The lack of an automatic repair mechanism makes things hairier, but while frozen, the radiation damage will be localized to the cells that get hit by radiation. By the time you get the tech to revive people from cryonic freezing, you'll most likely have the tech to fix/remove/replace the individual damaged cells before reviving someone. I think you're right that radiation won't be a big limiting factor, though it may be an annoying obstacle.
I don't know so much about C-14, but wouldn't potassium decay's effects be small on timescales ~10,000 years? The radioactive natural isotope K-40 has a ridiculously long half life (1.25 billion years, which is why potassium-argon dating is popular for dating really old things) and only composes 0.012% of natural potassium. Potassium's also much less abundant in the body than carbon - only about 140g of a 70kg person is potassium, although admittedly it might be more concentrated in the brain, which is the important part.
ETA - I did calculations, and maybe...
This is a nice example of the slipperiness I sometimes notice when I think about how one could test an ev. psych hypothesis. My first thought after reading your comment was 'but won't all those factors be just as correlated with unhappiness and depression as with genetic fitness? Surely there's a less complex explanation here: unhappy people don't like living as much, so they try killing themselves more.'
Then I thought a little more and realized that could also have an ev. psych basis: maybe we evolved to kill ourselves more when we're unhappy with life. B...
I had a similar discussion with a family member, about the existence of the Christian god, where I received that exact response. My wife was sitting right there. I responded with something along the lines of, "True, but my 'faith' in her love is already backed up by evidence, and besides, I have plenty of evidence that she exists. If there was evidence for God and evidence of His love, I would happily put faith in that too."
But I agree - it definitely caused me to pause to consider a tactful response.
Who's right? Who knows. It's a fine opportunity to remain skeptical.
Bullshit. The 'skeptical' thing to do would be to take 30 seconds to think about the theory's physical plausibility before posting it on one's blog, not regurgitate the theory and cover one's ass with an I'm-so-balanced-look-there's-two-sides-to-the-issue fallacy.
TV-frequency EM radiation is non-ionizing, so how's it going to transfer enough energy to your cells to cause cancer? It could heat you up, or it could induce currents within your body. But however much heating it causes, the...
it's at least a little silly for Kottke to say he's posting it because it's 'interesting' and not because it's 'right'
Yup, that's the bit I thought made it appropriate for LW.
It reminded me of my speculations on "asymmetric intellectual warfare" - we are bombarded all day long with things that are "interesting" in one sense or another but should still be dismissed outright, if only because paying attention to all of them would leave us with nothing left over for worthwhile items.
But we can also note regularities in the patterns of wh...
Does the lack of a response from EY imply that he's not interested in that sort of change and, if so, is it EY who would be the one to make the decision?
I wouldn't read anything into the lack of response, EY often doesn't comment on meta-discussion. In fact I'd guess there's a good chance he hasn't even seen this thread!
I guess it might be worth raising this in the Spring 2010 meta-thread? Come to think of it, it's been 4+ months since that meta thread was started - it may even be worth someone posting a Summer 2010 meta-thread with this as a topic starter.
I had a houseguest for a few days recently, a long-time reader who has only written a handful of comments, and I commented to him that the quality of discussion on LW is worse than it has ever been, and his reply was, "Well, yeah if you are talking about WrongBot."
I think your houseguest might not have read a representative selection of LW posts; their assessment doesn't ring true for me. I haven't read WrongBot's top-level posts closely (nothing personal - the evolutionary psychology stuff just isn't that interesting to me), but I've skimmed ...
Enthusiastically seconded.
The only change I'd make is to hide editorial comments when the post leaves editing (instead of deleting them), with a toggle option for logged-in users to carry on viewing them.
Unfortunately, most of the busy smart people only looked at the posts after editing, while the trolls and people with too much free time managed the edit queue, eventually destroying the quality of the site and driving the good users away. It might be possible to salvage that model somehow, though.
I think it is. There are several tricks we could use to...
Upvoted for raising the topic, but the approach I'd prefer is jimrandomh's suggestion of having all posts pass through an editorial stage before being posted 'for real.'
I'm open to suggestions for how I might improve the introduction to the article to make the article more palatable.
I was going to suggest this, but I see you've already added it: thanks for editing in your definition of capitalism at the top of the post. When I first read the post, that was something I thought would improve it. Like SilasBarta I thought it was a bad idea to leave unclear what you were counting as capitalism.
Done. I'm looking forward to either Nancy's substantive reply and apology, or your concession that the issue might be a bit more complicated.
It seems to me that the issue's already been complicated because you've already replied to Nancy impolitely. Now that's happened, it is not really realistic to expect a substantive reply and apology from her simply because you (I, if we're being pedantic) rephrased some of your original remarks more tactfully.
...Okay, but the part Nancy ignored when she replied bore directly on (and obviated!) her comment, so she sh
The rudeness is in how she completely ignores the explanation I just gave in the parent comment, of why wide feet would lead to people being prejudiced against you, which obviates her question.
There's no explicit question in the comment of NL's I think you're thinking of, so I imagine you mean that the statements in her comment could be read as implying an already-answered question, which makes the comment rude. That hardly registers on my rudeness detector; unless it's part of a systematic pattern of behavior, it's innocuous IMO.
Still, let me pretend I...
I don't think I'm capable of answering that question, since I'm not seeing the 'rudeness' in the parent comment posted by Nancy to which your linked comment replies. At any rate, I didn't find that particular comment of yours obnoxious except for the 'pity party' snark, which I basically just wrote off as your usual level of prickliness.
Did you find it obnoxious when Nancy outright ignored the part of the comment where I explained why having wide feet would lead to others being prejudiced against you? Or just the fact of me mentioning this ignoranc ... er, "act of ignoring".
Neither. I found the manner in which you mentioned it obnoxious, not the mention qua mention.
...This is what always gets me: no one cares when someone doesn't read a comment and yet still replies to it -- well, to a version of it. Yet when someone points out the rudeness of doing so -- well, then that perso
Not one of the downvoters, but the tone of these paragraphs was so overcooked I did consider it for a couple seconds:
...And frankly, when the asymmetic bra issue came up, I got pretty scared. Some of the commenters -- and I'm not going to single anyone out -- sound like really angry people in general and I fear that being around them would make their rage spill on to me.
They have this entitlement mentality, where everyone has to make clothes that they like. I think it's what motivates a lot of the crime against retailers.
I mean, how dare they make clothes f
what interpretation of the word "probability" does allow you to think that the probability of something is 1 and then change to something other than 1?
Any interpretation where you can fix a broken model. I can imagine a conversation like this...
Prankster: I'm holding a die behind my back. If I roll it, what probability would you assign to a 1 coming up?
cupholder: Is it loaded?
Prankster: No.
cupholder: Are you throwing it in a funny way, like in one of those machines that throws it so it's really likely to come up a 6 or something?
Prankster: No,...
These results seem to support that, though there have also been contradictory reports from people saying that the very aggressiveness was what made them actually think.
Presumably there's heterogeneity in people's reactions to aggressiveness and to soft approaches. Most likely a minority of people react better to aggressive approaches and most people react better to being fed opposing arguments in a sandwich with self-affirmation bread.
The negotiation of where LW threads should be on the 4chan-colloquium continuum is something I would let users handle by interacting with each other in discussions, instead of trying to force it to fit the framework of the karma system. I especially think letting people hide their posts from lurkers and other subsets of the Less Wrong userbase could set a bad precedent.
yes
OK. I agree with that insofar as agents having the same prior entails them having the same model.
...aaahhh.... I changed the language of that sentence at least three times before settling on what you saw. Here's what I probably should have posted (and what I was going to post until the last minute):
There's no model checking because there is only one model - the correct model.
That is probably intuitively easier to grasp, but I think a bit inconsistent with my language in the rest of the post. The language is somewhat difficult here because our unce
My implicit definition of perfect Bayesian is characterized by these propostions:
- There is a correct prior probability (as in, before you see any evidence, e.g. occam priors) for every proposition
- Given a particular set of evidence, there is a correct posterior probability for any proposition
OK, this is interesting: I think our ideas of perfect Bayesians might be quite different. I agree that #1 is part of how a perfect Bayesian thinks, if by 'a correct prior...before you see any evidence' you have the maximum entropy prior in mind.
I'm less sure wha...
I'm not sure about this. It's most likely that anything your kid does in life will get done by someone else instead.
True - we might call the expected utility strangers get a wash because of this substitution effect. If we say the expected value most people get from me having a child is nil, it doesn't contribute to the net expected value, but nor does it make it less positive.
There is also some evidence that having children decreases your happiness (though there may be other reasons to have kids).
It sounds as though that data's based on samples of a...
Points taken.
Let me restate what I mean more formally. Conditional on high living standards, high-quality parenting, and desire to raise a child, one can reasonably calculate that the expected utility (to myself, to the potential child and to others) of having the child is higher than the expected utility of not having a child. In which case I wouldn't think the antinatalism position has legs.
After the fact model checking is completely incompatible with perfect Bayesianism, if we define perfect Bayesianism as
There's no step for checking if you should reject the model; there's no provision here for deciding if you 'just have really wrong priors.' In practice,...
Do people here really think that antinatalism is silly?
A data point: I don't think antinatalism (as defined by Roko above - 'it is a bad thing to create people') is silly under every set of circumstances, but neither is it obviously true under all circumstances. If my standard of living is phenomenally awful, and I knew my child's life would be equally bad, it'd be bad to have a child. But if I were living it up, knew I could be a good parent, and wanted a kid, what would be so awful about having one?
A good illustration of multiple discovery (not strictly 'discovery' in this case, but anyway) too:
While Ettinger was the first, most articulate, and most scientifically credible person to argue the idea of cryonics,[citation needed] he was not the only one. In 1962, Evan Cooper had authored a manuscript entitled Immortality, Scientifically, Physically, Now under the pseudonym "N. Durhing".[8] Cooper's book contained the same argument as did Ettinger's, but it lacked both scientific and technical rigor and was not of publication quality.[citation needed]
My understanding is that historically, schizophrenia has been presumed to have a partly genetic cause since around 1910, out of which grew an intermittent research program of family and twin studies to probe schizophrenia genetics. An opposing camp that emphasized environmental effects emerged in the wake of the Nazi eugenics program and the realization that complex psychological traits needn't follow trivial Mendelian patterns of inheritance. Both research traditions continue to the present day.
Edit to add - Franz Josef Kallman, whose bibliography in schi...
Agreed. I wish they'd stick to calling hard-to-read graphics like this 'visualizations' - the word 'infographics' implies a graphic designed to efficiently display information.
The worst part is it wouldn't be hard to improve the graphic. They could drop the annoying 84-item list and just directly write the emotions in the 84 slots around the circle instead of using numbers. Enlarge the circle and blow up the font size a bit - then they can put the A to J list of cultures into the empty middle of the circle so you don't have to keep looking off the side to ...
I wonder if this counts as evidence for my heuristic of judging how seriously to take someone's belief on a complicated scientific subject by looking to see if they get the right answer on easier scientific questions.
It's apparently been put to use with some success. Clark Glymour - a philosophy professor who helped develop TETRAD - wrote a long review of The Bell Curve that lists applications of an earlier version of TETRAD (see section 6 of the review):
...Several other applications have been made of the techniques, for example:
Spirtes et al. (1993) used published data on a small observational sample of Spartina grass from the Cape Fear estuary to correctly predict - contrary both to regression results and expert opinion - the outcome of an unpublished greenhouse exp
One possible way to get started is to do what the 'Distilling Free-Form Natural Laws from Experimental Data' project did: feed measurements of time and other variables of interest into a computer program which uses a genetic algorithm to build functions that best represent one variable as a function of itself and the other variables. The Science article is paywalled but available elsewhere. (See also this bunch of presentation slides.)
They also have software for you to do this at home.
"Silas, there is no Bayesian ‘revival’ in science. There is one amongst people who wish to reduce science to a mechanical procedure." – Gene Callahan
Am I the only one who finds this extremely unlikely? So far as I know, Bayesian methods have become massively more popular in science over the last 50 years. (Count JSTOR hits for the word 'Bayesian,' for example, and watch the numbers shoot up over time!)
The problem that I hear most often in regard to mechanizing this process has the basic form, "Obviously, you need a human in the loop because of all the cases where you need to be able to recognize that a correlation is spurious, and thus to ignore it, and that comes from having good background knowledge."
Those people should be glad they've never heard of TETRAD - their heads might have exploded!
Reaching?