All of Josh Jacobson's Comments + Replies

Epistemic status: just speculation, from a not very concrete memory, written hastily on mobile after a quick skim of the post.


My guess is that these results should be taken with a large grain of salt, but if I'm wrong, I'd be interested in hearing more about why.

Specifically, I think the "alignment researcher" population and "org leader" populations here are probably a far departure from what people envision when they hear these terms. I also expect other populations reported on to have a directionally similar skew to what I speculate below.

An anecdote f... (read more)

7Cameron Berg
Here is the full list of the alignment orgs who had at least one researcher complete the survey (and who also elected to share what org they are working for): OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic, FHI, CMU, Redwood Research, Dalhousie University, AI Safety Camp, Astera Institute, Atlas Computing Institute, Model Evaluation and Threat Research (METR, formerly ARC Evals), Apart Research, Astra Fellowship, AI Standards Lab, Confirm Solutions Inc., PAISRI, MATS, FOCAL, EffiSciences, FAR AI, aintelope, Constellation, Causal Incentives Working Group, Formalizing Boundaries, AISC.  ~80% of the alignment sample is currently receiving funding of some form to pursue their work, and ~75% have been doing this work for >1 year. Seems to me like this is basically the population we were intending to sample.    Your expectation while taking the survey about whether we were going to be able to get a good sample does not say much about whether we did end up getting a good sample. Things that better tell us whether or not we got a good sample are, eg, the quality/distribution of the represented orgs and the quantity of actively-funded technical alignment researchers (both described above).   Note that the survey took people ~15 minutes to complete and resulted in a $40 donation being made to a high-impact organization, which puts our valuation of an hour of their time at ~$160 (roughly equivalent to the hourly rate of someone who makes ~$330k annually). Assuming this population would generally donate a portion of their income to high-impact charities/organizations by default, taking the survey actually seems to probably have been worth everyone's time in terms of EV.

Would anyone like the domain alignai.org ? Otherwise I'll probably let it expire (bought for a previous org, which doesn't want it).

1Johannes C. Mayer
Maybe ask @plex. 

Some lawyers claim that there may be significant (though not at all ideal) whistleblowing protection for individuals at AI companies that don't fully comply with the Voluntary Commitments: https://katzbanks.com/wp-content/uploads/KBK-Law360-Despite-Regulation-Lag-AI-Whistleblowers-Have-Protections.pdf

Very quick, likely highly flawed and inaccurate Fermi on the worthwhileness of riding in SUVs or vans instead of sedans:

~50% safer per mile maybe

~20% more expensive to buy / rent / rideshare

~1 day per year gained in expectation for a 35 yo

~$10k spent on vehicle travel per year per person

Cost: ~$2k / day of life gained

Worthwhile if valuing a year at: ~$600k or greater

6Elizabeth
what's this based on? At one point SUVs had a higher death rate due to risk of rollover, in addition to the negative externalities.
6RHollerith
It's only safer for the occupants of the SUV. For everyone else, an SUV is more dangerous.

For injury prevention (and can help with exercise efficiency as well): use machines, not free weights.

5romeostevensit
I used to be pretty anti machine. I still think 100% machines is a bad plan, but they're useful training wheels.

The advice I've seen elsewhere is that machines are all very well for specialised physiotherapy needs, but outside of that, always to use free weights or bodyweight exercises. The machines fix all the degrees of freedom but one, so you don't engage all the muscles needed to control the movement, so those muscles and the control they give you get no training. To avoid injury, don't use weights heavier than you can control. Don't expect to go from bench-pressing 60 kg on the machine to a 60 kg barbell, or from that to a pair of 30 kg dumbbells. Thus have I heard, but I am not an expert.

I don't know what it said pre-edit but your description sounds like it was directionally accurate (depending on how strongly it was worded).

There’s a decent argument that Cryonics takes on greater importance now.

5johnlawrenceaspden
do tell?

There’s a lot of COVID going on my family right now, and my father’s birthday that three of us flew in for is tomorrow. I’m trying to figure out who (if anyone) is safe to spend time with him, and to what degree.

My father: 77 years old and in very good health for his age. Four Moderna shots, has never caught COVID. He’s the one we’re trying to protect from our infections.

Me (mid-30s): Triple vaxed (Moderna). Symptoms started Sunday June 19th and had a rapid test positive Sunday. Started Paxlovid Monday. Negative rapid test w/ throat swab yesterday and toda... (read more)

Providing air support for Ukraine by sending in "little green men in little green airplanes". Considered to be escalatory but has been done before in the Korean war by the Soviets at just as tense a time as today, when both superpowers were already nuclear-armed

What does this mean?

2[anonymous]
NATO warplanes painted with Ukrainian colors fighting in Ukraine.
2Nanda Ale
It means the people flying the planes are 'private citizens' -- probably retired ex-military and acting as private citizen volunteers, technically, but organized through unofficial channels and with support. If there were truly no other options I might consider it but I think there are less escalatory and still effective ways to help.

During their brief masking-optional pilot, the school reported that “smiling is more contagious than covid-19,” and a survey of students found that 70 percent said the policy improved their experience, including their ability to learn.

That only 70% of kids said that getting rid of an annoying thing was good from their point of view is to me surprisingly low, and an update in the opposite direction vs what was seemingly intended by those who shared that result.

Then again, none of these statistics ever mean much at all without looking at the survey instrument and such.

2TLW
I would be interested, using the same methodology, what percentage of students would report that the sky is blue. Or green.

It's interesting that you cite last year as evidence of your trading going well, at a 13.5% gain, while the S&P 500 (SPY) total return for 2021 was 28.7%. Can you elaborate on your perspective given that the market performed so well in general?

3gilch
I think it was actually closer to 17% by the end of last year, but mostly unrealized and this is a very rough estimate. Good point though. Why not hold 100% SPY? Serious question! That is actually not an unreasonable long-term strategy. But are you adjusting for risk? Stocks outperform most other liquid asset classes. The exception right now seems to be crypto. Why not YOLO 100% Bitcoin? Again, a serious question. I'm less confident that is a reasonable strategy, but people do it! Does that seem reckless? It kind of does to me. Bitcoin had an 82% (!) drawdown around 2018. Yet Bitcoin absolutely dwarfed returns from SPY in 2017. It's really off the chart. 1500%. Seriously. SPY was up like 22%, which is pretty good for SPY, but it doesn't even compare. A fluke? Well, even as recently as 2020, Bitcoin was up 290% compared to SPY's 18%. SPY isn't all that conservative either. It has had a 50% drawdown before, and over its lifetime, its compound annual growth rate is only 9%. Its Sharpe ratio is 0.6. It's not hard to do better than that in a backtest. For example, 75% SPY and 75% TLT (borrowing the -50% cash) has both higher returns and lower volatility than 100% SPY, with a Sharpe ratio of 1.0. Its worst drawdown was only 27%. To be fair, TLT is not quite as old as SPY, which had a slightly better Sharpe of 0.7 over TLT's lifetime. The 75/75 portfolio clearly would have been a better choice overall. But some years it underperformed SPY by a significant margin. 2021 happened to be one of those years. My portfolio is performing within expectations.

FWIW I’ve had a pretty opposite experience of what you describe with CI.

Bringing over the outcome of a lot of recent discussion I've had on Facebook and some research I've done regarding the Narwall Mask:

  1. I believe there's currently a lot of uncertainty as to the effectiveness of the Narwall, with multiple meaningful reasons for there to be uncertainty. A lot of effectiveness outcomes would not surprise me. I do not believe it has been well-tested nor well-analyzed, at least compared to those that meet NIOSH standards.

  2. I think there's enough information out there to statistically estimate its effectiveness with some reason

... (read more)

there's paid tools that estimate this, probably poorly

I’m quite skeptical that improvements will be realized by this methodology. Not clear that there are health improvement gains in expectation.

Thought about the timing of Pfizer pill availability for ~2 minutes, current guess is that it will be similar to the vaccines last year. Late this year very limited availability, becoming more and more available in the early months next year, easy to get around April or May.

The tone of strong desirability for progress on WBE in this was surprising to me. The author seems to treat progress in WBE as a highly desirable thing; a perspective I expect most on LW do not endorse.

The lack of progress here may be a quite good thing.

3niconiconi
Did I miss some subtle cultural changes at LW? I know the founding principles of LW are rationalism and AI safety from the start. But in my mind, LW always has all types of adjacent topics and conversations, with many different perspectives. Or at least this was my impression of the 2010s LW threads on the Singularity and transhumanism. Did these discussions become more and more emphasized on AI safety and derisking over time? I'm not a regular reader of LW, any explanation would be greatly appreciated. 
RomanS*180

As many other people here, I strongly desire to avoid death. Mind uploading is an efficient way to prevent many causes of death, as it is could make a mind practically indestructible (thanks to backups, distributed computing etc). WBE is a path towards mind uploading, and thus is desirable too.

Mind uploading could help mitigate OR increase the AI X-risk, depending on circumstances and implementation details. And the benefits of uploading as a mitigation tool seem to greatly outweigh the risks. 

The most preferable future for me is the future there mind... (read more)

1J Thomas Moros
While I can understand why many would view advances toward WBE as an AI-safety risk, many in the community are also concerned with cryonics. WBE is an important option for the revival of cryonics patients. So I think the desirability of WBE should be clear. It just may be the case that we need to develop safe AI first.

But even if I’m wrong about that, that is, as I said, none of the FDA’s damn business. The FDA’s damn business is whether the booster shots are safe and effective or not.

Is this defined somewhere? I see the FDA and CDC doing this frequently, so I’ve assumed part of their medical mandate is indeed to consider questions such as global supply. It is an odd separation of powers, with ambiguous overlap, where different groups decide on donation of vaccines… even across different types of vaccine (eg the CDC seems to have donated HPV vaccines, indirectly, in ... (read more)

My understanding is that global public policy, and supply chains, and so on have nothing to do with the FDA's official powers.

However, the whole thing is a dumpster fire, and the FDA technically has a legislative mandate to control the legal right to buy "water hoses", which makes them the focal point during the dumpster fire.

In a deep sense, every person who dies because of a legally delayed treatment, or delayed testing, or very expensive manufacturing that putting life saving medicine out of their reach... is dead because of the FDA.

Since the FDA itself... (read more)

It’s very likely that the CDC is overcounting asymptomatic cases, so we’ll continue using our ⅓ number for now.

Shouldn't this say "undercounting"?

4Elizabeth
yes, thank you

Thanks for sharing the idea. I think I'd find this inconvenient, but I do expect the inconvenience of various changes will vary significantly between people.

Be much more wary of COVID when hospitals are full

Keep an eye on confirmed COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths in your area, and put effort into avoiding catching or transmitting COVID-19 if it looks like hospitals in your area will be overloaded 2-4 weeks from now.

I’ve had a vague impression that this hasn’t meaningfully led to worse outcomes, though I could be wrong. Know of any analysis on it?

Additionally, even if we added the hospitalization % to the death percent (pretended all hospitalizations were deaths), I think impact would still be dwarfed by long COVID?

There seems to be a strong consensus that the Mayo Clinic study was highly flawed (assuming this is the source for your Pfizer vs Moderna claim… it’s paywalled). I haven’t seen many people actually address their takeaways beyond that, except one in our community who said they’d bet on ~equal effectiveness still rather than Moderna having higher effectiveness.

I’d be interested in additional takes, or maybe I’ll look into this myself.

Answer by Josh Jacobson30

My mother is immunocompromised, so we’ve discussed this with 4 doctors who specialize in assessing immuno-affecting conditions.

3/4 felt that the information gain from doing this would be negligible. 2 of those 3 have generally had strong epistemics during her treatment. The fourth (who has generally been least impressive, but sounded like she maybe had a good idea on this?), thought it may be mildly useful.

8Lightwave
I'm a bit surprised by this. The entire logic behind booster doses for the immunocompromised (which several countries are already doing, e.g. US/UK) is based on a lack of (or low) immune response to the vaccine, which can be confirmed by an antibody test (measuring antibodies to the spike protein). There are studies with large numbers of people where you can see the median levels of antibodies in healthy adults and compare results (e.g. here and here). These tests are quantitative and give you a number, not just a positive or negative result, some people can have orders of magnitude more antibodies than others as a result of vaccination. Also my impression is that antibody levels (post vaccination) are possibly correlated or even predict who can be infected and correlate with vaccine effectiveness. Is that not likely to be the case? This is a bit anecdotal but I've read about people in the UK on immunosuppressive therapy getting 4 vaccine doses (as advised by their doctor) in order to generate enough immune response to have detectable antibodies.

EDIT (7/27/23) After very preliminary research, I now think "telling people to ride in SUVs or vans instead of sedans" may turn out to be worthwhile.


As I’m working on derisking research, I’m particularly aware of what I think of as “whales”... risks or opportunities that are much larger in scale than most other things I’ll likely investigate.

There are some things that I consider to be widely-known whales, such as diet and exercise.

There are others that I consider to be more neglected, and also less certain to be large scale (based on my priors). Air qual... (read more)

6Adam Zerner
If you're interested in a perspective from left field, I wrote a post about how we should perhaps be valuing life wildly more than we currently are, and that if so, driving becomes a terrible idea.
2ChristianKl
Wearing a helmet when driving in a car would be one intervention that isn't that inconvient but I don't know the impact.

Yeah that may be an interesting extension of it for version 2. Not sure how straightforward it would be to implement; haven’t looked into that yet.

Intersections are what kill mostly.

This doesn't appear to be true. Using the same data I used above I get:

TEST

5WilliamKiely
Perhaps the accurate way to say Romeo's point is that time spent driving through intersections is (much) more dangerous than time spent driving on roads, highways, etc.

I recently had what I thought was an inspired idea: a Google Maps for safety. This hypothetical product would allow you to:

  1. Route you in such a way that maximizes safety, and/or
  2. Route you in such a way that maximizes your safety & time-efficiency trade-off, according to your own input of the valuation of your time and orientation toward safety

First, I wanted to validate that such a tradeoff between safety and efficiency exists. Initial results seemed to validate my prior:

  1. The WHO says crashes increase 2.5% for every 1 km/h increase in speed.
  2. The In
... (read more)
1WilliamKiely
A related question I've never seen the data on: How much more dangerous is driving at night than driving during the day? (per mile driven)
2romeostevensit
Intersections are what kill mostly. The energy delta between two fast moving cars going the same direction is low. The energy delta between even moderatly moving cars at orthogonal or directly head to head is huge.

I think that’s a quite interesting topic / question. I may see if I can find any info on it, but for now am less informed than you.

This is a follow-up to https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RRoCQGNLrz5vuGQYW/josh-jacobson-s-shortform?commentId=pZN32PZQuBMHtM8aS , where I noted that I found the following sentence in an article about an Israeli study on 3rd shot boosters:

About 0.4% said they suffered from difficulty breathing, and 1% said they sought medical treatment due to one or more side effect.

worrisome, and how I reconciled it.


When I posted that, I reached out to Maayan Hoffman, one of the authors of the original Israeli article, with these observations. She found these interest... (read more)

This is really interesting; I’d never heard of it before… thanks for sharing. I’m excited to research it more.

Sunscreen lengthens the amount of sun exposure needed to synthesize a given amount of Vitamin D; I wonder if this does as well.

Indeed, the results for which warnings are thrown should be disregarded; the non-monotonicity of out-of-bounds results is a situation I noticed as well.

The authors were quite clear about the equation only being useful in certain conditions, and it does seem to act reliably in those conditions, so I think this is just an out-of-bounds quirk that can be disregarded.

But even so it still doesn't explain why I don't notice while reading the summary but do notice while reading the opinion. (Both the summary and opinion were written by someone else in the motivating example, but I only noticed from the opinion.)

Ah, this helps clarify. My hypotheses are then:

  1. Even if you "agree" with an opinion, perhaps you're highly attuned, but in a possibly not straightforward conscious way, to even mild (e.g. 0.1%) levels of disagreement.

  2. Maybe the word choice you use for summaries is much more similar to others vs the word choi

... (read more)
3Rohin Shah
(Not that inclined currently, but I do agree that all of these hypotheses are plausible)

How confident are you that this isn’t just memory? I personally think that upon rereading writing, it feels significantly more familiar if i wrote it, than if I read and edited it. A piece of this is likely style, but I think much of it is the memory of having generated and more closely considered it.

2Rohin Shah
It's plausible, though note I've probably summarized over a thousand things at this point so this is quite a demand on memory. But even so it still doesn't explain why I don't notice while reading the summary but do notice while reading the opinion. (Both the summary and opinion were written by someone else in the motivating example, but I only noticed from the opinion.)

Yes, and they are public, and others have highlighted similar things to them and publicly.

GiveWell is now starting to look into a subset of these things:

To date, most of GiveWell’s research capacity has focused on finding the most impactful programs among those whose results can be rigorously measured. ...

GiveWell has now been doing research to find the best giving opportunities in global health and development for 11 years, and we plan to increase the scope of giving opportunities we consider. We plan to expand our research team and scope in order to

... (read more)

Up until “Fuck The Symbols” I’m with you. And as an article for the general public, I’d probably endorse the “Fuck the Symbols” section as well.

In particular:

it’s usually worth at least thinking about how to do it - because the process of thinking about it forces you to recognize that the Symbol does not necessarily give the thing, and consider what’s actually needed.

To the extent this is advocacy, however, it seems worth noting that I think the highly engaged LW crowd is already often pretty good about this, (so I’d be more excited about this being re... (read more)

You're pointing to a good problem, but there's more to it than a slider between "pay more attention to Symbols" and "pay less attention to Symbols". I was thinking about writing a whole other post on this, but I'll give a short version here.

First, suppose some group of people repeatedly says "Fuck the Symbols" and then manages to do the corresponding things without the Symbols, across a bunch of different areas. How does this parse to others, through a social lens? Basically, it's countersignalling. It sends a message of "we are so good that we can do the ... (read more)

4justinpombrio
Have you talked to GiveWell about this? Like, I don't know much of anything about charities or the people at GiveWell. But the standard rationalist reaction to "I found something you can read that helps explain the domain you're in and how to make the world a better place" is supposed to be "give me, give it now". (And the reason I ask is the huge potential upside of making GiveWell donations more effective.)
1Kenny
The only reason ivy league MBA has easier time is because the symbol is used as a shortcut of the actual vetting process of qualifications, so are most social status symbols. They indicate certain qualities and expertise on certain topics because of the general process involved in getting those status symbols in the first place. Of course the actual usefulness of the individuals have to be vetted by doing real work. Outside of playing a role in the production of actual substance, they are mostly used in human social interactions and communications to induce specific positive emotions in said individuals.

I haven’t fully understood why weight loss drugs are so little used in the US given the health effects of being overweight/obese either. I think it’s good that you’ve shined a light on this and your overview is helpful guidance to someone getting oriented. Many aspects of this feel aligned with my research on the topics.

That said, Plenity (https://www.myplenity.com/) is a non-drug option that looks particularly promising and should potentially be at the top of the list here.

I haven’t looked into the longevity effects of weight loss yet myself, but the trea... (read more)

1Josh Jacobson
Surgical options may be useful for some as well. https://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/32/4/567.short
3Elizabeth
The mechanism for Plenity, a dry cellulose matrix that expands with water, seems extremely promising, but the experimental results don't seem that good even when selected by the manufacturer.  The one study has weight loss of 6.4% of body weight with Plenity vs. 4.4% with placebo, over six months.  Given the publication biases, that's nothing.  That said, I think the metrics used for most weight loss studies, including this one, are wrong. The control and treatment groups were on equally calorie-restricted diets, and my belief on hearing the mechanism was never that Plenity would accelerate calorie deficits (although it might smooth out sugar spikes), it's that it would make calorie restriction more bearable, which the study doesn't seem to have checked for (which is normal for weight loss studies). A second argument I'd consider is that weight loss is held back by different things for different people, and Plenity is extremely good for a handful of people for which satiety is their main problem. I don't see anything in the paper that would suggest that, but it does seem possible. 
225Hour
Also, good point about highlighting the uncertainty; I've added a disclaimer to that effect at the beginning of the section.
225Hour
All fair points!  That said, I think extended lifespan is a very reasonable thing to expect, since IIRC from longevity research that caloric restriction extends lifespan (from animal studies); this seems like a very natural extrapolation from that.

An article published today on Reuters and elsewhere reads, "Israeli survey finds 3rd Pfizer vaccine dose has similar side effects to 2nd." Buried within this article is the following:

About 0.4% said they suffered from difficulty breathing, and 1% said they sought medical treatment due to one or more side effect.

This seemed quite bad to me and like a worrisome result. I sought information on how many sought medical treatment after the second shot. I could not find this information, but I did find:

only 51 of some 650,000 people to have received the Pfi

... (read more)
1Kamil Pabis
With such highly subjective soft outcomes a lot depends on the way the question is phrased and interpreted (if self-reporting). Thus comparing different populations and studies is almost impossible without really carefully digging into the original publications and even then it is fraught with problems. If I have a rash post-vaccine and I go to see my GP or pharamcist, am I seeking medical help and is this worrisome? If I get up and later realize that I need to lie down or else I will faint (vasovagal syncope, around one in ten people have some form of needle phobia), am I seeking medical help for a side-effect? Technically yes, but a saline injection would cause the same. If I have asthma or hayfever, issues with breathing, and later misattribute this to the vaccine, is this a side-effect? (around 1 in 10 people or so have asthma) Finally, you cannot compare the serious side-effects in a trial (if this CDC figure really comes from a trial) with mild self-reported side-effects from Israel or American postmarketing surveillance. Trial participants will be monitored closely and will include a large number of at risk indiviudals (>60yo) so it is again a statistical artifact of data collection. IMHO all the data is worthless without a very well-matched control group.

Gawande discusses institutions, practices, and evidence that points to an alternative vision — of nursing homes that provide more autonomy; of hospice care that does not prolong life at extreme costs to its quality;

I don’t understand this; my understanding of hospice is that life-prolonging treatment is absolutely not allowed while being in hospice care (you have to exit hospice).

3Joe Carlsmith
I think this could've been clearer: it's been a bit since I wrote this/read the book, but I don't think I meant to imply that "some forms of hospice do prolong life at extreme costs to its quality" (though the sentence does read that way); more that some forms of medical treatment prolong life at extreme cost to its quality, and Gawande discusses hospice as an alternative.

~2 weeks ago, the FDA added a warning to the J&J Covid shot regarding increased risk of developing Guillain-Barré Syndrome.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the history with blood clots, my quick check of prevalence finds that reports of developing GBS following J&J vaccination are actually less than would be expected otherwise.

My very basic analysis: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1wDFrDq0E6Q096E97XzU7ndP53mYC0Paf9Wyun-XxmWA/edit?usp=sharing

Numbers from: https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/covid-vaccine-guillain-barre-syndrome

EDIT: Analyzed anot... (read more)

It's not just about Vitamin D. An example:

Liu et al. 201487 found that hypertension is reduced by UVR-induced nitric oxide independent of vitamin D. They showed that stores of nitrogen oxides in the human skin are mobilized to the systemic circulation by exposure of the body to UVA radiation, causing arterial vasodilation and a resultant decrease in blood pressure independent of vitamin D, confirming the hypothesis of Feelisch et al. 2010.88 These results correlate with the findings of Afzal et al. 201477 that genetically low 25(OH)D levels were associat

... (read more)

I entertained a similar hypothesis, but I now feel comfortable not including that to a meaningful extent in my decision making.

There's some evidence against this that I consider significant:

  1. I read ~3 doctors' takes on this question regarding a third dose; they all thought this sort of potential negative effect was very highly unlikely. At least one of them had a detailed explanation as to why that sounded reasonable to me (I'm not a medical professional), and that made that take a bit more additionally meaningful to me than those takes without explanati

... (read more)
1Ethan Perez
Also, do you think such adverse effects would also be unlikely for a fourth dose? E.g., since third dosers will probably also want to take whatever delta booster comes out
1Ethan Perez
Very helpful, thanks! That alleviates some of my concerns. Do you have any links to the doctors' takes on this question? I'd be interested to read more about what they said.

Thanks for signal-boosting, I had missed this. I'll pay at least $300 for it. (The fact that it already had been written 12 days ago seems like a point in its favour!)

It seems valuable to LOUDLY NOTE that Microcovid.org has not been updated for the Delta variant https://github.com/microcovid/microcovid/issues/869 and that the adjustment should be quite significant.

I'd be interested in perspectives on what adjustment should be implemented.

Cryopreservation doesn't have to cause damage. For instance, Aldehyde Stabilized Cryopreservation (on pigs) doesn't https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cryobiol.2015.09.003

  1. I don't think this is done at any of the main cryonics organizations, right? Their methods are damaging in perhaps less predictable ways than this mechanism.

  2. I think the statement

Cryopreservation doesn't have to cause damage

is deceptive and I wouldn't want it being shared without further context. I had a conversation with my expert-friend about this method and the type of damage it ca... (read more)

1oge
I think we agree that a safe audit would be desirable. We differ in thinking that the toxicity of ASC is a dealbreaker. Is this accurate? The most detailed studies of the brain today, which show the locations of dozens of memory-related proteins, are done using aldehydes (the A in ASC) so I hope to be revived as an emulation; I have little hope that my physical body can be rewarmed as is partly because of the difficulty of getting cryoprotectant to every part of the brain. Come to think of it, if you could be preserved pre-mortem in a territory where that is legal, and then had your body preserved at −135 °C  (ABOVE liquid nitrogen temperature and above the temp at which cracks form in the brain), then the body might be viable into the future...
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