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"Today we are announcing that we will donate 10% of our advertising revenue receipts in 2014 to non-profits chosen by the reddit community. Whether it’s a large ad campaign or a $5 sponsored headline on reddit, we intend for all ad revenue this year to benefit not only reddit as a platform but also to support the goals and causes of the entire community."

AMA is here : http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1r6exr/i_am_kenneth_hayworth_a_phd_neuroscientist_and/

The Brain Preservation Foundation's founder Ken Hayworth is going to be available on Reddit (http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA) this Thursday at 7:00PM EST to answer your questions. We hope to have a very interesting discussion ranging from the technical aspects of plastination and cryopreservation to the social consequences of widespread adoption of brain preservation.

Hayworth is a Senior Scientist at the Janelia Farm Research Campus and is an expert in state of the art brain preservation and imaging.

From the Brain Preservation Site:

Kenneth Hayworth, President and Co-Founder of the Brain Preservation Foundation, is currently a Senior Scientist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Farm Research Campus (JFRC) in Ashburn, Virginia. JFRC is perhaps the leading research institution in the field of connectomics in the United States. At JFRC, Hayworth is currently researching ways to extend Focused Ion Beam Scanning Electron Microscopy (FIBSEM) imaging of brain tissue to encompass much larger volumes than are currently possible. For an overview of this work see his recent review paper and online presentation. Prior to moving to JFRC, Hayworth was a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University. Hayworth is co-inventor of the Tape-to-SEM process for high-throughput volume imaging of neural circuits at the nanometer scale and he designed and built several automated machines to implement this process. Hayworth received a PhD in Neuroscience from the University of Southern California for research into how the human visual system encodes spatial relations among objects. Hayworth is a vocal advocate for brain preservation and mind uploading and a co-founder of the Brain Preservation Foundation which calls for the implementation of an emergency glutaraldehyde perfusion procedure in hospitals, and for the development of a whole brain embedding procedure which can demonstrate perfect ultrastructure preservation across an entire human brain.

Links:

- http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA
  Ask me anything page where the discussion will be held

- http://chronicle.com/article/article-content/132819/     
  Overview article explaining plastination and the Brain Preservation foundation

- http://hplusmagazine.com/2013/05/28/neuroscience-and-the-future-of-humanity-interview-with-ken-hayworth/
  Extensive interview with Hayworth.

- http://www.brainpreservation.org/
- http://www.janelia.org/people/scientist/kenneth-hayworth
- http://www.brainpreservation.org/content/contact

After a recent comment thread degenerated into an argument about trolling, moderation, and meta discussions, I came to the following conclusions:

1. Meta conversations are annoying to stumble across, I'd rather not see them unless I think it's important, and I think other people mostly feel the same way. Moreover, moderators can't easily ignore those conversations when they encounter them, because they're usually attacks on the moderators themselves; and people can't simply avoid encountering them on a regular basis without avoiding LW altogether. This is a perfect recipe for a flamewar taking over Top Comments even when most people don't care that much.
2. Officially banning all meta conversations, however, is a bad precedent, and I don't want LW to do that.

Ideally, Less Wrong would implement a separate "META" area (so that people can read the regular area for all the object-level discussions, and then sally into the meta area only when they're ready). After talking to Luke (who also wants this), though, it seems clear that nobody is able to implement it very soon. So as a stopgap measure, I'm personally going to start doing the following, and I hope you join me:

Whenever a conversation starts getting bitterly meta in a thread that's not originally about a LW site meta issue, I'm going to tell people to start a thread on the LW Uncensored Reddit Thread instead. Then I'm going to downvote anyone who continues the meta war on the original thread.

I know it's annoying to send people somewhere that has a different login system, but it's as far as I can tell the best fix we currently have. Since some meta conversations are important, I'm not going to punish people for linking to meta thread discussions that they think are significant, and the relevant place for those links is usually the Open Thread. I don't want LessWrong to be a community devoted to arguing about the mechanics of LessWrong, so that's my suggestion.

Thoughts? (And yes, this thread is obviously open to meta discussion. I'm hopefully doing something constructive about the problem, instead of just complaining about it, though.)

EDIT: Changed the link to the uncensored thread more specifically, at Luke's request; originally I linked to the general LW subreddit, which is more heavily moderated.

Not sure if this has been covered on LW, but it seems highly relevant to WBE development. Link here:

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/147gqm/we_are_the_computational_neuroscientists_behind/

A few questioners mention the Singularity and make Skynet jokes.

The abstract from their paper in Science:

A central challenge for cognitive and systems neuroscience is to relate the incredibly complex behavior of animals to the equally complex activity of their brains. Recently described, large-scale neural models have not bridged this gap between neural activity and biological function. In this work, we present a 2.5-million-neuron model of the brain (called “Spaun”) that bridges this gap by exhibiting many different behaviors. The model is presented only with visual image sequences, and it draws all of its responses with a physically modeled arm. Although simplified, the model captures many aspects of neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, and psychological behavior, which we demonstrate via eight diverse tasks.

I'm curious to see LWers' perspectives on the project.

Aubrey de Grey, Chief Science Officer of the SENS Foundation, has posted a video with answers to some of the questions posed at him in a recent Reddit AMA.

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6eet44YacRg

EDIT2: The video has now been posted, you can watch it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tsI_28O3Ws

EDIT3: I have typed up a transcript for this video, you can see it in this google doc or in the comments here.

Just a heads up to the lesswrong community. Dr. Aubrey de Grey will be doing an AMA (Ask Me Anything) on reddit this upcoming Tuesday the 15th, scheduled for 9am EST. He will be doing a video-style response, which likely means that he will take the top voted questions and post his responses on youtube. When the AMA starts, you will be able to find it posted on http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/ . I will update this post with links to the question thread and video response when they go live.

EDIT: Ask Aubrey de Grey your questions here: Ask Aubrey de Grey, Chief Science Officer, SENS Foundation, Anything! He will be taking the top voted questions and answering them later this week in a video response. I will update this post then.