Stupid Questions Open Thread Round 4

lukeprog

This is for anyone in the LessWrong community who has made at least some effort to read the sequences and follow along, but is still confused on some point, and is perhaps feeling a bit embarrassed. Here, newbies and not-so-newbies are free to ask very basic but still relevant questions with the understanding that the answers are probably somewhere in the sequences. Similarly, LessWrong tends to presume a rather high threshold for understanding science and technology. Relevant questions in those areas are welcome as well. Anyone who chooses to respond should respectfully guide the questioner to a helpful resource, and questioners should be appropriately grateful. Good faith should be presumed on both sides, unless and until it is shown to be absent. If a questioner is not sure whether a question is relevant, ask it, and also ask if it's relevant.

Ask away!

Previously: round 1, round 2, round 3

From the original thread:

This is for anyone in the LessWrong community who has made at least some effort to read the sequences and follow along, but is still confused on some point, and is perhaps feeling a bit embarrassed. Here, newbies and not-so-newbies are free to ask very basic but still relevant questions with the understanding that the answers are probably somewhere in the sequences. Similarly, LessWrong tends to presume a rather high threshold for understanding science and technology. Relevant questions in those areas are welcome as well. Anyone who chooses to respond should respectfully guide the questioner to a helpful resource, and questioners should be appropriately grateful. Good faith should be presumed on both sides, unless and until it is shown to be absent. If a questioner is not sure whether a question is relevant, ask it, and also ask if it's relevant.

Ask away!

In seriousness, it just floors me the degree to which every player worth speaking of in the field of cryonics seems to be managed (and micromanaged, at that) by Bad Decision Dinosaur. The concept of suspended animation is not inherently crackpot material; the idea that clinical death and information-theoretic death are different things (with implications for comparative medical treatment in different eras) is actually kind of profound -- yet the history of cryonics is a sordid tale full of expensive boondoggles, fraud, ethical nightmares and positively macabre events. And that's the stuff cryonicists will admit to! Look at that Alcor case: the only way I can avoid shuddering is by imagining it set to Yakety Sax.

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Stupid Questions Open Thread Round 4

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Stupid Questions Open Thread Round 4

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