divabot posted:

Just updated the RW cryonics article with the Kim Suozzi stuff. HOLY poo poo. Alcor's tried to litigate away the serious allegations concerning their slapstick incompetence at the one loving thing they claim to be able to do before, but this one condemns them out of their own mouths.

(I was neutral-to-positive on cryonics before looking into it. Then a friend got seriously interested and I looked more closely and went LOL loving WHAT and wrote most of that wiki page.)

For the biological problems: PZ Myers is an annoying skeptical atheist, but he's also a professor of developmental biology who freezes zebrafish brains as part of his work. This piece and this piece cover a lot of why anyone who's actually worked with freezing neurons, i.e. a lot of biologists, dismisses present-day cryonics out of hand from basic science, let alone that it's run by complete clowns. The chance is not 0.00000000001%, it's 0. That poo poo's trashed. You're not going to reconstruct an ice sculpture from the bucket of water it became, no matter how superintelligent an AI you put onto the task.

Pope Guilty posted:

Myers is the only public atheist with any kind of profile that I can think of who's not a raging libertarian rear end in a top hat

Cingulate posted:

Then you have an extremely idiosyncratic view on public atheism, as the New Atheists, to begin with, are, almost to a man, no libertarians.

divabot posted:

Just updated the RW cryonics article with the Kim Suozzi stuff. HOLY poo poo. Alcor's tried to litigate away the serious allegations concerning their slapstick incompetence at the one loving thing they claim to be able to do before, but this one condemns them out of their own mouths.

(I was neutral-to-positive on cryonics before looking into it. Then a friend got seriously interested and I looked more closely and went LOL loving WHAT and wrote most of that wiki page.)

For the biological problems: PZ Myers is an annoying skeptical atheist, but he's also a professor of developmental biology who freezes zebrafish brains as part of his work. This piece and this piece cover a lot of why anyone who's actually worked with freezing neurons, i.e. a lot of biologists, dismisses present-day cryonics out of hand from basic science, let alone that it's run by complete clowns. The chance is not 0.00000000001%, it's 0. That poo poo's trashed. You're not going to reconstruct an ice sculpture from the bucket of water it became, no matter how superintelligent an AI you put onto the task.

Cingulate posted:

In a way, all cryogenics does is allow the Basilisk to not only torture a copy of you (who cares), but actually you.

Doc Hawkins posted:

[these people] ... see this as a distinction without a difference

Cingulate posted:

Then you have an extremely idiosyncratic view on public atheism, as the New Atheists, to begin with, are, almost to a man, no libertarians.

Woolie Wool posted:

What's wrong with PZ Myers? Usually people who bitch about him are the very same people who we mock in this thread, whining about how PZ Myers is mean to us .

Wikipedia posted:

On July 24, 2008, Myers, in his post, "The Great Desecration," wrote that he had pierced through the "goddamned cracker" with a rusty nail, which he also used to pierce a few ripped-out pages of the Qur'an (in English translation, not the original Arabic) and The God Delusion, and had simply thrown them all in the trash along with old coffee grounds and a banana peel. He provided a photograph of these items in the garbage, and wrote that nothing must be held sacred, encouraging people to question everything.

neonnoodle posted:

Michael Shermer and Penn Jillette come to mind. Penn's not really a "new atheist" but he is a very vocal one with a fan following.

Cingulate posted:

The New Atheism figureheads are (were) Hitchens, Dawkins, Sam Harris and despicable clueless waste of soma Daniel Dennett, neither of which even borders on the libertarian. Jilette is A Not Completely Unknown Guy Who Happens To Be Atheist, not A Famous Atheist, and Michael Shermer is just a few orders of magnitude less popular than Harris or Dawkins.

If the first people coming to mind when you speak of prominent, outspoken atheism are libertarians, that says much about you, and next to nothing about contemporary popular atheism.

Silver2195 posted:

Note the "were." Hitchens is dead, and nobody seems to care much about Harris and Dennett anymore.

Cingulate posted:

The New Atheism figureheads are (were) Hitchens, Dawkins, Sam Harris and despicable clueless waste of soma Daniel Dennett, neither of which even borders on the libertarian. Jilette is A Not Completely Unknown Guy Who Happens To Be Atheist, not A Famous Atheist, and Michael Shermer is just a few orders of magnitude less popular than Harris or Dawkins.

If the first people coming to mind when you speak of prominent, outspoken atheism are libertarians, that says much about you, and next to nothing about contemporary popular atheism.

Reflections85 posted:

What's with Dennett being despicable? You're the first person I've seen to actually dislike him rather than just find him boring / pointless or not knowing who he is.

Count Chocula posted:

"Sleep, that little cousin of death. How I loathe it!" - Edgar Allan Poe

I'm cool with sleeping now but it used to terrify me. There's probably some stupid Silicon Valley invention to remove it, like Soylent promises for food.

Reflections85 posted:

What's with Dennett being despicable? You're the first person I've seen to actually dislike him rather than just find him boring / pointless or not knowing who he is.

MikeCrotch posted:

I hear copious amounts of speed works pretty well for a while

Cingulate posted:

Science fact: nobody knows what sleep is good for, to the extent that we can't even exclude that you could do completely without.

Cingulate posted:

Science fact: nobody knows what sleep is good for, to the extent that we can't even exclude that you could do completely without.

Cingulate posted:

1. he's incredibly smug about banal or wrong stuff. Like, have you ever seen him admit surprisal, or showing astonishment or wonder? And yet, he sells himself as being science aligned.
2. he's selling himself as a cognitive scientists when he has no insight into the field, no contributions, and no understanding
3. I just generally dislike (freedom-of-will) compatibilists of the Dennett/Searle/Chomsky tradition
4. fat
5. annoying voice
6. fat

Cingulate posted:

4. fat
5. annoying voice
6. fat

Oligopsony posted:

The sketchiest thing I can say about Dennet is that he's friendly with Stephen Pinker and Napoleon Chagnon, but in contrast to the other Horsemen he seems to pointedly abstain from either deriding believers or drawing goofy and/or repulsive political conclusions from the death of God. I can imagine someone being an incompatiblist, but compatibility does seem to be a strange thing to call someone out for specifically when it's the consensus position among analytics - or is there something about the Chomsky/Searle "tradition" (first I've heard of it, but I'm a nonspecialist) that's particularly irksome.

Puppy Time posted:

It's been proven that you suck a lot at everything on sleep deprivation, and you die after a long enough time.

DStecks posted:

It makes you not tired.

Jack Gladney posted:

Dennett is smart and nice, a teacher of students who wants them to do well and cares about them. Also spends zero seconds a day arguing on the internet as far as I can tell.

Oligopsony posted:

The sketchiest thing I can say about Dennet is that he's friendly with Stephen Pinker and Napoleon Chagnon, but in contrast to the other Horsemen he seems to pointedly abstain from either deriding believers or drawing goofy and/or repulsive political conclusions from the death of God. I can imagine someone being an incompatiblist, but compatibility does seem to be a strange thing to call someone out for specifically when it's the consensus position among analytics - or is there something about the Chomsky/Searle "tradition" (first I've heard of it, but I'm a nonspecialist) that's particularly irksome.

Cingulate posted:

That one may be somewhat of an urban myth insofar as this has not been scientifically established to occur in humans as far as I know

Scratch-O posted:

Right, fatal familial insomnia destroys your ability to sleep, and then you inevitably die later from completely unrelated circumstances

Cingulate posted:

That one may be somewhat of an urban myth insofar as this has not been scientifically established to occur in humans as far as I know, and the animal research is not trivially generalizable.
Lab rats die after sleep deprivation, but if you read the sleep deprivation literature, you'll find that 1. the technique to keep rats awake is super cruel: you basically force them to stay awake or drown, 2. the community accepts that this research says just as much about the function of sleep as what saying "food is necessary because if you don't eat, you die, and if you eat, you stop being hungry" tells you about food physiology, calories, protein metabolism and the Krebs cycle.

quote:

Consider muscle fatigue or hunger. Muscles are damaged by prolonged stress (the fibers literally tear), and their ATP runs out. But the brain blocks muscle activity long before traumatic damage occurs (although after the first tears occur), and long before ATP is truly depleted.

Cingulate posted:

In a way, all cryogenics does is allow the Basilisk to not only torture a copy of you (who cares), but actually you.

A White Guy posted:

No, you have to sleep, period. Your body is very good at forcing you to sleep at some point, but if you literally cannot sleep, poo poo goes south pretty quickly. Fatal Familial Insomnia is a pretty good show and tell of how your organs will stop functioning given long enough without sleep, but in these instances, one poor bastard went for almost a solid year without sleep.


This is wrong. You can literally destroy your own muscles through sheer willpower if you work out too hard, too long, or the wrong way, and your kidneys will give out before your brain will start screaming "oh god please stop".

Scratch-O posted:

Right, fatal familial insomnia destroys your ability to sleep, and then you inevitably die later from completely unrelated circumstances

Schenkein & Montagna 2006 posted:

Despite its suggestive name, the insomnia of FFI may not be an early or essential symptom of the disorder. Among a series of German patients, sleep disturbances were mild and often recognized only in retrospect after detailed questioning of the family or reinvestigation of the hospital records.[...] Similar observations have been reported in other international populations. [...]

[...]

Although patients with FFI share many features with those who are sleep deprived, certain differences are apparent: [...]

6. Rats who die of sleep deprivation do not show cortical apoptosis,[...] as seen in patients with FFI.

Scratch-O posted:

"Nobody actually knows what sleep is for" -Cingulate, allegedly a teacher, 2016

quote:

Everybody knows that sleep is important, yet the function of sleep seems like the mythological phoenix: “Che vi sia ciascun lo dice, dove sia nessun lo sa” (“that there is one they all say, where it may be no one knows,” Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Lorenzo da Ponte [1790], Cosě fan tutte). But what if the search for an essential function of sleep is misguided? What if sleep is not required but rather a kind of extreme indolence that animals indulge in when they have no more pressing needs, such as eating or reproducing? In many circumstances sleeping may be a less dangerous choice than roaming around, wasting energy and exposing oneself to predators. Also, if sleep is just one out of a repertoire of available behaviors that is useful without being essential, it is easier to explain why sleep duration varies so much across species [1–4]. This “null hypothesis” [5–7] would explain why nobody has yet identified a core function of sleep. But how strong is the evidence supporting it? And are there counterexamples?

[...]

An important unsolved question is whether the impairment, cognitive or otherwise, that follows sleep deprivation is merely the consequence of an increased drive for sleep (“sleepiness”) or whether brain cells need sleep because they are actually “tired.” Pure sleepiness can be conceptualized as the effect of central sleep-promoting mechanisms telling the brain it is time to sleep, whether or not brain cells need to do so.

[...]

While there is still no consensus on why animals need to sleep, it would seem that searching for a core function of sleep, particularly at the cellular level, remains a worthwhile exercise. Especially if, as argued here, sleep is universal, tightly regulated, and cannot be eliminated without deleterious consequences. In the end, the burden of proof rests with those who are attempting not only to reject the null hypothesis, but to gather positive evidence for the elusive phoenix of sleep.

quote:

The benefits of sleep are well documented in both humans and animals. In animal studies, total sleep deprivation resulted in death (within 4-6 days for puppies[15] and 2-4 weeks for rats[16]). Death is preceded by weight loss despite increased food intake, debilitation, a decline in thyroid hormone, elevated sympathetic activation, and poor resistance to infection.[17] Compared with yoked controls, glucose utilization decreases in the hypothalamus, thalamus, and limbic system. Hypocretin levels increase in the lateral hypothalamus[18] leading to wakefulness, stimulation of hypothalamic-pituitary axis, and sympathetic activation. A drop in body temperature 2-3 standard deviations below baseline is an irreversible harbinger of death.[17]

Scratch-O posted:

From the same article

Scratch-O posted:

E: Hey Cingulate, here's a fascinating paper for you! *lowers a sheet of paper to hand it to u, but I'm flipping u off behind the paper with my other hand*

Cingulate posted:

I think one of the reasons I'm so down on behavior like this is how much it seems to me like, essentially, bullying.

Cingulate posted:

- personal distaste for the person making the claim

Maybe with #3 absent, a more, to use that ugly rationalist word, charitable reading would have occurred.

Who What Now posted: