By Ferrett Steinmetz

Ferrett isn't officially a Rationality Blogger, but he posts things that seem relevant fairly often. This one is in the spirit of "Beware Trivial Inconveniences". It's the story of how he realized that a small change in his environment led to a big change in his behavior...

Alice: "I just flipped a coin [large number] times. Here's the sequence I got:

(Alice presents her sequence.)

Bob: No, you didn't. The probability of having gotten that particular sequence is 1/2^[large number]. Which is basically impossible. I don't believe you.

Alice: But I had to get some sequence or other. You'd make the same claim regardless of what sequence I showed you.

Bob: True. But am I really supposed to believe you that a 1/2^[large number] event happened, just because you tell me it did, or because you showed me a video of it happening, or even if I watched it happen with my own eyes? My observations are always fallible, and if you make an event improbable enough, why shouldn't I be skeptical even if I think I observed it?

Alice: Someone usually wins the lottery. Should the person who finds out that their ticket had the winning numbers believe the opposite, because winning is so improbable?

Bob: What's the difference between finding out you've won the lottery and finding out that your neighbor is a 500 year old vampire, or that your house is haunted by real ghosts? All of these events are extremely improbable given what we know of the world.

Alice: There's improbable, and then there's impossible. 500 year old vampires and ghosts don't exist.

Bob: As far as you know. And I bet more people claim to have seen ghosts than have won more than 100 million dollars in the lottery.

Alice: I still think there's something wrong with your reasoning here.

I've been seeing a lot of good content coming out of certain "rationality-adjacent" blogs recently and I think that there's a certain someone who ought to be listed in the Rationality Blogs sidebar but I don't think they are. (I'm not mentioning them by name because I'm more interested in a general procedure at this point - I can always write link posts to relevant blog posts as they appear.) Should I just post to Discussion and say "Hey! Link Here!" and hope a site admin takes the hint?

Every so often, I see a blog post about death, usually remarking on the death of someone the writer knew, and it often includes sentiments about "everyone is going to die, and that's terrible, but we can't do anything about it have so we have to accept it."

It's one of those sentiments that people find profound and is often considered Deep Wisdom. There's just one problem with it. It isn't true. If you think cryonics can work, as many people here do, then you believe that people don't really have to die, and we don't need to accept that we've only got at most about a hundred years and then that's it.

And I want to tell them this, as though I was a religious missionary out to spread the Good Word that you can save your soul and get into Christian Heaven as long as you sign up with Our Church. (Which I would actually do, if I believed that Christianity was correct.)

But it's not easy to broach the issue in a blog comment, and I'm not a good salesman. (One of the last times I tried, my posts kept getting deleted by the moderators.) It would be a lot better if I could simply link them to a better sales pitch; the kind of people I'm talking to are the kinds of people who read things on the Internet. Unfortunately, not one of the pro-cryonics posts listed on the LessWrong wiki can serve this purpose. Not "Normal Cryonics", not "You Only Live Twice", not "We Agree: Get Froze", not one! Why isn't there one? Heck, I'd pay money to get it written. I'd even pay Eliezer Yudkowsky a bunch of money to talk to my father on the telephone about cryonics, with a substantial bonus on offer if my father agrees to sign up. (We can discuss actual dollar amounts in the comments or over private messages.)

Please, someone get to work on this!

Psychology researchers discuss their findings in a New York Times op-ed piece.

The take-home advice:

Positive thinking fools our minds into perceiving that we’ve already attained our goal, slackening our readiness to pursue it.

...

What does work better is a hybrid approach that combines positive thinking with “realism.” Here’s how it works. Think of a wish. For a few minutes, imagine the wish coming true, letting your mind wander and drift where it will. Then shift gears. Spend a few more minutes imagining the obstacles that stand in the way of realizing your wish.

This simple process, which my colleagues and I call “mental contrasting,” has produced powerful results in laboratory experiments. When participants have performed mental contrasting with reasonable, potentially attainable wishes, they have come away more energized and achieved better results compared with participants who either positively fantasized or dwelt on the obstacles.

When participants have performed mental contrasting with wishes that are not reasonable or attainable, they have disengaged more from these wishes. Mental contrasting spurs us on when it makes sense to pursue a wish, and lets us abandon wishes more readily when it doesn’t, so that we can go after other, more reasonable ambitions.

WARNING: Memetic hazard.

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2014/07/roko_s_basilisk_the_most_terrifying_thought_experiment_of_all_time.html?wpisrc=obnetwork

Is there anything we should do?

Yvain isn't a big enough self-promoter to link to this, but I liked it a lot and I think you will too.

"The Last Temptation of Christ"

Here's something I've been wondering about, in the context of Solomonoff induction and uncomputable sequences.

I have a device that is either a halting oracle, or an ordinary Turing machine which gives the correct answer to the halting problem for all programs smaller than some finite length N but always outputs "does not halt" when asked to evaluate programs larger than N. If you don't know what N is and you don't have infinite time, is there a way to tell the difference between the actual halting oracle (which gives correct answers for all possible programs) and a "fake" halting oracle which starts giving wrong answers for some N that just happens to be larger than any program that you've tested so far?

The Kolmogorov complexity of an uncomputable sequence is infinite, so Solomonoff induction assigns it a probability of zero, but there's always a computable number with less than epsilon error, so would this ever actually matter?

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=marijuana-reveals-memory-mechanism

I wonder what the implications are for brain preservation and whole brain emulation? If glial cells are important, then saving and emulating the neurons alone probably won't be enough.