Thank you for these marvelous hacks, a few of these were unformed at the back of my head for a long time now.

I really like the Second Chances mentality, this line especially:

There are those who tell you to live each day as if it might be your last. I prefer to live each day as if I'm doing it over.

seems like a way to visualize/weaponize a consequentialist viewpoint that's also agreeable to your selves under reflection.

The Split Selves especially crystallized some of the "cooperate with alt-time self-versions" mentality I'm trying to stay aware of.

I do have to say "use with caution": Most of these are hard to execute or maintain consistently, and inevitable failures can end in a feeling of contract breach/lower self-trust/"fuck this shit" attitude and so on.

As such it's important to, um, let go of failure? I mean maybe analyze what went wrong, but definitely skip the punishment and just go to "lesson learned, sins forgiven, lets do our best next time!". At least that seems healthier than guilt/duty as motivation.

The tragedy as I see it has a slightly different flavor than that of my other family members: For them it’s probably seen as an ultimately inevitable end, and few perhaps hold some hope/notion of an afterlife or maybe just never thought too hard about what death entails.

Sorry for your loss, but I can't help but note that this seems to be a quite condescending and arrogant position. Philosophical and literary reflection about mortality has been present in all cultures, and I'm pretty sure that humans have been thinking about death well before they could write.

Thinking that the dead could be living on in different Everett branches, or in whatever variety of Tegmark's neo-Platonic world of ideals, isn't really much different that thinking they could be living on in a supernatural otherworld. And death still sucks for somebody who believes in Everett branches as much as it sucks for anybody who believes in a supernatural otherworld or metempsychosis, for exactly the same reason.

Burying the dead, burning them to ashes, or putting then into dewars filled with liquid nitrogen, after performing culturally-appropriate rituals which all involve some sort of symbolic "preservation", fulfils the same social and psychological functions.

Just because other people don't buy into your specific flavor of afterlife it doesn't mean that they haven't thought about death and haven't reached conclusions similar to your own.

Not sure where exactly to ask but here goes:

Sparked by the recent thread(s) on the Brain Preservation Foundation and by my Grandfather starting to undergo radiation+chemo for some form of cancer. While timing isn't critical yet, I'm tentatively trying to convince my Mother (who has an active hand in her Fathers' treatment) into considering preservation as an option.

What I'm looking for is financial and logistical information of how one goes about arranging this starting from a non-US country, so if anyone can point me at it I'd much appreciate it.

Not sure where else to ask but here goes:

Sparked by the recent thread(s) on the Brain Preservation Foundation and by my Grandfather starting to undergo radiation+chemo for some form of cancer. While timing isn't critical yet, I'm tentatively trying to convince my Mother (who has an active hand in her Fathers' treatment) into considering preservation as an option.

What I'm looking for is financial and logistical information of how one goes about arranging this starting from a non-US country, so if anyone can point me at it I'd much appreciate it.

I actually expected Harry to cast the Killing Curse as a last ditch desperation/rage effort. He knew what it does, has seen the wand movements and pronounciation (in the Dementor dream), knew and had the required state of mind. That should be enough to cast it, as per Ch26 ("He is in his sixth year at Hogwarts and he cast a high-level Dark curse without knowing what it did.").

Things flying very fast through the atmosphere of the earth have the habit of insinuating in it. Would the kind of technology that you would need to do astroid mining really give you the ability to blow up a city?

A reality of physics, and one that doesn't get much play in science fiction, is that as soon as humanity gains space travel, anyone in the asteroid mining or space travel business will have city-busting capabilities at their fingertips.

How do you know that's the reality? Could you go into more detail? Especially if you have enough telescope satellites to monitor all mining activities and some nuclear weapons to attack asteroids that get redirected?

Will a company like Planetary Resources, Inc have the ability to blow up a city when it gets it's mining working?

Have you tried your hand at drawing?

It is not quite the same skill, but being able to notice/See things as they are (closer to raw visual input) rather than letting your brain auto-label stuff may help you retain images better, and I think it'd also be interesting if you were to take a written scene from a book and try do draw it.

By the way, there is supposedly a fast way (~20h) to go from kindergarten to recognizably realistic in drawing skills using some neat tricks, there was even a series of articles about it here on lw. (the other 10k hours go into those final touches of skill, but to the untrained eyes the difference isn't as jarring as the no-training - some-training gap, at least in simple scenes)

Here's an anthropic question/exercise inspired by this fanfic (end of 2nd chapter specifically), I don't have the time to properly think about it but it seems like an interesting tests for current anthropic reasoning theories under esoteric/unusual conditions. The premise is as follows:

There exist a temporal beacon, acting as an anchor in time. An agent/agents may send their memories back to the anchored time, but as time goes on they may also die/be otherwise prevented from sending memories back. Every new iteration, the agent-copy at the time immediately after the beacons' creation gets blasted with memories from 'past' iterations, either from only the immediately preceding one which recursively includes all previous iterations as further back in subjective time, or from every past iteration at once, with or without a convenient way to differentiate between overlapping memories (another malleable aspect of the premise), or for real head-screwes, from all iterations that lived.

the interesting question would be how would an agent estimate their probability of dying in the current iteration, based on information it was blasted with immediately post-anchor time.

A very simple toy model would be something like: assuming all agent copies send back memories after T years if they haven't died, with the probability of dying/being unable to send back memories each iteration being p, an agent that finds itself with memories from N iterations, what should it estimate as its probability of dying in this iteration?

There should probably be more unsafe time-travel based questions to test anthropic decision making, maybe also to shape intuition regarding many-worlds/multiverse views.

Fanfiction Thread