"It's wonderful how much we suck compared to us ten years from now!"

-- Michael Blume

You can add me to the list of people who sent an email.

Could you elaborate on that? Is cryonic suspension inherently incompatible with organ donation, even when you are going with the neuro option or does the incompatibility stem from current obscurity of cryonics? I imagine that organ harvesting could be combined with early stages of cryonic suspension if the latter was more widely practiced.

Has anyone read "Games and Decisions: Introduction and Critical Survey" by R. Duncan Luce and Howard Raiffa? Any thoughts on its quality?

I support setting the posting threshold to 50 karma and the grace period proposals. I understand that up votes and down votes are generally given without comment, but providing constructive criticism to new users would be helpful.

I suppose you're right in saying that LW isn't supposed to be a forum, but the fact remains that there is a growing trend towards more casual/off-topic/non-rationalism discussion, which seems perfectly fine to me given that we are a community of generally like-minded people. I suspect that it would be preferable to many if LW had better accommodations for these sort of interactions, perhaps something separate from main site so we could cleanly distinguish serious rationalism discussion from off-topic discussion.

I hope I don't sound too effusive if I say that's borderline heroic.

But yeah, I suppose if you read "The Varieties of Religious Experience" or some other such book, you realize pretty fast that an experience like that is not really evidence.

I'm nonetheless surprised at your ability to do that calculus, as opposed to just closing the book. It impresses me almost as much as, say, the family of a murder victim speaking up in the defendant's cause. You were surely working through the Venus-of-Willendorf of all biases (I would imagine).

I honestly wish I never saw the damn thing.

I totally empathize with the psychology, but there's no good reason to regret seeing it. You saw something you didn't understand. You still don't understand it. Such things will happen. I think it's admirable that you hope for a rational explanation even when one isn't forthcoming - moreover, in the teeth of our human need for some explanation, even if it's a bad one.

To extend on Eliezer's point here, it's trivially easy to be a skeptic when the believer's epistemic position is foreign to you. Much harder when you're the experiencer-of-experiences, and the object of scrutiny.

We're nearly all of us materialists here; how many of us would still be if we had a powerful religious experience? And yet we (rightly) reject the truth claims of people who have had such experiences.

We're nearly all of us materialists here; how many of us would still be if we had a powerful religious experience?

I once experienced "Hag syndrome", I must have been around eleven. I woke up during the night, unable to move and convinced I had a witch sitting on me.

The next day when I could think about it in bright daylight I thought it was kinda cool that my brain could make me believe something so clearly supernatural, but it seemed just as obvious it had only been the same kind of thing as a nightmare, only more powerful. I didn't mention it to my parents or anything, just filed it as "one of those things". (It was downright scary at the time though; I don't recommend the experience, which as you can see still, um, haunts me.)

"If it works for you, it works because of you." -- Mark Greenway on marriage