I had read that article, which this one was supposed to be a sort of follow-up to. Many people here may disagree with my example answers intellectually, but like the Zombie article points out, that doesn't stop the false intuition that it is so.

Which brings me to the very subject that I hoped to discuss: Why would you or I care whether we get revived one hundred years from now? Reading on this forum, I feel like I should care, but for some reason I don't. Reproducing a similar version of my wavefunction from second to second takes considerably less effort and resources, and I think that's the process that we intuitively care about. That's an easy place for me to draw the line between what I consider "me" and "not-me". What are your personal feelings about identity?

"...Cryonics in some way preserves the original material, but your Speedy-dupe vaporizes it. The copy which emerges ten years later is not a direct continuation of the original physical material."

I would guess that many people here disagree with that assessment.

If the pattern is recreated precisely (or even well enough) at a temporal or spacial distance from the original, what is actually different between Speedy-dupe and Cryonics?

Not much. Both are processes that send a snapshot of the physical implementation of all the algorithms that are collectively called a person/"soul" through time or space.

What music do people listen to while they're working?

1st point: Regions experiencing a rise in violent crime are more likely to pass gun control laws, if the rate of rise stays approximately the same this would be evidence that gun control laws do not affect crime one way or the other.

This also seems like a place that needs close attention to the regression fallacy. If especially high crime rate areas tend to change their gun control laws (either direction!) and then crime rates improve, that could be regression instead of cause and effect.

re: 4: I am skeptical that the fraction of reported self-defense situations in which "someone would have died" are actually situations in which someone would have died is 100%. I would ballpark it at 25%-50%, but I wouldn't be terribly shocked by any number in the range 10%-150%. Citation definitely needed on this one, especially as my "reasonable range" is wide enough to cover everything from net positive to net negative.

My strategy in these cases is usually "look for lots of facts relevant to this issue and see what stands out". The things that jump out at me from just that page:

• Many American cities/states (and the entire UK in one very interesting case) have instituted or repealed gun control laws long enough ago that we can look at what happens to violent crime before and after the law is changed. In every case that they showed me, at least, places that pass gun control laws see an increase or no real change in their violent crime rate relative to national average.
• 1/3 of incarcerated US felons claimed to have been shot at, scared off, wounded, or captured by an armed victim, but only 1/12 of violent crimes committed in the US ever result in a prison sentence. My interpretation of these two numbers combined is that owning a gun makes it more likely that anyone who tries to commit a violent crime against you will not be successful, and also will more likely be punished by prison time and/or being shot.
• Just 8% of violent crimes are committed by someone visibly armed with a gun.
• About 11,000 murders per year are committed by gun in the US (in 2008), and about 160,000 people (in 1993) claim they've used a gun for self-defense in a situation within the last five years where someone would have died had they not had a gun. Based on these two numbers alone, and probably not exercising as much care as I should in producing such a pithy and easily-repeatable factoid, widely available guns (in the context of American society in the recent past) prevent on the order of three deaths for every one they cause.

The relative lack of facts that would justify stronger gun control laws on that site makes me suspicious, but I don't see anything wrong with the cited sources for any of these specific numbers.

Just to be crystal clear, the series of posts explaining why I think Science and my religion are compatible don't exist yet. What I linked to is a series of posts explaining what I think Science is. I wanted to pin that down first before asking what is, or is not, compatible with it. Besides, how Science works is interesting in its own right.

Although I do believe in an afterlife, I do not believe that the mechanism for this is that the soul is immaterial. My "soul" is a pattern of information in my neurons, which is eventually going to be downloaded to new hardware.

It's true I was raised Christian, but I went through a period of doubt and reflection around the time I was in the 6th grade. I decided then that there was enough evidence specifically for the Resurrection of Jesus to believe in it. It's not a question of whether there are good explanations for religion in general, it's that this partiular sequence of events seems to me highly implausible from a naturalistic perspective.

You could say that my upbringing makes me biased, although that's a catch-22 because there's no course of conduct which can change how I was raised.

I don't think it's just because I was raised Christian---my best friend from college, who was Jewish, very reluctantly agreed with me that the evidence is good, and converted despite the risk that he would be disowned by his father. All I can say is that I decided the evidence was good enough, even taking into account any biases of my own that I can detect. Like always, you just do the best you can.

I understand the pull of the idea that there's a discord (though obviously not a strict logical contradiction) between laws of nature that work so well almost all the time, and exceptional events like miracles. But partly as a result of my experience in physics, I don't think this is as much of a problem as it appears at first glance. But I'm going to be talking about this very thing later on my blog though, so I won't discuss it here and now.

My friends think science is cool. My guess for why some think science is uncool is they think people who like science are uncool, which (among other things) could be rooted in regularly being annoyed, confused, or humiliated by people smarter than themselves. Teaching the dumbest, most resentful portion of society to change their mind seems futile.

Also, is money the sole measure of status? Consider lottery winners, poetry professors, hipsters, oil rig workers, prostitutes...

Here's a collection of videos by the researchers on what exactly this thing does. I'm impressed, excited, and worried all at once.