The idea that you are alive “now” but will be dead “later” is irrational. Time is just a persistent illusion according to relativistic physics. You are alive and dead, period. A little knowledge is a dangerous etcetera. For one, it's like saying that relativistic spacetime proves New York isn't east of LA, but instead there are NY and LA, period. For another, if he really believed this then he wouldn't be able to function in society or make any plans at all.

Ditto a meat replica But aren't you always a meat replica of any past version of you? If he feels this way then he has to bite the bullet and recommend you quit your job, because you're working hard but it's only a meat replica that will recieve the pay for it.

Many worlds It's not making "another one", it's "A lot more". "Not many" + "A lot more" = "A little more than that". He's making Zeno's mistake here, thinking that just because there are infinite numbers between 0 and 1 you can't get to one, and it's meaningless to say that 10>1 because that's just 9 + infinity and you can't add to infinity.

Now, how does he donate? Does he give a good amount to actually useful charities (ie Villiage Reach, NTD treatments, etc) and you're trying to shift him over to SIAI and other such high risk charities? That would be pretty tricky as it's hard to get a grip on the actual value of SIAI donation. E=(A Lot times very small delta p) per dollar isn't super convincing sell to me when compared with E=(1/7 years of schooling + 1/10 years of healthy life) per dollar. I am not signed up for cryonics, mostly because my nation has no cryogenic facilities and therefore I don't think my brain would fare too well prior to vitrification. However, I would sign up if there was a nearby storage facility, especially since I have no current use for the death part of my Death, Terminal Disease and Permanent Disability insurance.

What I think could be useful is explaining cryonics as an extension of acceptable practices. He'd probably go under anaesthesia for life saving healthcare, and would probably approve of someone being put in a medically induced coma (I think it's generally to keep them stable before surgery but IANAD so do your research first). Explain Cryogenics as effectively a way of sustaining an effectively continuous life to the point where it can be treated and hopefully given a better chance at longevity.

The "it's okay to kill copies" thing has never made any sense to me either. The explanation that often accompanies it is "well they won't remember being tortured", but that's the exact same scenario for ALL of us after we die, so why are copies an exception to this?

Would you willingly submit yourself to torture for the benefit of some abstract, "extra" version of you? Really? Make a deal with a friend to pay you $100 for every hour of waterboarding you subject yourself to. See how long this seems like a good idea.

There's a related concept in the stage production Urinetown, where the draconian controls of the police state turn out to have been necessary all along

As a musical, Urinetown is okay, but its premise does not make sense. They have somehow managed, in spite of the water shortage and the wherewithal to institute massive societal change to manage it, to continue using restroom facilities that cost water, and they only don't all die because they charge money to use those facilities, as though this will affect how much waste a person produces. This is all instead of a water-free facility, or better yet, reclamation.

Reading through the misconceptions page I discover that meteorites are not hot when they hit the earth! And after all this time thinking I could use them to finish off trolls.

What is to standing, as standing is to sitting?

Jumping.

What is to walking, as walking is to crawling?

Running.

What is to humans, as humans are to their pets?

Dragons.

What is to 3D movement, as 3D movement is to 2D?

4D movement.

Never understood the math behind that one. Do I start off lying down?

So I assume that's a crack in the direction of Objectivism, but I think your insight actually applies to a large number of semi-political movements, especially if you see "interesting science fiction", and "utopian/dystopian literature", and "political philosophy" as repackagings of basically the same thing.

Part of the political back story of Plato's Republic is that it documents utopian political theorizing in the presence of Athenian youths. In reality, there were students of Socrates who were part of the Thirty Tyrants... which group was responsible for a political purge in Athens. In Plato's Apology, there's a bit about how Socrates didn't get his hands dirty when ordered to participate in the actual killing but if you want to read critically between the lines you can imagine that his being ordered to drink hemlock was payback for inflicting bad philosophy on the eventual evil leaders of Athens.

Its one of those meta-observations where I'm not sure there's real meat there or not, but the pattern of philosophers inspiring politics and significant political leaders operating according to some crazy theory seems to exist. Maybe the policiains would have grabbed any old philosophy for cover? Or maybe the philosophy actually determines some of the outcome? I have no solid opinion on that right now, prefering so far to have worked on data accumulation...

Aristotle was Alexander the Great's tutor. Ayn Rand's coterie included Alan Greenspan. Nietzsche and the Nazis sort of has to be mentioned even if it trigger's Godwin. Marx seems to have had something to do with Stalin. Some philosophers at the University of Chicago might be seen as the intellectual grand parents of Cheney et al.

In trying to find data here, the best example of something that didn't end up being famously objectionable to someone may be Saint Thomas Moore's book "A Fruitful and Pleasant Work of the Best State of a Public Weal, and of the New Isle Called Utopia" which served as an inspiration for Vasco de Quiroga's colonial administration of Michoacán.

One of the important themes in all this seems to be that "philosophy is connected to bad politics" with alarming frequency - where the philosophers are not or would not even be fans of the political movements and outcomes which claim to take inspiration from their thoughts.

Having read Zendegi, I get the impression from the portrayal of the character Caplan, with an explicit reference to overcoming bias and with the parody of the "benevolent bootstrap project", that Greg Egan is already not happy with the actions of those he may have inspired and is already trying to distance himself from Singularitarianism in the expectation that things will not work out.

The weird thing is that he says "those people are crazy" and at the same time he says "this neuromorphic AI stuff is morally dangerous and could go horribly wrong". Which, from conversations with LW people, I mean...

...the warnings Egan seems to be trying to raise with this book are a small part of the reason this issue is attracting smart people to online political organization in an effort to take the problems seriously and deal with the issue in an intellectually and morally responsible fashion. But then Egan implicitly bashes the group of people who are already worrying about the fears he addresses in his book...

...which makes me think he just has something like a very "far mode" view of OB (or at least he had such a view in July or 2009 when he stopped adjusting Zendegi's content)?

A far mode view of Overcoming Bias could make us appear homogenous, selfish, and highly competent. The character "Caplan" is basically a sociopathic millionaire with a cryonics policy, a very high risk tolerance, and absolutely no akrasia to speak of... he's some sort of "rationalist ubermensh" twisted into a corporate bad guy. He's not someone struggling to write several meaningful pages every day on an important topic before the time for planning runs out.

I suspect that if Greg got on the phone with some of us, or attended a LW meetup to talk with people, he would find that mostly we just tend to agree on a lot of basic issues. But the phone call didn't happen and now the book is published.

One of the reasons I love science fiction is that it says so much about the time and mindset it was written in. I can read scifi from the 1960's and recognize the themes and pre-occupations and understand how they grew out of 1950's science fiction and what I'm reading fell out of fashion for 1970's stuff and so on. Some of it is pretentious, some childish, some beautiful, some is outright political ranting, some is just plain fun. Usually its a mixture. I wouldn't be surprised if Zendegi is interesting in 2012 for how much it reveals about the preoccupations of people in early 2009.

And the fact that science fiction is working on shorter timescales like this is also something I think is interesting. Shorter science fiction feedback cycles is (weakly) part of what I would expect if concerns about the singularity were signal rather than noise...

This question has a natural upper bound, determined by the preexisting torture/fun distribution in the world. Most people would hold that it's morally acceptable to make the world larger by adding more people whose life outcomes will be drawn from the same probability distribution as the people alive today. If presently the average person has X0 fun, and fraction T0 of people are tortured without you being able to stop it, then you should press the button if X>X0 and N>1/T0.

It seems to me that, as a point of human psychology, pain and fun genuinely do have different scales. The reason is that the worse pain is more subjectively intense than the best pleasure, which looks to have obvious evolutionary reasons. And similarly our wince reaction on seeing someone get kicked is a lot stronger than our empathic-happiness at seeing someone have sex. So questions like "how many orgasms equal one crushed testicle" are genuinely difficult, not just unpopular. (Which is not to deny that they are unpopular as well, because few people like to think about hard questions.)

None of which excuses us from making decisions in the case that we have limited resources and can either prevent pain or cause pleasure. I'm just saying that it seems to me that our psychology is set up to have a very hard time with this.

To answer the question: For one orgasm, I will trade a few good hard punches leaving bruises. (Observe, incidentally, that this or a similar trade is made many times daily by volunteers in BDSM relationships; noting that there are people who enjoy some kinds of pain, and also people who don't enjoy the pain at all but who are willing to not-enjoy it because they enjoy giving pleasure to someone else by not-enjoying it. Human psychology is complex stuff.) I will not trade permanent damage (psychological or physical) for any number of orgasms, on the grounds of opportunity costs: You can always get another orgasm, but permanent damage is by construction irrecoverable. In the hypothetical where we gene-engineer humans to be more resilient or orgasms to be more intense, the details will change but not the refusal to trade temporary pleasure for permanent damage.

I must admit that I feel uneasy about the above; it seems I'm saying that there are diminishing returns to orgasms, which doesn't look quite right. Alternatively, perhaps I'm measuring utility as the maximum gain or loss of a single person in my sample of 3^^^^3, rather than summing over everyone - another form of diminishing returns, basically. Nonetheless, this is my intuition, that permanent damage ought to be avoided at any cost in pleasure. Possibly just risk-aversion bias?

As someone who actually does have ADD, I'd like to point out that if you take amphetamines often you need to pay more attention to dental hygene. Amphetamines inhibit saliva production (presumably this has something to do with its effects on appetite) which can promote cavities if you skip brushing your teeth. Since it can give you dry mouth, maybe a good way to ensure you eat is to make a nice soup so you'll eat it when you feel thirsty? If that doesn't work (I've never needed to try it) then maybe drinking milk instead of water could be good since at least you get some nutrition out of it (although being South Australian I do come from a culture where iced coffee is supposedly more popular than coca cola)