All of mariz's Comments + Replies

"Overconfidence leads to bad play."

As an avid chess player, I can tell you that this is true in chess as well. People look at brilliant sacrifices by grandmasters (Bobby Fischer was famous for this) and think they are brilliant enough to pull off the same thing. In my experience, 80-90% of material sacrifices fail. When they do succeed, it is usually because the sacrificer is considerably better than her opponent. I've learned to subdue my desire for a sacrifice and a quick strike and work on a longterm plan instead.

I'll say Hi and I'll post this link which describes a study that showed that people are more likely to believe in pseudoscience if they are told that scientists disapprove of it:

http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/146552

They are also much more likely to believe in pseudoscience if it has popular support.

I posted an argument here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/1mc/normal_cryonics/1i92

I didn't see a major criticism. There were some interesting responses and questions, like what constitutes a 5% increase in quality of life (I don't know; it's a crude metric), but my point stands. You're better off spending your money on marginal increases in quality of life with high probabilities of success than on cryonics.

Here's a simple metric to demonstrate why alternatives to cryonics could be preferred:

Suppose we calculate the overall value of living as the quantity of life multiplied by the quality of life. For lack of a better metric, we can rate our quality of life from 1 to 100. Thus one really good year (quality = 100) is equal to 100 really bad years (ql = 1). If you think quality of life is more important, you can use a larger metric, like 1 to 1000. But for our purposes, let's use a scale to 100.

Some transhumanists have calculated that your life expectancy ... (read more)

What is the calculated utility of signing up for cryonics? I've never seen a figure.

Plus, suicide allows you to make a controlled Exit and a controlled delivery in the cryopreserved state. You could die in a car accident, trapped in the wreckage for hours before they extract you, while your brain degenerates. You could be shot in the head. You could develop a neural disease or a brain tumor.

You just can't take these chances. The rational solution is suicide at an early age.

Taking the cryonics mindset to its logical conclusion, the most "rational" thing to do is commit suicide at age 30 and have yourself cryopreserved. Waiting until a natural death at a ripe old age, there may be too much neural damage to reconstitute the mind/brain. And since you're destined to die anyway, isn't the loss of 50 years of life a rational trade off for the miniscule chance of infinite life?

NO.

"So, yeah. I believe in God. I figure my particular beliefs are a little irrelevant at this point."

I think the particulars of your beliefs are important, because they reveal how irrational you might be. Most people get away with God belief because it isn't immediately contradicted by experience. If you merely believe a special force permeates the universe, that's not testable and doesn't affect your life, really. However, if you believe this force is intelligent and interacts with the world (causes miracles, led the Israelites out of Egypt, e... (read more)

Posts like this are the reason I read this blog. Great job.

It shouldn't be surprising that psychological differences inform our political intuitions. Hollywood doesn't make people liberal. Artistic / creative people are more likely to be liberal, and they're more likely to move to Hollywood.

We can define a psychological dimension as authoritarian vs non-authoritarian. Non-authoritarian psychology makes people more experimental and creative. They color outside the lines. They are more interested in art, theater, acting or music. They are more likely to experiment with alternative religions and spiritual pract... (read more)

Can I go ahead and call a bias? People who earn less, are less happy, or believe they are less successful than their peers are less likely to fill out this survey.

We tend to use trivial examples to illustrate sunk costs, like deciding whether to go to the movies, or deciding whether to leave a restaurant if the food is bad, but there are important real world situations where these considerations matter. For example, many people are afraid to change careers mid stream because they are afraid that all their education and experience up to that point would be a waste of time. They've already spent thousands of dollars on a degree, or tens of thousands of dollars on a professional degree, and now they have to start over? But isn't that better than being miserable for the rest of your career? You can't get your tuition and your time back, but you can still make yourself happier.

I'm agnostic to the heuristic you propose, but I disagree with applying it to the metric that you use (being pro- or anti-science). Scientific progress might be slowed by respecting genetic privacy rights, but we could say the same of any privacy rights (or, indeed, many other things). Imagine how much faster sociology and psychology could advance if we knew what everybody does in the privacy of their homes. Surely there are considerations more important than the advancement of science.

"How many non-fiction books did you read in the last month? How many fiction books?"

I would rather phrase this: "How many pages have you read in the last month?" I've read zero books, but I've read ~200 pages of journal articles. Others may read hundreds of newspaper pages in a month. Plus, some books are 200 pages long, others are 600 pages long, so it's better to ask directly about pages of text, irrespective of the medium.

"Are you signed up for cryonics? Views on cryonics."

This is a LW / OB bias. Why cryonics as opposed to the many other technoscientific and transhumanist topics out there? Because Eliezer and Robin hyped it up.