In addition, as Eliezer's earlier post about the math proof shows, if the original reason that led you to believe you could do something was shown to be false, you should almost certainly give up. It's very unlikely you were right for the wrong reasons. If, knowing what you know now, you would never have tried, then you should probably stop.

Several months ago, Ozy wrote a wonderful post on weaponized kindness over at Thing of Things. The principal benefit of weaponized kindness is that you can have more pleasant and useful conversations with would-be adversaries by acknowledging correct points they make, and actively listening to them. The technique sounds like exactly the sort of thing I'd expect Dale Carnegie to write about in How to Win Friends and Influence People.

I think, though, that there's another benefit to both weaponized kindness, and more general extreme kindness. To generalize from my own experience, it seems that people's responses to even single episodes of extreme kindness can tell you a lot about how you'll get along with them, if you're the type of person who enjoys being extremely kind. Specifically, people who reciprocate extreme kindness tend to get along well with people who give extreme kindness, as do people who socially or emotionally acknowledge that an act of kindness has been done, even without reciprocating. On the other hoof, the sort of people who have a habit of using extreme kindness don't tend to get along with the (say) half of the population consisting of people who are most likely to ignore or discredit extreme kindness.

In some sense, this is fairly obvious. The most surprising-for-me thing about using the reaction-to-extreme-kindness heuristic for predicting who I'll be good friends with, though, is how incredibly strong and accurate the heuristic is for me. It seems like 5 of the 6 individuals I feel closest to are all in the top ~1 % of people I've met at being good at giving and receiving extreme kindness.

(Partial caveat: this heuristic doesn't work as well when another party strongly wants something from you, e.g. in some types of unhealthy dating contexts).

People will be incentivized to share private things if robust public precommitments become available, because we all stand to benefit from more information. Because of human nature, we might settle on some agreement where some information is private, or differentially private, and/or where private information is only accessed via secure computation to determine things relevant to the public interest.

By how many orders of magnitude? Would you play Russian Roulette for $10/day? It seemed to me that implicit in your argument was that even if someone disagrees with you about the expected value, an order of magnitude or so wouldn't invalidate it. There's a rather narrow set of circumstances where your argument doesn't apply to your own situation. Simply asserting that you will sign up soon is far from sufficient. And note that many conditions necessitate further conditions; for instance, if you claim that your current utility/dollar ratio is ten times what it will be in a year, then you'd better not have turned down any loans with APY less than 900%.

And how does the value of cryonics go up as your mortality rate does? Are you planning on enrolling in a program with a fixed monthly fee?

Obviously Eliezer was not familiar with the concept "asymptote".

When he was a kid at a religious elementary school.

I made a video compilation of Japanese songs that include the words "Tsuyoku naritai".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtcXiT6An-U

I wasn't really convinced that this concept was really present in Japanese culture before but I suppose I am, now.

I think for most people if you ask them to define what "try" means they will tell you that it's about putting in effort to achieve a goal. Emprirically that's however doesn't describe well the circumstances in which they use the word.

Especially on LW it might be possible that you actually don't wouldn't describe the manager who works 80 hours as trying to do his best at his job, but what you said doesn't make me confident that's the case.

I was at a hypnosis seminar where one of the exercises is about temporily forgetting numbers. There no mental action that you can do where you exert effort that gets you to forget the numbers but if you are in a mental state where you don't try and follow the instructions of the hypnotherapist you will temporarily forget the numbers.

At the end of the seminar I think of roughly 20 people there were two for which it didn't work. It didn't work for me because I wanted to have the effect happen and therefore I couldn't let go enough to stop trying to make it work. There was another person who happened to be a professional hypnotherapist for whom the same was true.

The mental state of just working towards a goal and not putting in any effort isn't easy to achieve.

Additional comment years later: I don't think this actually makes any sense. Ignoring cases of people unable to give consent at all and a few more edge cases, the cases in the real world where you are permitted to do something to someone nonconsensually are cases where initating force is irrelevant (assuming you don't want to count the act itself as force). I can talk to you without your consent, because I don't need to say "let my sound waves reach your ears, or else I shoot you"--sound waves reach your ears automatically under most circumstances. But if you use earmuffs and I say "take out those earmuffs, so you can hear me, or else I shoot you", that would be illegal.

If this future society allows nonconsensual sex only when no force is used, that is a coherent concept, but except in a few edge cases that would just be equivalent to requiring consent but changing the defaults and changing the methods allowed to communicate lack of consent. You can have sex with someone "against his will" but you aren't permitted to tear off his clothes, hold him down, or threaten to hurt him if he refuses. That isn't really a society allowing rape at all.

And if this future society allows nonconsensual sex even when force has to be used, that would not only be different from how we deal with rape, it would be different from how we handle everything else as well. Are we expected to believe that this society doesn't permit "take off those earmuffs or I shoot you" or "take off those glasses so you can see my ugly shirt, or I shoot you" but it does permit "have sex with me or I shoot you"?

(Actually there's one case I left out: Governments get to do lots of things to you nonconsensually. But I don't think Eliezer is just postulating that the world has a tax that is paid in sex and is otherwise just like our own world with respect to sex.)

Opponents will not say, "OK, I will value my life at $X and if you can convince me that (cryonics success probability)*$X is greater than the $1/day fee, I will concede the argument".

Because if you put a high value on your life, this amounts to Pascal's Mugging.

Also, 1/10 chance of cryonics working is ridiculously optimistic.

I don't recommend having this argument. It's useless in almost every respect.

There are two fundamental issues. First, most people don't understand what a Calorie looks like, and think the difference between a healthy weight and an unhealthy weight is a large amount of food, rather than a small amount of food compounded over long periods of time. Want to lose weight in a sustained and sustainable fashion? Subtract a small amount of food over a long period of time. Instead, people crash-diet, then go back to normal eating habits.

An extra apple a day translates, over years, to up to 50 extra pounds. Looking at two people's daily diets, one is overweight, one is healthy, and most people couldn't tell the difference by looking at what they ate.

The second problem is that exercise is incredibly unpleasant if you're overweight. If you're currently in shape, try tossing 50 lbs of weights into a backpack the next time you exercise. Or better yet, don't, because you could hurt yourself pretty easily in exactly the ways overweight people injure themselves when doing things like jogging.

It takes physiological issues to gain serious amounts of weight in the first place; these won't stop you from losing weight, but they'll make it harder to maintain a steady weight. Normal people fidget or otherwise increase their base level of activity when they overeat, burning off excess calories. Overweight people have to be more deliberate and conscious of these things.