Something I would probably believe:
The AI informs you that it has discovered the purpose of the universe, and part of the purpose is to find the purpose (the rest, apparently, can only be comprehended by philosophical zombies, which you are not one).
Upon finding the purpose, the universe gave the FAI and humanity a score out of 3^^^3 (we got 42) and politely informs the FAI to tell humanity “best of luck next time! next game starts in 5 minutes”.
Accessing long term memory appears to be a reconstructive process, which additionally results in accessed memories becoming fragile again; this is what I believe is occurring here. The learned aversion is reconstructed and as then susceptible to damage much more than other non-recently accessed LTM. Consider that the drug didn’t destroy ALL of the mice’s (fear?) memories, only that which was most recently accessed.
So no worries to cryonics!
This reminds me place premium, an interesting concept that someone doing the same job in one country can earn more than in another. Though we are talking about some kid who can’t even get a job in the first place, this concept works well.
For example if a homogenous region such as country, city, or even suburb, has automated to such a degree that menial jobs are few. Has attracted the best people, and the best people to serve the best people. Such a region has ‘place premium’ as the top creative jobs, programming, finance, design work, etc, pay extremely well to entice the best. These people demand, via their wealth, the best service and so entice those that are skilled, good looking, whatever attributes required for service. Continuously filtering people.
I’ll also argue that the US is a special case in that US dollar holders get a subsidy to living via the petrodollar/global reserve currency. Payed for by any foreigners wanting to by [relative to them] foreign products. This only increases the place premium of living in the US, and thus earning a wage in USD.
For the IQ 70 kids, perhaps there ARE no jobs for them in the region they live in. They have been filtered out by better (in the sense of selected for the jobs in that region) people after the region’s ‘place premium’.
The solution is to move somewhere else, go opposite the flow of people moving to higher ‘place premium’ locations; the one they are in has been saturated by above average people. Perhaps even it is time to think of immigration to one of those countries where they can earn 50c/hour.
Of course with the advent of nation states there is no longer free flow of people, so without welfare these kids might just starve to death, denied the freedom to move.
I can only give you one upvote, so please take my comment as a second.
I am also a New Zealander, AND I am signed up with Cryonics Institute. You might be interested in contacting the Cryonics Association of Australasia but I’m sure there is no actual suspension and storage nearby.
Besides you are missing the main point, if you don’t sign up now and you die tomorrow, you are annihilated—no questions asked. I would be wary of this question as it can be an excuse to not sign up.
Not only that, it becomes a glue that binds people together, the more agreement the stronger the binding (and the more that get bound). At least that is the analogy that I use when I look at this; we (rationalists) have no glue, they (religions) have too much.
Lets be honest about ‘demonstrating rationality’ here. If your goals are to have much more romping in the bedroom, they have done well here. However many of these techniques speak to me of cults, the ones with the leader getting all the brainwashed girls.
A much better sign of rationality is to have success in career, in money, in fame—to be Successful. Not to just have more fun. Being successful hasn’t been much demonstrated, though I am hopeful still.
Other than the mass suicides...
And including the mass suicides? remember that in this story, 6 billion people become 1 in a million, and over 25% of people died in this branch of the story. Destroying Huygens resulted in 15 billion deaths.
As they say, shut up and multiply.
In Getting Things Done, after the first step of simply writing down each task you want to accomplish (can be of any level of difficult and time), and then you do a seperate processing step after that.
That is when you decide how long each task takes, and if it takes less than 5 minutes you do it now. When you get into the GTD system of life organization, trivial impetuses you put down in the initial collection phase, and when you get around to processing them, you have habits that say “do task now if takes less than 5 minutes”. GTD is (apparently, I tried to get it working for me but to little success so far) a life changing thing.
To be honest, as a long term supporter of SIAI, this sort of social experimentation seems like a serious political blunder. I personally have no problem with finding new (or not part of current western culture) techniques of… social interactions… if you believe it will make yourself and others ‘better’ for some definition of better.
But if you are serious in actually getting the world behind the movement, this is Bad. “Why should I believe you when you seem to be amoral?”. I have more arguments on this matter but they are easy to generate anyway.
Another thought: one way to think of it might be that to achieve your goals personal sacrifice is necessary and applauded: ‘I’m too busy saving the world to have a girlfriend.’. Perhaps there are better examples than that. Maybe it’s time to get rid of couches?
At first, I thought that making a new convention is the wrong way to go about it. How many conventions should we need to remember then? making new conventions all over the place for LWer’s will be too difficult, too many different social rules to juggle.
For example, in such a situation, as in asking a person out, you would need to think about the LW community conventions and then normal conventions when deciding actions. But then, you couldn’t do better unless you allow for change.
If a community is to be truly made, perhaps a set of conventions can be constructed so that, this convention will slot nicely into an easily searchable hierarchy: Relationships → relationship changing → approaches/dating requests. You could make an iPhone app so that the LWer looking for love (or wishing to do some social action) can quickly and discretely check up the currently accepted conventions/guidelines. If someone deviates, you can have all sorts of fun deciding to call them on it.
An important consideration not yet mentioned is that risk mitigation is can be difficult to quantify, compared to disaster relief efforts where if you save a house fill of children, you become a hero. Coupled with the fact that people extrapolate the future using the past (which misses all existential risks), the incentive to do anything about it drops pretty much to nil.
With Unbreakable Vows, the… arbitrator?… sacrifices a portion of their magic permanently yes? One issue is that, after you die you might need that magic for something, like the more magic you have the more pleasant (or less!) magically created heaven is. In any case, even if magical society was fine with sacrifices, they might reason thus, and not use unbreakable vows. Such a society would make investigation (magical!) into potential afterlife a top priority, so lack of use of such a ritual might be compensated by finding out there is a heaven (or hell).
This is so fun that I suspect that we have pushed back the date of friendly AI by at least a day—or we pushed it forward cause we are all now hyper motivated to see who guessed this question right!
One wonders if in the populations of rationalists (CFAR in particular) that there are naturally mono people who are ‘conformed’ into being poly?
It is truth, but you are explicitly saying those words so that the hearer (the patient) forms a false belief about the world. So it cannot be really truthful because most people in that situation would, after hearing example 3, believe that they are being given something that has more affect than a placebo.
I put in ~1000 or so over a few months. For a better world!