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I'd really like to know how Yudkowksy thinks cryonics works and how it's going to preserve his brain functions. Or is it just that the future benevolent AI that will wake him up will also be able to place a fully simulated version of Yudkowsky into his frozen head?
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# ? Apr 29, 2014 16:57 |
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# ? Jun 9, 2024 02:16 |
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quote:Yes, I am skeptical of most medicine because on average it seems folks who get more medicine aren't healthier. Wow, great work there genius. People who receive more medicine tend to be less healthy? I guess he also avoids starvation because it makes you eat less food.
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# ? Apr 29, 2014 17:02 |
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Djeser posted:I'd really like to know how Yudkowksy thinks cryonics works and how it's going to preserve his brain functions.
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# ? Apr 29, 2014 17:18 |
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potatocubed posted:More likely than not, most folks who die today didn't have to die! Yes, I am skeptical of most medicine because on average it seems folks who get more medicine aren't healthier. But I'll heartily endorse one medical procedure: cryonics, i.e., freezing folks in liquid nitrogen when the rest of medicine gives up on them.
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# ? Apr 29, 2014 17:39 |
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Sham bam bamina! posted:Ignoring the "folks who get more medicine aren't healthier" ery, he is aware that most folks who die today have no access to cryonic preservation in the first place, right? I can guarantee that you won't have the impoverished Chinese or Indian masses or the sub-Saharan Africans lining up for this Alcor thing, even assuming that they are RATIONAL enough to be on board with the idea. Well there's your problem! Those groups are beyond help due to being mindless savages. (LWites don't actually believe Chinese and Indians are savages, but only because Charles Murray says they aren't.)
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# ? Apr 29, 2014 17:49 |
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Ha ha ha ha Alcor. These clowns will fall for everything except evidence-based medicine.
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# ? Apr 29, 2014 17:53 |
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Djeser posted:I'd really like to know how Yudkowksy thinks cryonics works and how it's going to preserve his brain functions. They must be properly prepared so that their bodies will be ready for Osiris to weigh the probability that their heart donated to virtuous causes and usher them into the cyber-underworld.
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# ? Apr 29, 2014 17:54 |
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Sham bam bamina! posted:Ignoring the "folks who get more medicine aren't healthier" ery, he is aware that most folks who die today have no access to cryonic preservation in the first place, right? I can guarantee that you won't have the impoverished Chinese or Indian masses or the sub-Saharan Africans lining up for this Alcor thing, even assuming that they are RATIONAL enough to be on board with the idea. I've skimmed my way through a bunch of his blog posts, and Hanson seems to have trouble with 'poor people' as a general concept.
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# ? Apr 29, 2014 17:55 |
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Djeser posted:I'd really like to know how Yudkowksy thinks cryonics works and how it's going to preserve his brain functions. We already know Yudkowsky sees the human brain as a machine that can be copied perfectly or forced to do new things with the right input. Rebooting it after it lay dormant for a few thousand years is small fry.
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# ? Apr 29, 2014 19:12 |
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Do we actually have any evidence that cryonic suspension as-is is reversible? Like, has someone got frozen for a year, thawed out, and come out fine and dandy? Or is it just a really, really expensive assisted suicide?
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# ? Apr 29, 2014 19:15 |
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I think cryonics proponents just assume that we'll freeze people now and figure out how to thaw them later.
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# ? Apr 29, 2014 19:18 |
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Darth Walrus posted:Do we actually have any evidence that cryonic suspension as-is is reversible? Like, has someone got frozen for a year, thawed out, and come out fine and dandy? Or is it just a really, really expensive assisted suicide? If you are alive and you get frozen, you die. If your body is frozen it sustains a catastrophic amount of damage down to the cellular level. It would probably be easier to just clone someone in the future rather than try to revive them from a frozen state.
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# ? Apr 29, 2014 19:24 |
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Darth Walrus posted:Do we actually have any evidence that cryonic suspension as-is is reversible? Like, has someone got frozen for a year, thawed out, and come out fine and dandy? Or is it just a really, really expensive assisted suicide? Nope. The problem is; we are mostly water. Water freezes. Water is also one of the rare compounds (I want to say 'only' but it probably isn't) that expands when you freeze/solidify it. This has the nasty side effect of increasing the volume of the water in our cells (also because the ice forms crystals which act like spears who pierce the cell outer membrane). This ruptures the cells and ruptured cells are dead cells. So even if we flash-freeze by pouring someone under pressurized liquid nitrogen or something they are still as dead as a doornail. The technology required for repairing cellular damage on such a massive scale is so far off and, as a cellular engineer myself, I wouldn't hold my breath.
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# ? Apr 29, 2014 19:31 |
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↑ Ugh, beaten! Slate Action posted:If you are alive and you get frozen, you die. If your body is frozen it sustains a catastrophic amount of damage down to the cellular level. It would probably be easier to just clone someone in the future rather than try to revive them from a frozen state.
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# ? Apr 29, 2014 19:31 |
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potatocubed posted:I've skimmed my way through a bunch of his blog posts, and Hanson seems to have trouble with 'poor people' as a general concept. This seems to be a recurring problem among transhumanist/Singularity types.
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# ? Apr 29, 2014 19:36 |
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If the technological stupidity of cryo-suspension is not stupid enough for you: This Cyro stuff is mainly popular with the more libertatian/fygm parts of the immortalist movement. The more socialist parts generally ignore this idea. Who are they expecting to pay for their revival? Are they thinking their parents will be still alive somehow?
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# ? Apr 29, 2014 19:37 |
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You can freeze food and then thaw it out later and it'll be kind of the same, therefore you can do the same thing with a frozen human head. Science is seriously magic for these people. tonberrytoby posted:If the technological stupidity of cryo-suspension is not stupid enough for you: They will create a trust with their libertarian riches to pay for their dead-self storage. This keeps happening even after they abolish banks because
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# ? Apr 29, 2014 19:46 |
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Sham bam bamina! posted:I wondered how they avoided every cell getting perforated by ice but just assumed that they had something figured out because why would they do this otherwise? I'm beginning to think that this might have been a bit naïve of me. In theory, if you cool at the proper rate, you can avoid large-scale cell lysing, but freezing causes a lot of other irreversible damage besides that. The cryonics "industry" seems to mostly just be hoping the future will be able to fix this somehow or other.
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# ? Apr 29, 2014 19:51 |
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Basil Hayden posted:In theory, if you cool at the proper rate, you can avoid large-scale cell lysing, but freezing causes a lot of other irreversible damage besides that. The cryonics "industry" seems to mostly just be hoping the future will be able to fix this somehow or other. I rather doubt that the cryonics industry cares so long as they've got a steady cash-flow from wealthy idiots. Their customers, on the other hand...
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# ? Apr 29, 2014 20:10 |
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tonberrytoby posted:If the technological stupidity of cryo-suspension is not stupid enough for you: All the free market rational actors in the future will see the brightest minds of their generation (i.e., the libertarians) have cryoed themselves, and out of the goodness of their hearts, unfreeze them so that they can help build the traditionalist reactionary utopia. Also I think the "science" behind cryogenics is that you're supposed to somehow be able to flush out the water in your body and replace it with a non-polar liquid that won't rupture your cell membranes. Then when you're unfrozen, the people of the future will ??????? to restore the water in your body. Your brain will be okay, even though you will have hit brain death centuries ago, because ??????. The electrochemical reactions in your brain and all the memories that make you yourself are restored via ???????????, bringing you back to consciousness (and not just a similar but separate mind inhabiting your old body) by simply ???????????????????. They do this because in the future, nerds from the past are ??? so it only makes sense to spend billions of futurebux to bring them back.
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# ? Apr 29, 2014 20:14 |
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Djeser posted:All the free market rational actors in the future will see the brightest minds of their generation (i.e., the libertarians) have cryoed themselves, and out of the goodness of their hearts, unfreeze them so that they can help build the traditionalist reactionary utopia. Compare this to the Christian idea that one day an all-loving God will restore you to life if you haven't been too much of a dick to other people because a book He may or may not have had a hand in writing said so, and see which makes more sense.
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# ? Apr 29, 2014 20:56 |
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SerialKilldeer posted:I think cryonics proponents just assume that we'll freeze people now and figure out how to thaw them later. Yep. I think it's much like the other assumptions that they make about technological progress. They see that we have a limited ability to freeze and revive cells and assume that this technology will progress rapidly to the ability to freeze and revive people. There are many problems with this because what you can do to any individual cell will not scale to an entire complex organism. When you revive frozen cells you only get a percentage of them return to viability which is fine when you're talking about a batch of sperm or stem cells that can still be used directly or cultured up to useful numbers; it is not fine when you're talking about a system like a person. You can help to protect cells by freezing them at the right rate but that requires them to be spread out so they all cool evenly and not in a large group like a body. Also individual cells do not need to retain connectivity, separating membranes, fluid networks like blood, bone structures and any number of other things that are also essential to bodily function and could be destroyed by freezing. This is not even touching on the fact that the people in question are already dead when they are frozen. Even if we did, in the far future, manage to develop a system for freezing and restoring an entire person, the development would entirely depend on a non-destructive "freezing" process anyway. So even if future people had this technology there is no reason to assume that they would be able to restore a person that was not only already dead when they were frozen but also frozen by the primitive means of dumping them whole into a vat of liquid nitrogen. It would definitely be easier to just clone somebody from a DNA sample and that sample wouldn't even have to be frozen. So if your goal is to be resurrected in the future then cryonics is completely pointless and also you will need to be someone that would be worth resurrecting in order to be chosen out of the billions of people it would be possible to clone. That does mean going out, doing things and accomplishing stuff though. To be honest I'm not sure why someone that believes in a future AI that can make perfect reproductions of them would even consider bothering with cryonics anyway. Or is it just because it sounds cool and future sciencey?
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# ? Apr 29, 2014 21:22 |
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Ktb posted:Or is it just because it sounds cool and future sciencey? Sham bam bamina! fucked around with this message at 21:28 on Apr 29, 2014 |
# ? Apr 29, 2014 21:26 |
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I think it's because Yudkowsky probably has his own Pascal's Wager set up in his head. If you don't pay for cryo and cryo tech doesn't pan out, you die naturally and that's it, you're dead. If you don't pay for cryo and cryo tech does pan out, you die naturally and that's it, you're dead, and you missed out. If you do pay for cryo and cryo tech doesn't pan out, you die naturally and then get put on ice. If you do pay for cryo and cryo tech does pan out, you live an immortal life in the post-singularity future where everywhere looks like the inside of an Apple Store crossed with the inside of a Starbucks. Therefore the only logical choice is to get cryogenically frozen. There's a fifty/fifty chance of it working. Cryo either happens, or it doesn't, so that's fifty fifty.
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# ? Apr 29, 2014 21:27 |
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You're also wagering that by the time you die of natural causes, cryo technology will have advanced significantly. If you start with the premises that we're approaching a technological singularity and that exponential growth will continue at the current rate, you would have to be stupid not to do it.
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# ? Apr 29, 2014 21:35 |
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GWBBQ posted:You're also wagering that by the time you die of natural causes, cryo technology will have advanced significantly. If you start with the premises that we're approaching a technological singularity and that exponential growth will continue at the current rate, you would have to be stupid not to do it. "And that's why there are only 1400 smart people in the entire world. Welp, okay, blog post for today is done, time to kick back and take some time off."
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# ? Apr 29, 2014 21:45 |
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SolTerrasa posted:"And that's why there are only 1400 smart people in the entire world. Welp, okay, blog post for today is done, time to kick back and take some time off." Les Wrongers - even bigger elitist fucks than the Jehovah's Witnesses. Seriously, that blog is almost literally the Watchtower gone information-age.
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# ? Apr 29, 2014 21:59 |
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Djeser posted:I'd really like to know how Yudkowksy thinks cryonics works and how it's going to preserve his brain functions. IIRC Yudkowsky believes that if you gather enough information about a person (people's recollections, newspaper clippings, YouTube videos) that a sufficiently advanced AI could reconstruct an exact copy, which makes no sense from an information theory perspective and also from every other perspective.
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# ? Apr 29, 2014 22:22 |
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GottaPayDaTrollToll posted:IIRC Yudkowsky believes that if you gather enough information about a person (people's recollections, newspaper clippings, YouTube videos) that a sufficiently advanced AI could reconstruct an exact copy, which makes no sense from an information theory perspective and also from every other perspective. When asked why a person's productive output provides sufficiently many bits of entropy to reconstruct the person from "person-space", he said something intentionally confusing about quantum mechanics and tried to get the question to fade into obscurity. He does not want to admit that the idea first appeared in (to my knowledge) Accelerando, an excellent piece of transhumanist fiction by Stross, written 2005.
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# ? Apr 29, 2014 22:33 |
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GottaPayDaTrollToll posted:IIRC Yudkowsky believes that if you gather enough information about a person (people's recollections, newspaper clippings, YouTube videos) that a sufficiently advanced AI could reconstruct an exact copy, which makes no sense from an information theory perspective and also from every other perspective. According to this wikipage, some LessWrong users have tried to figure out how to erase evidence of themselves so the basilisk won't be able to reconstruct them. But wouldn't a godlike AI be able to find some way around that? One speculation I've seen in other discussions (such as here, if I recall correctly) is that it will simulate every possible human mind, and one will inevitably match your consciousness. Or it'll simulate from "first principles," as the RationalWiki page mentions, which I guess means modeling the whole universe at the subatomic level? Never mind how it will acquire enough processing power for this, let alone enough to make 3^^^3 or however many simulations in order to make the probability we're its simulation high enough.
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# ? Apr 29, 2014 22:35 |
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Sham bam bamina! posted:What does your heart tell you? yeah I guess that's it. I'm just not sure why you wouldn't set your crazy hopes on immortality in a artificial or simulated body instead of some extra years in a freezer burned old corpse. Unless the plan is to wait for us to have immortality and be able to reverse ageing as well as curing death and thawing out frozen people. Although now I think about it more the draw has to be the selection process. If you go for cryonics then you are preselected as one of the few to be brought back because you were clever enough to freeze yourself and you wouldn't have to rely on getting chosen by future people who are obviously not as smart as you and might not make the right decision. I also don't get why hell the future would want any of these people or bother to restore them outside of one or two for scientific curiosity. I sure as hell wouldn't want to be a natural history exhibit for the future. There's probably an interesting sci-fi story in there somewhere with an overpopulated future facing the ethical dilemma of what to do with millions of people in storage that they have the ability to revive but no need or space for and are wasting loads of energy preserving.
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# ? Apr 29, 2014 22:46 |
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GottaPayDaTrollToll posted:IIRC Yudkowsky believes that if you gather enough information about a person (people's recollections, newspaper clippings, YouTube videos) that a sufficiently advanced AI could reconstruct an exact copy, which makes no sense from an information theory perspective and also from every other perspective. He must have watched that episode of Star Trek where Geordi creeps on the holographic extrapolation of an influential engineer at a really formative moment in his childhood, huh. (and then never saw the follow-up episode)
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# ? Apr 29, 2014 22:49 |
At the risk of playing devil's advocate, is there any real reason not to have your body frozen if the idea interests you? I'm having a hard time thinking of any negative consequences other than possibly getting fleeced out of some money if it's horseshit.
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# ? Apr 29, 2014 22:52 |
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SerialKilldeer posted:According to this wikipage, some LessWrong users have tried to figure out how to erase evidence of themselves so the basilisk won't be able to reconstruct them. But wouldn't a godlike AI be able to find some way around that? One speculation I've seen in other discussions (such as here, if I recall correctly) is that it will simulate every possible human mind, and one will inevitably match your consciousness. Or it'll simulate from "first principles," as the RationalWiki page mentions, which I guess means modeling the whole universe at the subatomic level? Never mind how it will acquire enough processing power for this, let alone enough to make 3^^^3 or however many simulations in order to make the probability we're its simulation high enough. Pft, the AI will just be able to simulate people who knew you and grill them all for enough information with which to accurately simulate you (under threat of sim-torture, obviously). Better yet, it will simulate your mother and father and then just simulate as many sim-babbies as necessary until it strikes upon you. YOU CAN'T HIDE FROM ROKO'S BASILISK! SALT CURES HAM posted:At the risk of playing devil's advocate, is there any real reason not to have your body frozen if the idea interests you? I'm having a hard time thinking of any negative consequences other than possibly getting fleeced out of some money if it's horseshit. Future AI might thaw you just to torture.
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# ? Apr 29, 2014 22:55 |
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SALT CURES HAM posted:At the risk of playing devil's advocate, is there any real reason not to have your body frozen if the idea interests you? I'm having a hard time thinking of any negative consequences other than possibly getting fleeced out of some money if it's horseshit. It costs a lot of money and unless you can somehow remove all water from your corpse the very act of freezing it will destroy it entirely before one even has to answer the question of how to thaw you. It's a very, very expensive security blanket.
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# ? Apr 29, 2014 23:04 |
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SALT CURES HAM posted:getting fleeced out of some money if it's horseshit. Ding ding ding ding ding
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# ? Apr 29, 2014 23:45 |
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The thing that confuses me most about Roko's basilisk is, if you're already a simulation, wouldn't Hal 3^^^3 then be torturing a simulation of a simulation? And thus, still not be torturing you? My head hurts.
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# ? Apr 30, 2014 00:29 |
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Hate Fibration posted:The thing that confuses me most about Roko's basilisk is, if you're already a simulation, wouldn't Hal 3^^^3 then be torturing a simulation of a simulation? And thus, still not be torturing you? No. The Basilisk works differently. Basically, you exist (and by you I mean the being that made that post). You assume to exist in reality. A being like you exists in reality. However, in the future, an omnipotent
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# ? Apr 30, 2014 00:37 |
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Djeser posted:Therefore the only logical choice is to get cryogenically frozen. There's a fifty/fifty chance of it working. Cryo either happens, or it doesn't, so that's fifty fifty. Let's be fair, that's not how it works. If cryo has a one in a thousand chance of working, then that's okay because the magical future AI utopia will be ten thousand times as good as your life today. If cryo has a one in a billion chance of working, then that's okay because the magical future AI utopia will be a trillion times as good as your life today. If cryo has a 1/(3^^^^3) chance of working, then that's okay because the magical future AI utopia will be 3^^^^^3 times as good as your life today. Even if the success probability is vanishingly small, we can make up enough baseless praise about Multivac's eutopia that the expected value of cryo becomes positive. And obviously you should always do anything for which the expected value is positive, regardless of whether it's a high-variance long-odds bet. According to this post, the average Lesswronger believes that the probability of an average cryonics patient being revived in the future is in the 15-21% range, and 13% of their long-time members are signed up for cryonics. This is somehow intended to prove that LW's brand of "rationalist" isn't gullible and easy to sucker into wasting money on non-functional bullshit. Here's a weird LW article called Value Deathism: Vladimir Nesov posted:
drat hypothetical kids these drat hypothetical future days not sharing our values! But we shall not give in, no matter how insane it may seem. We must take every effort to ensure that society remains as it always was, that their utility functions are exact copies of ours, that all future people match exactly our values and beliefs and thought processes throughout eternity. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a rationalist overwriting a human brain - forever.
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# ? Apr 30, 2014 00:51 |
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# ? Jun 9, 2024 02:16 |
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ArchangeI posted:No. The Basilisk works differently. Basically, you exist (and by you I mean the being that made that post). You assume to exist in reality. A being like you exists in reality. However, in the future, an omnipotent Oh. That has to be one of the dumbest things I've ever heard. Edit: This just in quote:We all know the problem with deathism: a strong belief that death is almost impossible to avoid, clashing with undesirability of the outcome, leads people to rationalize either the illusory nature of death (afterlife memes), or desirability of death (deathism proper). But of course the claims are separate, and shouldn't influence each other. I am a deathist Hate Fibration fucked around with this message at 00:58 on Apr 30, 2014 |
# ? Apr 30, 2014 00:54 |