Neil deGrasse Tyson on Cryonics

bekkerd

Question:

What are your thoughts on cryogenic preservation and the idea of medically treating aging?

His response:

A marvelous way to just convince people to give you money. Offer to freeze them for later. I'd have more confidence if we had previously managed to pull this off with other mammals. Until then I see it as a waste of money. I'd rather enjoy the money, and then be buried, offering my body back to the flora and fauna of which I have dined my whole life.

Link

Question:

What are your thoughts on cryogenic preservation and the idea of medically treating aging?

His response:

A marvelous way to just convince people to give you money. Offer to freeze them for later. I'd have more confidence if we had previously managed to pull this off with other mammals. Until then I see it as a waste of money. I'd rather enjoy the money, and then be buried, offering my body back to the flora and fauna of which I have dined my whole life.

Link

I wonder what will we hear from non-LW rationalists about the SIAI when it gains enough prominence. I think its pretty easy to predict...

Do we need to predict? http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/LessWrong & http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Thread:User_talk:WaitingforGodot/Criticisms_of_LessWrong - and keep in mind this is with David Gerard watering it down.

You didn't yet gain enough prominence...

By non-LW rationalists I mean the people whom promote science, for instance.

edit: On the rationality, the issue is that IMO breaking down the improvement into two sub improvements of 'having the most unbiased selection of propositions' and 'performing most accurate Bayesian updates on them' simply doesn't result in most win for computationally bounded agents compared to the status quo of trying to generate more of most useful hypotheses (at the expense of not generating less useful ones), and propagating certainty be... (read more)

3billswift14y

I don't feel like going looking for the original post, someone can move this there if they want, but responding to Godot's complaint about "cached thoughts", it is now apparent that they should more accurately be called "habitual thoughts", thoughts that automatically re-occur in response to a particular stimulus. Copied with some editing to the Sequence Rerun of Cached Thoughts post

9David_Gerard14y

And Tetronian. I'll note yet again that, in the general case, if you're worrying about your image on RationalWiki, then you're bottoming out the obscurity scale.