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Comment by zpinter on October 2017 Media Thread · 2017-10-06T15:17:22.675Z · LW · GW

The Bobiverse Series by Dennis E. Taylor

A fun book series with good pacing that explores a lot of interesting ideas (cryonics, mind uploading, AI, etc). Highly recommended.

Comment by zpinter on January 2017 Media Thread · 2017-01-10T06:21:38.934Z · LW · GW

The Best of Charlie Munger - A great collection of articles and transcripts from Charlie Munger, vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway. Seems particularly relevant to Less Wrong as an example of an individual using applied rationality and an interest in cognitive biases (even before they had a name) in the pursuit of systematized winning.

Comment by zpinter on Survey: What's the most negative*plausible cryonics-works story that you know? · 2015-12-24T01:31:47.401Z · LW · GW

Note: I'm still quite confused with how to think about subjective experience and sleeping beauty-type scenarios. I don't give this scenario much weight, but find it interesting to think about:

Ordinarily, your future is void of any future-self brain states following your death, so the probability of your subjective experience following a path that leads to death in the near future is low (assuming youth, good health, avoidance of risky sports/habits, etc). However, after signing up for cryonics, you open up new potential future-self brain states that follow immediately after a freak/improbable death where you are preserved and then revived. In some of those potential future-self brain states, you are revived multiple times - e.g. maybe the same copy of your preserved brain state is booted up in a variety of different environments for research or assessment.

If the number of potential future-self brain states following revival vastly outweighs the future-self brain states that would otherwise occur in your near future, then the act of signing up for cryonics shifts the probability of your subject experience to follow paths that lead to death in the near future with revival afterwards.

The scary/negative part here (if it wasn't obvious) is inadvertently increasing the odds of personally experiencing death in the near future.