Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are:
Because if you put a high value on your life, this amounts to Pascal's Mugging.
No, it doesn't, not unless you're talking about valuing your life at $10^(10^10000000) or something ridiculous.
Also, 1/10 chance of cryonics working is ridiculously optimistic.
There's a bit of room for disagreement here, but I haven't heard a convincing argument for anything much lower. What did you have in mind?
More like 1/100000, and then when they thaw you you'll be brain damaged and have to live in an institution forever. They don't really know how to do this yet. How far along are they now? Have they frozen and thawed a mouse yet, and did it behave the same as before? I won't let them freeze me earlier than that, because there's essentially no chance I'll be even able to walk and talk, let alone be someone present me would recognize as 'me'.
Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are:
Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are:
Just to elaborate, I noticed a long time ago that when I was grading every day with a 1-10 pain rating, it made everything seem extremely dismal, especially since almost no day was ever scored "zero". Recasting this so that I also took note of when I was feeling really great (even if it was just in the morning, etc.) allowed me to see a more balanced and realistic picture of my state.
Sure, avoiding negative feedback loops is easier said than done. Sometimes things are just that bad. All I can say is that I seem to have cultivated a reflexive, aversive reaction to ruminating. I'm almost more scared of ruminating, and the places that leads, than I am scared of pain. I don't know if this is a psychologically healthy stance, but it keeps my thoughts mostly in a place that I like.
I do not seem to have the knack for lucid dreaming, but I have used meditation to some minor success.
...a reflexive, aversive reaction to ruminating. I'm almost more scared of ruminating, and the places that leads, than I am scared of pain. I don't know if this is a psychologically healthy stance...
I think it is. My own life is pretty good, actually, but I could easily talk myself into a depression if I didn't try and avoid ruminating as much as possible. "Don't believe everything you think"—I learned that here on LW, and that alone is easily worth all the time I've spent on this site.
Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are:
Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are:
This made me think of this cartoon: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?n=1174.
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Well, the position you're advocating here is certainly not one I - or other smart cryo advocates - agree with, but there is room for debate to be had. Let me keep it short for this comment though.
First of all, cryonics aims to vitrify people, not freeze them. This means they - ideally - turn into glass, not ice.
As such, they could not be thawed.
Going up a step in complexity, most cryo advocates don't believe that they will be revived in the same body, rather that the information that makes them who they are will be extracted and used to construct a real or virtual or robotic body.
Also, this:
Putting aside that cryonics is not about freezing and thawing, there is the issue of wanting to wait until the revival side of cryonics is perfected. Well, sure, by the time science has advanced to that point, you would no longer have to make a probabilistic decision. But by that point, medical conditions - including aging - will probably have been eliminated. If you survive that far, good on you. But suppose we reach that point in 200 years' time. If you refuse cryonics because it's not yet proven, you will be dead by the time the proof comes.
So you have to make the decision right now: do you want to lose $1/day if cryonics doesn't work, or do you want to gain your life back if it does?
And this:
I'm confused here. If you are cryopreserved (please, not frozen) at date X, and then at a later date X+100 they invent better revival technology, you can have that better revival technology used on you, even if it hadn't been invented when you were deanimated and cryopreserved! This seems so obvious to me that I'm confused about why you're objecting to it. Help me out?!
I'm afraid the preservation techniques are still so bad that you can't be revived correctly even with improved future techniques.