LESSWRONG
LW

LessWrong

59 years after the first cryopreservation we finally have non-zero electron micrographs!!! Super grateful for Greg Fahy's research! And thanks for doing a write-up on it!

Replying toStill Too Soon

Mati_Roy11d

Still Too Soon

I'm sorry for your lost. I bet she got a better preservation than most humans given the laws are much more supportive for non-human preservations.

Are you looking for Neptune or Vulcan?

Mati_Roy

11d

When a theory that has a huge amount of evidence for it, if you find a data point that contradicts it, the most likely hypothesis is sometimes still that the theory is correct. The question becomes "what would make both the data point and the theory correct?" (whether in the environment or your instrumentation) That's not confirmation bias, that's generating the most likely hypotheses to investigate them first.

For example, when Uranus was discovered, it didn't follow what Newtonian gravity predicted. Scientists asked themselves "what other mass would need to be where to explain Uranus' orbit under Newtonian gravity" and that allowed them to discover Neptune.

Same happened with Mercury. So scientists went on... (read more)

Replying toAccording to doctors, how feasible is preserving the dying for future revival?

Mati_Roy2mo

According to doctors, how feasible is preserving the dying for future revival?

Thanks for writing and sharing that! I have at least one family member for whom physician approval is one of their main uncertainty about the validity of cryonics

Mati_Roy2moQuick Take

if your mind clones are edited to not mind being shut down, then is ethically fine to shut them down? it wouldn't violate their preference and also it would make it clear to you that you're not a mind clone. but still feels icky. and are you indistinguishable from a mind clone when you're not actively reflecting on your desire not to die? how similar can a mind clone be while having such a core value altered?

Replying toCryonics is free

Mati_Roy4mo

Cryonics is free

Cool! Thanks for the update!

I also think upload is probably fine.

But also, while not an expert, I don't think I'd put most of my probaiblity mass on "it's physically impossible to 'unfix' a brain / return a protein to their original state".

Neuroscientist survey says P(brain preservation works) is substantial

Mati_Roy

7mo

x-posted on X

312 neuroscientists were surveyed, and they assigned substantial probability to long-term memories only depending on static brain structure preservable by modern brain preservation techniques.

Modern brain preservation techniques have a substantial probability to be good enough to preserve identity—to be a blueprint for a future whole-brain emulation/reconstruction/repair.

It's hard to overstate how important of an update this should be for a lot of people—seems like the highest impact per bit of information you could give an individual, at least one who wasn't signed up for brain preservation because they thought it was extremely unlikely to work.

In terms of preservation quality, there's still the uncertainty of whether you'll die in a way that's... (read more)

Replying toCryonics is free

Mati_Roy8mo

Cryonics is free

probability of reverting biological viability of fixated brain seems plausibly higher to me than reverting structural integrity (connectome mapping) of traditional cryonics 🤷‍♂️ I'm still signed up with Alcor atm, but I'd rather vitrifixation

What Is Death?

Mati_Roy

9mo

This article is an excerpt from the book 'The Future Loves You'.

Summary of the article by Grok:

The article "What Is Death?" by Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston explores the evolving definition of death in light of medical advancements. Historically, death was straightforward—cessation of breathing and heartbeat. However, technologies like mechanical ventilators, cardiopulmonary bypass machines, and extracorporeal membrane oxygenation have decoupled death from these functions, allowing bodies to be sustained without natural heart or lung activity. This has made defining death complex, as traditional markers no longer suffice.
The piece discusses how legal definitions of death, based on "irreversible cessation" of cardiorespiratory or brain functions, are problematic. These definitions depend on available technology, leading to inconsistencies, and

Mati_Roy10mo

Thoughts on the Double Impact Project

Maybe you would need a trust in between?

But yeah, good point, it might explain (more) why it didn't blow up.

“A victory for the natural order”

Mati_Roy

10mo

In what many are calling "a victory for the natural order," the final remaining vials of the controversial CHRONO-X anti-aging treatment were ceremoniously destroyed yesterday at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
"Today marks humanity's return to wisdom," declared Giorgos Hickel, spokesperson for the Foundation Against Increasing Lifespan (FAIL). "Death isn't just natural - it's necessary. The prospect of immortality was never a gift but a curse disguised as progress. We've finally chosen meaningful brevity over longer, purposeless existence."

Keep reading at the link.

Originally posted on April 1st.

Replying toThoughts on the Double Impact Project

Mati_Roy10mo

Thoughts on the Double Impact Project

should make it easier to convince, no? this system is more likely to mean the donation is tax deductible which is good

Replying toThoughts on the Double Impact Project

Mati_Roy10mo

Thoughts on the Double Impact Project

ah, yeah, that's what I was referring to with:

At some point this incentive mechanism would stop working because a party receiving 0 vs a party receiving non-zero would benefit more from having money at the margin.

Replying toThoughts on the Double Impact Project

Mati_Roy10mo

Thoughts on the Double Impact Project

I'm not sure I'm seeing how "most ads aren’t for getting people to switch sides" means "$10m of ads for one party and $8m in ads for the other is not equivalent to $2m in just one"

Thoughts on the Double Impact Project

Mati_Roy

10mo

How it works

You donate to the Republican or Democratic pool. The pool with the highest amount donates what it has more at the margin to their political party. Everything else goes to other charities. For a better and more complete explanation, check out: https://doubleimpact.charity/

Should it work?

Assuming the platform is legibly reliable, I would expect the following people to donate to Double Impact instead of a political party:

Are homo economicus
Prefers to donate to their political party lacking coordination mechanisms
Thinks the value of donating the same amount to both political parties is less than the value of donating to another charity

And this would create a lot of value assuming it's true that political donations... (read 325 more words →)

Parable of the vanilla ice cream curse (and how it would prevent a car from starting!)

Mati_Roy

Story from https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~wkw/humour/carproblems.txt (my thoughts follow):

For those of us who understand that the obvious is not
always the solution, and that the facts, no matter how implausible,
are still the facts ...
A complaint was received by the Pontiac Division of General Motors:
"This is the second time I have written you, and I don't blame you
for not answering me, because I kind of sounded crazy, but it is a
fact that we have a tradition in our family of ice cream for dessert
after dinner each night. But the kind of ice cream varies so, every
night, after we've eaten, the whole family votes on which kind of ice
cream we should have and I drive down to the

... (read 645 more words →)

summary of https://gwern.net/socks

--> https://www.facebook.com/reel/1207983483859787/?mibextid=9drbnH&s=yWDuG2&fs=e

😂

Steven Universe s1e5 is about a being that follows commands literally, and is a metaphor for some AI risks

Cryonics is free

Mati_Roy

I've been wanting to write a nice post for a few months, but should probably just write one sooner instead. This is a top-level post not because it's a long post, but because it's an important one.

Anyways. Cryonics is pretty much money-free now (ie. subsidized technically)—one of the most affordable ways to dispose of your body post-mortem.

Don't die because you didn't double-check whether the argument you came up against cryonics in 5 seconds checks out.

In the west coast in the USA, from Oregon Brain Preservation, as of around May 2024 I think:

Our research program is open to individuals in Washington, Oregon, and Northern California. This is the same brain preservation procedure, with

... (read 341 more words →)

215

here's my new fake-religion, taking just-world bias to its full extreme

the belief that we're simulations and we'll get transcended to Utopia in 1 second because future civilisation is creating many simulations of all possible people in all possible contexts and then uploading them to Utopia so that from anyone's perspective you have a very high probability of transcending to Utopia in 1 second

^^

Is the opt-in button for Petrov Day a trap? Kinda scary to press on large red buttons 😆

epistemic status: speculative, probably simplistic and ill defined

Someone asked me "What will I do once we have AGI?"

I generally define the AGI-era starting at the point where all economically valuable tasks can be performed by AIs at a lower cost than a human (at subsistance level, including buying any available augmentations for the human). This notably excludes:

1) any tasks that humans can do that still provide value at the margin (ie. the caloric cost of feeding that human while they're working vs while they're not working rather than while they're not existing)

2) things that are not "tasks", such as:

a) caring about the internal experience of the service provider (ex.: wanting a DJ... (read more)

AI: 4 levels of impact [micropost]

Mati_Roy

LLM is as big as the smartphone/electricity: it will be the building block on which a lot of tech gets built.
AI is the new industrial revolution/agricultural revolution: it will allow for a whole new level of automation of the economy.
AGI is the new macro-optimisation process since the economy/memes/sexual reproduction/DNA: it will change the evolutionary process itself.
ASI is the new Big Bang: first matter expanded in the universe, second intelligence will.

(Pedantic note: "LLM is AI", "space itself expands, not matter", "AGI is an ill-defined concept", etc. Ok, but the core idea is the general framework / spectrum for thinking about the impact of AI 😊)

Second-Order Rationality, System Rationality, and a feature suggestion for LessWrong

Mati_Roy

Second-order rationality

Definition

By “second-order rationality” (and intelligence) I mean the study of rationally reasoning about other people’s rationality (and intelligence) in order to inform us about the world.

This is opposed to evaluating a proposition at face value, using the first-order evidence supporting it.

Second-order rationality is about updating your beliefs just from understanding the distribution of different beliefs or belief histories, possibly by grouping them across populations with different characteristics, without referring to any first-order evidence related to the nature of the belief.

I think it’s an area worth exploring more.

What’s your probability that this is a useful area to study? You can use your own operationalization. For this exercise to work, you should record... (read 2391 more words →)

imagine (maybe all of a sudden) we're able to create barely superhuman-level AIs aligned to whatever values we want at a barely subhuman-level operation cost

we might decide to have anyone able to buy AI agents aligned with their values

or we might (generally) think this way to give access to that tech would be bad, but many companies are already incentivized to do that individually and can't all cooperate not to (and they actually reached this point gradually, previously selling near human-level AIs)

then it seems like everyone/most people would start to run such an AI and give it access to all their resources--at which point that AI can decide what to do, whether... (read 426 more words →)

AI is improving exponentially with researchers having constant intelligence. Once the AI research workforce become itself composed of AIs, that constant will become exponential which would make AI improve even faster (superexponentially?)

it doesn't need to be the scenario of a singular AI agent self-improving its own self; it can be a large AI population participating in the economy and collectively improving AI as a whole, with various AI clans* focusing on different subdomains (EtA: for the main purpose of making money, and then using that money to buy tech/data/resources that will improve them)

*I'm wanting myself to differentiate between a "template NN" and its multiple instantiation, and maybe adopting the terminology from The Age of Em for that works well

i want a better conceptual understanding of what "fundamental values" means, and how to disentangled that from beliefs (ex.: in an LLM). like, is there a meaningful way we can say that a "cat classifier" is valuing classifying cats even though it sometimes fail?

it seems to me that disentangling beliefs and values are important part of being able to understand each other

and using words like "disagree" to mean both "different beliefs" and "different values" is really confusing in that regard

Which LessWrongers are (aspiring) YouTubers?

Mati_Roy

Mati_Roy, β-redex

I'm currently working on some videos and would like to consume content by other LessWrongers as well as connect with some :)

I'm also interested in other video platforms like TikTok!

LESSWRONG
LW

LESSWRONG
LW

Mati_Roy

Cryonics is free

Parable of the vanilla ice cream curse (and how it would prevent a car from starting!)

Exams-Only Universities

Should I delay having children to take advantage of polygenic screening?

Mati_Roy

Mati_Roy

Are you looking for Neptune or Vulcan?

Neuroscientist survey says P(brain preservation works) is substantial

What Is Death?

“A victory for the natural order”

Thoughts on the Double Impact Project

Parable of the vanilla ice cream curse (and how it would prevent a car from starting!)

Cryonics is free

Mati_Roy

Cryonics is free

Parable of the vanilla ice cream curse (and how it would prevent a car from starting!)

Exams-Only Universities

Should I delay having children to take advantage of polygenic screening?

Mati_Roy

Mati_Roy

Are you looking for Neptune or Vulcan?

Neuroscientist survey says P(brain preservation works) is substantial

What Is Death?

“A victory for the natural order”

Thoughts on the Double Impact Project

Parable of the vanilla ice cream curse (and how it would prevent a car from starting!)

Cryonics is free

How it works

Should it work?

Second-order rationality

Definition