then you'd better not have turned down any loans with APY less than 900%.

Since I was unemployed with no assets, I wasn't (until very recently, i.e. yesterday) eligible for any kind of personal loan.

By how many orders of magnitude?

Mortality rate in your late 20s is low, and when you add that accidents, sudden deaths and murder are already very bad for cryo, that is further compounded.

Then you have the problem that I'm not in the USA (I plan to eventually move, once my career is strong enough to score the relevant visa); being in the US is the best way to ensure a successful, timely suspension. If you are in Europe you have to both pay more for transport and you will be damaged more by the long journey, assuming you die unexpectedly in Europe.

And how does the value of cryonics go up as your mortality rate does?

Well obviously it is worth more to mitigate death if your death is more likely. Especially when the kinds of ways you die when young are bad for yoir cryo chances.

Not that it's relevant, but the claim that malaria has killed half of humans who have lived is completely absurd. Falciparum malaria is nasty because it has only recently jumped to humans. With time, it would adapt to be less deadly, to better spread, and humans would adapt to be less vulnerable. This is exactly what happened to vivax ("benign") malaria. Vivax jumped to humans 35k years ago, while falciparum only 5k years ago. The genus Homo was free of malaria for millions of years. If you define humans as starting 50k years ago, then some form of malaria was present for most of that time, although how deadly it was varied a lot over the millennia.

Is it a good idea to leave alive mosquitos that don't bite humans? How long would it take them to mutate and fill the "human bloodsucking" niche that is suddenly vacant?

Perhaps a more comprehensive program of disease vector eradication is in order. Any organism that acts as a flying hypodermic needle poses the risk of moving pathogens around between species. For that matter, there are a lot of parasites in the world that parasitise mammals. If they were all to be eradicated, predators could take up the slack, but predators such as foxes, wolves or lions are trivially easy for us to control in comparison.

Natural ecosystems are de facto bioterrorist labs that occasionally output horrors like AIDS and ebola and zika. Maybe human beings need to start a serious and far-reaching effort to shut them down.

But we shouldn't define One True Approximation, which is oxymoron, there is no true approximations.

What we need is to define practical useful approximation. For example I want to create loose copy of me during uploading, and some information will be lost. How much and what kind of information I could skip during uploading? It is important practical question.

I would also add that there is two types of identity, and above I spoke about second type.

First one is identity of consciousness (it happens if you lose all your memories , overnight, but from our last discussions I remember that you deny existence of consciousness in some way).

Second is identity of memory where someone gets all your memories, thus becoming your copy. (There is also social, biological, legal and several other types identities).

They are not different definitions of one type of identity, they are different types of identity. During uploading we have different problems with different types of identity.

Me-tomorrow will be similar to me-now, and it is governed by second type of identity, and there are no much problems here. The problems appear than different types of identity become not alined. In Parfit's example if I lose all my memories and someone gets all my memories, where will be I?

(Parfit named this two types of identity "numerical" and "qualitative", the names are not self evident, unfortunately, and the definition is not exactly the same, see here http://www.iep.utm.edu/person-i/:

"Let us distinguish between numerical identity and qualitative identity (exact similarity): X and Y are numerically identical iff X and Y are one thing rather than two, while X and Y are qualitatively identical iff, for the set of non-relational properties F1...Fn of X, Y only possesses F1...Fn. (A property may be called "non-relational" if its being borne by a substance is independent of the relations in which property or substance stand to other properties or substances.) Personal identity is an instance of the relation of numerical identity;")

I don't want to answer your question because it appears to me to be a trap.

It's not a trap, it's a bullet :-) which you can attempt to bite or dodge :/

For palatability I can express it in the 'expected' form: for someone who is currently overweight (and so, in expectation, is less healthy than a similar slim person), will losing weight, in expectation, worsen his health? If so, what avenues are open to an overweight person who would like to get healthier?

A lot of great topics here.

Elon Musk has risked his entire fortune for you.

I am a huge fan of Elon Musk.

I suspect a big reason Mr. Musk tries to make the greatest possible positive difference for humanity is to reduce his risk of being murdered by established players. He’s pissed off a lot of powerful people, but provided benefits to many more.

He was forced out of controlling PayPal...and his vision for PayPal was to make it a “full-service financial institution”. He wanted to “convert the financial system from a series of heterogeneous insecure databases to one database.” This is threatening to the global elite in a way that going to Mars is not. Thus, he was forced out.

While he risked his personal fortune on SpaceX in 2013 when it looked like they would run out of money, he also had plans to sell a large interest in Tesla to Google in order to acquire funding for additional SpaceX launches. The story he tells about betting all of his assets with no recourse is true but under-emphasizes his backup plans for additional launches.

Paul has written 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 essays that touch on the topic of why cooperators tend to get rich in Silicon Valley rather than defectors.

I am a huge fan of Paul Graham as well.

However, his advice can mislead young technical people into thinking that a startup is going to make them rich. He says, “If you wanted to get rich, how would you do it? I think your best bet would be to start or join a startup....you can think of a startup as a way to compress your whole working life into a few years”. But in reality most startups fail and waste 5 years of the founders’ time in the process. Plus, for every founder, there are dozens of joiners/employees who work for below-market-rate salary plus a small percentage (often 0.1%) of the new company. Thus, his advice to “start or join a startup” is dangerously misleading because his target audience is young technical people without the political or sales skills to actually succeed.

Arguing for the opposition is Michael Church. I was intrigued by The 3-Ladder System of Social Class in the US (summary: college-educated technologists learned how to make wealth, not how to own it) and his VC-istan series (summary: Silicon Valley got colonized by MBA financiers who extracted all the goodwill). He alleges he deleted his blog archive and left the Valley because of threats from financiers affiliated with Paul Graham.

The Forbes 400 does not and cannot track privately-held wealth. Thus, the Forbes 400 only includes rich people who wanted to appear there.

Sean Parker on his giving philosophy...

That’s a marketing piece. Rich people often hide their wealth, but if they can’t they market themselves as hyper-successful good people, not as the driven perfectionist tyrants they often are. As the MacLeod Hierarchy explains, rank-and-file workers work best if they think they’re climbing a career ladder. Rich people climbed a different ladder, then hid it.

There’s a tradition of robber barons giving away vast wealth to manage their public image.

highly intelligent people tend to be interested in things other than sex,

I agree with this.

But it's hard to tease out exactly why.

The truth is not just politically incorrect; the truth is disgusting and offensive.

The Red Pill says is clearly: women want good genes and good resources. This means that men with good genes have the opportunity for lots of sex, and men with good resources get strung along in sexless relationships, and men with neither good genes (looks) nor good resources (money/power) get nothing except shame. Women want the best they can get, so the top 10% of men have sex with the top 80% of women. Below-average men get nothing. Traditional marriage is illegal (“until death do us part” is legally unenforceable). Many women try to copy the behavior of the most attractive men -- promiscuous casual sex that they lie about -- and then settle down with someone much less attractive than their casual sex partners once they reach their late 20s. And for men: most men are weak, emotionally-manipulated, directionless sheep.

This explains why rock band front-men, criminals, and selfish finance bros enjoy lots of sex despite their toxic behavior: they have looks plus power.

If you want more sexual partners, a good first step is to start working out

Yup. Will do. To be clear, the advice is to develop a ripped body that generates tingly feelings in women’s vaginas, not to “be a good person” or “make a positive difference” or even “have a job”. We deserve the coming global Apocalypse.

you'll likely feel less insecure about who your girlfriends have slept with.

So it was OK for them to lie to me? Fuck you. If that’s how it works, I’m gonna go date 5 young women at the same time by telling them lies, then blame them for being insecure when the truth comes out.

Do not mistake my righteous anger for “insecurity”. That’s what old women do when they’re trying to shame a man into marrying them.

you can work on cool stuff like decreasing existential risk.

I don’t see how this would benefit me. “Cool” is a fossilized instinct for what is powerful. I’d rather go get what will really make me powerful: a shitload of money, and skill at building alliances I control.

Research also seems to indicate that having lots of sexual partners is associated with decreased happiness.

For women, definitely. For men, the data is inconclusive.

Those dominant "defector" types are often rejected by women for longer-term relationships

Did you start acting like a non-dominant non-defector type, and get dumped soon after? Or did you become less attractive/successful/high-status over time? The struggle is real.

Psychological research, insofar as it relates to this topic, is more mixed.

The Art of Manliness is clickbait for unsuccessful beta males. A psychological survey is a hilariously inaccurate methodology for gaining insight into a biological response.

If there's a particular sort of defection you are concerned about, you can work to change society in order to disincentivize it.

I don’t have the power to make a difference.

For example, I want to make it illegal to lie about one’s relationship status and sexual history. But, I can’t at my current power level. More specifically: I have met 3 different employees of a certain investment bank, who all were more sexually successful than me despite routinely lying to women to get sex. One tried to seduce my girlfriend at the time despite having one “girlfriend” and several “casual sex partners” who were unaware of each other, and who he implied possible long-term relationship potential with. Another tried to set me up with a woman he was tired of seeing (she wanted a relationship; he just wanted sex) without disclosing that he had had sex with them. A 3rd talked to me about startup projects while badly hiding the micro-expressions for “smugness/contempt” and “duping delight” and then predictably failed to follow up. I’m pretty sure at least 2 of these guys are into spreading genital herpes. But, I looked up the slander laws and it’s illegal for me to publicly shame these selfish men or their firm without recorded evidence (there’s a presumption of innocence), and it’s illegal for me to collect that evidence (two-party consent required for recording, and they avoid using email for their games). Thus, they win, and I lose, and their sex partners lose, and the people they do business with lose (their attitude carries over to their business dealings...it’s all about wealth extraction.).) Check out Wall Street Playboys for a description of the “finance bro attitude” including advice about being attractive enough for someone in a relationship to want to cheat with. I’ve thought about creating some sort of morality Leviathan app, to track people’s “trust graphs” over time to provide a permanent record of who burned who, but this has the potential to go badly wrong.

Thus, I figured the best thing to do was to pull a Voldemort and go all-in on selfishness. Investing in other people and in relationships is a bad deal because the relationships inevitably end. Successful people only invest in relationships that they control. God is OK with animals violently killing each other all the time, with zero regard for suffering or fair play, and who am I to question God? The 48 Laws of Power (by Robert Greene) has some fascinating ideas about how to find common grounds to shit in.

This probably isn't the best example, but I've always wondered why we don't punish rapists (and maybe other criminals) with castration.

False convictions. “Cruel and unusual” punishments are illegal because they make people angry in a way just locking up the wrong person doesn’t. Can you imagine the rage of the Black Lives Matter movement if the US Government was routinely castrating rapists? Or, more accurately, rich people are against physical punishments because they can’t be undone (whereas a long prison sentence + enough expensive lawyers = freedom).

what we want to happen

Taking a step back here...I shouldn’t be this angry for this long with this little forward progress.

Better to choose a specific dream and make it happen.

Undisciplined flailing with no single clear goal has kept me middle-class for a decade.

I tried LeechBlock, but I missed some options there. Such as "let me do anything I want, just keep a big timer displayed showing how long am I already doing that". I don't want the software to prevent me from reading Facebook; sometimes I do have a good reason to look there. I just want the software to tell me "hey, did you know that you have already spent 30 minutes there? just saying..."

The movie tells me clearly how much time did I spend watching it.

I refuse to sacrifice my life to protect billionaires who would not do the same for me.

Elon Musk has risked his entire fortune for you. "In my case, I think these things are important... I need to do it, I promised people I would do it, but I'm not doing it because this is the most fun way to live."

The world's wealthiest people (the "ownership class") is increasingly made up of scientists and engineers:

If you work your way down the Forbes 400 making an x next to the name of each person with an MBA, you'll learn something important about business school. After Warren Buffett, you don't hit another MBA till number 22, Phil Knight, the CEO of Nike. There are only 5 MBAs in the top 50. What you notice in the Forbes 400 are a lot of people with technical backgrounds. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Michael Dell, Jeff Bezos, Gordon Moore. The rulers of the technology business tend to come from technology, not business.

- Paul Graham

Paul has written 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 essays that touch on the topic of why cooperators tend to get rich in Silicon Valley rather than defectors. The Silicon Valley elite is giving their money away significantly earlier in life than previous generations of wealthy people, and there are indicators that they care more about having their philanthropic dollars actually do good--here's tech billionaire Sean Parker on his giving philosophy. (Not to say that other wealthy people are especially lacking in their philanthropy--check out the Giving Pledge signatories.)

Scientists get less sex than criminals.

High IQ people, regardless of gender, have less sex. But it's hard to tease out exactly why. I lean towards Paul Graham's explanation--highly intelligent people tend to be interested in things other than sex, whereas average people structure large amounts of their lives around it (for example, it's typical for every Friday and Saturday evening to be spent drinking carcinogens and searching for sexual partners). More evidence for this hypothesis: Intelligent people seem to be taller and better looking on average. And intelligent friends of mine who have chosen to optimize for having more sexual partners have done well, especially if they're willing to date down in intelligence (to avoid the problem that highly intelligent women are outnumbered by highly intelligent men and also relatively uninterested in sex) and live in an area with a favorable gender ratio. If you want more sexual partners, a good first step is to start working out--it will give you a masculine physique, help you live longer, improve sleep, improve immune system, improve willpower, etc. Once you've spent some time optimizing to increase your number of sexual partners, you'll likely feel less insecure about who your girlfriends have slept with. (And once you've conquered your insecurities, you can work on cool stuff like decreasing existential risk.)

(BTW note that there are more women graduating college nowadays than men, at least in the US, so being educated gives you a leg up.)

all of my ex-girlfriends had sex with someone who doesn't share my values

You're looking at a small number of data points. Psychological research, insofar as it relates to this topic, is more mixed. Research also seems to indicate that having lots of sexual partners is associated with decreased happiness. Those dominant "defector" types are often rejected by women for longer-term relationships, which sucks a lot more than you would think (speaking from personal experience as someone with a dominant/masculinized facial appearance).

It's illegal to punish people who always defect in prisoner's dilemmas.

If there's a particular sort of defection you are concerned about, you can work to change society in order to disincentivize it. This probably isn't the best example, but I've always wondered why we don't punish rapists (and maybe other criminals) with castration. It seems like something that both the far left and the far right could get behind--the far left is full of feminists who think rapists are unadulterated evil, and the far right can appreciate the eugenic benefits of sterilizing criminals. It's cheaper and more humane than locking someone in a hellish prison cell for years on end. It helps solve the root problem, given testosterone's role in facilitating aggression. And it sends the right message to other folks in society. "Here's a man who defected against the rest of us. He speaks in a high voice now because we literally chopped his balls off. He tried to rape a woman, but now he will never have sex again." I think castrated criminals who lived in lower class communities would inevitably get bullied and made fun of, which seems like exactly what we want to happen (as long as someone is going to get bullied and made fun of in lower class communities, which seems inevitable).

Congrats to gwern for making it into the Economist!

I think the reason people are hesitant to choose the dust speck option is that they view the number 3^^^3 as being insurmountable. It's a combo chain that unleashes a seemingly infinite amount of points in the "Bad events I have personally caused" category on their scoreboard. And I get that. If the torture option is a thousand bad points, and the dust speck is 1/1000th of a point for each person, than the math clearly states that torture is the better option.

But the thing is that you unleash that combo chain every day.

Everytime you burn a piece of coal, or eat a seed, or an apple, you are potentially causing mild inconvenience to a hypothetically infinitely higher number of people than 3^^^3. What if the piece of coal could warm someone else up? What if that seed's offspring would go on to spread and feed a massive amount of people? The same applies to all meat and all fruit, and most vegetables. By gaining a slight benefit now, you are potentially robbing over 3^^^3 people of their own slight benefit. Now, is it likely that said animal or seed will go on to benefit so many? Maybe not, but the chance exists. Are you willing to take that chance with a number like 3^^^3?

Well, you should be. Morality should not be solely based of off mathematical formula and cost/benefit analysis. It can greatly help determine a moral course of action, but if that is your motivation for wanting to do the right thing than you have lost sight of what morality is about. The basis of morality is this: Do unto others, as you would have done unto yourself. I, for one, would rather have a dust speck in my eye than be tortured for 50 years. And I wouldn't get 3^^^3 specks of dust in my eye, because none of them did either, they only got one. Even if I was assured of getting that many specks of dust in my eye, (in deep space, of course, because the resulting explosion of dust specks would surely engulf the Earth and possibly most of the Milky Way), I would still do it. Because I choose to save the person in front of me, and fix any negative results afterwards. I choose to stop the wrongdoing directly in front of me, because if everyone did so then everyone would be saved. Do what you can right now. Worry about dust specks later. Help that guy who is getting tortured now.

The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas Should Turn The Fuck Around And Sprint Back To The City, Because Holy Shit That Poor Kid Is Being Tortured So Those Fucks Can Have Air Conditioning. -An improved title, in my opinion.

A massive amount of beneficial outcomes being caused by one person's misfortune is not always justifiable. If they are innocent, it's not justifiable. If they were going to directly and consciously and maliciously cause the massive negative outcome that will result if you do not stop them, then it is arguably justifiable. However, there is only one situation, one context, in which one person's suffering for the benefit of countless others is wholly and totally justified.

You see, someone figured out the answer to this dilemna about 2000 years ago. You've probably heard of Him.

One person's suffering benefitting countless others is a beautiful thing when they choose to suffer of their own free will.

You can choose the 50 years of torture if you wish.....

But only if that person being tortured is you will it be anything other than total evil.