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It's not quite information-theoretical, but does a snub nose .357 count? I carry because statistically the safest thing to do as the attempted victim of a violent crime is to resist using a firearm.
Interesting. Do you have a source on that?
- Energy-efficient controlled nuclear fusion
- Space colonization
- Widespread use of videophones (to make actual videocalls)
More failed (just googled them, I didn't check): top-30-failed-technology-predictions
And successful: Ten 100-year predictions that came true
No videocalls - what about the widespread skyping?
In response to
Less Wrong Product & Service Recommendations
Dropbox (2gb for free, 50gb for $99/yr, 100gb for $199/yr)
Maybe this is too obvious to mention, but Dropbox rules.
Sync files between your computers and smartphone. Share photo albums and specific files with the public. Very easy to use. Way better for project management than emailing different versions of files back and forth a million times. Recover files you deleted weeks ago. Also see: 62 things you can do with Dropbox.
You can get some 5.2GB free with dropbox - first they have a few small"quests" giving 0.2 extra. But then they also gave you up to 3GB more if you synced photos from mobile to dropbox (did this then removed the photos to get extra non-picture storage space).
In response to
What was your biggest recent surprise?
That there is reason to believe that it is "relatively easy" (say if we survive x-risk and get a good singleton within a million years) to colonize billions of galaxies. That makes the expected (ignoring possibility of discovering new useful physics, creating universes etc) hedonic utility of x-risk reduction up to some 9-orders of magnitude greater than I had previously thought.
In response to
What was your biggest recent surprise?
Not really related to any explicit field of study, but...
Most recently, I was surprised by the extent to which the Japanese still use faxes.
Before that, I was really surprised by the whole Planetary Resources thing. My model of the world claimed that aside for some relatively minor stuff like space tourism and such, plausible pushes to actually do something new and non-trivial in space simply do not happen, and that there would be essentially no real progress in any kind of space exploration before the Singularity. At best, there would be a new private space station in orbit, or NASA would announce a manned Mars mission that would get quietly killed by budget cuts a few years later. Having a bunch of billionaires announce a real effort to actually mine asteroids was something that made it slightly easier for me to alieve in the Singularity happening some day. Before, both asteroid mining and the Singularity used to belong to the mental category of "things that I intellectually acknowledge as possible, but which would be such huge changes to the current paradigm that on a gut level, I don't really grasp either of them happening".
Why it just something which made it easier to "alieve" (in contrast to just believing) in a singularity, or do you think this information was good evidence for updating towards that a singularity is more likely? (eg because it shows that billionaires might invest in such crazy projects)
In response to
List of underrated risks?
In general: an unhealthy lifestyle. In the relevant context the overwhelming majority of people die of diseases when relatively old (and not accidents or violence).
Other than that: suicide is often underrated - it is often the main non-disease cause of death for males.
(Eg when checking the stats for my own demographic I had about a 6.55% risk of death the next 30 years. Out of this some 10% were from suicide, 5% from accidents and only 1.5% from infectious diseases but over 50% from malignant neoplasms and circulatory system diseases.)
Useful statistics: http://www.deathriskrankings.com/default.aspx?AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1 Some useful tips: http://longevity.about.com/od/liveto100/tp/Avoid-The-Top-Five-Killers-Of-Older-Men.htm
In response to
List of underrated risks?
Let's turn this around.
What opportunities are you missing by overrating risks? I am almost certain you are not socially courageous enough. Hanson always goes on about missed opportunities from FDA being too strict.
Humans in general are pretty risk averse. Which means the threat of missed opportunities is actually a lot larger than other threats!!! When I realized this, it was a big moment. I haven't compiled it fully yet, but it has really improved things over the last few weeks.
Possible examples: Taking part in paid medical experiments. Selling kidney.
In response to
Another reason why a lot of studies may be wrong
From the author profile:
Mattson traces his interest in aging back to his ninth-grade classroom. Asked then to write an essay on a scientific topic of his choice, he picked cryopreservation—the futuristic concept that humans can be resurrected after being suspended in the deep freeze for years. "I was grabbed with the idea of putting aging on hold," he now says.
The question is, does he post on Less Wrong?
Mail him and ask?
"Weirdness" is in the mind of the beholder.
Also, I bet they didn't check the openness level of people who start or join new religions-- such people are pretty rare, but they're the ones who keep the religious landscape lively.
I was assuming you meant something like "willing to go against the dominant norms in one's society" by it, which is close related to Openness.
I'd expect those people joining/starting new religions to be more open, thus the operalization of your hypothesis in terms of big5-Openness. There should probably be studies on smaller religions, such as new age, which might aptly be called new.
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Here's the reason I don't find this very scary. As a frozen person, you have very little of value to offer people, and will probably take some resources. Thus, if someone wants to bring you back it will likely must be mostly for your benefit, rather than because they want to enslave you or something. If the universe just has people who don't care about you, then they just won't revive you, and it will be the same as if you had died.
In order for you to be revived in a hellish world, the people who brought you back have to be actively malicious, which doesn't seem very likely to me.
What do you think?
Although the hellish world scenario seems unlikely it might be important to consider. At least according to my own values things like being confined to children's books and being injected with heroin would contribute very little negative utility (if negative at all) compared to even 1 in 1000 of enduring the worst psychologically possible torture for, say, a billion years.