Another consideration, though maybe not a fundamental one, is that past and future selves are the only beings we know for sure that we have lots of subjunctive dependence with, just from "structural" similarity like calculators from the same factory (to use an example from the TDT paper). Tumblr usr somnilogical elaborated on this a bit, concluding "future selves do help past selves!" An upload is a future self in the way that matters for this conclusion.

Yes, and I did look at something like four of the individual studies of depression, focusing on the ones testing pills so they would be comparable to the Prozac trial. As I said in the post, they all gave me the same impression: I didn't see a difference between the placebo and no-pill groups. So it was surprising to see the summary value of -0.25 SMD. Maybe it's some subtle effect in the studies I looked at which you can see once you aggregate. But maybe it's heterogeneity, and the effect is coming from the studies I didn't look at. As I mentioned in the post, not all of the placebo interventions were pills.

From a quick look on Wikipedia I don't see anything. Except for patients that report side effects from placebo, but of course that could be symptoms that they would have had in any case, which they incorrectly attribute to the placebo.

I don't see how you could get an accurate measure of a nocebo effect from misdiagnoses. I don't think anyone is willing to randomize patients to be misdiagnosed. And if you try to do it observationally, you run into the problem of distinguishing the effects of the misdiagnosis from whatever brought them to the doctor seeking diagnosis.

I took a look at The Secret of Our Success, and saw the study you're describing on page 277. I think you may be misremembering the disease. The data given is for bronchitis, emphysema and asthma (combined into one category). It does mention that similar results hold for cancer and heart attacks.

I took a look at the original paper. They checked 15 diseases, and bronchitis, emphysema and asthma was the only one that was significant after correction for multiple comparisons. I don't agree that the results for cancer and heart attacks are similar. They seem within the range of what you can get from random fluctuations in a list of 15 numbers. The statistical test backs up that impression.

If this is a real difference, I would expect it has something to do with lifestyle changes, rather than stress. However, it's in the opposite direction of what I would expect. That is, I would expect those with a birth year predisposed to lung problems to avoid smoking. I did find some chinese astrology advice to that effect. Therefore they should live longer, when in fact they live shorter. So that doesn't really make sense.

This result seems suspicious to me. First of all because it's just a couple of diseases selected out of a list of mostly non-significant tests, but also because people probably do lots of tests of astrology that they don't publish. I wouldn't bet on it replicating in another population.

It's okay, the post is eight pages long and not super internally consistent, basically because I had to work on Monday and didn't want to edit it. I don't make a post like that expecting everyone to read every paragraph and get a perfectly clear idea of what I'm saying.

Observation of the cosmic microwave background was a simultaneous discovery, according to James Peebles' Nobel lecture. If I'm understanding this right, Bob Dicke's group at Princeton was already looking for the CMB based on a theoretical prediction of it, and were doing experiments to detect it, with relatively primitive equipment, when the Bell Labs publication came out.

"Norman Borlaug’s Green Revolution" seems to give the credit for turning India into a grain exporter solely to hybrid wheat, when rice is just as important to India as wheat.

It seems that the high-yield rice used in India's Green Revolution derives from the Chinese crop breeding program.

Yuan Longping, the "father of hybrid rice", is a household name in China, but in English-language sources I only seem to hear about Norman Borlaug, who people call "the father of the Green Revolution" rather than "the father of hybrid wheat", which seems more appropriate. It seems that the way people tell the story of the Green Revolution has as much to do with national pride as the facts.

I don't think this affects your point too much, although it may affect your estimate of how much change to the world you can expect from one person's individual choices. It's not just that if Norman Borlaug had died in a car accident hybrid wheat may still have been developed, but also that if nobody developed hybrid wheat, there would still have been a Green Revolution in India's rice farming.

As someone who grew up with Greg Egan on the shelf, I want to note that Greg Egan said basically the same thing about "Neuromancer" (that it cares more about being fashionable than having the characters think through their situation), and "Quarantine" and "Permutation City" were in part responses to cyberpunk, so perhaps all is not lost.

Backing that up with Greg Egan interview quotes.

From the Karen Burnham interview, on hating "Neuromancer", and on the influence of cyberpunk on "Quarantine":

I read Neuromancer in 1985, because I was voting for the Hugos that year and I thought I ought to read all the nominated novels. I really hated it; aside from the style and the characters, which definitely weren't to my taste, a lot of things about the technology in the book seemed very contrived and unlikely, especially the idea that anyone would plug in a brain-computer interface that they knew a third party could use to harm them.

Over the next few years I read some Rucker and Sterling novels, which I definitely enjoyed more than Gibson. So there was some reasonable stuff written under the cyberpunk banner, but none of it felt very groundbreaking to anyone who'd been reading Dick and Delany, and if it hadn't been wrapped in so much hype I probably would have enjoyed it more. In fact, the way cyberpunk as a movement influenced me most was a sense of irritation with its obsession with hipness. I don't think there's much doubt that “Axiomatic” and the opening sections of Quarantine have a kind of cyberpunk flavour to them, but my thinking at the time would have been less “Maybe I can join the cyberpunk club!” and more “Maybe I can steal back private eyes and brain-computer interfaces for people who think mirror shades are pretentious, and do something more interesting with them.”

From the Marisa O’Keeffe interview, something that corroborates what Eliezer Yudkowsky said about "Neuromancer" characters worrying how things look on a t-shirt:

A lot of cyberpunk said, in effect: “Computers are interesting because cool, cynical men (or occasionally women) in mirrorshades do dangerous things with them.” If that really is the most interesting thing you can imagine about a computer, you shouldn’t be writing SF.

From the Russell Blackford interview, on the influence of cyberpunk on "Permutation City":

I recall being very bored and dissatisfied with the way most cyberpunk writers were treating virtual reality and artificial intelligence in the ’80s; a lot of people were churning out very lame noir plots that utterly squandered the philosophical implications of the technology. I wrote a story called “Dust”, which was later expanded into Permutation City, that pushed very hard in the opposite direction, trying to take as seriously as possible all the implications of what it would mean to be software. In the case of Permutation City that included some metaphysical ideas that I certainly wouldn’t want to repeat in everything I wrote, but the basic notions about the way people will be able to manipulate themselves if they ever become software, which I developed a bit further in Diaspora, seem logically unavoidable to me.

Something depressing is certainly going on in mainstream culture, since for example "The New York Times" hasn't had a review of a Greg Egan book since "Diaspora" in 1998, except to suggest "that Egan doesn’t fully understand how oppression works — or that he is trying to make an inappropriate point".

But science fiction seems alright, if it reacted to "Neuromancer" exactly along the lines of Eliezer Yudkowsky's reaction to this post, producing some of the most beloved (by sci-fans) science fiction of the 90s. And I still see every new Alastair Reynolds book in the sci-fi sections of non-specialty bookstores.