The article is unclear in its terms. At the top is says "92 percent of the Universe's habitable planets have yet to be born" and at the bottom it says "Earth is in the first 8 percent". Those two statements can only both be true if no habitable planets were formed between the formation of the earth and now (which is, of course, not the case). If the former is correct, earth might be significantly higher than top 8%.

I still don't see how this escapees the Fermi paradox though. Even if we're top 1%, that still means there must be great, great many potential alien civilizations out there. A factor 100 isn't going to significantly affect that conclusion.

It seems to me that there is an important difference between 'flipping the switch' and 'flipping the switch back', which is the intent of the action.

In the first scenario, your intent is to sacrifice one person to safe many.

In the second scenario, your intent is to undo a previous wrong.

Thus a deontologist may perfectly consistently argue that the first action is wrong (because you are never allowed to treat people only as means, or whatever deontological rule you want to invoke), while the second action is allowed.

Straight out of the box, the new machine plays at the same level as the best conventional chess engines, many of which have been fine-tuned over many years. On a human level, it is equivalent to FIDE International Master status, placing it within the top 2.2 percent of tournament chess players. But even with this disadvantage, it is competitive. “Giraffe is able to play at the level of an FIDE International Master on a modern mainstream PC,” says Lai. By comparison, the top engines play at super-Grandmaster level.

That's a pretty hard contradiction right there. The latter quote is probably the correct one. Modern chess engines beat any human player these days, even running on relatively modest hardware. That's assuming full length games. At blitz games computers are much better still, compared to humans, because humans are much more error prone.

So if this neural net is playing at master level it's still much, much weaker than the best computers. From master to grandmaster is a big leap, from grandmaster to world top is another big leap, and the best computers are above even that.

Still interesting of course.

O wow.

I've been following Lesswrong for months now, and only because of this post did I found out that there's more posts hidden under 'main' than just the promoted ones. So Thanks Elo!

I now wonder if there are any other hidden site features I don't know about.

I have to say this is not very good design. Why would you hide posts in such a non-obvious way. It's also rather inconsistent. The discussion page opens an overview page of newest posts, while the main page shows only a subset of newest posts, and shows the full content instead of an overview. There is apparently a way to get both main and discussion on a single page (see the links Vaniver and ike posted), but then for some reason the overview page is formatted completely differently.

Slightly unrelated to the point made above, but there is one particular weird argument that always seems to come up (at least in my circle of friends and acquaintances) when talking about immortality.

I tell someone plan to live forever, and the response is "Not me! That must be terrible! Imagine being forced to watch as everybody you know dies. And what if humanity dies out? You'll be sitting on a barren world for all eternity. Imagine how bored you will get."

I call this the 'cursed with immortality' argument. It is of course utterly ridiculous, but it's surprisingly common. My guess is that people place the idea of 'immortality' firmly in the realm of fairy tales, and in fairy tales the immortal being desperately trying to die is of course a common theme.

People who use this argument aren't stupid. They of course realize that an immortality curse is the stuff of fairy tales, and has nothing to do with science. But that's the point, they don't consider the question to be part of the realm of science.

And so if you ask people about immortality, make sure they take the question seriously first, and consider it in the right context, before assigning any value to their answer.

Sleeping Beauty is right not to cancel the bet if she is woken up on not-Wednesday (so Monday or Tuesday, but she does not know which). But this is not the optimal strategy. instead she should she roll a 4-sided die and cancel the bet if she rolls a 1. In other words she should keep the bet with 75% chance.

If she always keeps the bet, her expected payout on Wednesday is 0.5 * 1.5 - 0.5 * 1 = 0.25. That is she makes 25 cents per dollar bet, on average. But if she cancels the bet with 25% chance each time she wakes up, her expected win is 0.5 * 0.75 * 1.5 - 0.5 * 0.75 * 0.75 * 1 = 0.28125. So now she makes 28.125 cents for every dollar bet.

I think this illuminates the apparent paradox too. The fact that she is woken up on a not-Wednesday is extra information. She should lower her confidence in winning the bet, knowing the fact that she has been woken up. And she can use this information to her benefit.

If she always cancels the bet though, she destroys this extra information, since the bet will end up cancelled regardless of whether the coin came up heads or tails.

Honestly the easiest explanation is just that Aumann is a very muddled thinker when it comes to religion. That's hardly a surprising explanation - muddled thinking is extremely common when it comes to religion. And it doesn't mean that such a person can't otherwise be very rational. I know I'm being blunt here, but I see no reason to look beyond superficial appearances here. Just because a statement is religious doesn't mean it's deep.

All this stuff about non overlapping magisteria is honestly just confused nonsense. There's only one truth. Sure you can approach that truth from different directions, but not if those directions directly contradict each other. Spending a great many pages talking about this just obscures that obvious fact.

And it's all good and beautiful to say that "Religion is very different from science. The main part of religion is not about the way that we model the real world". But I've never met a religious person who said that and then didn't immediately turn around and started applying their religion to the real world. Aumann also does that. In fact in this very interview he literally says that copying software is wrong because his religion says so. So he clearly is modelling the real world based on his religion.

And a 5% chance of cryonics working seems hopelessly optimistic to me. So let's make that a 0.0000001% chance of working. Suddenly it seems like a pretty lousy deal. Do you think any rational person would still say yes?

No, they wouldn't. If that really is your estimated probability (where did you get those six zeros from? why not three, or twenty?), then you should not sign up for cryo. Those involved think there's a much higher chance than that. In fact, 5% is the usual order of magnitude.

And you won't have any other use for that money when you're dead. Whether it would be better to give it away and certainly die is a whole other issue. (EA meets cryonics — there's a subject for an interesting debate.)

So yes, those signing up are betting on a long shot, but not an impossibly long one.

This is from my book Singularity Rising:

I have encountered many of the same objections to cryonics in the numerous conversations I have had on the subject, and I’m going to assume that you object to cryonics for one or more reasons I have heard before. Below this paragraph is a list of cryonics objections, and beneath each objection is a question. For reasons that either I will provide or should seem obvious, answering any question in the affirmative means that its corresponding objection shouldn’t block you from joining the cryonics movement.

Objection 1: Cryonics is unnatural.

Question 1: Would you support a law prohibiting all medicine not used by our hunter-gatherer ancestors?

Objection 2: Once you have died, you are dead.

Question 2: You fall into a lake while ice skating, and your body quickly freezes. A year from now your body thaws out and for some crazy reason, you think, look and act just as before. Are you alive?

Objection 3: Even if cryonics works, the “person” that would be revived wouldn’t really be me.

Question 3: Were you alive ten years ago?

If you answered yes, then you are not defining “you” by the physical makeup of your body, because almost none of the atoms in your body today are the same as they were ten years ago. Your body has undergone many changes over the last decade, meaning that if you still identify as you, you must be defining yourself by some broad structure and not merely by the exact arrangement of the molecules that compose “you.”

Also, imagine that a year after joining Alcor, you wake up one morning in a hospital bed, and see the smiling face of your (now much older) child. Although thirty years has passed since you died in your sleep, no subjective time has transpired, and your body has the exact same look and feel as it did before you went to bed. Indeed, had Alcor placed you back in the room in which you died, you would think today was a normal morning. Are you still you? Are you glad you signed up with Alcor?

Furthermore, consider two 40-year-olds named Tom and Jane. Tom legally dies in 2020, is cryogenically preserved, and is then revived in 2045 by a process that restores his body and brain to the condition it was in before he legally died. Jane survives to 2045. The Tom of 2045 is vastly more similar to the Tom of 2020 than the Jane of 2045 is to the Jane of 2020, as the Jane of 2045 has undergone twenty-five extra years of aging and life experience. So if you believe that Jane has stayed Jane over the time period, then you should think that the pre-cryonics Tom is the same as the post-cryonics one.

Objection 4: I don’t want to wake up a stranger in a strange world.

Question 4: While driving, you get into an accident. When you wake up in a hospital, an FBI agent tells you that the son of a Mafia leader died in the accident, and although the accident wasn’t your fault, the leader will hold you responsible. If the Mafia thinks you survived the accident, it will kill you. The agent confesses that the Mafia has infiltrated the FBI, and so the government will never be able to protect you. The agent provides one option for survival. He will fake your death, and make people think your body was burned beyond recognition. The agent will then give you a new identity, and transport you to another country, one very different from your own. You will never be able to contact any of your old friends or family again, because the always suspicious Mafia will monitor them. Do you accept the agent’s offer?

Objection 5: If revived, I wouldn’t have any useful skills.

Question 5: You have a fatal disease that has only one cure, but this cure costs $1 billion, which you can't possibly raise. NASA, however, makes you an offer. The space agency is launching a rocket that will travel near the speed of light. Because of Einstein’s theory of relativity, although the mission will take you only one subjective year to complete, when the rocket returns to Earth, one thousand years will have passed. Because you are the most qualified person to fly the rocket, NASA will pay the cost of your disease’s cure if you accept the mission. Do you accept? .

Also, you are only likely to get revived in a friendly rich world.

Objection 6: The people who revive me might torture me.

Question 6: If you knew an intelligence explosion would occur tomorrow would you commit suicide today to avoid the chance of being tortured?

Objection 7: I don’t cherish my life enough to want to extend it with cryonics.

Question 7: You will die of cancer unless you undergo a painless medical procedure. Do you get the procedure?

Objection 8: It would be morally superior for me to donate money to charity rather than spending money on cryonics.

Question 8: Same as Question (7), but now the operation is expensive, although you can afford to pay it.

Objection 9: It’s selfish of me to have more than my fair share of life, especially since the world is overpopulated.

Question 9: Same as question (7), except that your age is well above the length of time the average human lives.

Objection 10: I believe in God, the real one with a capital G, not an extremely smart artificial intelligence. I don’t want to postpone joining him in the afterlife.

Question 10: Same as Question (7).

Also, even the extra million years of life that cryonics might give you is nothing compared to the infinity you believe you will eventually spend in heaven. If you believe that God wants you to spend time in the physical universe before joining him, might he not approve of you using science and reason to extend your life, so you can better serve him in our, material world?

Many faiths believe it’s virtuous to have children, raise these children to understand God, and then hope these children beget more children who will carry on the faith. If there is a God, he appears to have started us out on a tiny planet in an empty universe. People who make it to the Singularity would likely get to “be fruitful and multiply”, and populate God’s universe. (Don’t worry if you are past childbirth age: any technology that could revive the cryogenically preserved could be used to help you have children.)

Objection 11: If people find out I have signed up for cryonics they will think I’m crazy.

Question 11: Same as Question (7), but now most people think the type of operation you will get is crazy.

The stigma of cryonics is real and has even made this author nervous about outing himself, for fear that it might make it harder for me to find alternative employment, should I choose to leave or get fired from Smith College.

Objection 12: Cryonics might not work.

Question 12: Same as Question (7), but now the procedure only has a 5% chance of saving your life.

Here is my final question for you:

One minute from now a man pushes you to the ground, pulls out a long sword, presses the sword’s tip to your throat, and says he will kill you. You have one small chance at survival: grab the sword’s sharp blade, throw it away, and then run. But even with your best efforts, you will probably die. Do you fight?