• Eliezer Yudkowsky was once attacked by a Moebius strip. He beat it to death with the other side, non-violently.
• Inside Eliezer Yudkowsky's pineal gland is not an immortal soul, but another brain.
• Eliezer Yudkowsky's favorite food is printouts of Rice's theorem.
• Eliezer Yudkowsky's favorite fighting technique is a roundhouse dustspeck to the face.
• Eliezer Yudkowsky once brought peace to the Middle East from inside a freight container, through a straw.
• Eliezer Yudkowsky once held up a sheet of paper and said, "A blank map does not correspond to a blank territory". It was thus that the universe was created.
• If you dial Chaitin's Omega, you get Eliezer Yudkowsky on the phone.
• Unless otherwise specified, Eliezer Yudkowsky knows everything that he isn't telling you.
• Somewhere deep in the microtubules inside an out-of-the-way neuron somewhere in the basal ganglia of Eliezer Yudkowsky's brain, there is a little XML tag that says awesome.
• Eliezer Yudkowsky is the Muhammad Ali of one-boxing.
• Eliezer Yudkowsky is a 1400 year old avatar of the Aztec god Aixitl.
• The game of "Go" was abbreviated from "Go Home, For You Cannot Defeat Eliezer Yudkowsky".
• When Eliezer Yudkowsky gets bored, he pinches his mouth shut at the 1/3 and 2/3 points and pretends to be a General Systems Vehicle holding a conversation among itselves. On several occasions he has managed to fool bystanders.
• Eliezer Yudkowsky has a swiss army knife that has folded into it a corkscrew, a pair of scissors, an instance of AIXI which Eliezer once beat at tic tac toe, an identical swiss army knife, and Douglas Hofstadter.
• If I am ignorant about a phenomenon, that is not a fact about the phenomenon; it just means I am not Eliezer Yudkowsky.
• Eliezer Yudkowsky has no need for induction or deduction. He has perfected the undiluted master art of duction.
• There was no ice age. Eliezer Yudkowsky just persuaded the planet to sign up for cryonics.
• There is no spacetime symmetry. Eliezer Yudkowsky just sometimes holds the territory upside down, and he doesn't care.
• Eliezer Yudkowsky has no need for doctors. He has implemented a Universal Curing Machine in a system made out of five marbles, three pieces of plastic, and some of MacGyver's fingernail clippings.
• Before Bruce Schneier goes to sleep, he scans his computer for uploaded copies of Eliezer Yudkowsky.

If you know more Eliezer Yudkowsky facts, post them in the comments.

http://webtv.un.org/watch/chemical-biological-radiological-and-nuclear-cbrn-national-action-plans-rising-to-the-challenges-of-international-security-and-the-emergence-of-artificial-intelligence/4542739995001

Exactly what it says on the tin. It starts around 1:50:00. I had trouble buffering for some reason, and I couldn't find it on YouTube.

EDIT: It's on YouTube now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9N_Fsbngh8

Just published an article in the The Huffington Post about using rationality-informed strategies to manage my mental illness. Hope this helps people think more rationally about this topic.

Rationality Cardinality is a card game which takes memes and concepts from the rationality/Less Wrong sphere, and mixes them with jokes to make a game. After nearly two years of card-creation, playtesting and development, today, I'm taking the "beta" label off the web-based version of Rationality Cardinality. Go to the website and, if at least two other people visit at the same time, you can play against them.

I've put a lot of thought and a lot of work into the cards, and they're not just about humor; I also went systematically through blog posts and glossaries collecting terms and concepts that I think people should know about and be reminded of, and wrote concise explanations for them. It provides an easy way for everyone to quickly learn the jargon that's floating around, in a fun way; and it provides spaced repetition for concepts that might not otherwise have sunk in.

Rationality Cardinality will also soon have a print version. The catch is that in order to mass-produce it, I need to be sure there's enough demand. So, here's the deal: once enough people have played the online version, I'll launch a Kickstarter to sell print copies. You can speed this up by inviting people who might not otherwise see it to play.

Rationality Cardinality is somewhat inspired by Cards Against Rationality. Software for the web-based implementation is based on Cards for Humanity, with modifications.

(This post won't make much sense if you don't know about the game Cards Against Humanity. Fortunately it has a web site. If you know the game Apples to Apples, well, CAH's gameplay is almost identical to Apples to Apples ... but the cards range from snarky to perverted to shockingly un-PC.)

After the LW meetup in Mountain View yesterday, the idea came up of a Less Wrong expansion set for Cards Against Humanity ... with a roughly Shit Rationalists Say theme, with a little help from Eliezer Yudkowsky Facts. Regardless of whether this ever happens, we felt the need to share the pain with the rest of the community.

These are meant to be mixed with the standard deck. Hence, the completed phrase "That which can be destroyed by being a motherfucking sorceror should be" is a clearly winning combination, as is "Why am I sticky? Grass-fed butter."

Black cards:

• That which can be destroyed by _____ should be.
• _____ is the mind-killer.
• The thirteenth virtue of rationality is _____.
• _____ is truly part of you.
• "Let me not become attached to _____ I may not want."
• _____ is vulnerable to counterfactual mugging.
• What is true is already so. _____ doesn't make it worse.
• _____ is not the territory.
• _____ will kill you because you are made of _____ that it could use for something else.
• "I'm an aspiring _____."
• In the new version of Newcomb's problem, you have to choose between a box containing _____ and a box containing _____.
• Instrumental rationality is the art of winning at _____.
• Less Wrong is not a cult so long as our meetups don't include _____.
• In an Iterated Prisoners' Dilemma, _____ beats _____.
• The latest hot fanfic: _____ and the Methods of _____.
• _____ is highly correlated with _____.
• Absence of _____ is evidence of _____.
• The coherent extrapolated volition of humanity includes a term for _____.
• We have encountered aliens who communicate through _____.
• In the future, Eliezer Yudkowsky will be remembered for _____.
• I'm signed up with Alcor, so _____ will be frozen when I die.
• "I am running on corrupted _____."
• An improperly-programmed AI might tile the universe with _____.
• You know what they say: one person's _____ is another person's _____.
• "I want to want _____."
• _____ is what _____ feels like from the inside.
• _____ is the unit of caring.
• If you're not getting _____, you're spending too many resources on _____.
• Every _____ wants to be _____.
• Inside Eliezer Yudkowsky's pineal gland is not an immortal soul, but _____.
• Before Bruce Schneier goes to sleep, he scans his computer for uploaded copies of _____.
• Eliezer Yudkowsky updates _____ to fit his priors.
• Eliezer Yudkowsky doesn't have a chin; under his beard is _____.
• Never go in against _____ when _____ is on the line.
• Reversed _____ is not _____.
• You have no idea how big _____ is.
• Why haven't I signed up for cryonics?
• What am I optimizing for?
• The Quantified Self people have finally figured out how to measure _____.
• You can't fit a sheep into a _____.
• Make beliefs pay rent in _____.
• Why did my comment get downvoted?
• "You make a compelling argument for _____."
• "My model of you likes _____."
• "I can handle _____, because I am already enduring it."

I searched but did not find any discussion comparing the merits of the two major cryonics providers in the US, so I figured it might be productive to start such a discussion myself by posing the question to the community: which provider would you choose, all things being equal: Alcor or the Cryonics Institute?

From my research, Alcor comes across as the flasher, higher-end option, while CI seems more like a Mom-and-Pop operation, having only two full-time employees. Alcor also costs substantially more, with its neurosuspension option alone running ~$80k, compared with CI's whole-body preservation cost of ~$30k. While Alcor has received far more publicity than CI, much of it has been negative. The Ted Williams fiasco is probably the most prominent example, although the accuser in that case seems anything but trustworthy. However, Alcor remains something of a shadowy organization that many within the cryonics community are suspicious of. Mike Darwin, a former Alcor president, has written at length on both organizations at http://www.chronopause.com, and on the whole, at least based on what I've read, Alcor comes across looking less competent, less trustworthy, and less open than CI.

One issue in particular is funding. Even though Alcor costs much more, it has many more expenses, and Darwin and others have questioned the long term financial stability of the organization. Ralph Merkle, an Alcor board member and elder statesman of cryonics who has made significant contributions to other fields like nanotechnology, a field he practically invented, and encryption, with Merkle's Puzzles, has essentially admitted(1) that Alcor hasn't managed its money very well:

"Some Alcor members have wondered why rich Alcor members have not donated more money to Alcor. The major reason is that rich Alcor members are rich because they know how to manage money, and they know that Alcor traditionally has managed money poorly. Why give any significant amount of money to an organization that has no fiscal discipline? It will just spend it, and put itself right back into the same financial hole it’s already in.

 As a case in point, consider Alcor’s efforts over the year to create an “endowment fund” to stabilize its operating budget. These efforts have always ended with Alcor spending the money on various useful activities. These range from research projects to subsidizing our existing members — raising dues and minimums is a painful thing to do, and the Board is always reluctant to do this even when the financial data is clear. While each such project is individually worthy and has merit, collectively the result has been to thwart the effort to create a lasting endowment and leave Alcor in a financially weak position."

Such an acknowledgement, though appreciated, is frankly disturbing, considering that members depend utterly on these organizations remaining operational and solvent for decades, perhaps even centuries, after they are deanimated.

Meanwhile, CI carries on merrily, well under the radar, seemingly without any drama or intrigue. And Ben Best seems to have very good credentials in the cryonics community, and Eliezer, one of the most prominent public advocates of cryonics, is signed up with them. Yet the tiny size of the operation still fills me with unease concerning its prospects for long-term survivability.

So with all of that said, besides cost, what factors would lead or have led you to pick one organization over the other?

1: http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/CryopreservationFundingAndInflation.html