The video archive of the talk is available here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pm-5s__aZE0

FTBCon (Free Thought Blogs) is an all-online convention, a chance for a lot of people to get together and hangout while listening to people talk about atheist and skeptic issues. I proposed a panel on whether human immortality is a good thing or a bad idea  in principle when Myers first asked for submissions, and a few hours later I had managed to fall into this. :) I’ll be speaking with David Brin, PZ Myers, and Eliezer Yudkowsky, which is amazing as they’re all on a level significantly above mine. I guess there’s some advantages to moving quickly and organizing things. Anyone who’s seen any of these people speak before knows that this is going to be extremely cool, and very thought-provoking.

The panel will taking place over Google+ on Sunday, July 21st, at 12:00noon Pacific Time (GMT -7). To watch, go to PZ’s page here, it’ll start streaming at the appointed time. You can chat with other people (and submit questions to the moderators) right here. Afterwards the recording will be put on YouTube, I’ll post a link when it becomes available.

The full schedule of all FTBCon sessions is here.

ETA: direct link to the live feed - https://plus.google.com/events/cpqd03p20njfchsnumae3dehi2s

In fairness, this is almost certainly a coincidence. But it's interesting how similar the new HP cover art looks to Dinosaurusgede's "Shopping With Minerva" piece

http://dinosaurusgede.deviantart.com/art/shopping-with-minerva-174358965

http://io9.com/5984599/the-harry-potter-books-are-finally-getting-decent-covers

A fun little exercise in dissolving a problem. Relatively quick, but it can wake you up on a slow day.

http://www.memedroid.com/share-meme/337837/8000

In the style of Jeff Foxworthy's "You Might Be A Redneck If..."

If you're waking up and the characters in your dream start asking you to stay asleep a bit longer because they're running on your brain and they don't want to be consigned to oblivion just yet... you might be on LW too much.

Happened to me this morning, it was kinda weird, and I felt kinda sad. In fairness, it might just be my subconscious brain telling me I need to get more damn sleep.

Anyone have similar stories?

9/26 is Petrov Day

While mentioning this in Facebook statuses, Tweets, and face-to-face conversation is good, things often stick better when there's a picture associated with them. Image macros are popular, and more fun to share. So here's one for Petrov Day I threw together.

http://i.imgur.com/3GNms.jpg

Progeria is an extremely rare condition, 15 years ago almost nothing was known about it. Then Leslie Gordon and Scott Berns, both physicians, had a son who was diagnosed with it at 2 years old. They were able to find the cause, isolate the genes responsible, and adapt a drug to combat many of the more fatal symptoms. They had help, and luck. But they are doing the impossible.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2012/09/25/161691083/experimental-drug-is-first-to-help-kids-with-premature-aging-disease

Bonus: the drug may help slow aging in healthy humans as well.

Also: this has been mentioned on LW before, but without the awesome Do The Impossible narrative. I blame the BBC.

A long time ago, in the colder seasons, I asked for suggestions for a Shit Rationalists Say video. Due to other concerns it took me this long to put it together, and the meme has long since passed. However, here it is.

Shit Rationalists Say

It is my first time in front of a camera, so I'm shakey. But I learned, and there it is.

Lately I'd gotten jaded enough that I simply accepted that different rules apply to the elite class. As Hanson would say, most rules are there specifically to curtail those who don't have the ability to avoid them and to be side-stepped by those who do - it's why we evolved such big, manipulative brains. So when this video recently made the rounds it shocked me to realize how far my values had drifted over the past several years.

(the video is not about politics, it is about status. My politics are far from those of Penn)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWWOJGYZYpk&feature=sharek

It's good we have people like Penn around to remind us what it was like to be teenagers and still expect the world to be fair, so our brains can be used for more productive things.

By the measure our society currently uses, Obama was winning. Penn was not. Yet Penn’s approach is the winning strategy for society. Brain power is wasted on status games and social manipulation when it could be used for actually making things better. The machinations of the elite class are a huge drain of resources that could be better used in almost any other pursuit. And yet the elites are admired high-status individuals who are viewed as “winning” at life. They sit atop huge piles of utility. Idealists like Penn are regarded as immature for insisting on things as low-status as “the rules should be fair and apply identically to every one, from the inner-city crack-dealer to the Harvard post-grad.”

The “Rationalists Should Win” meme is a good one, but it risks corrupting our goals. If we focus too much on “Rationalist Should Win” we risk going for near-term gains that benefit us. Status, wealth, power, sex. Basically hedonism – things that feel good because we’ve evolved to feel good when we get them. Thus we feel we are winning, and we’re even told we are winning by our peers and by society. But these things aren’t of any use to society. A society of such “rationalists” would make only feeble and halting progress toward grasping the dream of defeating death and colonizing the stars.

It is important to not let one’s concept of “winning” be corrupted by Azathoth.

ADDED 5/23:

It seems the majority of comments on this post are people who disagree on the basis of  rationality being a tool for achieving ends, but not for telling you what ends are worth achieving.

I disagree. As is written "The Choice between Good and Bad is not a matter of saying 'Good!'  It is about deciding which is which." And rationality can help to decide which is which. In fact without rationality you are much more likely to be partially or fully mistaken when you decide.

Cracked, already known for its lay-person-friendly approach to promoting rationality, now has a quick video that roughly explains the Singularity and why we should be worried about it while being funny and interesting to people who normally wouldn't care. Done in their After Hours series.

http://www.cracked.com/video_18400_why-scariest-sci-fi-robot-uprising-has-already-begun.html