. I'm kinda surprised I haven't already heard his name brought up on LessWrong, or SlateStarCodex, or /r/rational. I'm fixing that this week.

A few of my favorite stories:

Economies of Force - A post-GAI story where humanity made AI that almost captures our values, but not quite, and it results in the sort of utopia you might expect from that sort of failure. Shades of Amputation of Destiny and Bostrom's Empty Disneyland. If anyone can figure out the significance of the name "Loom", please let me know. It must have been chosen for a reason, but I'm not making the connection.

Sekhmet Hunts the Dying Gnosis: A Computation - A rather literal take on Meditations on Moloch, and/or An Alien God

Morrigan in the Sunglare - Like Bayesians vs Barbarians, told from the PoV of the Barbarians (sort of).

Kumara - a seriously beautiful post-singularity transhumanist story. Just... really beautiful. And murderous.

Yeah, but honestly, try reading Dickens or Shakespeare today. Maybe I'm just an uncultured philistine, but it's not what I would call good. If they weren't so highly regarded I'd never choose to read them myself, and certainly wouldn't recommend them to friends.

200 years from now, you probably wouldn't even want to read any of Eliezer's books (or whoever your favorite author is right now). I'm fairly convinced all fiction is contemporary and fades in relevance in a matter of decades. But would a promise today of another Eliezer work in the future motivate you to sign up for cryo?

That's a good point, and you're right. I wish "person" didn't feel so formal though. I'm having trouble thinking of a gender-neutral word that conveys the same casualness of "guy."

I've written a short fiction piece that has been accepted for publication. My first ever professional publication will appear in February's issue of Asimov's Science Fiction magazine.

Not much has been said cuz there ain't much to say about things that don't exist. Your mind is what your brain does. When the brain stops, so do you. This isn't even advanced rationality - it's reductionism 101. I believe there was a Intelligence Squared debate on it just a few days ago that rehashed all the same old ground if you'd like a refresher. Here we go.

Giving a prior of .5 is ridiculous. Something for which you have no evidence and which breaks several known laws of physics should begin with a seriously tiny prior. You're being heavily influenced by social traditions.

Ever since my brother joined the Military I've thought that could be a potentially good way to push cryonics. The Military is already well-known for forcing technological change, but it's less known that the Military's effort to reduce loss of fighting men to Syphilis (as well as other STIs) was a major contributor to the social acceptance of condoms, which had previously been shunned. The social changes resulting from that campaign are often cited as a precursor to the sexual revolution.

People don't seem to care that much when an old person dies of natural causes, which is the case for most cryo. A young, attractive corpse gathers enough sympathy and attention to get crowd-sourced funding. The Military produces a much higher-than-average number of young, tragic deaths. A fair percentage of them leave the brain intact. It shouldn't be that hard of a case to make that since the Military is the reason that these young people are losing their lives, it has a duty to give them the best chance at getting their lives back.

Difficulty of engineering a moderately-sided canister that can be fitted over the head of a dead soldier and automatically sever and preserve it (obviously opt-in only)? Probably well within DARPA resources. A decade of this being a standard option for military personnel would do wonders to ease social acceptability, no? A family that has a son/brother in cryo now has emotional motivation to consider that it just might, maybe, work some day in the future.

Also -

I actually have a list of about ten of these, which I will happily make available on request (i.e. I’ll write another discussion post about them if people are interested)

I am interested, please consider this +1 requests. :)

UPPP

Not terribly expensive. The recovery is painful. But the pain is temporary, and the improvements are amazing. It was a major turning point in my life, and I'd strongly recommend it to anyone who is considered a good candidate (consult your specialist)

Well, someone's gotta do it.

Interestingly, I've been using card and online banking for so long that I seem to have internalized "money is the number stored in the bank's computer/my mental register". Recently I came into a steady flow of cash (long story), and I didn't want to go to the bank every damn week to deposit it, so I started paying for groceries and restaurants with that cash. It felt like giving away play money and getting real goods and services in exchange. "You mean I can give you some colored paper slips, and you'll just give me $100 worth of groceries? It doesn't reduce the money I have in the bank? And I'm not going to jail for this?" It was weird.

Well, my actual guess is 85%, so it's not a symmetrical split for me. Hopefully I'm not doing confidence intervals wrong..

Personally I picked "monogamous" because it's the closest to how my relationship actually works. Aside from sex with other people, we are a monogamous couple.

I don't think we're using the same definition of 'win'. This is the same thinking that leads to two-boxing.

40-98

So if a group using your decision-making-process all took this survey, "rationally" trying to win the contest, they would end up winning $0. :)

Because I think it's one of the three major relationship models. Pure Monogamy is traditional, and Polyamory is the reaction against it, but Monogamish is how a lot of relationships actually work (while operating under the cloak of monogamy). It's like a worldwide religion survey allowing only "Christian" and "Muslim", and lumping Hinduism under "Other". There's another major option here that should be broken out.

I'm seconding the request for next year to include a Monogamish option. I'm in a basically monogamous relationship, but we both sometimes sleep with friends.

(also I took the survey)

In the spoken presentation I did amend that to "or early next year" :)

I don't think I was frightened in the same way that other people say they are - I certainly wouldn't rate this worse than death. It was more of that fear of doing something in public for the first time where you know you could screw it up badly and there's no way to undo the mistake.

A podcast is a very different animal. You're in a private room, there's no one there watching you as you do it, you have all the time you need to correct mistakes and edit them out later. It's nothing like public speaking. :)

For my first, possibly-terrible public talk, I'm ok with lowering expectations. :) That whole first intro paragraph ended up being more of a dialog with the audience (which is why it's cut from the video) and it went pretty well.

Expecting Short Inferential Distances may be a good idea, since it encapsulates the reason there are so many words/posts in the sequences.

I thought Religion's Claim to be Non-Disprovable is an amazing post, one of the most memorable, and it'd be a shame not to include it.

Likewise, The Hidden Complexity of Wishes was an incredibly intuitive way to explain that an AI doesn't have to hate you for it to destroy the world, it simply has to not have your values.

I think a much more interesting take on Milgram is one presented by Radio Lab in which it's put forth that people were particularly likely to obey due to the spirit of scientific exceptionalism during that era. Science had won WWII, science was responsible for our prosperity and was making life better for everyone on earth, and they were helping that cause. It was idealism and optimism that prompted people to go beyond their own bounds in the pursuit of the greater good, rather than cynicism and obedience.

Also of note was that everyone who continued all the way to the final shock never heard the final prompt (“You have no other choice, teacher; you must go on”). Anyone who did hear that prompt would instantly fight back and refuse to continue. Being told you have no other choice was apparently counter-productive and would trigger resistance.

http://xkcd.com/167/

Only tangentially related, this reminds me of a flash-fiction about vast farms of neuron-less meat, and the conundrum a humane society faces when some of those slabs of meat develop neurons. Great story, only 1000 words. Neither Face Nor Feeling.

Can we taboo "Suffer"? Because at this point I'm not even sure what that means. Is it "a biological signal that identifies damage"? That seems too simple, because most sophisticated machines can detect damage and signal it, and we don't particularly worry ourselves about that.

Catch-22 re God & pain:

Oh, He was really being charitable to us when He gave us pain! Why couldn't He have used a doorbell instead to notify us, or one of his celestial choirs? Or a system of blue-and-red neon tubes right in the middle of each person's forehead. Any jukebox manufacturer worth his salt could have done that.

Listening to RadioLab they described a wasp who's midsection had been accidentally crushed. As it was dying it began to eat it's own viscera. Likely because it detected a rich food source and began executing the standard action when in the presence of a rich food source. It was at this point that I finally intuitively understood that insects are simply biological replicating machines. I cannot think of them as feeling anything akin to suffering any more, merely damage-avoidance subroutines.

It seems we're concerned about the capacity of a mind to experience something it wants to avoid. Doesn't that imply that the complexity of the mind is a factor?

I can read fine, I've taken up writing, and I do most of my online-doable chores & blog reading. And reply to LW posts. ;) I suppose it depends on your office but mine is cool.

When I'm actually working it's a lot of number juggling on spreadsheets, pulling data from databases, and tracking down where money went and why it wasn't entered into our system the way it was supposed to be. About half of it requires little enough concentration that I can listen to podcasts while doing it. The other half takes actual mental effort.

The pay right now - yeah. Starting pay is lower, I've been in the game for a while. And it depends on how you live. After bonus I make aprox 66k/year, which isn't spectacular, but is more than enough for me, and seems fair based on how much free time I get at work. I've had to start investing my money, because it was piling up and doing nothing.

$200, and finally signed up for monthly donations as well.

This takes some start-up time, but accounting can work for this. Without higher ed you can get various low-level positions in large corporations and if you're smart you work up quickly. The work process is likely to be old and very inefficient, with some computer savvy you can streamline your work and slowly phase out duplicated labor. And the work naturally comes in cycles - quarter-ends are rough, the rest of the time is fairly light. It's been a few years, but now (aside from 2 weeks per quarter) I only actually labor for 20 hours/week. The down side is that you do still have to be at the office for 40 hours, but if you can be productive at your computer, or read surreptitiously (eReaders are great), that time isn't lost. And it pays fairly well.

Were you, then, truly using the technical definition? Do you actually feel you do not understand the mental processes and lines of thought by which people decide that immortality is undesirable? If so, it's worth discussing because it's generally bad form to give a strong dismissal a viewpoint that you know you don't fully understand.

I was using it in both senses. I've tried doing a lot of reading and talking about the subject, and it hasn't helped. The panel was an effort to further that as well. I really am trying to get it. I almost feel like I need Yvain to write a "Deathism in a giant planet-sized nutshell" post.

much too uncharitable and [...] not sincere

This is a blind-spot for me, and honestly is the reason I tried to get some smart people together to talk. I know it's uncharitable, and I feel like I'm strawmanning my opposition, yet I just can't seem to wrap my head around how this viewpoint even exists. The panel didn't help much with that, but that was mainly my fault.

You're the host, your introduction primed the debate on religion, which is among the least interesting aspects (to me), and made Brin talk about monasteries later on. Thanks ...

I'm also uninterested in the religion aspect, but I was trying to tie it into the con's theme of atheism/religious-skepticism. It's how I pitched it to PZ in the first place, so I didn't feel I could abandon it once the show started. If I didn't think it was necessary for inclusion in the con I wouldn't have bothered.