Filled out the survey. The cryonics-question could use an option "I would be signed up if it was possible where I live."

Good Translation! I'm through the whole text now, did proofreading and changed quite a bit, some terminological questions remain. After re-reading the original in the process, I think the english FAQ needs some work (unbalanced sections, winding sentences etc). But as a non-native speaker, I don't dare.

Video of the author and Aubrey de Grey at the fifth SENS conference

I get the feeling there's an obvious answer to this, but: why is it necessary to have a full-on encryption system for each nanomachine's assembly instrutions, with all the decryption overhead that implies? Wouldn't something like CRC, or one of the quicker hash functions, be a much easier way to prevent accidental changes between generations?

Don't you believe in flying saucers, they ask me? Don't you believe in telepathy? — in ancient astronauts? — in the Bermuda triangle? — in life after death? No, I reply. No, no, no, no, and again no. One person recently, goaded into desperation by the litany of unrelieved negation, burst out "Don't you believe in anything?" "Yes", I said. "I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement, and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I'll believe anything, no matter how wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it. The wilder and more ridiculous something is, however, the firmer and more solid the evidence will have to be."

Isaac Asimov

Good points, thx for the link to Carl Shulman's comment, I love his reasoning.

Just for the record: The reason why I don't like the conclusion of working in finance to earn money in order to donate is that I guess I can't do it. I simply hate finance too much and I know I'm too selfish. Just wearing a suit is probably more I could bear;) I will respond to the rest of your comment in private.

I'm trying to think of evidence that would count against Eliezer's claim here.

Eliezer's conditions for "the majority is always wrong" scenarios are:

1. A popularity effect (it's easier to use something other people are using)
2. A most dominant alternative, plus a few niche alternatives

And his claim is that when these conditions hold, "the most dominant alternative will probably be the worst of the lot — or at least strictly superior to none of the others."

How strong the "most dominant alternative" would have to be in order for an example to count against this claim? Or how far down the "niche alternatives" do we have to go to find an example of one that's worse than the dominant one?

For instance, in religion in the U.S., Christianity is the most dominant alternative, and there is a popularity effect for religion. However, it is not clear to me that Christianity is "the worst of the lot" for the individual believer — compared to, say, Scientology, or a suicide cult like Heaven's Gate?

One might say that "Christianity" is not a single alternative, though, and that there is no "most dominant alternative" among the Catholic, Baptist, Methodist, Mormon, etc. churches.

Returning to desktop computers: Eliezer's coworker Marcello uses the example of Macs in contrast to Windows PCs: if the Mac were "worse" than Windows, no one would use them. However, perhaps instead of "no one would use them", we should say "you wouldn't have heard of them." Obviously there are worse choices than Windows for getting stuff done on a computer; they're just more obscure than the Mac — so obscure that mentioning them as serious alternatives comes across as a bit perverse. But their popularity is still above zero.

For instance, hardly anyone but Richard Stallman uses gNewSense GNU/Linux on a Lemote Loongson MIPS computer. I've been a Linux user for years, but if my choices were between the Loongson and a Windows PC, I'd take the Windows PC; the Loongson is really, really slow. But some people do use it; even the set containing only RMS is not the empty set.

One might say that since RMS has clearly thought about what sort of computer to use, and chose the Loongson, that the Windows PC is not "strictly superior" to the Loongson. It's not superior in the metric that RMS cares about, namely software freedom.

In which case, the claim seems to reduce to, "If someone chooses an alternative other than the majority choice, they must have some reason for doing so, because they're clearly not doing it by simply taking the obvious, easy, popular choice." Which sounds like a much weaker claim than talking about the majority choice being "the worst of the lot".

But ... how about medicine? The dominant form of medicine in the U.S. is the one that we usually just call "medicine" ... sometimes known as "Western medicine", "allopathy", or various other names. There are more practitioners of "Western medicine" (physicians, nurses, etc.) than there are homeopaths or any other particular school of "alternative medicine".

As with many other market choices, there is a popularity effect, mostly driven by money and advertising: it is easier to find a doctor than to find any particular variety of altmed practitioner. There are highway signs for hospitals, not for homeopaths. If you want a Reichian therapist or even a practitioner of Classical Chinese Medicine, you probably have some searching to do; whereas Western medicine doctors take out ads on buses and billboards.

However, I doubt many of us would conclude from this that Western medicine is thereby shown to be "strictly superior to none of" the alternatives.

So, is medicine a counterexample?

The explicit lesson in this is that we should always be looking for self-improvements: skills to gain, fixes for our flaws, etc. There is a related lesson, a bit easier to apply, which I would like to highlight:

Every possible avenue for self-improvement that comes to our attention is important, important enough to take seriously, where "take seriously" means a minimum of five minutes of thought, concluding with a cost-benefit analysis, a firm decision to pursue, reject, or shelve it, and if the decision is to pursue it, a concrete next action. Skipping any one of these steps means losing experience points.

LW has definitely made me more rational. My first thought while reading this article was; Ah, but any attempt to regulate necessarily make things worse! But then I caught myself; Wait, that's not why you're against it. You're against regulation because you believe the initiation of the use of force is immoral. Then I evaluated it from that standpoint.

I don't have this problem, but I'm told this article is excellent: How to Get Up Right Away When Your Alarm Goes Off