= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
DanArmak comments on Female Test Subject - Convince Me To Get Cryo - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (176)
What if the future is hellish and I won't be able to die? (Current objection)
I realize there are lots of interesting technologies coming our way, but there are a lot of problems, too. I don't know which will win. Will it be environmental collapse or green technology? FAI or the political/other issues created by AI? Will we have a world full of wonders or grey goo? Space colonies or alien invasions? As our power to solve problems grows, so does our ability to destroy everything we know. I do not believe in the future any more than I believe in heaven. I recognize it as a potential utopia / dystopia / neither. I do not assume that the ability to revive preserved people would make us utopia-creating demigods any more than our current abilities to do CPR or fly make our world carefree.
A new twist, waking up into this world, would be that I may not be able to die. The horrors that I could experience in a technologically advanced dystopia might be much worse than the ones we have currently. Dictators with ufAI armies, mind control brain implants, massive environmental and/or technological catastrophes.
There is one thing worse than dying, and that's living an unnaturally long time in a hellish existence. If I sign up for cryo, I'll be taking a risk with that, too.
Consider that you might reach such a future in your natural lifespan, without cryonics. Does this cause you to spend resources on maintaining a suicide button that would ensure information-theoretical erasure of yourself, so no sudden UFAI foom could get hold of you? If not, what is the difference?
It's not quite information-theoretical, but does a snub nose .357 count? I carry because statistically the safest thing to do as the attempted victim of a violent crime is to resist using a firearm.
[EDITED to add: oops, I completely misinterpreted what Decius wrote. What follows is therefore approximately 100% irrelevant. I'll leave it there, though, because I don't believe in trying to erase one's errors from history :-). Also: I fixed a small typo.]
Assuming this isn't a statistical joke like the one about always taking a bomb with you when you fly (because it's very unlikely that there'll be two bombs on a single plane) ... do you have reason to think that having-but-deliberately-not-using the firearm actually causes this alleged improved safety?
It seems like there are some very obvious ways in in which that association could exist without the causal link -- e.g., people are more likely to be able to resist when the danger is less, people who are concerned enough about their safety to carry for that reason but sensible enough not to shoot are also more likely to take other measures that improve their safety, etc.
Who said anything about not using? I have never seen statistics regarding outcomes of victims of violent crime having a firearm but never drawing it.
There could be other confounding factors as well, like underreporting by people who are mugged, cooperate, and experience no injury; or a tendency among people who carry legally to know how to use their weapons better than criminals and typical people; or difficulty determining whether a dead victim resisted or not. But the statistics aren't even remotely vague: Among reported victims of violent crime, a larger percentage of those who cooperated with the criminal died than those who resisted the crime using a firearm.
Not that something already known would be able to prevent a post-singularity hostile AI from accomplishing the goals it has, much less a firearm that has about as long an effective range when fired as when performing a lunging swing.
D'oh. I completely misinterpreted what you wrote: "to resist-using a firearm", rather than "to resist, using a firearm".
Sorry- my original phrasing is ambiguous to someone who doesn't already know what I'm saying.
Interesting. Do you have a source on that?
Kleck G. Point Blank --- Guns and Violence in America. New York, NY, Aldine De Gruyter, 1991.
Tangent: Do you have a link to a study that backs this up? I'm very interested in it. EDIT: Arg, serves me right for not reading more downthread.