What?! We now have a free pass on transhumanist cheerleading on LW, no matter how crazy, and norm against criticising it or even raising a concern about its unsubstantiated nature? (Or was it just the reaction to downvote-the-post decision given in the parent comment, given that the problem is not relevant to the overall topic of the post?)
I know of no convincing account for why the probability of achieving “biological immortality or uploading” during our lifetime is sufficiently nontrivial to talk about planning for that. Even FAI, also unlikely in the near future, doesn’t imply these particular outcomes (it implies strictly better outcomes, but not these). And humans “manually” getting uploading to production on human brains, not just the first proof-of-concept experiments, not counting the difficulty of getting the prerequisite technologies up and running? It’s a whole lot of work.
Whatever the case, if the claim is not sufficiently accepted, it shouldn’t be mentioned in passing, reinforcing the anti-epistemic norm of propagating memetic noise.
While I haven’t downvoted your comment, I considered it briefly. Why?
Your reading of the initial statement is only one possible take on what could be meant, and it’s by far the most uncharitable reading. (Contrast to reading it as “I wasn’t planning on retiring, if we achieve biological immortality or updating technologies.”)
It’s a bit noisy. The thrust of the piece is in its quotation, which is relatively interesting. The poster’s beliefs which may be crazy don’t really affect it. It’s not in any way advocating those beliefs, merely mentioning them as they pertain to why the poster was interested in this.
Whatever the case, if the claim is not sufficiently accepted, it shouldn’t be mentioned in passing, reinforcing the anti-epistemic norm of propagating memetic noise.
(Looks at parent comment rating of −2)
What?! We now have a free pass on transhumanist cheerleading on LW, no matter how crazy, and norm against criticising it or even raising a concern about its unsubstantiated nature? (Or was it just the reaction to downvote-the-post decision given in the parent comment, given that the problem is not relevant to the overall topic of the post?)
I know of no convincing account for why the probability of achieving “biological immortality or uploading” during our lifetime is sufficiently nontrivial to talk about planning for that. Even FAI, also unlikely in the near future, doesn’t imply these particular outcomes (it implies strictly better outcomes, but not these). And humans “manually” getting uploading to production on human brains, not just the first proof-of-concept experiments, not counting the difficulty of getting the prerequisite technologies up and running? It’s a whole lot of work.
Whatever the case, if the claim is not sufficiently accepted, it shouldn’t be mentioned in passing, reinforcing the anti-epistemic norm of propagating memetic noise.
While I haven’t downvoted your comment, I considered it briefly. Why?
Your reading of the initial statement is only one possible take on what could be meant, and it’s by far the most uncharitable reading. (Contrast to reading it as “I wasn’t planning on retiring, if we achieve biological immortality or updating technologies.”)
It’s a bit noisy. The thrust of the piece is in its quotation, which is relatively interesting. The poster’s beliefs which may be crazy don’t really affect it. It’s not in any way advocating those beliefs, merely mentioning them as they pertain to why the poster was interested in this.
Agreed, and upvoted grandparent.