First, I don't think anyone's welcomed you to Less Wrong yet. It looks from your comments like you've been a lurker for a while?

Secondly, we do take these questions pretty seriously; it's just that we think that the best answer, based on the evidence available, is at least cautious optimism about cryonic revival (given some advances in technology well within the limits of possibility). See for instance ciphergoth's investigation of critiques for a discussion of this.

How in the world can you assign any value to that proposal? There is a total lack of evidence in support of resurrecting a frozen human because its never been done and as of now nobody knows if it is even possible.

See this post (Section B in particular).

You guys are aware that the type of cryonics you are talking about doesn't exist. So far nobody has been revived from a frozen state. Sure they may be able to freeze organs or small scale things but that is a long ways from resurrecting a dead frozen human.

You also do realize that cryonics may never work in which case you are turning yourself into a corpse popsicle and having to pay for the honor.

How in the world can you assign any value to that proposal? There is a total lack of evidence in support of resurrecting a frozen human because its never been done and as of now nobody knows if it is even possible. So essentially cryonics is a way to spend money on a one in a million chance you might be revived in the future. Why? I would much rather bet on life extension then cryonics.

What you hope is that in the future, if it happens, where this is possible that they won't just ditch all these warehouses of corpse popsicles because it is deemed to be a waste of money or not cost effective to defrost millions of 1000 year old, way past their prime, corpse popsicles.

Food for thought my future corpse popsicles.

Apologies for being blunt, but your comment is nigh on useless: Andrew Gelman is a stats professor at Columbia who co-authored a book on Bayesian statistics (incidentally, he was also interviewed a while back by Eliezer on BHTV), while Cosma Shalizi is a stats professor at Carnegie Mellon who is somewhat well-known for his excellent Notebooks.

I don't fault you for not having known all of this, but this information was a few Google searches away. Your advice is clearly inapplicable in this case.

Can anyone with more experience with Bayesian statistics than me evaluate this article?

Hey, not to sound intimidating or anything, but it's a sad fact that while Michael Vassar and I have gigantic webs of precomputed original ideas, we can also generate original ideas in real time.

On one hand, Eliezer writes extremely good explanations. I'm learning from his style a lot.

On the other hand, many people have pointed out that he doesn't publish novel rigorous results, which kinda detracts from the aura.

On the third hand, he often finds and corrects non-obvious mathematical mistakes made by other people, including me, and he's turned out right every time that I know of.

On the fourth hand, I've seen multiple cases where he made math mistakes of his own, and have discovered a couple of those myself. But that could be attributed to the fact that he publishes so much, and his error frequency is certainly many times lower than mine.

On the fifth hand, he has published novel non-rigorous arguments on real world topics that I don't completely agree with but find pretty important. Biggest of them is the idea of Friendly AI.

The weighting coefficients you give to those considerations are, of course, up to you.

ETA: on an unrelated topic, would you like to write a post on Go? CronoDAS has just turned our attention to something interesting.

While I also don't see the point in the enterprise, and think many of the specific suggestions misguided, you misinterpret its intent. Read the original post for an explanation. The point isn't to learn math "in a simple form", but to explain some of the most important facts about the world with at least a bit of mathematical rigor and expressive power.

Ok, I have to be honest this entire idea makes me cringe, it seems a bit to much like a cheap get out of learning the math idea. Maybe I am biased because I actually am a mathematician but these kind of ideas I think are dangerous since you take away an important bar of admission to fields like physics. If you don't understand why the math is an important bar of admission look at the google groups physics group.

To be honest I think someone would be better off spending their time learning calculus at minimum then trying to read this kind of general overview. I think what is likely to happen is that either the math will be to simple and muddles the field to the point of being useless or its so complex that nobody can follow it. A good case and point you can understand quantum physics if you understand algebra but your going to be hopeless in a discussion about it without understanding things like the differential equations. Of course there are other fields which you have to know the math, from some of my own experience, fluid mechanics.

For my own part I think required math should include at minimum: Advanced Calculus (not that "calculus class" you took in high school it doesn't count) Differential Equations Linear Algebra Abstract Algebra Set Theory (basic at least) Number Theory

I think with these you probably can figure a lot of the more complex math out.

I am sure I am leaving a couple out but you get the idea.

Why re-invent the wheel this has already been done if I understand correctly for example in a bit of a more specific case "Fundamental Formulas of Physics".