When new people show up at LW, they are often told to "read the sequences." While Eliezer's writings underpin most of what we talk about, 600 fairly long articles make heavy reading. Might it be advisable that we set up guided tours to the sequences? Do we have enough new visitors that we could get someone to collect all of the newbies once a month (or whatever) and guide them through the backlog, answer questions, etc?

In the long run, they may be positive. In the short run, melting the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets means that most of Manhattan Island, most of Florida, and plenty of other very valuable developed land will end up underwater. The cost of relocating the inhabitants and rebuilding the infrastructure would be enormous, easily reaching into the trillions of dollars. Might as well drop a hydrogen bomb on New York City!

ETA: The "hydrogen bomb" comment was stupid and gratuitous. I blame sleep deprivation.

Alcor is better.

CI is cheaper and probably good enough.

Could someone discuss the pluses and minuses of ALCOR vs Cryonics Institute.

I think Eliezer mentioned that he is with CI because he is young. My reading of the websites seem to indicate that CI leaves a lot of work to be potentially done by loved ones or local medical professionals who might not be in the best state of mind or see fit to co-operate with a cryonics contract.

Thoughts?

Eliezer:

Don't you realize that I have work to do and a personal life to engage in without you posting things that I must obviously drop everything and read and think about like the Bostrom paper. Have a heart, man. Have a heart.

I see some problems here but it doesn't seem quite as intractable as Alicorn suggests.

If your beliefs are highly correlated with those of your teachers then you need to immerse yourself in the best arguments of the opposing side. If you notice that you are not changing your mind very often then you have a deeper problem.

To give a few related examples. One of the things that gives me confidence in my major belief structure is that I am an Atheist Capitalist. But, as I child I was raised and immersed in Atheist Communism. I rejected the communism but not the Atheism. At least in the small set my parents/early teachers were only 50% right in their basic belief structure and that doesn't sound too unlikely.

On the other hand I have been troubled by the extent to which I have become more sensitive to liberal arguments over the past 2 years. My social and professional circle is overwhelmingly liberal. It is unlikely that this does not have an effect on my beliefs.

To compensate I am attempting immerse myself in more conservative blogs.

Now of course there is no way to be sure that the balancing act is working. However, if we take as a starting point that errors among well informed people are randomly distributed then as a rough approximation your adherence to the beliefs of your community should be proportional to the number of intellectuals who hold those same beliefs.