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Plasmon comments on The $125,000 Summer Singularity Challenge - Less Wrong
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Wasn't there something similar a while ago? ... yes there was. I can reasonably assume there will be others in the future. You are trying to get people to donate by appealing to an artificial sense of urgency ("Now is your chance to" , "Donate now" ). Beware that this triggers dark arts alarm bells.
Nevertheless, I have now donated an amount of money.
Disagree about the dark arts, but upvoted for donating anyways.
I fully and completely embrace "dark arts", is there a problem with that?
Your thoughts on the matter are unclear. They could be any of the following, or something else:
"I see no reason to classify broad forms of social interaction as always bad, though they may be effective without persuading people as they would wish to be persuaded, that's just another negative to take into account when considering the total consequences of a speech act."
"I see no reason to classify broad forms of social interaction as always bad, though they may be effective without persuading people as they would wish to be, I don't care directly about people's desires to believe ideas only for certain reasons, such as persuasion and not emotional manipulation."
"I see some forms of changing minds as inherently good and others as inherently bad, and though I value being good rather than bad, it's not a high enough priority to be expressed in my actions very often."
"I see some forms of changing minds as inherently good and others as inherently bad, but I prefer to do what I feel like rather than what's good."
"Me want cookie! Me eat cookie! Om nom nom nom!"
Yeah, I can't write out fully what I mean, I just think the term has come to be too broad, to the point where it nixes obviously pragmatic lines of thought and action. More like:
"I see no reason to classify broad forms of social interaction as always bad, though they may be effective without persuading people as they would wish to be persuaded, upon first reflection, but they'll appreciate it later."
Only on this site would you see perfectly ordinary charity fundraising techniques described as "dark arts", while in the next article over, the community laments the poor image of the concept of beheading corpses and then making them rise again.
I thought that we'd pretty much ditched the beheading part precisely for that reason?
CI don't behead people, Alcor offer it as an option. If I've just met someone at a party, I'll tend to say "I'm having my head frozen" because people have heard of that, but I'll explain I'm actually signed up for whole-body if the conversation gets that far.
I usually offer my name and ask them theirs.
I'm quite often asked about my necklace, and I'll say "It's my contract of immortality with the Cult of the Severed Head", or in some contexts, "It's my soul" or "It's my horcrux".
I've asked you this before and you haven't answered: Severed Head? You're signed up with CI, which doesn't do neuro, aren't you? So how does that make sense?
They only care about the head.
Is it beneficial to say "immortality"? Would "It's my contract of resurrection with the Cult of the Severed Head" be deficient?
Phrases like "live forever" and "immortal" bring corrupting emotional connotations with them. It's not automatic to ignore the literal meaning of terms, even if we consciously keep track of what we mean - and of course in a discussion, we can only do our best to help the other person not be confused, not think for them.
The key thing is for your voice to make it clear that you're not at all afraid and that you think this is what the high-prestige smart people do. Show the tiniest trace of defensiveness and they'll pounce.
I wasn't referring to prestige at all when I said "beneficial". I was exclusively referring to what sketerpot is referring to.
I don't see how "resurrection" is less of a show of confidence, confidence by nonchalance in framing an issue in light least favorable to the speaker. The advantage is that people do not get confused and think it a bad idea for reasons that don't actually apply.
So, your method leaves open the option of educating your interlocutor, if they question further. If all you're worried about is avoiding a status hit, you could confidently proclaim it to be an amulet given to you by the king of all geese in honor of your mutual defense treaty.
In arguments, it's pretty common for people to argue for the traditional "decay and die before living even a hundred years" system with arguments against literal immortality. I've seen this happen so many times.
"What if you're getting your liver continuously ripped out by disagreeable badgers?" the argument goes. "Immortality would be potentially super-painful! And that's why the life expectancies in the society in which I happened to be born are about right."
The easiest way to bypass this semantic confusion is to explicitly say that it's about always having the option of continuing to be alive, rather than what people usually mean by immortality.
(P.S: Calling the necklace a phylactery would also be fun.)
1) Death can still happen from any number of causes - tornadoes, for example.
2) That may bypass some of the most conscious semantic confusion, in the same way declaring that whenever you said any number, you always meant that number minus seven would clear up some confusion (if you did that). There is a better way.
3) It's probably not true.
I have a wallet card rather than a necklace; by and large I end up talking about it because another of my friends brings it up.
Really? My image of cyronics is always of people lying in tanks, a pre-LW conceptualization. Cutting off heads always seems to me like a wasteful way of going about things and has much more of a "creepy sci-fi movie" vibe to it.
Best blog comment I've ever seen.
To be fair, it's just the heads that rise again, not the rest of the corpse... ah, I'm not helping, am I? :-)
Agreed; I'd personally like if a planned schedule for major grants was disclosed regularly, maybe annually.
Anyway, I donated 500 USD.