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If it's stupid and it works, it's not stupid.
"Murphy's Laws of Combat"
In response to
Rationality Quotes December 2014
In response to
Rationality Quotes August 2014
Sometimes the biggest disasters aren't noticed at all -- no one's around to write horror stories.
Vernor Vinge, A Fire Upon the Deep
Refer to case summary A-2435, a recent patient who was able to become the "most expedient cases expedient cases from bedside to cryopreservation procedures that Alcor has ever experienced" by ensuring she was as geographically close to Alcor as possible when preservation became necessary:
http://www.alcornews.org/weblog/2009/09/case_summary_a2435_member_a243.html
Linkrot marches on; the summary is here and the full case report is here. (The former says that A-2435 is Alcor's 88th patient, the latter the 89th, which is a bit odd.)
In response to
Rationality Quotes July 2014
HEALY: The doctor recommends a bilateral salpingo-oophorectomy.
ROSA: Who doesn't love a surgery with "ooph" in it?
HEALY: Yeah, well, uh the, uh, DOC has set certain limits on invasive... It's not gonna happen. [pause] You're not out of options. We'll stick with the chemo.
ROSA: "We"? You got cancer in your ovaries, too?
HEALY: I'm your counselor. I'm here to help you through this.
ROSA: There is no "through this". I'm gonna die.
HEALY: Hey. Come on, now. You could live for years.
ROSA: That's a fucking lie.
HEALY: Language! Look, I know this is difficult for you. My cousin had lung cancer. It didn't look good for him, but he stuck with the chemo and now he's back fixing roofs in Oneonta.
ROSA: Lucky duck, your cousin. Me? Dead duck.
HEALY: You have to try to remain positive. No one knows the future.
ROSA: Doctors know the future. They think I need the surgery.
Orange is the New Black, 2x08, "Appropriately Sized Pots"
That's the standard Eastern Orthodox doctrine: everybody goes to heaven, but only those who love God will enjoy it.
These theological symbols, heaven and hell, are not crudely understood as spatial dimensions but rather refer to the experience of God's presence according to two different modes.
I wonder if we'll ever learn to reconstruct people-shadows from other people's memories of them. Also, whether this is a worthwhile thing to be doing.
It's a little creepy the way Facebook keeps dead people's accounts around now.
Relevant: Greg Egan, "Steve Fever".
It's an often described caricature of heaven but I imagine that most believers would say that heaven isn't actually like that, and possibly add something about how the things a soul experiences in heaven are beyond mortal comprehension.
I think you may have been giving them too much credit. Here's an adherent explaining that wireheading is a bad thing, but in heaven, wireheading is good because everything in heaven is good.
I don't think people don't always put much effort into critically considering their beliefs.
I had an idea for a sort of Christian fanfiction, in which people marked for heaven and people marked for hell both go into the same firey pit, but the former are wireheaded to be happy about it. It's a far more efficient construction that way. (I suppose you could also do the reverse, with the people marked for hell being reverse-wireheaded to find nice things agonizing, but that doesn't have the same tasty irony.)
Bitrot marches on; a copy at The Wayback Machine should be more durable.
Even with memories that cause PTSD, it's not so much the forgetting that helps as the being able to reconsolidate the memories without them being hooked into trauma.
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That is an interesting thought. When I try to ground it in contemporary reality my thoughts turn to politics. Modern democratic politics is partly about telling stories to motivate voters, but which stories have outlasted their usefulness? Any answer is likely to be contentious.
Turning to the past, I wrote a little essay suggesting that stories of going back to nature to live in a recent golden age when life was simpler may serve as examples of stories that have outlasted their usefulness by a century.
We're doing politics? Cool.
In a very short-term sense, "death panels". We provide a terrible end-of-life experience for people; we keep people barely at great expense in states of pain and confusion as long as possible even when this is not something that they would want; finite healthcare dollars are thus spent torturing the dying rather than fixing treatable problems in otherwise healthy people.
An attempt to make a dent in this (by at least getting people to talk about advance-care directives, for example) was derailed in a failed attempt to score some political points. As a result, this will continue to be a problem for the foreseeable future, because it's no longer a technical problem, it's a Red Team/Blue Team thing. Well done, politics.