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Provided you aren't already malnourished, NO diet, even starvation, is going to be harmful over the course of one month.
100% not true. Ignoring actual poisons, overemphasis in some foods might make you ill, underemphasis might make you ill, too little X might affect your ability to process Y, and just plain starving for a month will leave you with organ damage.
It's their goal, not their means of deriving methods to achieve their goal, that I would be tempted to take issue with if I tried to engage with the topic.
I think (from your comments here and elsewhere) you are putting far too much trust in the good judgment of unimproved human dating. Taking an outside view of various women you have known picking partners the normal way, were they able to reliably make good matches? How many of them ended up pair bonded to a bad match, and had to break up?
I think the truth about dating is that intimacy, companionship etc are what you have to build after you're in a relationship. The process that grabs up a single and whisks them into a pair bond is very non-rational, but it's the prerequisite for all the various advantages of a relationship. What the seductionists are trying to do is bump themselves over that one particular roadblock - for whatever reason.
Got it. if X is the placeholder for whatever eventually solves the creation conundrum, there's no reason to call it anything else, much less something misleading.
In fact even naming it X is a bit of a stretch, because "the creation conundrum" is being assumed here, but my own limited understanding of physics suggests this "conundrum" itself is a mistake. What a "cause" really is, is something like: the information about past states of the universe embedded in the form of the present state. But the initial state doesn't have embedded information, so it doesn't really have either a past or a cause. As far as prime movers go, the big bang seems to be it, sufficient in itself.
In response to
Instrumental vs. Epistemic -- A Bardic Perspective
It seems like you've already worked out the answer with good epistemology (you must act dominant) but you can't apply it unless you put yourself in a less epistemically correct state.
But were you in an epistemically correct state to begin with? Your thoughts were. Your executing adaptations weren't; they were shaped around an assumed bone-wielding alpha male.
Isn't what you've done really more like "moving the untruth around"?
I agree. Mensa and the AMA aren't actually avowedly rational, nor do they have any group goals that require the same, but they are weakly rational groups, because they contain a lot of smart people and they have institutional biases against failures of intelligence and opinion.
This keeps out certain types of dysrationalia, which is all I needed for my comparison to more vulnerable groups like the LDS and those Charismatic Protestants.
I'd say they have no better success at rationalism than the Mormons. All they have is a reactive distaste for some of the traditional symptoms of dumb, including the sillier kinds of religion. They are completely undefended against other death spirals, even closely related ones concerning silly but detailed theories with no evidence.
The Cryonics Institute does whole-body preservation for $28,000. (I looked it up.)
Also, don't bother with whole-body preservation. It's useless, because regrowing a body is the least of revival problems, and it's harmful, because your brain spends longer warm while the whole useless hunk of meat attached to it is cooling down. Plus it costs more.
In response to
This Didn't Have To Happen
I'm not signed up for cryonics. Partly, this is because I'm poor. Partly, it's because I'm extremely risk-averse and I can imagine really really horrible outcomes of being frozen just as easily as I can imagine really really great outcomes - in the absence of people walking around who were frozen and awakened later, my imaginings are all the data I have.
I'm sorry for your loss and that of your girlfriend, and I wish her grandfather had not died. While I'm at it, I'll wish he'd been immortal. But there are two mistaken responses to the fact that human beings die: one is to tout death as a natural and possibly even positive part of the human condition, and one is to find excuses not to deal with it when it happens. Theism with an afterlife is the first thing; freezing the dead person is the second.
In all likelihood, if and when I stop being poor, my bet and the money behind it is going to be on medicine, and maybe uploads of living people if there are very promising projects going on by then.
OK, you're risk averse. Specifically, you're scared. If you put a bit of imaginative effort into it you can play out scenarios of awakening into a dystopia, or botched revival, or abusive uploading, or various nastiness. Fair enough.
I propose that you haven't stretched your imagination far enough.
Staying in doom-n-disaster mode, what are the other ways you could suffer? Illness, madness, brain damage, disability, mistreatment, war, famine, plague, loneliness... it just goes on and on.
Switching to happy mode, what are the good scenarios? Love, long life, wealth and good ideas to use it on... again it goes on and on.
Then if you take all those scenarios, and add a whole lot more of mediocre and tolerable and mildly downbeat ones, and you scatter them out ahead of you into an imaginary branching map of infinite reachable futures. Not all equally easy to reach. There are probability assignments on each, shifting and flowing as your actions and experiences move the chances.
This sort of visualization helps me put my own worrying into perspective. Worrying is a kind of grasping for control, but the future is too big and surprising to be pinned down that way. You can't control what you get. You can steer into a region with more good chances than bad. To do that you have to learn to discount the low chance of bad as just the price of admission.
This argument forced me to change my mind a little: indeed, to do the neurosurgery, you need an image anyway, possibly of the same order of resolution or even greater than required for scanning, so emulation may be easier than repair, and realignment of the image should be relatively easy once you have a scan. Still, I don't see emulation working for a long time still, I'd give it expected 60 to 150 years, and it's hard to say how the process will look at that point, on the progress of what kinds of technologies the feasibility of this process will depend.
I'm an atheist and I'm not currently persuaded by the case for cryonics. I'm unpersuaded purely on a (non-rigorous, informal) cost-benefit analysis. It just seems to me that there are better things to spend my money on. It seems to me that you can make a similar case for being a survivalist - stocking up on guns, ammo and emergency supplies in case of major disaster - and while the argument is sound I just don't judge the expected utility to be worth the outlay. The social stigma is certainly a factor in both cases.
How much do you expect it to cost?
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