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I recently discovered that I like peas porridge. You can apparently just put the split peas in water in an insta-pot and if you cook them enough they disintegrate. Unlike beans or potatoes, you don't have to mash them to get a homogeneous food. The resulting soup firms up nicely when refrigerated, and you can sweeten or spice the "pudding" depending on your preference.
Winco carries dry split green peas for $0.86/lb. Walmart offers price parity to that in 8lb bags. The commodity index price is $0.15/lb, so I think something is up with the supply chain and recursive markups because that's almost a 600% markup (contrast the allegedly typical 1-2% grocery store markup). In any case, dry peas are 20% protein, so the protein powder equivalent would be $4.30/lb. (I have yet to see protein powder at anything close to this price.)
Oats are 13% protein but slightly cheaper than peas, so they have a similar protein to dollar value ratio. They have a different amino acid profile, so you can mix or alternate between the two to get complete protein.
However, both oats and peas contain significant amounts of phytic acid which can prevent the absorption of various minerals (iron, zinc, magnesium, calcium) during the same meal. The trick here might be to cook no higher than 90°C (the lowest setting of the insta-pot should suffice) to avoid denaturing phytase enzymes prematurely while giving them time to work. Rye is relatively high in phytase, oats relatively low, so adding a handful of rye might be ideal (or wheat berries).
Alternatively, you could obtain phytase from a feed store (typically added to chicken and swine feeds). Phytases intended for animal feeds tend to be thermostable up to 120°C so you would not have to be as careful with the cooking temperature.
Setting a recurring alarm at 9:30pm and taking melatonin right away. Got me in the habit of getting tired and going to bed more consistently.
Good points, and I think we mostly agree. If I understand correctly, the idea would rely on building a city from the ground up elsewhere rather than modifying existing cities.
In principle, pods anywhere between shipping container size and coffin size could be warehoused somewhat like cargo, although obviously more safety considerations apply, and you'd need things like supply and air conditioning lines. I wouldn't want to put up with a small pod unless the VR experience was very good, and it was easy to get out of.
The moving company analogy is interesting because in principle, you could automate the moving process to the point where you only need to rent a space when you're actually there. That is, a robot system picks up all your stuff, packs it and moves it to storage, etc while you're off of work, vacation, or wherever -- at which point the apartment is immediately sterilized and prepped for the next resident -- and you move back in (with all your stuff in analogous places to where you left it) when you come home. Not a particularly simple task, but doesn't need big infrastructure like moving a whole house.
With regards to RV parks, I'm thinking a metropolitan center could easily use parking garage style buildings to house the RVs indoors in tall buildings. I wouldn't be at all surprised if these exist already in some cities. It does probably imply lower population density on a volumetric basis than an equivalent apartment complex though, as there's going to be distance between the vehicles, thick enough floors to drive on, high ceilings for clearance, etc. On the plus side, in an RV park you can easily step out of your vehicle and say hi to the neighbors, so it's a bit different from being palletized in an automated storage/retrieval warehouse.
I really like this kind of speculation (clearly marked as low probability, but not without effort to develop something that works in principle). I do think it's a near-miss in terms of being an optimal path for cities though, as there are several alternatives with higher likelihood that honestly seem like they would create more value per amount of infrastructure/cost than easily-moved suburban-style homes.
First, apartments can be made better than they usually are. It's just that usually when you move to get a job in the city, being cash constrained, you settle for the lowest budget option you can make work. The rent extracted is not lowered in accordance to the living conditions, because of the rent being extracted on the proximity to an employer.
So while it's easy to say some people will insist on Rivendell for psychological reasons, that probably isn't as essential as it seems. A bigger factor is that a big, high quality apartment is going to cost a very large amount. That isn't because the physics demands a high cost for a big apartment in a high rise, but because scarcity pressures force the price upward.
Secondly, moveability correlates to smallness. So theoretically you could have e.g. a metropolis of parking garages and RVs, but a consequence of sticking to roadways as transit everyone would live in fairly small homes. At the more extreme end of small, japanese style sleeping pods, basically coffins.
As a transhumanist, I'm willing to make some trades for a better outcome. Modify my genetics to live longer, bones to be less breakable, zero gee tolerant, etc. But apart from intelligence enhancement and similar, I'd really prefer my brain and preferences not be altered much, and especially not via near term tech invented by humans. So I'd rather not self-modify to be content with coffin housing / deep crowding, and I expect this is common. And the process of getting used to it over time seems like a lot of suffering.
With good VR, it could be another story. However, an immersive VR environment in something like basically a bed in a box carries the risk of physical illness from inactivity. So you would need a gym routine or similar. It might be less safe to telework from such a thing if you're spending the rest of your day inside of it as well. For long term use, this would probably also need to come with some kind of medical package -- blood pressure check, temperature, and ways to get clean and dispose of bodily waste like with a bedridden patient. So such a device overlaps medical needs substantially.
Thus in the class of near term "what if someone Elon-like really gets a bee in their bonnet about it" questions, it seems possible that you get to a point where pods with built in equipment and easy access to amenities are better than a (much more expensive) suburban residence.
The reason pods are fascinating in spite of the technical hurdles is because they allow much higher volumetric density with (in principle!) none of the discomfort of being actually crammed into a slum. And a further benefit of VR with small box-shaped pods is that you can replace mass transit (and private cars) by shipping people in their own homes directly to the location. When they step out, assuming it's scheduled ahead and robotically delivered at low gees, it's sort of like being teleported.
So that's one competing scenario with some risks, but high payoff, and it stops well short of the requirements for brains in jars or ems.
Perhaps not as likely as simply building taller apartments until the shortage goes away. However, even then, there's the issue of coordinating and getting around building regulations. So the idea of moving somewhere empty and making a city from scratch has some appeal.
In 2011, a company called Broad Sustainable Building from China demonstrated that they could build 30 floor buildings (330 apartment capacity) in 2 weeks. The time lapse video is quite impressive. The cost was $1000/sqm or 3.3M. They've actually done several different buildings on similar timelines.
I'm not so sure the reason we haven't done it here is all regulatory. Part of what they did to make it so cheap was set up a factory dedicated to the prefabricated componencts. Repeating that here in the US might push the start cost quite a bit higher. Still, it's probably mainly regulations that prevent it, or render it a slightly more than trivial inconvenience, or whatever the blocker really is.
There was an interesting suggestion by u/jkaufman as to how one might hypothetically create location value a few years back. (For the record, I don't agree with the critique of LVT, but I consider the article a great example of an educated near-miss that interestingly conveys foundational concepts): Land Value Taxes Are Distortionary.
Some great suggestions there IMO:
- Buy cheap land in rural New Mexico.
- Put down the subway tunnels before doing any construction.
- Put in fiber internet, obviously.
- Get big companies to sign on (ideally, before spending any money on it).
However, the real advantage really might be the lack of competing pre-existing interests in the location, rather than the pre-laid infrastructure. Here are some more examples of things centralized control/planning lets you do that a pre-existing city can't easily do:
- Define a wide radius where only buildings taller than a certain height are permitted. So no buildings need demolished to make room.
- Rental agreements structured to mimic land value taxes.
- Using prefab structural components like the BSB buildings?
- Robot cars only. No streets for people to get killed trying to cross, not necessary to favor line of sight between buildings (put the roads in tunnels under and/or through the buildings).
- Hexagonal buildings that lock side to side in a honeycomb mesh. Adds structural stability, making it (I think) possible to go higher per unit cost. More useful when you don't need roads / roads are all in tunnels.
- Mandate a set of identical building plans be used. Can be a somewhat large set to choose from, but the growth can be managed much easier if you are tiling similar things than if you have to re-plan for each tiny change on every vanity project.
So if you don't focus on the narrow scenario, I think the OP has a heck of a lot of value. And as a general rationality point, I think it's usually best to consider such proposals as intuition pumps for the concepts that motivate them, and figure out how to conceivably correct their deficits.
If you still want to ban politics, whatever, your actions are law, but be transparent and say what you are doing.
Is there a reason to do that? Nobody said that a rule was violated, and the explanation given makes sense to me as it stands. What is the problem with just deleting the (not necessarily rule violating) post and explaining that we usually avoid stuff like articles with Trump in the title?
Phil Metzger on building space industry arXiv
Isaac Arthur on Self Replicating Machines and Technological Singularity
Found this great youtube channel by a guy named Isaac Arthur, covering a variety of space topics. Has videos on Dyson Spheres, colonizing the Moon, and even concepts for very long term survival of civilizations and people past the heat death of the universe. Very rational and comprehensive.
My long hiatus started a couple years ago, so my perspective might be different from yours.
I think the main issue for me it was more that it wasn't very fun any more. The people who made it fun (EY, Yvain, etc) were mostly posting elsewhere. The majority of posts were starting to be boring things like meetup announcements. Some of the new posts were interesting, but had more technical content and less humor.
Part of it could be that the commenters became more politically (in the sense of national politics) motivated, but that's not something I noticed at the time... I think that's perhaps a more recent thing, assuming that is indeed happening.
Another thing that might have been a factor is that I started using a smartphone more. So apps like twitter and facebook that can be easily checked there had more appeal. (This website still sucks for mobile.)
It depends on the scale you are working at. A large body with no internal heat source can be kept cold over time at a lower cost because only the outside needs to be insulated. If cryonics were at the scale of a large cryogenic warehouse, it might be much less expensive.
Orbiting landing tracks.
Payloads would be launched from earth with just enough fuel to loft them above the atmosphere and keep them hovering for a few minutes. Then they would electromagnetically couple to a long horizontal structure in low orbit, picking up velocity (or "losing" it, depending on the frame of reference) until they are orbiting at the same rate.
Electrically driven thrusters (e.g. vertical electrodynamic tethers which push against the earth's magnetic field) would be used to replenish the lost momentum. At any given time, the payload would be a fraction of the total track mass, but since it could be new track material this would permit (fairly rapid) bootstrapping.
One possible reason is that it facilitates trust-building. Say you are stuck in a cell with another prisoner, and every day you have the chance to cooperate or defect on a small task (for example, sharing food equally vs trying to steal an unequal share). Later, you are asked to testify against each other and get a slightly reduced sentence in exchange for the other person having a drastically increased sentence. A history of the other person cooperating gives some evidence that they will cooperate in this new situation as well.
Another analogy to this would be the process of building credit. If you take out lots of loans and pay them back scrupulously, you build a history of credit worthiness. The banks are more willing to be vulnerable based on past behavior of not defaulting.
A quick process like that is pretty much insignificant compared to a month or two, let alone 15 years. Unless there are tens of thousands of other steps in the chain of comparable length, it doesn't come close to explaining it.
As I see it, there are roughly four steps:
- Excavating.
- Refining.
- Power collecting.
- Manufacturing.
The ones towards the end seem to be the biggest time sinks. However, power collection should not raise it by more than a factor of two or so. I don't think it takes many months to mine enough coal to pay for the energy costs of coal mining equipment, for example.
Exactly. Self-Replicating robotics on Earth is a global instant victory condition. Completion of one would result in machines that could double their production exponentially, leading to practically infinite production capability within no time.
Per Robin Hanson, a machine shop can put out its own mass in equipment in roughly a month or two. And yet, the economy doesn't double every month, or even every year. Why not?
There seems to be a fair chance the reasons are mostly rooted in cognitive biases, cumulative coordination mistakes, economic rent-seeking, and so on -- not anything technological.
A well planned lunar or orbital mission might well be free of these issues. Space conditions are mechanically simpler in some respects, so there's a stronger case for pre-planning everything rather than requiring a market economy to make it work. Supporting structures are less needed, transit is less two dimensional, and solar energy can be harvested at scale with low costs in equipment density. There is also instant access to ultra-high vacuum conditions which are useful for refining. And in addition to the endless cheap sunlight, there's no anti-nuclear lobby which can claim it's in their back yard.
Suggesting self-replicating robotics is akin to saying we should just solve this whole not being post-scarcity problem.
Maybe we should solve this whole not being post-scarcity problem...
Good question. I am not sure where I originally found the idea that shorter commutes make you happier, but I suspect it might have been an earlier version of this from 80000hours, which cites a couple of studies. Googling for pre-2013 media articles shows a lot of mentions of the idea as well.
The idea about a well optimized train or bus ride that Dr_Manhattan brought up also makes sense, if you live in an area with decent public transportation. It's the car drives that are a big time-killer, since you can't really turn your brain off while navigating through traffic, and traffic is usually more stressful at times you need to get to work.
There are a few productive things you can do during long drives though. For example, you can practice speeches, elevator pitches, songs, comedy bits, and so on without anyone hearing. That may not be quite as effective as interacting with another person on a bus/train, but the lack of an audience/consequences can make it easier to try out new things. Also, there's the option of consuming audio content (which you could also do with headphones on the bus or train).
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To be fair, the article got lots of things wrong.
Here's a recent idea I had: A tattoo that responds to blood alcohol content over a certain level (e.g. causing an itchy sensation in the skin, or releasing a small amount of something that causes nausea), making it difficult / anti-habit-forming to get drunk. I'm thinking this could solve the alcoholism problem, comprehensively, without discouraging moderate drinking or relying on willpower.
Another variant would rely on social pressure. Although that is less reliable, it could be safer or easier to implement than one that creates a physiological reaction. For this version, one would have a tattoo that is usually invisible, but becomes visible in the presence of high alcohol level. It could e.g. spell "drunk" across the person's forehead.
Of course, such an invention is not quite on par with flush toilets. Not everyone gets drunk, and it is not infectious. Alcohol is not necessary for civilization. However, comprehensively eliminating alcohol overconsumption would be pretty darned helpful and would eliminate a lot of spillover costs of alcohol consumption, like drunk driving, spousal abuse, and so forth. Moreover, ethanol in excessive doses damages the liver, heart, and skin over time.
In addition to helping people who are alcoholics or at-risk directly, a side effect of such an invention is that people who do not drink due to perceived risk of alcoholism (or reluctance to expose oneself to such a risk) would be able to start drinking. This would probably have benefits that go beyond the extra hedons. Assuming it functions as a nootropic for social characteristics, it could lead to more people being better connected socially (i.e. having more close friends).
Incidentally, I don't see a reason something along these lines could not have been developed 50+ years ago.
If you're trying to prevent information-theoretic death by preserving the brain it's critical that the information that makes you be "you" actually be preserved.
Look at it from the other side: In order to achieve information-theoretic death, it is critical that the information that makes you be "you" actually be lost.
By "lost" we mean it has to be scrambled at least enough that superintelligent computronium dyson spheres aren't going to be able to (reasonably) crack the code.
So let's say you dissolve the brain in acid. That is likely to be a good way to achieve information-theoretic death.
Leaving it to rot for a few days? Probably.
Freezing it in ice crystals? Maybe.
Vitrifying it? Probably not.
there are many aspects of the brain structure that might or might not be relevant. Is information stored in the positions of proteins within the cells? Are phosphorylation states significant? What scale of preservation is sufficient?
Any given bit of data is likely to be stored in multiple areas by multiple mechanisms, with lots of redundancy. Moreover, every time data is stored or accessed by some mechanism, there should be side effects, things you can infer the data from that aren't part of the mechanism. The complexity of the brain works in our favor, not against -- assuming we can develop good enough reductionistic models of the brain to account for all the details.
Short for Intermediate Temperature Storage.
This is good argument capable of convincing me into pro-cryonics position, if and only if someone can follow this claim by an evidence pointing to high probability estimate that preservation and restoration will become possible during a resonable time period.
At some point, you will have to specialize in cryobiology and neuroscience (with some information science in there too) in order to process the data. I can understand wanting to see the data for yourself, but expecting everyone to process it rationally and in depth before they get on board isn't necessarily realistic for a large movement. Brian Wowk has written a lot of good papers on the challenges and mechanisms of cryopreservation, including cryoprotectant toxicity. Definitely worth reading up on. Even if you don't decide to be pro-cryonics, you could use a lot of the information to support something related, like cryopreservation of organs.
If it so happens, that cryopreservation fails to prevent information-theoretic death then value of your cryo-magazines filled with with corpses will amount to exactly 0$ (unless you also preserve the organs for transplants).
Until you have enough information to know, with very high confidence, that information-theoretic death has happened in the best cases, you can't really assign it all a $0 value in advance. You could perhaps assign a lower value than the cost of the project, but you would have to have enough information to do so justifiably. Ignorance cuts both ways here, and cryonics has traditionally been presented as an exercise in decision-making under conditions of uncertainty. I don't see a reason that logic would change if there are millions of patients under consideration. (Although it does imply more people with an interest in resolving the question one way or another, if possible.)
I don't quite agree that the value would be zero if it failed. It would probably displace various end-of-life medical and funeral options that are net-harmful, reduce religious fundamentalism, and increase investment in reanimation-relevant science (regenerative medicine, programmable nanodevices, etc). It would be interesting to see a comprehensive analysis of the positive and negative effects of cryonics becoming more popular. More organs for transplantation could be one effect worth accounting for, since it does not seem likely that we will need our original organs for reanimation. There would certainly be more pressure towards assisted suicide, so that could be positive or negative depending how you look at it.
If you're worried about the effects of cracking, you can pay for ITS. LN2 is only used because it is cheap and relatively low-tech to maintain.
If you ask me it's a silly concern if we're assuming nanorepair or uploading. Cracking is just a surface discontinuity, and it forms at a point in time where the tissue is already in a glassy state where there can't be much mixing of molecules. The microcracks that form in frozen tissue is a much greater concern (but not the only concern with freezing). The fact that vitrified tissue forms large, loud cracks is related to the fact that it does such a good job holding things in place.
It feels to me like the general pro-cryo advocacy here would be a bit of a double standard, at least when compared to general memes of effective altruism, shutting up and multiplying, and saving the world. If I value my life equally to the lives of others, it seems pretty obvious that there's no way by which the money spent on cryonics would be a better investment than spending it on general do-gooding.
I think the scale on which it is done is the main thing here. Currently, cryonics is performed so infrequently that there isn't much infrastructure for it. So it is still fairly expensive compared to the amount of expected utility -- probably close to the value implied by regulatory tradeoffs ($5 million per life). On a large, industrial scale I expect it to be far better value than anything Givewell is going to find.
Sorry, I didn't notice my wording. Fixed.
Max More just put out a response to Michio Kaku's video on the topic of cryonics. Seems to be getting some coverage (KurzweilAI, io9, geek.com).
This is speculative, but I think cryonics could be useful to fix the biological body as well. Cryogenic conditions are easier for certain types of things, for example some types of molecular nanotech might not work well under warm conditions but should work fine if kept cold. Also, more finely detailed printing could be possible under cryogenic conditions. It might turn out to be the most reliable way to replace the body when it gets old -- vitrify, cut out the brain, then print everything else around it. When printing in a cold state to begin with, there would be less concern of overexposure to cryoprotectants or achieving perfusion (you could use less toxic, harder to perfuse cryoprotectants such as trehalose).
If cryonics works in the here and now, we could in principle (with adequate PR, policies, and so forth) replace all funerals with cryonics and save almost everyone from dying today. I would expect regenerative therapies to finally get out of clinical trials after 50 years or so, even if we were to get them working right away. This represents a very large amount of expected utility (2.5 billion deaths worth, at 50 million per year) with that amount of time.
That said, it is not such a good comparison to hold current cryonics tech up against future advances anticipated in antiaging tech. If you want to put money into future advances in life extension, generally considered, it makes more sense to consider whether meaningful antiaging (say, something significant enough to get large numbers of people to actuarial escape velocity -- perhaps a 10-year improvement) is more/less likely than the cryonics equivalent (say, reversible vitrification of the brain) to be adequately solved, and cheaply distributed to the global population, first.
Some things to consider:
- Cryonics has already been pioneered to the point of reversible rabbit kidney, and the prospects for a brain are defensible (if uncertain) in patients right now, despite clinical death. By contrast, we can be pretty sure nobody currently has been rejuvenated from aging. The closest existing thing is caloric restriction, which appears not to work in primates. SENS is still speculative.
- The problem of cryonics is largely brute physics (cooling, diffusion, cryoprotectant chemistry), whereas aging is predominantly a matter of the biochemistry of metabolism and regeneration. The complex biochemical technologies we uncover that we can expect to be helpful against aging may be even more effective towards cryonics, because they can be combined/hybridized with mechanically based advances (e.g. cooling more rapidly to prevent toxicity while simultaneously mitigating toxicity with engineered biochemicals).
- Experimental feedback for cryonics research tends to be faster (and involve less suffering) because you do not have to wait for the animal to die of old age. The study can be done on a healthy animal, where the only relevant form of damage is the cryobiological/toxicological damage, which occurs instantly, and after anesthetization.
Apart from the technical advantages, it is worth considering that cryonics may be cheaper to deploy on a massive scale. Liquid nitrogen costs are much lower (per unit volume) for larger storage units. Perfusion with cryoprotectant could be worked into the existing end-of-life medical system. You wouldn't have to experiment on healthy old people with innovative therapies as SENS would need to to, only terminal or clinically dead patients would be subject to cryonics.
The efficient charity essay contest had a bottom line, it just wasn't something anyone would be likely to dispute (and which had been previously argued for on Less Wrong). Qualified entries were supposed to explain, in less jargonistic terms, that you should optimize for utilions rather than fuzzies. The idea in that case was to put the existing ideas in more layman-friendly terms.
If the bottom line we're discussing is just "some utilitarians in some situations support cryonics", my thinking is that it shouldn't be controversial, since that's pretty much already implied by the fungibility of utility. At least, if the opposite were true, I'd be surprised and want a good explanation for it. But I'm wondering if there's a more subtle issue -- perhaps it is being experienced as implying in some dark-artsy way something like "no rational utilitarian would ever oppose cryonics", something I never intended (and don't agree with).
Another explanation is that there's a real disagreement about the relative plausibility of utilitarians supporting cryonics. I have more or less implied (by the existence of the contest) that it is fairly plausible for lots of kinds of utilitarians. That is something I actually think, but is open to question. Some might be thinking it is fairly implausible for most kinds of utilitarians. It could be seen as a dark arts move on my part, that I didn't really give the opposite perspective much consideration in composing the contest.
However, the results of the contest should render that idea more of a testable prediction than it was before the contest. If it's right, it should be possible to critique most of the essays produced for the contest by pointing out how implausible the scenarios are or how odd/implausible the particular kind of utilitarianism they discuss are. If it's wrong, at least some of the scenarios should be fairly plausible ones for realistic utilitarianisms.
Is the clock running? Loans are rarely made at zero interest rate, as the time goes by does my total obligation increase?
It could be zero interest, if the primary purpose for holding onto it is to remind the person of their obligation and produce good feelings when they return the favor.
Also, what is my incentive to make any payments?
If you hold onto a debt, it shows on your credit report. Paying it off could improve your credit. But apart from that, there's the matter that it is functionally identical to donating to effective charity.
How is this relevant to anything?
The subjective feeling of obligation with regards to the original debt might affect probability of repayment over time.
Okay, that is the new deadline. (Updated.)
Does Sunday 11/17 at 8pm PST sound good?
So maybe hold onto the debt indefinitely and offer to forward any repayments to charity? That might work, but it seems like if their income increases later, it might not be as advantageous to forgive it then for tax reasons. Also, there might be a goodwill factor associated with debt-forgiveness that isn't there with repayment. The person may even feel the debt was unjustly accrued (e.g. medical bills for botched procedures) and feel repayment is a bad thing overall.
I wonder if one could focus on something that often goes untapped like innate programming ability. Have the person take a test that sees if they can learn to program, and if they can, forgive their debt and enroll them in a program to train them and get them employed.
Yes, but having the forgiveness happen in a low-income year would result in less taxes. So perhaps the charity could forgive debt in a way that is conditional on later income being donated to effective causes.
That's correct. However I will move the deadline out by a few days if anyone asks. If that happens, you will be able to use the time to edit and polish your submission further if you like.
Would anyone like more time to complete an essay?
What bottom line are you suggesting this contest has written into it? That cryonics is something that some utilitarians would support under some circumstances? Why is supporting cryonics more controversial than running someone over with a trolley car all of a sudden?
The only filter I'm putting up is a small chunk of prize money, and the only filter is to stay on topic with regards to a specific set of implicitly pro-cryonics issues that I am interested in. Anyone who wants to attack cryonics in a well-written essay is free to do so -- I'm simply under no obligation to pay them for it.
That is not what I'm trying to do. I put up the prize with the intent of exploring a certain class of positions that I already know exist in concept-space (utilitarian frameworks friendly to cryonics). If there are weaknesses, I expect them to be highlighted better once explicated. That isn't the same as rejecting a fully different class of positions (utilitarian frameworks unfriendly to cryonics), although I feel no particular obligation to fund the latter.
Feel free to make edits.
Do people have the impression that signing up for cryonics makes reversible vitrification much more likely?
I certainly assign it high probability (although not necessarily that it is the best way to accomplish this specific goal). The only scientists that I'm aware of pursuing the goal of whole organ vitrification are Greg Fahy and Brian Wowk of 21st Century Medicine, who are also cryonicists and whose main source of funding seems to be cryonics. Chana and Aschwin de Wolf are also cryonicists, and do neural cryobiology experiments -- a topic that is basically unheard of outside of cryonics.
My understanding was that the current vitrification process as used for cryonics is extremely toxic, but that's fine because the most likely revival process would be scanning.
I would describe it as somewhat toxic, but not on par with say fixatives. Effective toxicity is dependent on exposure time, so faster cooling is a factor there. In any case, vitrification is something we can expect incremental improvements to result in higher viability in larger organs over time.
I would expect future brain preservation research to be focused on issues like getting the cryoprotectant through the whole brain as quickly as possible, test scans of cryogenically preserved brains to see what level of detail is being kept currently, and alternative methods like plastination.
Yes, scanning is good, but viability assays are arguably better in some respects because something that doesn't harm viability is less likely to harm things that you can't detect with current scanning tech.
If you vitrify a small slice of brain tissue, the cryoprotectant can be washed out and the cells will resume functioning. I expect work that improves viability in larger organs and whole brains to involve the discovery of less toxic cryoprotectants and/or delivery of such past cell membranes and the blood brain barrier. Another approach is supercooling, which allows lower concentrations of cryoprotectant because it avoids ice formation below the freezing point.
While reversible vitrification would clearly be valuable for both cryonics and medicine in general, I think if you want more research into it you would need to explicitly fund it and you're not going to get much of it as a spillover from signing up for the current version.
That seems like a reasonable position, but it could be wrong due to network effects and so forth. I don't see any kind of public outreach designed to get people to donate money to focused cryonics research, rather I see private networking between wealthy cryonicists as being the major factor in the present environment. That's something that can be affected indirectly by an individual signing up (by influencing wealthy people in your social network to become interested), I think.
It's not just "is the effect positive" but "is the effect in the same range as the current best options". If you think it's 1/100th as much good for your money as donating to the best charity then you could count 1% of the spending as altruistic and the rest as self-spending, but I think you need to get up to at least 1/10th before this bookkeeping becomes worth it.
Perhaps, but note that the significance of x-risk overall is higher in a world where everyone lives a lot longer. So the percent to which this matters should be affected by your confidence in the soon discovery of life extension (even if you don't personally experience life extension).
What kind of utility are you thinking about? I was writing for someone with a vaguely hedonistic view, where death is bad because of the effect it has on those that remain and because it removes the possibility for future joy on the part of the deceased (if you're not at malthusian limits). A preference utilitarian will see death differently, though, as a massive violation of preferences.
I'm thinking that some kind of preference-based utility could still be considered as a total over time -- the more sentient beings whose preferences are met over time, the more utility there is.
The question is, how much does your signing up do to improve these? Even then, I would expect you could get these same benefits more efficiently through an organization that advocated people sign up for cryonics.
This aspect needs to be given more focus, I think, as it shows how a person might possibly attempt to achieve cryonics-related goals more efficiently by abstaining from signing up and instead donating to a charity which advertises cryonics.
for it to be more cost effective than giving to the AMF you would need to think it's at least 10% likely give you 8,000 years of additional life.
This does not apply quite so straightforwardly to more general cryonics goals like achieving reversible vitrification and thus preventing death from a broad spectrum of diseases (including aging). If such a goal were achieved, it would dramatically increase the odds of cryonics being useful for the patient, which would increase adoption rates and also decrease use of heroic measures that prolong suffering.
Someone might hope to achieve such goals more effectively by donating to a research facility directly instead of signing up, but then again signing up does probably have a positive effect overall.
Also, the idea that there might be significant x-risk reduction in people anticipating extended life is another source of utility to factor in. Another notion to consider is that a utilitarian might join a cryonics organization for the chance to network with a group of relatively wealthy individuals, with the goal of attracting donations to proven causes like AMF.
If you're a total utilitarian, caring about there being as many good lives over all time as possible, deaths averted isn't a real metric. Instead the question is how many lives will there be and how good are they?
You lost me there. As I understand it, a total utilitarian cares about utility for all lives over all time, but that doesn't indicate that they don't disvalue death in and of itself. I could perhaps be a total utilitarian, but I think death is a negative event that isn't fully negated, utility-wise, by the creation of new people. So a world where more deaths occurred is one that I would prefer less than one where fewer deaths occurred, even if the same number of people exist in the end.
So this contest is essentially a cryonics propaganda competition?
Tongue in cheek answer: Sure, I'll admit to that. I'd never have lasted long in Slytherin anyway.
Awesome.
Serious answer: I'm just trying to avoid an awkward situation by not appearing willing to actively fund a position I don't agree with at a core level. An honorary submission would be welcomed, and in fact I think I've read and recommended Thrasymachus work in the past on this very topic. It's based on pro-natalism, if I remember right. So it is on topic in the sense that it would present interesting contrast to the other essays, it just doesn't answer the questions I actually asked / am willing to pay for answers to (which I expect that many here to already have thought of, but think they need incentive to actually write it out in a nice essay format).
Some meta notes:
- This is an essay contest because my previous attempt (in 2011) was for a video contest, and nobody entered. (The bitcoins were later stolen from the online wallet that was hosting them and half returned. The remaining 5.5 coins are in a more secure wallet valued at around $2000, which I plan to use for cryonics charity later, no sooner than next April.)
- I consider essays to be Lesswrong's strong point. Further, utilitarians (of various kinds) and cryonicists (of various kinds) are common here as are ideas for how the two can/should overlap. I want to see those ideas.
- If anyone wins and does not want a bitcoin, I would be happy to paypal them the equivalent value, although I consider that a bit less convenient.
- There have been essay contests here in the past, at least one of which has resulted in good outcomes. I don't know if the culture has changed too much since then or if the value of a whole bitcoin is so high it will drive people crazy, but I am assuming not.
(Edit) An essay simply detailing considerations as to why cryonics has net negative effects if successful would not qualify. However, if you were to answer one of the questions directly (they aren't yes/no, but scenario based) you could still feature your argument prominently.
Example: Some particular kind of utilitarians think cryonics has net disutility for certain reasons (your argument), but in the event that they find that cryonicists are easy to work with (plausible scenario), they would cooperate to accomplish some particular instrumental goal despite the net disutility of cryonics.
(I'm not actively soliciting submissions of such a nature, just noting that they are possible. I actually think the utilitarian-against-cryonics space of arguments has been fairly well explored already, and there is motive to do so in the fact that cryonics competes for resources and is unpopular already.)
I find it harder to engage in System 2 when there are images around. Heck, even math glyphs usually trip me up. That's not to say graphics can't do more good than harm (for example, charts and diagrams can help cross inferential distance quickly, and may serve as useful intuition pumps) but I imagine that more images would mean more reliance on intuition and less on logic, hence less capacity for taking things to analytical extremes. So it could be harmful (given the nature of the site) to introduce more images.
Is that a per-person maximum, or are you only accepting up to that much worth of bets?
Edit: I have contacted gwern via IRC and invested 1 BTC.
What I meant is that those properties are specific to the secret part of login information used for online services, as distinct from secret information used to encrypt something directly.
I am certain that that it was a negative contribution to this site.
Well, that's harsh. My main intent with the links was to show that the system for picking the words must be unpredictable, and that password reuse is harmful. I can see now that 8-word passphrases are useless if the key is too short or there's some other vulnerability, so that choice probably gives us little more than a false sense of security.
in the particular application of bitcoin, quantum computers break it thoroughly.
This is news to me. However, I had heard that there are only 122 bits due to the use of RIPEMD-160 as part of the address generation mechanism.
According to the Diceware FAQ, large organizations might be able to crack passphrases 7 words or less in 2030. Of course that's different from passwords (where you have salted hashes and usually a limit on the number of tries), but I think when it comes to establishing habits / placing go-stones against large organizations deciding to invest in snooping to begin with, it is worthwhile. Also, eight words isn't that much harder than four words (two sets of four).
One specific use I have in mind where this level of security is relevant is bitcoin brainwallets for prospective cryonics patients. If there's only one way to gain access to a fortune, and it involves accessing the memories of a physical brain, that increases the chances that friendly parties would eventually be able to reanimate a cryonics patient. (Of course, it also means more effort needs to go into making sure physical brains of cryonics patients remain in friendly hands, since unfriendlies could scan for passphrases and discard the rest.)
You can generate a very strong passphrase with Diceware. Physical dice are more secure than almost any electronic device, and dictionary words let you memorize the randomness very efficiently.
This can then be used with KeePass or some other password manager. Also useful for brainwallets and other kinds of data where offline attacks are likely.
I recently memorized an 8-word passphrase generated by Diceware.
Given recent advances in password cracking, it may be a good time to start updating your accounts around the net with strong, prescriptively-generated passphrases.
Added: 8-word passphrases are overkill for most applications. 4-word passphrases are fairly secure under most circumstances, and the circumstances where in which they are not may not be helped by longer passphrases. The important thing is avoiding password reuse and predictable generation mechanisms.
I wonder if the degree of technological progress envisioned by transhumanists will eventually make the ethical problems posed by this particular sexual orientation a moot point. Just as we will eventually cure aging, and more easily switch genders, we ought to be able to alter development, for example. An adult-aged person could easily assume a childlike body, while retaining the ability to consent in every ethically relevant sense.
On the other hand, we should eventually know enough about neuroscience to make alterations to aspects of attraction and identity. Gays could become straight, straights could become gay, sadism and masochism levels could be adjusted, gender and sex could be flipped arbitrarily... And pedophilia could be added or subtracted.
We could end up with a society of only straight people -- or the opposite -- depending on our meta-level preferences. In fact, it would also probably be feasible to turn anyone who wants completely asexual -- in the extreme case, doing away with sex entirely (presumably with everyone perfectly okay with their new asexual identity).
Given that as possible, what are our meta-level preferences? Should we prefer to peacefully coexist with pedophile/pedomorph couples, and whatever other combination comes up (furries, tentacles, whatever) or should we just cut the crap and settle on something boring like all-asexual or all-straight?