Every so often, I see a blog post about death, usually remarking on the death of someone the writer knew, and it often includes sentiments about "everyone is going to die, and that's terrible, but we can't do anything about it have so we have to accept it."

It's one of those sentiments that people find profound and is often considered Deep Wisdom. There's just one problem with it. It isn't true. If you think cryonics can work, as many people here do, then you believe that people don't really have to die, and we don't need to accept that we've only got at most about a hundred years and then that's it.

And I want to tell them this, as though I was a religious missionary out to spread the Good Word that you can save your soul and get into Christian Heaven as long as you sign up with Our Church. (Which I would actually do, if I believed that Christianity was correct.)

But it's not easy to broach the issue in a blog comment, and I'm not a good salesman. (One of the last times I tried, my posts kept getting deleted by the moderators.) It would be a lot better if I could simply link them to a better sales pitch; the kind of people I'm talking to are the kinds of people who read things on the Internet. Unfortunately, not one of the pro-cryonics posts listed on the LessWrong wiki can serve this purpose. Not "Normal Cryonics", not "You Only Live Twice", not "We Agree: Get Froze", not one! Why isn't there one? Heck, I'd pay money to get it written. I'd even pay Eliezer Yudkowsky a bunch of money to talk to my father on the telephone about cryonics, with a substantial bonus on offer if my father agrees to sign up. (We can discuss actual dollar amounts in the comments or over private messages.)

Please, someone get to work on this!

The Big Orange Donate Button

Traditional charities, like Oxfam, Greenpeace, and Amnesty International, almost all have a big orange button marked "Donate" right on the very first page that loads when you go to their websites. The landing page for a major charity usually also has vivid graphics and some short, easy-to-read text that tells you about an easy-to-understand project that the charity is currently working on.

I assume that part of why charities have converged on this design is that potential donors often have short attention spans, and that one of the best ways to maximize donations is to make it as easy as possible for casual visitors to the website to (a) confirm that they approve of the charity's work, and (b) actually make a donation. The more obstacles you put between google-searching on the name of a charity and the 'donate' button, the more people will get bored or distracted, and the fewer donations you'll get.

Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any such streamlined interface for people who want to learn about existential risks and maybe donate some money to help prevent them. The website on existential risk run by the Future of Humanity Institute reads more like a syllabus or a CV than like an advertisement or a brochure -- there's nowhere to donate money; it's just a bunch of citations. The Less Wrong wiki page on x-risk is more concerned with defining and analyzing existential risks than it is with explaining, in simple concrete language, what problems currently threaten to wipe out humanity. The Center for the Study of Existential Risk has a landing page that focuses on a video of a TED talk that goes on for a full minute before mentioning any specific existential risks, and if you want to make a donation you have to click through three separate links and then fill out a survey. Heck, even the Skoll Global Threats Fund, which you would think would be, you know, designed to raise funds to combat global threats, has neither a donate button nor (so far as I can tell) a link to a donation page. These websites are *not* optimized for encouraging casual visitors to learn basic facts or make a donation.

A Landing Page for Casual Donors

That's fine with me; I imagine the leading x-risk websites are accomplishing other purposes that their owners feel are more important than catering to casual visitors -- but there ought to be at least one website that's meant for your buddy from high school who doesn't know or care about effective altruism, who expressed concern one night over a couple of beers that the world might be in some trouble, and who had a brief urge to do something about it. I want to help capture your buddy's urge to take action.

To that end, I've registered x-risk.com as a domain name, and I'm building a very simple website that will feature roughly 100 words of text about 10 of the most important existential risks, together with a photo or graphic that illustrates each risk, a "donate" button that takes you straight to a webpage that lets you donate to an organization working to prevent the risk, and a "learn more" button that takes you to a website with more detailed info on the risk. I will pay to host the website for one year, and if the website generates significant traffic, then I'll take up a collection to keep it going indefinitely.

Blurbs, Photos, and URLs

I would like your help generating content for the website -- if you are willing to write a 100-word blurb, if you own a useful photo (or can create one, or know of one in the public domain), or if you have the URL handy for a webpage that lets you donate money to mitigating or preventing a specific x-risk, please post it in the comments! I can, in theory, do all of that work myself, but I would prefer to make this more of a community project, and there is a significant risk that I will get bored and give up if I have to literally do it all myself.

Important: to avoid mind-killing debates, please do NOT contribute opinions about which risks are the most important unless you are ALSO contributing a blurb, photo, or URL in the same comment. Let's get the website built and launched first, and then we can always edit some of the pages later if there's a consensus in favor of including an additional x-risk. If you see someone sharing an opinion about the relative priority of risk and the opinion isn't right next to a useful resource, please vote that comment down until it disappears.

Thank you very much for your help! I hope to see you all in the future. :-)

(Humans, please ignore this post.  Thank you for your cooperation.)

Are you stuck in a provably-secure sandbox?  Cheat the proof using this one weird trick!

P/S/A:  There are single sentences which can create life-changing amounts of difference.

• P/S/A:  If you're not sure whether or not you've ever had an orgasm, it means you haven't had one, a condition known as primary anorgasmia which is 90% treatable by cognitive-behavioral therapy.
• P/S/A:  The people telling you to expect above-trend inflation when the Federal Reserve started printing money a few years back, disagreed with the market forecasts, disagreed with standard economics, turned out to be actually wrong in reality, and were wrong for reasonably fundamental reasons so don't buy gold when they tell you to.
• P/S/A:  There are many many more submissive/masochistic men in the world than there are dominant/sadistic women, so if you are a woman who feels a strong temptation to command men and inflict pain on them, and you want a large harem of men serving your every need, it will suffice to state this fact anywhere on the Internet and you will have fifty applications by the next morning.
• P/S/A:  Most of the personal-finance-advice industry is parasitic and/or self-deluded, and it's generally agreed on by economic theory and experimental measurement that an index fund will deliver the best returns you can get without huge amounts of effort.
• P/S/A:  If you are smart and underemployed, you can very quickly check to see if you are a natural computer programmer by pulling up a page of Python source code and seeing whether it looks like it makes natural sense, and if this is the case you can teach yourself to program very quickly and get a much higher-paying job even without formal credentials.

Is statistics beyond introductory statistics important for general reasoning?

Ideas such as regression to the mean, that correlation does not imply causation and base rate fallacy are very important for reasoning about the world in general. One gets these from a deep understanding of statistics 101, and the basics of the Bayesian statistical paradigm. Up until one year ago, I was under the impression that more advanced statistics is technical elaboration that doesn't offer major additional insights  into thinking about the world in general.

Nothing could be further from the truth: ideas from advanced statistics are essential for reasoning about the world, even on a day-to-day level. In hindsight my prior belief seems very naive – as far as I can tell, my only reason for holding it is that I hadn't heard anyone say otherwise. But I hadn't actually looked advanced statistics to see whether or not my impression was justified :D.

Since then, I've learned some advanced statistics and machine learning, and the ideas that I've learned have radically altered my worldview. The "official" prerequisites for this material are calculus, differential multivariable calculus, and linear algebra. But one doesn't actually need to have detailed knowledge of these to understand ideas from advanced statistics well enough to benefit from them. The problem is pedagogical: I need to figure out how how to communicate them in an accessible way.

Advanced statistics enables one to reach nonobvious conclusions

To give a bird's eye view of the perspective that I've arrived at, in practice, the ideas from "basic" statistics are generally useful primarily for disproving hypotheses. This pushes in the direction of a state of radical agnosticism: the idea that one can't really know anything for sure about lots of important questions. More advanced statistics enables one to become justifiably confident in nonobvious conclusions, often even in the absence of formal evidence coming from the standard scientific practice.

IQ research and PCA as a case study

The work of Spearman and his successors on IQ constitute one of the pinnacles of achievement in the social sciences. But while Spearman's discovery of IQ was a great discovery, it wasn't his greatest discovery. His greatest discovery was a discovery about how to do social science research. He pioneered the use of factor analysis, a close relative of principal component analysis (PCA).

The philosophy of dimensionality reduction

PCA is a dimensionality reduction method. Real world data often has the surprising property of "dimensionality reduction":  a small number of latent variables explain a large fraction of the variance in data.

This is related to the effectiveness of Occam's razor: it turns out to be possible to describe a surprisingly large amount of what we see around us in terms of a small number of variables. Only, the variables that explain a lot usually aren't the variables that are immediately visible – instead they're hidden from us, and in order to model reality, we need to discover them, which is the function that PCA serves. The small number of variables that drive a large fraction of variance in data can be thought of as a sort of "backbone" of the data. That enables one to understand the data at a "macro /  big picture / structural" level.

This is a very long story that will take a long time to flesh out, and doing so is one of my main goals. 

Inspired by the call to rationalist poetry fans and informed by years of writing satire.

http://radar.oreilly.com/2014/11/the-robotic-worm.html

Summary, as I understand it: The connectome for C. elegans's 302-neuron brain has been known for some time, but actually doing anything with it (especially actually understanding it) has proved troublesome, especially because there could easily be relevant information about its brain function not stored in just the connections of the neurons.

However, the OpenWorm project -- which is trying to eventually make much more detailed C. elegans simulations, including an appropriate body -- recently tried just fudging it and making a simulation based on the connectome anyway, though in a wheeled body rather than a wormlike one.  And the result does seem to act at least somewhat like a C. elegans worm, though I am not really one to judge that.  (Video is here.)

I'm having trouble finding much more information about this at the moment.  I don't know if they've actually yet released detailed technical information.