I don't smoke, but I made the mistake of starting a can of Pringles yesterday. If you >asked me my favorite food, there are dozens of things I would say before "Pringles". >Right now, and for the vast majority of my life, I feel no desire to go and get Pringles. >But once I've had that first chip, my motivation for a second chip goes through the >roof, without my subjective assessment of how tasty Pringles are changing one bit.

What is missing from this is the effort (which eats up the limited willpower budget) required to get the second Pringle chip. Your motivation for a second Pringle chip would be much lower if you only brought one bag of Pringle chips, and all bags contained one chip. However, your motivation to have another classof(Pringle) = potato chip no doubt rises -- due to the fact that chips are on your thoughts rather than iPhones.

Talking about effort allows us to bring in habits into the discussion, which you might define as sets of actions that, due to their frequent use, are much less effort to perform.

The difference between enjoyment and motivation provides an argument that could >rescue these people. It may be that a person really does enjoy spending time with >their family more than they enjoy their iPhone, but they're more motivated to work >and buy iPhones than they are to spend time with their family.

Alternatively, for potentially good reasons before (working hard to buy a house for said family), work has become habitual while spending time with the family has not. Hence, work is the default set of actions, the default no-effort state, and anything that takes time off work requires effort. Spending time with the family could do this, yet buying an iPhone with the tons of money this person has would not.

A way of summarizing the effect of effort is that it is a function of a particular persons set of no-effort (no willpower) actions. This function defines how much 'wanting' is required to do that action -- less effort actions of the same amount of 'wanting' are more 'desirable' to be done.

Willpower plays a big role in this in that you can spend willpower to pull yourself out of the default state (a default state such as being in New York), but it only last so long.

I have a cryonics related question, and this seems as good a thread as any to ask it.

I'm a New Zealander and most discussions of cryonics that I've been exposed to focus on the United States, or failing that Europe. If I have to have my head packed in ice and shipped to the US for preservation its going to degrade a fair bit before it gets there (best case scenario its a 12 hour flight, and that's just to LA, in practice time from death to preservation could be days). This is not a pleasant prospect for me, since it could lower the probability of successful revival by a large margin.

Since there are about 24 million people in Australia and New Zealand I'm sure I'm not the first person to realise this. Is anyone out there aware of any reputable cryonics organisations that are a bit closer to home? Alternatively, can anyone point me to sources that contradict my belief that the distance my head would have to travel would make cryonics a poor bet?

A turn out of 3 including myself, which is quite a success for a small place such as Auckland. We agreed that in mid December we should meet again. So for anyone who considered coming but did not, please come next time!; these meet-ups are excellent motivators for studying rationality.

Automatically, because nobody hates life this much. Although when you look at it zoomed out, it's kind of beautiful.

What I like is that I can look at the list of referenced previous posts, and see which posts I should read.

Did you construct these automatically, or by hand?

Excellent response.

As a side note, I do suspect that there's a big functional difference between an entity that feels a small voice in the back of the head and an entity that feels pain like we do.

In Getting Things Done, after the first step of simply writing down each task you want to accomplish (can be of any level of difficult and time), and then you do a seperate processing step after that.

That is when you decide how long each task takes, and if it takes less than 5 minutes you do it now. When you get into the GTD system of life organization, trivial impetuses you put down in the initial collection phase, and when you get around to processing them, you have habits that say "do task now if takes less than 5 minutes". GTD is (apparently, I tried to get it working for me but to little success so far) a life changing thing.

You could make voting a post mandatory to comment on that post, so to submit a comment you get prompted to vote it up or down (or maybe neutral)

Or maybe just by having the vote up/down/neutral buttons next to the comment submit button, right in peoples faces, would make them more likely to vote.