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dclayh comments on Christopher Hitchens and Cryonics - Less Wrong
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I've observed that the world's most awesome people are pretty strongly connected, graph-theoretically. I would bet that there are well fewer than six degrees between, say, Eliezer and Hitchens under the relation "good friends with".
Randi's speaking at the Summit. I'll talk with him.
Thank you.
I'm guessing that if you do that, most of the things we could do over and above that would be positively counterproductive - would you agree?
Yes.
How did this go? I recall he made a comment in his talk that was less anti-death (with respect to his own life, at least) than we might have hoped...
Of course a different cluster of awesome people not strongly connected to the one we know about wouldn't be one we know about. For example, I can't think of any awesome people who are active principally in East Asia or India, and it's demographically unlikely that there aren't any.
Even worse, I'm not really aware of awesome people who are active primarily in Continental Europe as opposed to the Anglosphere. Europeans use English as a trade tongue, but not really for building cultural communities. So there isn't an easy way to figure out what's going on around Europe without knowing a bunch of languages.
This might be easier to investigate if you gave us an operational definition of "awesome." If it reduces to "those you admire," and it probably does, it shouldn't be surprising that they're all clustered together. You find new people to admire by the recommendations and name-droppings of those who have similar tastes to you.
Okay, the people who promote a certain cluster of ideas centering on skepticism, rationalism, atheism and libertarianism, in the U.S. and culturally connected nations. (Which, yes, is quite close to "people I admire". I wasn't trying to claim it was especially surprising, although I am often surprised at just how tight it is.) In particular:
and probably some others I can't think of right now.
Some may not know this, Steven Landsburg is a member here since I posted a quotation from his latest book. Here is a highly interesting discussion that resulted from it.
How About Eliezer, Peter Thiel, Peter Diamandis, done... I know that Peter Diamandis would NOT be turned away by Hitchens... Now, it is just a matter of getting ahold of a few mullionaire/billionaire types...
This is a tempting approach. I'm guessing, though, that if Diamandis was going to go around promoting cryonics to his friends, he'd have done it already; but maybe he'd be sympathetic enough to pass on a letter, or something?
Most English speakers probably are that closely connected. If you reduce it to "is acquainted with", most people in the world.
The problem with connecting to somebody is to know how you're already close. A depth-6 search of the acquaintance graph is unmanageable from any starting point outside of the few remaining uncontacted tribes.
The four horseman probably are, one of them being Randi who speaks soon the singinst conference.
The four horsemen are Dennett, Hitchens, Harris and Dawkins, no?
I always feel embarrassed for them when I hear them called that.
They have sort-of adopted the label. I'm thinking of the lecture at which Dennett put his hand up and started a question with "I'm Dan Dennett, one of the four horsemen of atheism, and I'd like to ask..."
Oh my, I confused them.