All of byrnema's Comments + Replies

what observation can distinguish those which actually are loving?

I think, evidence that the universe was designed with some degree of attention to our well-being. If the universe is unexpectedly kind to us, or if we are especially well taken care of, would be evidence of a loving God.

I'm conflicted about which universe we're in. Things could certainly be worse, but it's also not very good. Is life more tolerable to us than we'd expect by random chance?

But for sure, just look at outcome. It only muddles to consider intention for three reasons:

(1) it is ... (read more)

True. I linked the article as an example of the idealistic journalist, one that is disappointed that his motives are distrusted by the public.

Your comment is well-received. I'm continuing to to think about it and what this means for finding reliable media sources.

My impression of journalists has always been that they would be fairly idealistic about information and communicating that information to be attracted to their profession. I also imagine that their goals are constantly antagonized by the goals of their bosses, that do want to make money, and probably it is the case that the most successful sell-out or find a good trade-off that is not entirely ideal for them or the critical reader.

I'll ... (read more)

7Azathoth123
Unfortunately, in practice this frequently translates to "show the world how evil those blues are even if I have to bend the literal truth a little to do it."
5NancyLebovitz
The link is making a different argument-- it says the problem isn't with the journalists or with their bosses, it's that the public isn't paying attention to the stories journalists are risking their necks to get.
7Lumifer
My feeling is that quest is misguided. There is no such thing as a pure spring which gushes only truth -- you cannot find one. My own approach is to accept that reality is fuzzy, multilayered, multidimensional, looks very different from different angles, and is almost always folded, spindled, and mutilated for the purpose of producing a coherent and attractive story. Read lots of different (but, hopefully, smart and well-informed) sources which disagree with each other. Together they will weave a rich tapestry which might not coalesce into a simple picture but will be more "true", in a way, than a straight narrative. Having said this, I should point out that adding pretty clear lies to the mix is not useful and there are enough sources sufficiently tainted to just ignore.

I might need some recalibration, but I'm not sure.

I research topics of interest in the media, and I feel frustrated, angry and annoyed about the half-truths and misleading statements that I encounter frequently. The problem is not the feelings, but whether I am 'wrong'. I figure there are two ways that I might be wrong:

(i) Maybe I'm wrong about these half-truths and misleading statements not being necessary. Maybe authors have already considered telling the facts straight and that didn't get the best message out.

(ii) Maybe I'm actually wrong about whether... (read more)

9ChristianKl
That's a funny sentence. You yourself blame scientists with whom you didn't interact at all based on the way they got quoted without critically asking yourself whether your behavior makes sense. If a journalist quotes a scientist the process might be: Journalists picks up the phone and calls the scientists. They talk 15 minutes about the issue. Then the journalist who thinks that it's his job to quote an authority picks one sentence of that interview that fits into the narrative the journalist wants to tell. It's quite possible that the scientists even didn't say that sentence "word for word". It's also quite possible that you spend more time investigating the issue in detail then some of the journalists you read.

My first suggestion would be to look at the incentives of people who write for the media. Their motivations are NOT to "get the best message out". That's not what they're paid for. Nowadays their principal goal is to attract eyeballs and hopefully monetize them by shoving ads into your face. The critical thing to recognize is that their goals and criteria of what constitutes a successful piece do not match your goals and your criteria of what constitutes a successful piece.

The second suggestion would be to consider that writers write for a particular audience and, I think, most of the time you will not be a member of that particular audience. Mass media doesn't write for people like you.

A person infected with Ebola is very contagious during the period they are showing symptoms. The CDC recommends casual contact and droplet precautions.

Note the following description of (casual) contact:

Casual contact is defined as a) being within approximately 3 feet (1 meter) or within the room or care area for a prolonged period of time (e.g., healthcare personnel, household members) while not wearing recommended personal protective equipment (i.e., droplet and contact precautions–see Infection Prevention and Control Recommendations); or b) having di

... (read more)

Sorry, realized I don't feel comfortable commenting on such a high-profile topic. Will wait a few minutes and then delete this comment (just to make sure there are no replies.)

[This comment is no longer endorsed by its author]Reply

I don't believe we disagree on anything. For example, I agree with this:

If you have equal numbers at +4 and +3 and +2, then most of the +4 still may not be the best, but the best is likely to be +4.

Are you talking about relative sample sizes, or absolute?

By 'plenty of points'... I was imagining that we are taking a finite sample from a theoretically infinite population. A person decides on a density that represents 'plenty of points' and then keeps adding to the sample until they have that density up to a certain specified sd.

Interesting post. Well thought out, with an original angle.

In the direction of constructive feedback, consider that the concept of sample size -- while it seems to help with the heuristic explanation -- likely just muddies the water. (We'd still have the effect even if there were plenty of points at all values.)

For example, suppose there were so many people with extreme height some of them also had extreme agility (with infinite sample size, we'd even reliably have that the best players we're also the tallest.) So: some of the tallest people are also the... (read more)

1philh
Are you talking about relative sample sizes, or absolute? The effect requires that as you go from +4sd to +3sd to +2sd, your population increases sufficiently fast. As long as that holds, it doesn't go away if the total population grows. (But that's because if you get lots of points at +4sd, then you have a smaller number at +5sd. So you don't have "plenty of points at all values".) If you have equal numbers at +4 and +3 and +2, then most of the +4 still may not be the best, but the best is likely to be +4. (Warning: I did not actually do the math.)

I see. I was confused for a while, but in the hypothetical examples I was considering, a link between MMR and autism might be missed (a false negative with 5% probability) but isn't going to found unless it was there (low false positive). Then Vanviver explains, above, that the canonical null-hypothesis framework assumes that random chance will make it look like there is an effect with some probability -- so it is the false positive rate you can tune with your sample size.

I marginally understand this. For example, I can't really zoom out and see why you c... (read more)

(I realize I'm confused about something and am thinking it through for a moment.)

3byrnema
I see. I was confused for a while, but in the hypothetical examples I was considering, a link between MMR and autism might be missed (a false negative with 5% probability) but isn't going to found unless it was there (low false positive). Then Vanviver explains, above, that the canonical null-hypothesis framework assumes that random chance will make it look like there is an effect with some probability -- so it is the false positive rate you can tune with your sample size. I marginally understand this. For example, I can't really zoom out and see why you can't define your test so that the false positive rate is low instead. That's OK. I do understand your example and see that it is relevant for the null-hypothesis framework. (My background in statistics is not strong and I do not have much time to dedicate to this right now.)

OK, that sounds straightforward.

How does one know that the 60 studies are these? (rather then the others (e.g., that were designed to show an effect with 95% probability, but failed to do so and thus got a negative result)).

Another way of asking my question, perhaps more clearly, is: how do we know if the 60 considered studies were testing the hypothesis that there was a link or the hypothesis that there was not a link?

9Douglas_Knight
There is an asymmetry that makes it implausible that the null hypothesis would be that there is an effect. The null hypothesis has to be a definite value. The null hypothesis can be zero, which is what we think it is, or it could be some specific value, like a 10% increase in autism. But the null hypothesis cannot be "there is some effect of unspecified magnitude." There is no data that can disprove that hypothesis, because it includes effects arbitrarily close to zero. But that can be the positive hypothesis, because it is possible to disprove the complementary null hypothesis, namely zero. Another more symmetric way of phrasing it is that we do the study and compute a confidence interval, that we are 95% confident that the effect size is in that interval. That step does not depend on the choice of hypothesis. But what do we do with this interval? We reject every hypothesis not in the interval. If zero is not in the interval, we reject it. If a 10% increase is not in the interval, we can reject that. But we cannot reject all nonzero effect sizes at once.
8Vaniver
I think the answer to this is "because they're using NHST." They say "we couldn't detect an effect at the level that random chance would give us 5% of the time, thus we are rather confident there is no effect." But that we don't see our 5% false positives suggests that something about the system is odd.

Which 5%?

No, that 5% is the probability of a false positive, [...]

No, "that" 5% is the probability from my cooked-up example, which was the probability of a false-negative.

You're saying (and Phil says also in several places) that in his example the 5% is the probability of a false positive. I don't disagree, a priori, but I would like to know, how do we know this? This is a necessary component of the full argument that seems to be missing so far.

1byrnema
Another way of asking my question, perhaps more clearly, is: how do we know if the 60 considered studies were testing the hypothesis that there was a link or the hypothesis that there was not a link?

I don't think that it's necessarily suspicious in that, a priori, I wouldn't have a problem with 60 tests all being negative even though they're all only 95% confident.

The reason being, depending on the nature of the test, the probability of a false negative might indeed be 5% while the probability of a false positive could be tiny. Suppose this is indeed the case and let's consider the two cases that the true answer is either 'positive' or 'negative'.

(A) if the true conclusion is 'positive', any test can yield a negative with 5% probability. (this test wi... (read more)

8Douglas_Knight
No, that 5% is the probability of false positive, not the probability of false negative. Phil has the number he needs and uses it correctly.

I preferred to count down since I would like to keep track of how many comments remain until I've successfully met my commitment. If I had just wanted to accumulate an unspecified number, I would have counted up.

…any particular reason why you asked?

0Douglas_Knight
Just because you are counting up doesn't mean the limit is unspecified. Indeed, your original version explicitly specified the limit in every comment. I asked because it looked very odd to me, especially counting down using # signs. I asked in the present tense because I thought you might have a general rule, such as counting down for commitments. Here is an analogous situation: what if you are managing a crowd on a trip, so you count them at the beginning, and again at some checkpoint, to make sure you haven't lost them. Do you count down?

Thanks for the feedback. I'll keep track of my 50 comments more unobtrusively. (Comment #47.)

0Douglas_Knight
How do you decide whether to count down or to count up?

This is one of the strangest posts I have ever read on Less Wrong..


50 comments 50 words or less. #48

4Pfft
Meh, it doesn't even contain an Icelandic image search for "no".

Depending on opportunities in your field, academia may provide favorable amounts of freedom, job security and impact. However, for the quintessential academic, academia is not a calculated optimization but a personality type:

It’s awesome to be supported while you learn and think, if that’s what you wanted to do anyway.


50 comments 50 words or less. #49

I had already noticed I needed to adjust in this direction. I'm going to try being more concise and see how it goes.

Specifically, 50 words or less for 50 comments. (#50)

4moridinamael
The signature lines you're writing under your posts are confusing and caused me to follow your post history to understand what was going on, arriving here, so that I can now tell you adding a block of extra text to all your posts in an effort to be terse seems like a lost purpose.

I appreciate your responses, thanks. My perspective on understanding a concept was a bit different -- once a concept is owned, I thought, you apply it everywhere and are confused and startled when it doesn't apply. But especially in considering this example I see your point about the difficulty in understanding the concept fully and consistently applying it.

Volume conservation is something we learn through experience that is true -- it's not logically required, and there are probably some interesting materials that violate it at any level of interpretati... (read more)

1Kaj_Sotala
I appreciate hearing that you appreciate them. :) Boaler 1993 is another interesting discussion about the rules that people might use in order to decide what kind of skill or mental strategy might apply to a situation. It argues that, because school math problems often require a student to ignore a lot of features that would be relevant if they were actually solving a similar problem in real life, they easily end up learning that "school math" is a weird and mysterious form of mathematics in which normal rules don't apply. As a result, while they might become capable of solving "school math" problems, this prevents them from actually applying the learnt knowledge in real life. They learn that school math problems require a mental strategy of school math, and that real-life math problems require an entirely different mental strategy.

I agree that while not exactly 'volume conservation', this addresses the exact same skill.

If the child gave a good explanation for a problem, there was only a 43 percent chance of his advancing the same explanation when later confronted with the identical problem.

Would you interpret this as meaning the children had not acquired the concept, after all? It seems that if the child actually truly understands the concept that moving things around doesn't change their number, then they wouldn't be inconsistent. (Or is the study demonstrating what I found unintuitive, that children can grasp and then forget a concept?)

2Kaj_Sotala
I interpreted it as indicating that there are multiple ways of thinking about the problem, some of which produce the right answer and some of which produce the wrong answer. There's an element of chance involved in which one the child happens to employ, and children who are farther along in their development are more likely but not certain to pick the correct one on any single trial. "Acquiring a concept" is a little ambiguous of an expression - suppose there's some subsystem or module in the child's brain which has learned to apply the right logic and hits upon on the right answer each time, but that subsystem is only activated and applied to the task part of the time, and on other occasions other subsystems are applied instead. Maybe the brain has learned that this system/mode of thought is the right way to think about the issue in some situations, but it hasn't yet reliably learned to distinguish what those situations are. Not sure how analogous this really is, but I'm reminded of the fact that IBM's Watson used a wide variety of algorithms for scoring possible answer candidates, and then used a metalearning algorithm for figuring out the algorithms whose outputs were the most predictive of the correct answer in different situations (i.e. doing model combination and adjustment). So it, too, had some algorithms which produced the right answer, but it didn't originally know which ones they were and when they should be applied. That kind of an explanation would still be compatible with a sudden boost in math talent, if things suddenly clicked and the learner came to more reliably apply the correct ways of thinking. But I'm not entirely sure if it's necessarily a developmental thing, as opposed to just being a math-related skill that was acquired by practice. Jonah wrote: And if there is a specific "recognize the situations that can be thought of in algebraic terms and where algebraic reasoning is appropriate" skill, for example, then simultaneously studying mult

What I summarize from the above is that educators have decided that Piaget's theory is not helpful for deciding 'developmentally appropriate practice'. Perhaps because the transitions from one stage to another are fuzzy and overlapping, or because students of a particular age group are not necessarily in step. Furthermore, understanding of a concept is 'multi-dimensional' and there are many ways to approach it, and many ways for a child to think about it, rather than a unique pathway, so that a student might seem more or less advanced depending on how you ... (read more)

6Kaj_Sotala
The article doesn't discuss conservation of volume in detail, but it talks about an experiment that's said to be "conceptually similar". And while it's hard to say from the quote, it seems to imply that when children are given feedback on the similar problem, their performance improves (I've bolded that part):

The basic capability for formal operations sets in much earlier.

I think it depends. The wikipedia page says that the onset is between 11 and 20 years or so.

My aptitude in mathematics was a bit above average when I was 11 years old. Maybe I had already met the criterion for the formal operation stage, despite not doing well in math the first couple years of high school. But something significant happened when I was 17, and it seemed to be a qualitative change in the way I understood mathematics. I also seemed to be developed the ability to excel in Algeb... (read more)

Maybe.

When something very similar happened to me (failing Algebra in 9th grade, aptitude suddenly surfacing in 11th), I also thought motivation was really important, but I also noticed my brain working differently. Algebra went from being semi-confused symbol manipulation to understanding what a variable was actually about.

In a simultaneous psychology course, I learned about Piaget's "formal operational stage" and that's what I attributed it to. I think it happens when you're 17 or 18. (Consider/compare with also this data point). So I agreed,... (read more)

1itaibn0
It's interesting that you found Piaget's "formal operational stage" so applicable. I remember when I learned about it (also in a psychology course at around the same age) I found the claim that people only develop abstract thought at the age of 12 completely ridiculous. This is probably related to how my own development was very anomalous.
6Kaj_Sotala
Criticism of Piaget's theory
2Emily
I think 17 or 18 would be considered pretty outlyingly late for the onset of a formal operational stage... but it is supposed to be an ongoing stage of development from something like 11-13 or so onwards, so I guess there could still be some sort of qualitative change around that age.
9JonahS
Good point. I think that there was in fact a physiological shift. But that doesn't account for my dramatically improved performance relative to my classmates.

I though the cartoon was a good example. The tiger convinced the boy that he was smarter than he actually was, with smooth talking.

It seems you are using 'seeming smart' as interchangeable with 'convincing' or 'persuasive'?

However, these are quite independent. Someone can easily convince me of something, without my thinking they are more intelligent than I am, and without convincing me that they are more intelligent than they are.

Consider a 'smooth talker'. I think people generally recognize that these smooth-talkers are more likable and persuasive on any topic, but there is no necessary correlation with having a higher IQ. In fiction, there are extreme examples like Forest Gump (low... (read more)

-3Eugine_Nier
Well, there are entire tropes about this.

Fluidly using the right jargon, and signaling that you 'know stuff' without sounding like you're trying hard too show that you know stuff, requires a fair amount of intelligence. (Incidentally, an inability to maintain a natural flow of conversation when someone knows a lot of stuff is one way highly intelligent people reveal that their social acuity is not that high. Their IQ may be extremely high, but a five minute interview can often easily identify these things.)

A certain degree of being articulate and appropriately assertive can be trained – I think I... (read more)

The outside view is very good to apply, especially in this case where there hasn't been much independent validation and lots of opportunity for confirmation bias. However, I would and do generally trust the assessment someone else makes about the intelligence of someone else. (With the exception of any assessments based on politics or tribe affiliation.) I guess I agree with the OP that intelligence is fairly straightforward to estimate with secondary signals.

I'm not familiar with any charlatans or scammers being successful by pretending to be smarter tha... (read more)

-3Eugine_Nier
They are if you're smarter then they really are. Well, there's Yvain's tale of how he was almost convinced by Velikovsky's pseudohistory.

I find that I don't agree with this comment, though perhaps if I thought about it more I would..

I often categorize people as 10-points-smarter-than-me, 20-points-smarter-than-me, etc, just naturally as I go about my day, and I'm (currently) fairly confident of my evaluations.

Sometimes I can get a pretty good estimate by speaking with someone for 5 minutes -- but I'm aware this is heavily weighted towards verbal acuity, which is just one dimension. A high verbal acuity for me is a marker of high IQ, though average verbal acuity is not strong evidence eithe... (read more)

2Eugine_Nier
So you don't have any independent way to verify your evaluations. Let's apply the outside view here: Would you trust the assessment of someone of average or below average intelligence about the relative intelligence of people smarter than him. Note that there exist entire cottage industries of quacks, charlatans, and scammers based on convincing people that someone is smarter than they really are.

So it's like the same algorithm operating on different data?

To be clear, just the part about feeling like I'm "me". I think it would feel very different to be an alien, but I expect I would feel the same way about being myself.

On some level of abstraction this is both trivial and meaningless: at the bottom we all are just "particles following the same laws of physics"

I agree about the triviality. Especially for the thesis that we all share one consciousness -- that we are all a physical computation is both obvious and meaningles... (read more)

What exactly it means to "feel the same" in this context? The same memories? No. The same plans? No. The same emotions? No.

Memories, plans, emotions and even qualities of what it feels like to be a general or specific human are all aspects I would bundle with an identity's 'situation'. For example, in philosophies that assert there is 'one shared consciousness', they don't mean we all think the same thoughts or have the same plans.

Rather, there would be something in common with specifically the ways it feels on the inside to be an 'I', to be ... (read more)

3Viliam_Bur
So it's like the same algorithm operating on different data? On some level of abstraction this is both trivial and meaningless: at the bottom we all are just "particles following the same laws of physics". The question is, can we make it more specific while it still remains true? How far? That's a great way to put it!

To try steel-manning your perspective, if I'm not misrepresenting it, the idea is that every identity feels the same from the inside, it doesn't matter which one you have or which one is you.

I agree with this.

However (in response to Tenoke below) the situations of identities, and relationships between identities, do matter so it doesn't follow that you can change situations (or kill people) without creating value differences.

0Viliam_Bur
What exactly it means to "feel the same" in this context? The same memories? No. The same plans? No. The same emotions? No. Seems to me the "same" things are: (1) being a consciousness, and (2) having the traits that all humans have. In the latter sense we are the same to all humans, and in the former sense, we are the same to all conscious being. But it seems like stretching the meaning of the word "same" extremely far, almost to its opposite.
0Thomas
Please, continue!

Oh, I see you already considered this:

But I'd say that there's a small chance that maybe yes, and that if we understood the right kind of math, it would seem very obvious that not all intuitively possible human experiences are actually mathematically possible.

I think this is very likely, and in fact we don't need to compute what is possible ... What we experience is exactly what is mathematically possible.

So why is our world so orderly? There's a mathematically possible continuation of the world that you seem to be living in, where purple pumpkins are about to start falling from the sky. Or the light we observe coming in from outside our galaxy is suddenly replaced by white noise. Why don't you remember ever seeing anything as obviously disorderly as that?

Who says all of this is mathematically possible? I've read this idea before, and I think it's wrong.

First of all, I think it's very difficult to guess what is mathematically possible. We experience the... (read more)

0byrnema
Oh, I see you already considered this: I think this is very likely, and in fact we don't need to compute what is possible ... What we experience is exactly what is mathematically possible.

I also discovered I was like this as a teenager -- that I had an extremely malleable identity. I think it was related to being very empathetic -- I just accepted whichever world view the person I was speaking with came with, and I think in my case this might have been related to reading a lot growing up, so that it seemed that a large fraction of my total life experience were the different voices of the different authors that I had read. (Reading seems to require quickly assimilating the world view of whomever is first person.)

I also didn't make much disti... (read more)

0tristanhaze
This is interesting, particularly in connection with your grativation towards materialism - thanks for sharing.

So that's what I am going to do. I actually ordered an external hard drive, and every few weeks I'll back up my hard drive. The whole thing (no decisions).

I also understand that I don't need to worry about versions -- the external hard drive just saves the latest version.

I also talked to a friend today and found out they backed their data regularly. I was surprised; didn't know regular people did this regularly.

I understood (and my perspective changed quite a bit) as soon as I read about Miller's Law in the exchange you linked. I really like having a handle for the concept (for my own sake, its usefulness is curbed by not being well-known).

I believe the default interpretation of the question you asked is the interpretation that I had (that you were using the Socratic method). The reason for this being the default interpretation is that there is an obvious, intuitive answer. (This question was a good counter-argument, which is why I think it was up-voted.)

... to d... (read more)

0TheOtherDave
(nods) Yeah, that last one would have been a good alternative, in retrospect. I got there eventually but could have gotten there sooner. (The other one is a fine question, but I already had the answer.) Though I suspect that it, too, would have been understood as Socratic in the closed-ended sense.

I'm interested in the choices, and the factors that contribute to those choices, so I asked about them.

If you are specifically interested in the contexts of a person deciding that they do wish, or do not wish, to continue living in the current moment, then my comment wasn't relevant.

However, I interpreted your question as a Socratic challenge to realize that one values immortality because they do not wish to die in the present moment. (I think these are separate systems in some sense, perhaps far versus near).

0TheOtherDave
Yeah, I often get misinterpreted that way. Relevant earlier exchange here. Any suggestions you have about how I could have worded my question to make it clearer that I was actually interested in the answer are welcome.

I don't think this question is a good way to investigate feelings about immortality and death.

This is somewhat related to Yvain's post post about liking versus wanting / The Neuroscience of Pleasure.

While we're alive, we want to keep on living. I recall moments -- locked away for the moment, unreachable --when the idea of death caused feelings of intense terror. But one can also recognize an immutable biological component to this (immutable unless one is depressed or in pain, etc). To circumnavigate this immediate biological feeling about death, it is bett... (read more)

0TheOtherDave
Sure, I recognize that there are all kinds of feelings one can have about immortality and death that are not captured, or even necessarily relevant, to one's choices about living and dying. I'm interested in the choices, and the factors that contribute to those choices, so I asked about them. Others are of course welcome to investigate other things however they consider best.

I have a Windows machine, but I know there are automatic back-up schedules that can be done. I just don't want to do it... I don't want to think about a complex automatic process or make decisions about scheduling. Trying to pinpoint why ... it feels messy and discontinuous and inconvenient, to keep saving iterations of all my old junk.

3Lumifer
Backups aren't about saving your old junk. Backup are about saving everything that you have on your hard drive in case it goes to the Great Write-Only Memory In The Sky. If you're talking about staggered backups or snapshots, their usefulness lies mostly in being a (very primitive) versioning system, as well as a possible lifeline in case your data gets silently corrupted and you don't notice fast enough.
6Richard_Kennaway
When dealing with old data, what I find most stressful is deciding which things to keep. So as far as possible I don't. It's a wasted effort. I keep everything, or I delete everything. It doesn't matter that there's gigabytes of stuff on my machine that I'll never look at, as long as I never have to see it or think about it. Disc space is measured in terabytes these days.
1Said Achmiz
Well, the way it works on the Mac — and I'm only describing this because I speculate that similar, if not quite as awesome, solutions exist for Windows — is this: 1. Scheduling: backups happen every hour if the backup drive is plugged in; or, whenever you plug it in; plus, you can trigger them manually. You pretty much don't have to think about it; just either keep the thing plugged in (easy with a desktop), or plug it in once in a while. 2. Multiple iterations of your stuff: there's a "history" of backups, maintained automatically. You can go back to any backed-up prior version (to a certain point; how long a history you can keep is dictated by available storage space). The interface for restoring things hides the messy complexity of the multiple versions from you, and just lets you go back to the latest version, or any previous available version, sorted by time. With good backup software, it's really quite smooth and easy. The process is not complex; decisions to be made are minimal; your backup feels nice and non-messy; restoring is easy as pie. Unfortunately I can't recommend good Windows backup software, but maybe someone else can chime in.

(This is a stream of consciousness where I explore why I haven't backed up my data. This proceeds in stages, with evolution to the next stage only because the writing of this comment forced me to keep going. Thus, it's a data point in response to this comment.)

Back up your data, people. It's so easy

Interesting. I have a very dense 'ugh field' around backing up my data, come to think of it. Based on this population of one, it has nothing to do with not trusting the salesperson, or not being aware that my hard drive is going to fail.

... in fact, I know ... (read more)

4Richard_Kennaway
Others have mentioned Dropbox, but it's so wonderful I'll mention it again. Dropbox. It's almost as awesome in its just-works-ness as Time Machine (Apple's awesome backup solution). Free up to 2GB, $10/month gets you 100GB. Runs on everything. Note that Dropbox isn't designed as a backup solution, it's really for sharing files across multiple devices. It only preserves the current version of a file, so offers no protection against deleting a file you didn't mean to. As soon as you edit a file, the changes are uploaded to the Dropbox cloud. A point to remember is that every backup solution protects against some threats but not others, and you have to decide what you need to defend against. I have a Time Capsule (external drive for Time Machine backup), but it's in the same room as the computer, so it provides excellent protection against disc failure or accidental deletion, but none against theft. So I also have an external drive that I plug in once a week and the rest of the time leave hidden elsewhere. If the files on your computer are your livelihood, you need an off-site backup to survive risks such as your house burning down, or serious burglars doing a complete house clearance. A backup solution that presents a continuous, ongoing chore is not going to work. It has to be something that once you set it up, Just Works. I don't know if there's anything as awesome as Time Machine in this respect for Windows. Ideally a solution should automatically backup everything, except possibly some things you specifically exclude. If you only back up things you specifically decide to, you will inevitably leave things out, that you'll only discover when you need the backup you don't have.
0Said Achmiz
I take it you've got a Windows or Linux machine? Because if you have a Mac, there's a much easier solution. Edit: I mean easier than a continuous, ongoing chore of deciding what files to save, drag-and-dropping stuff, etc. You do still need to buy a device, though. For a $20 budget I recommend this 32 GB USB flash drive.

Hmm...I wonder to what extent emigrating a relative 'lot' has formed my ideas about identity. Especially when I was younger, I did not feel like my identity was very robust to abrupt and discordant changes, usually geographic, and just accepted that different parts of my life felt different.

I did enjoy change, exactly as an adventure, and I have no wish to end experience.

However, with a change as discontinuous as cryonics (over time and social networks), I find that I'm not attached to particular components of my identity (such as gender and profession a... (read more)

But I wanted to add ... if the daughter of the person from Ohio is also cryonicized and revived (somewhat randomly, I based my identities on the 118th and 88th patients at Alcor, though I don''t know what their professions were, and the 88th patient did have a daughter), I very much hope that the mother-daughter pair may be revived together. That, I think, would be a lot of fun to wake up together and find out what the new world is like.

I think you're going too far when saying it's "no different than any other", but I agree with the core idea - being revived without any of my social connections in an alien world would indeed significantly change "who I am".

Hmm..actually, you have a different point of view.

I feel like I would have the same identity even without my social connections; I would have the specific identity that I currently have if I was revived.

My point was more along the lines it doesn't matter which identity I happened to have -- mine or someone else's... (read more)

0byrnema
But I wanted to add ... if the daughter of the person from Ohio is also cryonicized and revived (somewhat randomly, I based my identities on the 118th and 88th patients at Alcor, though I don''t know what their professions were, and the 88th patient did have a daughter), I very much hope that the mother-daughter pair may be revived together. That, I think, would be a lot of fun to wake up together and find out what the new world is like.

It's neutral from a point of pleasure vs suffering for the dead person

It forgets opportunity costs. Dying deprive the person of all the future experience (s)he could have, so of a huge amount of pleasure (and potentially suffering too).

I feel like being revived in the future would be a new project I am not yet emotionally committed to.

I think I would be / will be very motivated to extend my life, but when it comes to expending effort to "come back", I realize I feel some relief with just letting my identity go.

The main reason behind this i... (read more)

0Richard_Kennaway
Suppose that due to political upheavals you suddenly had to emigrate on your own. If you stay you will die, and if you leave you will lose your connections. Would you not leave, with regret certainly, but make new connections in your new home? In the present day world, many people have to do this. Cryonics is like emigration. You leave this time and place because otherwise you die, get into a flimsy boat that may well sink on the trip, and possibly emerge into a new land of which you know nothing. To some it is even a desirable adventure.
0kilobug
I think you're going too far when saying it's "no different than any other", but I agree with the core idea - being revived without any of my social connections in an alien world would indeed significantly change "who I am". And it's one of the main reason for which while I do see some attraction in cryonics, I didn't do any serious move in that direction. It would be all different if a significant part of my family or close friends would sign too.

I meant a physical copy.

Would it make a difference, to you, if they rebuilt you in-situ, rather than adjacent?

But I just noticed this set of sentences, so I was incorrect to assume common ideas about identity:

In particular, I find questions about personal identity and consciousness of uploads made from preserved brains confusing,

0[anonymous]
I know. I was pointing out that your thought experiment might not actually apply to the topic of cryonics.

If it could be done, would you pay $500 for a copy of you to be created tomorrow in a similar but separate alternate reality?(Like an Everette branch that is somewhat close to ours, but faraway enough that you are not already in it?)

Given what we know about identity, etc., this is what you are buying.

Personally, I wouldn't pay five cents.

Unless people that you know and love are also signed up for cryonics? (In which case you ought to sign up, for lots of reasons including keeping them company and supporting their cause.)

1[anonymous]
Cryonics does not necessarily imply uploading. It is possible that using atomically precise medical technology we could revive and rebuild the brain and body in-situ, thereby retaining continuity.

Ah, thanks. My interpretation was that he was saying that conscious minds do that particular carving, but your interpretation is that he proposes that particular carving for finding conscious minds – and other entity like objects. That makes more sense.

Ok, that's a start, thanks. So is he suggesting that the way consciousness carves reality at the joints is special?

...in which case, this carving must be done at the analysis stage, right, not at the perception stage? Because at the perception stage, our senses work just like other (non-conscious) sensors.

And then finally, if he is talking about the way the conscious mind carves reality at the joints, this is processing after we have all the data so why is quantum mechanics relevant? (I imagine that a creature could analyze sensory data in lots of differe... (read more)

5Luke_A_Somers
He's trying to find the joints that you have to carve in quantum mechanical systems so that you can find any consciousnesses that happen to be in them. So yes, it's entirely in the analysis stage - finding how to describe in quantum mechanical terms those things we already know how to describe in informal language, like 'person' or 'choice' or 'memory'.
Load More