We're doing politics? Cool.
In a very short-term sense, "death panels". We provide a terrible end-of-life experience for people; we keep people barely at great expense in states of pain and confusion as long as possible even when this is not something that they would want; finite healthcare dollars are thus spent torturing the dying rather than fixing treatable problems in otherwise healthy people.
An attempt to make a dent in this (by at least getting people to talk about advance-care directives, for example) was derailed in a failed attempt to sc...
If it's stupid and it works, it's not stupid.
"Murphy's Laws of Combat"
Sometimes the biggest disasters aren't noticed at all -- no one's around to write horror stories.
Vernor Vinge, A Fire Upon the Deep
Linkrot marches on; the summary is here and the full case report is here. (The former says that A-2435 is Alcor's 88th patient, the latter the 89th, which is a bit odd.)
...HEALY: The doctor recommends a bilateral salpingo-oophorectomy.
ROSA: Who doesn't love a surgery with "ooph" in it?
HEALY: Yeah, well, uh the, uh, DOC has set certain limits on invasive... It's not gonna happen. [pause] You're not out of options. We'll stick with the chemo.
ROSA: "We"? You got cancer in your ovaries, too?
HEALY: I'm your counselor. I'm here to help you through this.
ROSA: There is no "through this". I'm gonna die.
HEALY: Hey. Come on, now. You could live for years.
ROSA: That's a fucking lie.
HEALY: Language! Look, I
These theological symbols, heaven and hell, are not crudely understood as spatial dimensions but rather refer to the experience of God's presence according to two different modes.
I think you may have been giving them too much credit. Here's an adherent explaining that wireheading is a bad thing, but in heaven, wireheading is good because everything in heaven is good.
I don't think people don't always put much effort into critically considering their beliefs.
I had an idea for a sort of Christian fanfiction, in which people marked for heaven and people marked for hell both go into the same firey pit, but the former are wireheaded to be happy about it. It's a far more efficient construction that way. (I suppose you could also do the re...
Even with memories that cause PTSD, it's not so much the forgetting that helps as the being able to reconsolidate the memories without them being hooked into trauma.
even if the rest of the story had made good on its promise of providing an interesting look at a posthuman world. (It doesn't. We don't even get to see anything of it.)
You may enjoy A Casino Odyssey in Cyberspace--it's based in part on the author's history of card-counting--but then, you might not, as the Casinos don't seem like a very Fun place to go.
I think I'm missing something here. As I understand it, you (Mike Darwin) have a great deal of experience and expertise in the actual practice of cryonics, as well as a lot of actionable recommendations. The current staff at Alcor (e.g., Max More) seem to take you seriously.
Is it a silly question to ask why you're not working for Alcor?
"You're like an infant!" Tosco sneered. "Still humming at night about your poor lost momma and the terrible thing men do to their cos? Grow up and face the real world."
"I have," Carlo replied. "I faced it, and now I'm going to change it."
Greg Egan, The Eternal Flame, ch. 38
I think the problem is that it should take more than one explicitly evil person per country to cause that much damage.
PROF. PLUM: What are you afraid of, a fate worse than death?
MRS. PEACOCK: No, just death; isn't that enough?
--Clue (1985)
a Rational (tm) Work Out sequence
Liam Rosen's FAQ, i.e. "the sticky" from /fit/, struck me as being an island of reasonableness in an ocean of bad advice and broscience.
That's pretty much the plot of Quarantine, isn't it?
Wow; that just reminded me of a bit from The Smartest Guys In The Room, where Enron partnered with Blockbuster to stream movies-on-demand over the internet in 2000. It was a scam, but clearly someone thought it was a real thing. (Netflix started streaming movies in 2007.)
And--yes, you said it. Projects like this and OpenWorm are particularly important because they help narrow down really uncertain things; OpenWorm, for instance, might be able to settle the "neurons are really complicated"/"neurons are accurately simulatable-in-bulk by simple...
Well, a number of things have gone not-as-planned, but it did help to make a public commitment here, and I've (finally!) donated an order of magnitude more than I did last year, along with the corresponding employer match. Last year's donation drive is over, but I expect they'll still have science to do.
I look forward to seeing the results.
I strongly support this post.
It would be much better if it were less inflammatory. The last sentence, in particular, is reprehensible. But you respond to the substance of the criticism you get, not the criticism you might want or wish to have at a later time. Otherwise you might as well be slashing your own tires. The vast majority of the discussion below is simple tone policing. Someone's telling you that your house is on fire, and you're complaining that they're shouting.
It's correct that it's incredibly troubling that the author didn't even consider rom... (read more)