Recently, an acquaintance asked me whether I believed in destiny. I told her I didn't, and she told me a long story boiling down to this: someone she knows was prevented, by a series of improbable accidents, from getting on a plane. The plane then crashed, killing this person's entire family.

"How do you explain that?" she asked. "I don't really see the need for an explanation," I said.

I relayed the cached wisdom that there are billions of people on Earth, all living eventful lives, and therefore we can expect one-in-a-billion experiences to occur daily.

It just occurred to me that people in this sort of situation are subject to something very similar to the red/green paradox first discussed here. Suppose 10^9 people have a commonly agreed-on model of the universe (each person assigns it a probability of about 10^-3 of being false). This model says that, each time you wake up, there is precisely a 10^-9 chance of discovering you have been transformed into a giant insect, with the chance being independent for each person for each day. If we read in the news that someone was transformed, we don't update against the model being true--the model predicts that about one person should be transformed each day.

On the other hand, if you yourself wake up to find yourself transformed into a giant insect, it is tempting to say that you should update against the model, since it is more likely that the model underestimates the chances of this happening than that you have experienced a 1 in 10^9 event. Indeed, if someone within 2 degrees of separation from you is transformed, it seems you should update.

Such a population could experience a long period of statistical adherence to the model, yet contain a growing population of skeptics who believe that a lot of transformations are unreported or covered up.

Is this, generalized, the situation we actually find ourselves in with respect to what's usually called "belief in the supernatural?"

I've reviewed Jason Rosenhouse's book on the Monty Hall problem. Overall summary: The book is very good and does an interesting job of discussing not just the original problem but variations of it, as well as what reactions to the problem can teach us about how humans estimate probabilities.

My university recently held an event involving a presentation and book signing by Ray Kurzweil and a screening of The Singularity is Near. Fangirling about meeting Ray and getting my book signed aside, I thought I would give a short description of the movie and my opinion of it.

The film is mostly made of interviews with big names, so most of the time you will have somebody's head on-screen talking, whether it's Ray's, Aubrey De Grey's, Eric Drexler's, or Eliezer Yudkowsky's. The movie covers a wide variety of singulitarian and transhumanist topics (including a small debate on life extension), and although the material is a bit basic for someone who has already spent a lot of time reading sites like lesswrong and The Transhumanist Wiki, I quite enjoyed it.

Some of the scenes make use of spiffy CGI, including the opening and a couple of illustrations of nanobots. The biggest use of CGI by far occurs in the B-Plot, though, which consists of several interspersed short scenes dealing with an artificial intelligence named Ramona who goes from being a mechanical paper doll to a Second Life bot to a wholly sentient virtual being as the decades pass. I thought this plot thread was the weakest part of the movie; while it was entertaining and it illustrated ideas like editing one's own thinking process (Ramona cures herself of her fear of mice), several of the scenes were rather narmful (WARNING: TVTropes) and the overall sci-fi feel may have hurt the movie's credibility with people who would have otherwise taken it seriously.

So, to conclude, I asked a friend what she thought of the movie, and she said that it had been "too flashy" for her taste.

I still have my doubts about cryonics. I believe people here are a bit too optimistic about the future. How confident are you that the “molecular nanotechnology” necessary to repair cells will be developed within 100 or 200 years? If Alcor had been founded in 1800, would it have survived the industrial revolution and both world wars?

About neuropreservation, is it that easy to grow a new body? I mean, there is a big difference between just fixing some broken cells and completely creating a whole body. Even if it's possible, it'll probably be much more expensive (and thus you'll be less likely to get revived). And unless the new body is exactly like the old one, your motor system will be screwed up.

And you need rejuvenation technology too. Alcor claims that "By the time it becomes possible to revive cryonics patients, especially today's cryonics patients, biological aging as we know it today will not exist". I don't know how likely that is, but there is a difference between stopping aging and rejuvenating. What if they find a simple DNA mutation that stops aging, but it can only be applied before birth? In the worst case you'll wake up and die again a few weeks later. You may be lucky and only have to spend a few decades in a 90-year-old body.

The Big Short is a really fun book about the financial crisis of last decade. It's a good followup to Eliezer's Just Lose Hope Already.

Here are some LessWrong RSS feeds aggregated on a single page:

http://www.netvibes.com/lesswrong

The latest Scenes from a Multiverse (the comic plus the news post below) discusses rationality.

Andrew Gelman's book on Bayesian Statistics has been banned in China. Apparently Bayes' theorem is "politically sensitive material." Gelman notes that that last sentence might not be true, but I really hope it is.