I can't give you an exact time, but if you need a few months until you can sign up, your chances will be improved by providing content (e.g. lightning talks). If I remember correctly, last time it took about 6 months until all spots were filled, but it may well be sooner this time.

Also the statistical difference in 12 years is still strong in this case as Hompertz curve is much steeper in 90th that in 70th.

For example, after 100 a person has the probability to die 50 per cent a year. In this case gaining several years is very unprobable event. For example for 91 years old person to survive until 103 has probability around 1 in 1000.

The statistic for twins is also probably distorted by earlier deaths of most twins (like 65 and 71) - because most people die earlier than Hompertz curve is not so steep.

The example of Rita Montalchni is incredibly interesting (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rita_Levi-Montalcini). She administered a nerve growth factor (NGF) as eye drops and lived for 101 years while her twin sister died when she was 91. (Bearing in mind the average life duration difference of twins is six years, we can conclude that she gained about four years.)

Actually, all we can conclude is that you have managed to find a single anecdote to support your point. (Sidenote: according to the link she died at 103 years of age.)

Is there any way to do these things without paying a large pricetag? Could you just lurk around campus or something? Only half-joking here.

be sure to first consider the most useful version of grad that you could reliably make for yourself... and then decide whether or not to do it.

Planning fallacy is going to eat you alive if you use this technique.

In the example I gave the nuke exploding would be a narrow local effect which bleeds over into a large area. I agree that a pump which needed to monitor everything might very well choose only quite local direct effects but that could still have a lot of long range bad side effects.

Bursting the damn a few hundred meters upriver might have the effect of carrying your mother, possibly even alive, far from the center of the building and it may also involve extinguishing the fire if you've thought to add that in as a desirable element of the outcome yet lead to wiping out a whole town ten miles downstream. The sort of the point is that the pump wouldn't care about those side effects.

Their approach reduces to an anti-epistemic affect-heuristic, using the ugh-field they self-generate in a reverse affective death spiral (loosely based on our memeplex) as a semantic stopsign, when in fact the Kolmogorov distance to bridge the terminological inferential gap is but an epsilon.

"whether they're worth the cost of keeping alive." and this highlights the differences in our views.

our point of difference is in this whole basis of using practical "worth" as The way of deciding whether or not a person should live/die.

I can get trying to minimise the birth of new people that are net-negative contributors to the world... but from my perspective, once they are born - it's worth putting some effort into supporting them.

Why? because it's not their fault they were born the way they are, and they should not be punished because of that. They need help to get along.

Sometimes - the situation that put them in their needy state occurred after they were born - and again is still not their fault.

Another example to point out why I feel your view is unfair to people: Imagine somebody who has worked all their lives in an industry that has given amazing amounts of benefit to the world.. but has only just now become obsolete. That person is now unemployed and, due to being near retirement age, unemployable. It's an industry in which they were never really paid very well, and their savings don't add up to enough to cover their ongoing living costs for very long.

Eventually, there will come a time when the savings run out and this person dies of starvation without our help.

I consider this not to be a fair situation, and I'd rather my tax-dollars went to helping this person live a bit longer, than go to the next unnecessary-war (drummed up to keep the current pollies in power).

I think the unlimited potential for bad outcomes may be a problem there.

After all, the house might not explode, instead a military transport plane nearby might suffer a failure and the nuclear weapon on board might suffer a very unlikely set of failures and trigger on impact killing everyone for miles and throwing your mothers body far far far away. The pump isn't just dangerous to those involved and nearby.

Most consequences are limited in scope. You have a slim chance of killing many others through everyday accident but a pump would magnify that terribly.

I really do not understand how "ruthless truth telling" is supposed to work. Lots of behavior is motivated by reasons that cannot be said aloud with hurting people. What if my reasons are things like "I think X person is pretty dull and I am not interested in what they have to say." There are alot of unpleasant feelings in most people's heads (including mine). I would strongl prefer these unpleasant feelings not be spoken aloud.

Actually most of it is quite natural, QM is the most obvious extension that you get when you try to extend the concept of 'probability' to complex numbers, and there are some suggestions why you would want to do this (I think the most famous/commonly found explanation is that we want 'smooth' operators, for example if turning around is an operator there should also be an operator describing 'half of turning around', and another for '1/3 of turning around' etc., which for mathematical reasons immediately gives you complex numbers (try flipping a sign in two identical steps, this is the same as multiplying by i)).

To my best knowledge the question of why we use wavefunctions is a chicken-and-the-egg type question - we want square integrable wavefunctions because those are the solution of Schrodingers equation, we want Schrodingers equation because it is (almost) the most general Hermitian time-evolution operator, time-evolution operators should be Hermitian because that is the only way to preserve unitarity and unitarity should be preserved because then the two-norm of the wavefunction can be interpreted as a probability. We've made a full circle.

As for your second question: I think a 'natural part of the theory' is something that Occam doesn't frown upon - i.e. if the theory with the extra part takes a far shorter description than the description of the initial theory plus the description of the extra part. Informally, something is 'a natural result of the theory' if somehow the description for the added result is somehow already partly specified by the theory.

Again my apologies for writing such long answers to short questions.