I'm not sure he thinks his methods will achieve immortality. his overt goals are reversing aging and improving quality of life. If he's talked about living long enough for drastically better tech, I haven't heard him say it. I think he does believe it would take too long to get to a general solution for aging for it to do him any good.
I suggest thinking about other possible social dark matter.
I think deliberate weight loss makes a lot of people's lives worse-- that being hungry and distracted (possibly chilled and more frequently sick) isn't worth greater social acceptance, and that the current insistence on leanness is about looking right rather than health.
Asexuality could have fit in the article.
This reminds me of something odd about Socrates (from memory)-- when he decides to accept execution rather than exile, all of the sudden he's talking about adherence to values-- he owes so much to Athens that he won't live somewhere else-- rather than all that questioning. How does this fit into his story?
I can make some guesses, but they're no more than that.
1. His health was failing, and he decided to go out with a bang rather than enduring a decline.
2. No place else wanted him, either.
3. He came to realize the damage he was doing, and thought the punishment was appropriate.
So far, I've only read the introduction. It pulls together things I already believe, so I like it.
First thought is James C. Scott's work-- Two Cheers for Anarchism is a good starting point. He writes about tyranny's demands for legibility.
Also, a lot of science requires taking a close look at the world.
See also "the map is not the territory"-- but it takes time to see the territory.
I've been doing qi gong-- it's amazingly easy to think I know what I'm feeling physically, and a lot of work to actually start to notice it.
And I've been thinking that a way for...
If you for example want the critcism on GiveWell, Ben Hoffman was employed at GiveWell and made experiences that suggest that the process based on which their reports are made has epistemic problems. If you want the details talk to him.
The general model would be that between actual intervention and the top there are a bunch of maze levels. GiveWell then hired normal corporatist people who behave in the dynamics that the immoral maze sequence describes play themselves out.
Vassar's action themselves are about doing altruistic actions more directly by l...
He argued
(a) EA orgs aren't doing what they say they're doing (e.g. cost effectiveness estimates are wildly biased, reflecting bad procedures being used internally), and it's hard to get organizations to do what they say they do
(b) Utilitarianism isn't a form of ethics, it's still necessary to have principles, as in deontology or two-level consequentialism
(c) Given how hard it is to predict the effects of your actions on far-away parts of the world (e.g. international charity requiring multiple intermediaries working in a domain that isn't well-understood)...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivier_Ameisen
A sidetrack, but a French surgeon found that Baclofen (a muscle relaxant) cured his alcoholism by curing the craving. He was surprised to find that it cured compulsive spending when he didn't even realize he had a problem.
He had a hard time raising money for an official experiment, and it came out inconclusive, and he died before the research got any further.
This is interesting to me because I was brought up to go to college, but I didn't take it seriously (plausibly from depression or somesuch), and I definitely think of him as a guy with an interesting perspective. Okay, a smart guy with an interesting perspective, but not a god.
It had never occurred to me before that maybe people who were brought up to assume they were going to college might generally have a different take on the world than I do.
This is reminding me of a book called Plain and Simple by a woman who spent some time as a guest in Amish Families. She found that she'd mistakenly believed that having lots of options was the right way to live, but the actual effect was that she wasn't making decisions. The revelation hit when she realized she actually wanted something in particular, and ferociously re-decorated her kitchen in as somewhat Amish style. "Ferociously" seems like weirdly strong language, but she seemed surprised that she could really want something and go for it.
It's a smallish thing, but I think it's pointing at a pervasive modern error.
""Why didn't you tell him the truth? Were you afraid?"
"I'm not afraid. I chose not to tell him, because I anticipated negative consequences if I did so."
"What do you think 'fear' is, exactly?""
The possibly amusing thing is that I read it as being someone who thought fear was shameful and was therefore lying, or possibly lying to themself about not feeling fear. I wasn't expecting a discussion of p-zombies, though perhaps I should have been.
Does being strongly inhibited against knowing one's own emotions make one more like a p-zombie?
As for social inhibitio...
Have a theory about why people can be reluctant to google. It may be excessively bitter.
To a large extent (especially for neurotypical people, though it seems to depend on the subject) learning is an unconscious process. The result is that people don't know how they learned and don't know how to teach.
What's more, people are apt to want to just get things done and also apt to have punishment as an easy strategy. So they shame people for not knowing what they are supposed to have picked up somehow.
This means that googling indicates that you didn't kno...
Just to underline the fundamental question: if pain isn't a good metric (and I agree that it isn't) what is a good metric?
I'm recommending Bruce Frantzis' tai chi, qi gong, bagua etc. classes at Energyarts.com.
One of the fundamental principles is to put out reliable 70% effort-- this is enough to create progress without much chance of injury or burnout. Considerably less effort if you're sick or injured.
This is harder than it sounds, if you're from a culture which assumes that more effort = better results and is a sign of more virtue.
Your effort leve...
Plurality of my effort has been studying agency-adjacent problems. How to detect embedded Bayesian models (turns out to be numerically unstable), markets/committees requiring unanimity as a more general model of inexploitable preferences than utility functions, abstraction, how to express world models, and lately ontology translation.
Other things I've spent time on:
Until I read this, I didn't realize there are different possible claims about the dangers of cults. One claim-- the one gwern is debunking-- is that cults are a large-scale danger, and practically anyone can be taken over by a cult.
The other less hyperbolic claim is that cults can seriously screw up people's lives, even if it's a smallish proportion of people. I still think that's true.
https://www.coindesk.com/blackballed-by-paypal-scientific-paper-pirate-takes-bitcoin-donations
" In 2017, a federal court, the U.S. Southern District Court of New York, sided with Elsevier and ruled Sci-Hub should stop operating and pay $15 million in damages. In a similar lawsuit, the American Chemistry Society won a case against Elbakyan and the right to demand another $4.8 million in damages.
In addition, both courts effectively prohibited any U.S. company from facilitating Sci-Hub’s work. Elbakyan had to migrate the websit...
Conservation of thought, perhaps. The root problem is having more options than you can handle, probably amplified by bad premises. Or the other hand, if you're swamped, when will you have time to improve your premises?
"Conservation of thought" is from an early issue of The New York Review of Science Fiction.
I don't have children, and my upbringing wasn't especially good or bad on learning rationality.
Still, what I'm noticing in your post and the comments so far is the idea that rationality is something to put into your children.
I believe that rationality mostly needs to be modeled. Take your mind and your children's connection to the universe seriously. Show them that thinking and arguing are both fun and useful.
Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency is about why businesses fail if they ignore all other values in favor of maximizing profit-- they lose too much flexibility.
I'm looking forward to the rest of this series.
There was someone who was interviewed on Tim Ferriss who recommended finding out what you care about and spending a lot more on that and what you don't care about and spending a lot less on that. In particular, there was a suggestion to think about spending ten times as much on what you care about-- you've got a chance of turning up improvements which aren't nearly that expensive.
It's a fascinating essay, but non-automation isn't all that great. In particular, Confucian China had foot-binding for nearly a thousand years-- mothers slowly breaking their daughter's feet to make the daughters more marriageable.
It's possible that in the long run, societies with automation are even worse than societies without it, but I don't think that's proven.
I was very fond of this site. There were excellent essays, and the discussion structure suited me very well. I'm more of a short form writer. Also, the way it was easy to find old material and conveniently add to old threads is a feature that ssc doesn't have.
The big block of unchanging recommendations at the top of LW2 gets on my nerves.
This being said, the resident troll squeezed a lot of the fun out of LW1, and getting to be moderator-- and then discovering I didn't have adequate moderation tools-- gave me something of an ugh field about the place. And now it's over. It was good when it was good.
There's an alternate approach I've seen in Neo-Paganism-- have a structure for rituals, and a high proportion of people who can improvise within the framework.
I don't know whether this would work for rationalist rituals (maybe if we start having smaller more frequent rituals), but I'm mentioning it for completeness.
I don't like the way he treated his girlfriend, but that doesn't address whether his health advice is good. It did make me want independent verification of his claims about what he's selling.