Tim Freeman

Since then we did get cryonics to work and preserve memories for roundworms: "Persistence of Long-Term Memory in Vitrified and Revived Caenorhabditis elegans"

Not mammals yet AFAIK.

Liquid nitrogen is generated using electricity, so you weren't all that far off.

Liquid nitrogen is basically industrial waste that is left over after a useful industrial process, specially generating liquid oxygen. But you still have to carry it to the cryonics installation in a truck, which uses energy, even if the LN2 is free.

Cryonics storage gets cheaper at scale. The number of patients is proportional to the space, which is the cube of the length, and the boil off rate is proportional to the surface which is the square of the length. So boil off per pa... (read more)

You left out where you have to say something about where we are in that large universe that evolved from that Big Bang. That is going to be a huge amount of data because, given many worlds, that is such a huge universe that even a position in that universe is huge.

We actually don't need to uniquely identify our exact position; we just need enough be able to compute a next observed event. The locations of planets in Andromeda or mineral deposits deep underground would be computable from our exact position in the multiverse, but if we haven't yet observed them they don't have to be included in the bits required to predict the next event.

Part of the process of coming to believe a verbal statement often includes a social requirement to claim to believe that statement. I call these "credal beliefs" because the profession of belief is often phrased as a creed.

For example, a well known creed is the US Pledge of Allegiance, which includes the words "I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America". It is obviously meaningless to pledge allegiance to a flag, since allies are entities one expects to cooperate with and flags are inanimate objects that don't take action and therefor... (read more)

The claim that "AI goal systems cannot be built around English statements" is not supported by the page it links to. Any solution humans might invent to the FAI problem is going to be renderable as English statements, so this implies that the FAI problem is unsolvable. If you want it solved, you should not make unsupported public statements that it cannot be solved.

The cited link https://www.lesswrong.com/lw/ld/the_hidden_complexity_of_wishes makes the more plausible claim that short intuitive English statements don't make good wishes, and therefore don't ... (read more)

I care about human culture and human genetic diversity and human long term survival. In the first example, if the 500 people share a culture or are related to each other, there might be worthwhile unique ideas or genes that are either preserved with certainty if I pick the more certain option, or lost altogether if I pick the option where all die with probability 10%, so I prefer the more certain option.

Similarly, if we have been fighting this thing for a while and there are only 500 humans left, I certainly prefer having 400 left with certainty over havin... (read more)

But then once you have an omnipotent God your ability to make predictions goes away. God could have willed something else, so when I raise the ball in the air and drop it I have to be surprised every time when it falls to the ground.

But then once you have an omnipotent God your ability to make predictions goes away. God could have willed something else, so when I raise the ball in the air and drop it I have to be surprised every time when it falls to the ground.

Here's an additional hypothesis to consider:

• Rationalism is at odds with popular religions. (I have talked with a rational-seeming Christian I liked, and there are many Presuppositionalists, but rationalist Christians are a very small portion of Christians. Rationalist Christianity can be modeled as Bayesian reasoning with a flagrantly contrived prior. More reasonable priors give an astronomically low probability for religious claims, IMO.)
• Popular religions offer excellent reasons for people to cooperate. (Basically, God says to.)
• CFAR does not prominently o

I was trying to find the bounds of my ignorance of physics yesterday and I realized nobody has a self consistent story of how a lightbulb works. Emission of photons requires quantum electrodynamics and there is no self consistent mathematical model of QED. Apparently the required integrals diverge at very small scales, and if you can get a paper describing how to fix that math through peer review, there are people who want to give you a million dollars.

The correct link for "fiction differs from reality in systematic ways" might now be this. Robin starts that page with a link to the scribd document he is summarizing. That document has been deleted. If someone has enthusiasm and ability to find a replacement link, please reply.

In response to:

Traditional Rationality doesn’t have the ideal that thinking is an exact art in which there is only one correct probability estimate given the evidence.

The ideal process applies Bayes' rule to the evidence and the prior probabilities to get the (posterior) probability estimate. Since there is no law saying what prior probabilities to assume, thinking is not an exact art in the sense used here. You might have meant that there is value in Traditional Rationality having this ideal even if we know it to be false, but in that case I don't underst... (read more)

Shinzen Young's Five Ways to Know Yourself https://www.shinzen.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/FiveWaystoKnowYourself_ver1.6.pdf uses the words "spacey" and "racy" instead of "hazy" and "crazy", but they might be talking about the same thing. He has specific antidotes for each. There are YouTube videos in addition to the document I just cited. He has a newer book out that is probably about the same topics, but I haven't read it.

Would you be willing to share the koan?

I generally don't believe that dreams or omens come from a place with some special connection to the truth, but if following a clue from a mysterious source is cheap, I generally follow it. If one doesn't accept prompts to go on an adventure, one cannot reasonably claim disappointment if life has too few adventures.

I have known these people personally with broken bones from bicycling: two people each with a broken collarbone from mountain biking, one broken arm, one minor skull fracture that would only have been considered a bump if it were not observed with modern imaging equipment, and one broken pelvis. It also killed Steven Covey but I never met him.

The minor skull fracture was interesting because I knew the person to be successful at a job that required mostly conscientiousness. He fell during his work commute and was riding a bike that had no clear purpose othe... (read more)

I liked the story. I could imagine a sequel where Maya persuades Jun to say something true about where he grew up, and maybe visit his peers or family there. He already leaked enough information about the place that perhaps disclosing its existence to Maya would not be a problem.

It is unreasonable to expect an output from biological evolution to do something reasonable in a situation vastly different from the situations it evolved in. In this case, you aren't going to learn much from the state of mind of a human who has been tortured more than his ancestors could have been tortured.

Trying to extract guidance from that story seems like an example of generalizing from fiction.

I'm not sure how the rest of the article is connected to the fiction at the beginning. Given that people tend to generalize from fiction and get to false concl... (read more)

My reading of the EMDR section was that the patient had panic attacks, did EMDR, then had a panic attack, and then either the patient ran out of money or it was time to write the paper, so we don't know about the presence or absence of panic attacks after that.

On rereading that section, it is clear that there is no claimed period of time when the patient was observed not to have a panic attack during that period of time. The last panic attack was labelled as "mild". I didn't bother to read back to see if any of the other panic attacks were "mild" before success was declared.

There is such a thing as a symptom pool. Some people who are having a difficult time instinctively acquire symptoms that are fashionable and signal their difficulty, but the symptoms are not related to the actual problem. The prototypical example for this, IIRC, is incidence of anorexia in some specific country (Hong Kong?). An anorexia awareness campaign caused that symptom to become fashionable and increased the apparent incidence much more than can be explained as an increased ability to observe the cases that were present before.

This applies to some b... (read more)

I would not categorize you as Christian. In my conversations with Christians, the unifying themes have been:

• God is good
• Heaven exists as a desirable place to go after you die.
• Jesus exists and has some significant role in getting you into Heaven.

You didn't mention Heaven at all and you seem to regard Jesus as another iteration in the general improvement of moral examples instead of as someone special.

I don't mean to imply that there is any reason for me to regard you as Christian. I'm just a little surprised, or maybe I have misunderstood you.

But to ge... (read more)