John_Maxwell_IV comments on Questions on SI Research - Less Wrong

7 Post author: MichaelAnissimov 01 June 2012 03:00PM

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Comment author: [deleted] 01 June 2012 07:34:08PM 6 points [-]

I gave a quick talk about the singularity a few days ago. One guy kept heckling me about 'rapture for geeks'. It's definitely a thing.

Comment author: John_Maxwell_IV 01 June 2012 08:37:07PM *  6 points [-]

This is a good illustration of how hucksters and differentiated meme virulence mean we can't have nice things.

People really want X (e.g. to live forever, to lose weight, etc.). Hucksters take advantage of this by promising X, and memes that persuade people they can achieve X by adopting the meme (e.g. Christianity in the case of living forever) spread. Then people develop antibodies to the hucksters or memes, and the antibodies end up attacking anything that promises X (since it resembles the mistaken claims).

As Randall Munroe joked:

Somewhere out there is a company that has actually figured out how to enlarge penises, and it's helpless to reach potential customers.

Hence my proposed slogan for cryonics, "Cryonics: A scheme for living forever that might actually work". Of course, we should only use the slogan if it might actually work, which looks highly doubtful to one LWer who is a neuroscientist.

Comment author: ciphergoth 02 June 2012 01:53:00PM 1 point [-]

If that one LWer has a technical critique of cryonics, they should write it up. cf, oh, just about everything on my blog. http://blog.ciphergoth.org/

Comment author: Nisan 02 June 2012 03:53:06PM 0 points [-]

That's a really nice explanation of the situation.