I'm still reeling from http://lesswrong.com/lw/g0y/gun_control_how_would_we_know/84ky?context=1#comments ; I'm noticing how in other contexts "Why are we still talking about this we have better things to do?" is obvious, but it tends not to be for me in mind-killer contexts. Unfortunately, the impact of that point on my mind is such that I'm maybe not giving this thread the attention that all of your very well-thought out answers deserve, because I've suddenly stopped caring very much.
Regardless, though, y'all certainly have lived up to my expectations as polite, reasonable, rational debaters. Well done.
Oh, I like this. I like this a lot. The underlying attitude, I mean. I'm going see if I can't extrapolate a general policy from this, actually. Something like:
"In a world where there still exist children that live (or, more likely, die) on garbage heaps, the fact that we're still arguing about [whatever issue] implies to me that it's not a low hanging fruit, and we should just go work on those instead."
I don't have clear lines of retreat for the simple reason that to answer what I would do in each of those cases requires also knowing what sorts of actions make things better in each case. I mean, I can say something generic like "increase or decrease the availability of guns in linear proportion to how much they help", but what actually decreases availability of guns, without having terrible side effects? Like, does gun control as we currently understand it lead to only crazy/criminal/insane people owning guns?, because that seems suboptimal.
H...
Those are both really good points, thanks.
While a school shooting is what got me thinking about this, I didn't mean to limit to that specifically; my pre-cached thought on mass murders is "if people in the crowd had been armed, the shooter would have been stopped quickly". I phrase it that way to emphasize that I have no real evidence there.
Spending time training people to help those around them, in general, as a possible solution, though ... I admit that I'd honestly never thought of that. It doesn't just apply to teachers, either; one can ima...
What I was going for is the difference between wanting a particular person dead (i.e. one's wife, one's boss, etc), in which case I'd assume that access to particular weapons is irrelevant because you'll find a way, vs. wanting to kill lots of people, or to kill lots of people in a particular category (i.e. school shooting mass murders, which as I implied is how I got on this topic). It seems at least possible that weapon limitations could help limit the latter, whereas if person X really wants person Y, specifically, dead, weapon limitations seem unlikely to be relevant.
If only I had that option. :) If you know how to explain this to my 8 month olds, please do let me know. :)
I appreciate the info about the ideal there; I'm going to keep it in mind. But it's simply not reasonable for me right now.
My focus and attention are much better late at night, so I tend to stay up as late as I can stand, to get more done. Unfortunately, with babies around, both when I wake up in the morning and when in the evening I can start focusing on the things I want to work on are entirely random. Hence wanting to get as much effective ti...
Unless I'm misunderstanding, a lot of what the Zeo does is select a wake time that matches one's sleep cycle. I have twin infants; the time(s) at which I am awoken are entirely out of my control. :D Also, I don't use an alarm, and haven't in many years; as such I awake at what I assume is the right point of my sleep cycle (when allowed to wake naturally, which doesn't much happen anymore).
If I'm misunderstanding, feel free to elaborate; the copy on Amazon at least is pretty inspecific.
Generally speaking, though, I don't have a serious problem with sleep...
Given external evidence that my performance is reduced, I don't think getting myself to go to sleep will be a significant problem. My issue is usually the belief that I'm still getting useful stuff done, and actively resisting sleep on that basis; evidence to the contrary is something I think I would treat as real data.
FWIW, I have a lot of what you've described in terms of non-vivid sensory memories; the primary difference is that my factual memories ("I once did X", without sensory context) are very important to me, and I don't have the pain response.
Having said all of that, it may help you to know that my access to childhood memories has improved significantly after therapy, and this was not a therapy goal at all. If you are in the SF bay area, I would be ecstatic to recommend my therapist: http://mylesdownes.com/ (site looks much more newage then he ever behaved with me).
I will keep the whole "don't get it banned for other people" thing in mind should this ever actually come up, but as I can't predict ultimate outcomes I can't make any promises.
Choosing not to eat or drink doesn't seem likely to provoke that response, especially if I only explain it as "I don't want to live through [whatever]".
I would make such a choice long before I was considered legally incompetent; the Russian roulette of "any day a fond memory could disappear" is to horrible for me; unlike other people in this thread, I consider my memories a central part of who I am.
If you think that morphine solves that, you have had the very good fortune to never experience severe pain. I've watched my father bellow in pain for hours while he was on several times the maximum recommended dose of every pain medication a hospital could provide.
We are very bad at controlling severe pain; any belief to the contrary is simply mythology believed by people who have never been there (I have as well, and I can assure you this is true).
My father was in severe pain, every day, for the last decade or so of his life. It happens to be the case t...
WRT the actual method of cryocide, "lie down in a tub full of ice water" seems the obvious choice, but has important legal complications, so I'll point people to http://www.alcor.org/magazine/2011/01/14/options-for-brain-threatening-disorders/ , which provides a legal alternative.
The problem here is that, as evidenced by SL4 list posts, Phil is serious.
So basically, there is some super-morality or super-goal or something that is "better" by some standard than what humans have. Let's call it woogah. Phil is worried because we're going to make FAI that can't possibly learn/reach/achieve/understand woogah because it's based on human values.
As far as I can see, there are three options here:
Phil values woogah, which means it's included in the space of human values, which means there's no problem.
Phil does not value wooga
That's a really good point.
I think if the only reason you're staying alive is to stop other people from being sad, you've got a psychological bug WRT valuing yourself for your own sake that you really need to work on, but that is (obviously) a personal value judgment. If that is the only reason, though, you're right, suicide is bad and cryo is as bad or worse.
I imagine that such a person will have a really shitty life whenever people close to them leave or die; sounds really depressing. I can only hope, for their sake, that such a person dies before their significant other(s).
-Robin
(way after the fact)
You know what? You are absolutely right that I'm spouting an untested theory. I have since stopped.
The problem is that I see no way to test either side; either what I said or the converse, which you seem to be asserting, which is that whatever comes out of MMA is basically optimal fighting technique.
The only test I can think of is to load up fighters that assert opposite sides of this, and are both highly trained in their respective arts and so on, on lots of PCP, and see who lives.
There are ... some practical and ethical problems the...
which you seem to be asserting, which is that whatever comes out of MMA is basically optimal fighting technique.
If that is the claim you are rejecting then I must agree. I have no reason to expect optimal fighting technique to come out of MMA, indeed, it would indicate a failure of optimisation in MMA competitors. As you go on to indicate you are measuring fighting technique as it serves to facilitate survival in one on one fights to the death. The social and physical payoffs in MMA training, competition and sparring are different. Optimising for one in...
Torture doesn't actually bother me much at all. -_- The more I talk about this the more I think it's just me being weird.
I remember the Eaters in Consider Phlebas, but my only reaction to that episode was "why is this in this novel at all?" It served no purpose and could, and I think should, have been cut without leaving a gap.
That is exactly why it bothered me: it seemed to exist for the sole purpose of grossing me out, with no actual connection to the plot. I can deal with just about anything as long as it advances the plot.
-Robin
What you mentioned there sounds perfectly fine and reasonable. I enjoy Terry Goodkind and Neal Asher, I'm hardly a lightweight in this respect normally. Perhaps I just have more issues with cannibalism and/or disgusting food than other people (the "disgusting food" part seems likely, actually).
I will take a look at them. Thanks.
-Robin
I don't read Banks (see explanation at the page I linked to at the bottom of the post, if you care).
I'm pretty sure I'd remember if it was Vinge or Stross, but:
It's not anything at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Stross#Short_fiction , and I've never read either of his collections.
Looking at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernor_Vinge#Uncollected_short_fiction ,there's a tiny chance it could be A Dry Martini, as I was at ConJose, but I would expect that to be food themed. It's not Cookie Monster. I've not read any of the other collections except True ...
(Edit: after having written this entire giant thing, I notice you saying that this was just a "why are some people not interested in cryo" comment, whereas I very much am trying to change your mind. I don't like trying to change people's minds without warning (I thought we were having that sort of discussion, but apparently we aren't), so here's warning.)
But it seems that natural death seems like a good point to say "enough is enough." In other words, letting what's been given be enough.
You're aware that your life expectancy is abo...
Careful with life-expectancy figures from earlier eras. There was a great chance of dying as a baby, and a great chance for women to die of childbirth. Excluding the first -- that is, just counting those that made it to, say, 5 years old, and the life-expectancy greatly shoots up, though obviously not as high as now.
In some piece of fiction (I think it was Orion's Arm, but the closest I can find is http://www.orionsarm.com/eg-topic/45b3daabb2329 and the reference to "the Herimann-Glauer-Yudkowski relation of inclusive retrospective obviousness") I saw the idea that one could order qualitatively-smarter things on the basis of what you're calling "clicks". Specifically, that if humans are level 1, then the next level above that is the level where if you handed the being the data on which our science is built, all the results would click immediately/...
Other people have suggested similar things, but I'll take it a step farther: the issue may simply be fidelity of sensory input neurons, i.e. different things count as "having taste" for different people. I assure you, you could give me olive oil so lite that it glowed, and it would still have a very distinctive and strong taste to me.
This, I guess, is where the noseclip suggestion came from.
I have an (I think) better idea: "drink" the stuff by putting it in a (clean!) turkey baster, stick the turkey baster in the back of your throat, a...
This is sort-of true, but with one really, really big caveat that people seem to forget: any form of fighting that is controlled basically screws large portions of many styles.
If you go into an MMA tournament and deliberately break someone's arm, you aren't going to be asked back. Let alone if you break their neck. Furthermore, non-crazy martial artists don't even want to: there's too much respect for that. There are styles that are centered around causing maximum damage as quickly as possible, and they are entirely useless in MMA fights. You're never going to see a hard-style master being competitive in an MMA tournament, because 90% of what they know is irrelevant.
-Robin
rlpowell, you are incorrect. You are spouting an untested theory that is repeated as fact by those with a vested interest in avoiding the harsh light of truth.
In actual fact, there is no problem with breaking someone's arm in an MMA fight (see Mir vs. Sylvia in the UFC, for example). It's also close to impossible to break someone's neck (deliberately), despite what you may see in movies.
The "we're too dangerous to fight" is an easy meme to propagate. But let me just ask you this: let's just say, hypothetically, that your theory ("maximum ...
I'm interested in theory, but in practice I am attached to living in SF proper that may be hard to overcome.
I'll mention that in South Bay there are housing complexes that have multiple nearly-adjacent units in shared space, and it might work well to just pick such a complex and progressively have like-minded people take over more and more of it. Noticeably less awesome, but also noticeably easier.