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"When two planes collided just above a runway in Tenerife in 1977, a man was stuck, with his wife, in a plane that was slowly being engulfed in flames. He remembered making a special note of the exits, grabbed his wife's hand, and ran towards one of them. As it happened, he didn't need to use it, since a portion of the plane had been sheared away. He jumped out, along with his wife and the few people who survived. Many more people should have made it out. Fleeing survivors ran past living, uninjured people who sat in seats literally watching for the minute it took for the flames to reach them." - http://io9.com/the-frozen-calm-of-normalcy-bias-486764924
Speaking as someone who's been trough that, I don't think that the article gives a complete picture. Part of the problem appears to be (particularly by reports from newer generations) in such instaces is the feeling of unreality, as the only times when we tend to see such situations is when we're sitting comfortably, so a lot of us are essentially conditioned to sit comfortably during such events.
However, this does tend to get better with some experience of such situations.
In response to
Hindsight Devalues Science
I believed the first two, one out of personal experience and the other out of System 1. I guessed that as a soft, water-fat intellectual, I'd have more trouble adjusting to a military lifestyle than someone who's actually been in a fight in his life. And that people from warmer climes deal with warmer temperatures more easily, well, I guess I believe people adapt to their circumstances. People from a warmer climate might sweat more and drink more water, or use less energy to generate less heat, whereas a man in Siberia might move more than is strictly necessary to keep his body temperature stable.
The other three are in subjects I know nothing about, and therefore I couldn't have predicted them. A wise man knows his limits...
I've had a nagging sense of wrongness about #1, not so much about #5, which were the two that I knew the truth about.
While it might be true that intelectuals have trouble adapting to military lifestyle, actual combat is a whole different animal in that respect. It is also different from the type of fighting that goes on in typical civilian life.
Other than that, why would you assume that intelectuals wouldn't be better predisposed to figguring out what they're supposed to do to stay alive and accomplish the mission? Particularly as they're more used to thinking than the average guy.
In response to
Welcome to Less Wrong! (July 2012)
Hello, I'm a physics student from Croatia, though I've attended a combined physics and computer science program (study programs here are very specific) for couple of years at a previous university that I left, though my high school specialization is in economy. I am currently working towards my bachelor's degree in physics.
I have no idea how I learned of this site, though it was probably trough some transhumanist channels (there's a lot of half-forgotten bits and pieces of information floating in my mind, so I can't be sure). Lately I've started reading the core sequences, mostly on my cell phone, while traveling (it avoids tab explosions). So far I've encountered a lot of what I've already considered or concluded for myself in a more expanded form.
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They present a seriously posthuman future, with a populace consisting mostly of human uploads and digital substrate native people, as a normal setting. Basically, hardcore computationalist cogsci, computer science mediated total upheaval of the human condition, and observing how life goes on nevertheless instead of bemoaning the awfulness of losing some wetware substrate. Several short stories of non-shallow thought about issues with human uploads and human cognitive modification. Pretty much the same cultural milieu as the SIAI writings are based on.
The ideas about singularity and AI come from Vinge, but I have a hard time coming up with other writers before 2000 that take the same unflinching materialistic stance to human cognition that Egan does, and aren't saddled by blatantly obvious breaks from reality. Ken MacLeod's Fall Revolution series maybe.
Basically Egan showed how the place where SIAI wants to go can be inhabitable.
Egan's stance is not materialistic in the least. It can be best described as a "what if" of extreme idealism. It has computers without any substrate, as well as universes operating on pure mathematics. You can hardly find a way of being less materialistic than that.
The idea of singularity and AI originates with Stanislaw Lem. Vinge was following his lead.
Egan's novels do have plenty of themes relevant to transhumanism, though their underlying philosophical suppositions are somewhat dubious at best, as they negate the notion of material reality.