It's true that GDP is not identical to national welfare. And you can come up with anecdotes where some welfare measure isn't fully captured by GDP (both positive and negative).

But GDP is useful, because it is very hard to game. The examples in your "fetishism" link are very weak. Unlike the nails example, where we can all agree that the factory made the wrong choice for society, it is far from clear that the GDP examples resulted in the wrong policy, even if GDP is only an approximation for welfare.

GDP is not a good example of Goodhart's Law. It's nothing at all like the (broken) correlation between inflation and unemployment, which varies widely depending on policy choices.

Is Alcor in fact that much better than CI (plus SA, that is)?

"Pseudoscience" isn't the only possible criticism of cryonics. One could believe that it may be scientifically possible in theory, still without thinking that it's a good idea to sign up for cryonics in the present day. (Basically, by coming up with something like a Drake equation for the chance of it working out positively for a current-day human, and then estimating the probability of the terms to be very low.)

You're right, that most of the popular criticism of cryonics is mere non-technical mocking. Still, there's a place for reasoned objections as well.

Fun sneaky confidence exercise (reasons why exercise is fun and sneaky to be revealed later):

Please reply to this comment with your probability level that the "highest" human mental functions, such as reasoning and creative thought, operate solely on a substrate of neurons in the physical brain.

I don't think I can persuaded.

I have many good responses to the comments here, and I suppose I could sketch out some of the main arguments against anti-realism, but there are also many serious demands on my time and sadly this doesn't look like a productive discussion. There seems to be very little real interest in finding out more (with a couple of notable exceptions). Instead the focus is on how to justify what is already believed without finding out any thing else about what the opponents are saying (which is particularly alarming given that many commenters are pointing out that they don't understand what the opponents are saying!).

Given all of this, I fear that writing a post would not be a good use of my time.

You can't be serious. Sure, I get your point in regard to the cold winters and I know others who argue the same way, but the thing is, no one has an exact idea of what will change in the world once the temperature rises a few degrees. More melting of ice will change the salinitiy of the sea and cause a change in sea currents which might precipitate a new ice age, this is one possibility in which Moscow will become much colder.

There already were some extreme heat waves in Europe during summer that killed thousands of people.

Our biosphere is a complex system and how goes the saying? "Never change a running system."

Hmm, I was thinking about writing something similar to your article here.

A pet peeve of mine is the Observer Effect in QM - not once, on any skeptical radio show, on any internet animation, or in any High School Class (and I am wagering that it is no different in University) have I ever heard it specifically pointed out that OE does not mean conscious observer - not even when it is a PhD talking to a lay audience.

And thus we have movies such as What the * do we know, and the myths keep spinning.

Reference class forecasting is meant to overcome the bias among humans to be optimistic, whereas a perfect rationalist would render void the distinction between "inside view" and "outside view" -- it's all evidence.

Therefore a necessary condition to even consider using reference class forecasting for predicting an AI singularity or cryonics is that the respective direct arguments are optimistically biased. If so, which flaws do you perceive in the respective arguments, or are we humans completely blind to them even after applying significant scrutiny?

Perhaps. But I am far more annoyed by people who know better throwing around absolute terms, when they also know counterexamples are available in literally 3 or 4 seconds - if they would stop being lazy and would just look.

(I'm seriously considering registering an account 'LetMeFuckingGoogleThatForYou' to handle these sorts of replies; LW may be big enough now that such role-accounts are needed.)

Roughly on the same topic, a few years ago I read Intelligence in War by John Keegan. I was expecting a glorification of that attribute which I believed to be so important; to read story after story of how proper intelligence made the critical difference during military battles.

Much to my surprise, Keegan spends the whole book basically shooting down that theory. Instead, he has example after example where one side clearly had a dominant intelligence advantage (admittedly, here we're talking about "information", not strictly "rationality"), but it always wound up being a mere minor factor in the outcome of the battle.

Definitely worth checking out, if you're at all interested in the power (or lack thereof) of being smarter, rather than all the other factors that determine the outcome of military battles.