Bugmaster

Karma: 4,004

Bugmaster 23 Aug 2011 10:00 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Jack’s comment on: For fiction: How could alien minds differ from human minds?
I’ve got to agree, Blindsight is an excellent example. It successfully (IMHO) portrays aliens that are clearly quite intelligent, and yet utterly inhuman.

SPOILERS SPOILERS

The most frightening thing about them is that none of the usual tropes apply to them; mutual understanding and/or empathy isn’t an option because their psychology (or possibly lack thereof) makes it completely impossible. There’s nothing there to empathize with.

Bugmaster 23 Aug 2011 10:14 UTC
1 point
on: Needing Better PR
Forgive me if this is a stupid question (I am new here), but is there a community-endorsed primer on the Singularity that I can read somewhere ? The reason I ask is that, currently, I am not convinced that the Singularity is likely to happen, and I’m not even convinced that it could happen at all. Thus, even if the leadership of SIAI were silver-tongued marketing geniuses on par with Steve Jobs, I would still be unlikely to join them.

Don’t get me wrong, I like the idea of the Singularity. I would love to live in a post-Singularity, friendly-AI world. Therefore, I am compelled to examine the idea as critically as I can, to compensate for my cognitive bias.

Bugmaster 23 Aug 2011 10:29 UTC
3 points
on: [SEQ RERUN] Radical Honesty
I’ve never practiced Radical Honesty, nor do I know anyone who does, so my thoughts on the subject are pure conjecture. Still, it seems to me that Radical Honesty could only be practiced by someone who is independently wealthy. If you can’t afford to lose your job, or that apartment you’re renting, or a couple teeth during your bus ride, you simply can’t afford to alienate the people on whose good will your well-being depends.

If everyone in the world was 100% rational and a Radically Honest person, this wouldn’t be a problem. Unfortunately, we don’t live in a world like that. Instead, we live in a world where little white lies (and especially lies of omission) are the norm; they are the glue that keeps a society (which is composed of less-than-rational individuals) going smoothly.

I suppose that you could practice Radical Honesty by behaving like an Aes Sedai, and speaking statements that, while literally true in a technical sense, imply something very different than it would appear to the listener. I think that would defeat the spirit of the movement, however. Lying creatively is still lying.

Bugmaster 23 Aug 2011 20:04 UTC
1 point
in reply to: SilasBarta’s comment on: [SEQ RERUN] Radical Honesty
Your approach sounds good, but it also sound like plain, ordinary, run-of-the-mill honesty. It’s not very “Radical”; and many (though, perhaps, far from most) people already practice it every day.

But perhaps I am missing something ?

Bugmaster 23 Aug 2011 22:40 UTC
0 points
in reply to: mstevens’s comment on: [SEQ RERUN] Radical Honesty
The Fair Witness idea is not entirely analogous, since (IIRC) the Fair Witnesses have a pre-appointed niche in their society. They are highly paid and highly respected; and Radical Honesty is, in fact, their primary occupation. Our own society does not contain a niche like that, however; and no one can get paid solely for being Radically Honest.

Bugmaster 24 Aug 2011 4:15 UTC
4 points
on: [SEQ RERUN] We Don’t Really Want Your Participation
I agree that a poet or an artist probably wouldn’t have much to contribute to the task of actually making the Singularity happen. However, they could contribute to the tasks of raising public awareness, building positive PR, generating discourse, and presenting the ideas involved to the general public. In fact, Charles Stross, Bruce Sterling, Cory Doctorow, and other writers, are doing just that, and they’re good at it.

Actually, this reminds me of what Mariesa van Houten says in Michael Flynn’s Firestar, when she’s asked why she bothers focusing on fine arts education at all (paraphrased from memory): “The new generation will need scientists and builders. But it will also need a voice”.

(of course, all of the above is contingent upon the Singularity actually being likely to happen, of which I am not personally convinced, but still).

Bugmaster 24 Aug 2011 18:03 UTC
0 points
in reply to: lessdazed’s comment on: [SEQ RERUN] We Don’t Really Want Your Participation
Well, I don’t know what the SIAI people were thinking. It’s possible, for example, that they were thinking “let’s just get everyone we can, the more the merrier, filtering out specific professions is not worth the effort”. But the original article implies that the Singularity movement does not need liberal arts participants at all; at least, not in their professional capacity:

I would call on you to participate as a human being, not an artist. If your artistry has something to say, it will express itself naturally in your responses, without you needing to make a conscious effort to say something artist-like.

I, on the other hand, believe that artists can contribute professionally, as per my post above. You seem to be more concerned with the question, “even if artists can contribute, should SIAI seek them out deliberately ?”, but I don’t have an opinion on that.

Bugmaster 24 Aug 2011 20:52 UTC
1 point
in reply to: JAlfredPrufrock’s comment on: [SEQ RERUN] We Don’t Really Want Your Participation

but resents that poets and artists are specifically called on to do so, apparently because he sees that as reducing their humanity to mere titles.

I understood the rest of your comment, but I don’t understand this part. I, for example, am a software engineer. If SIAI wanted me to write some sort of an AI-management console for them, I would gladly do it. I don’t think this would “reduce my humanity to a mere title”. Acknowledging that my particular skills are well-suited to writing AI consoles, and poorly suited to, say, writing poems, does not somehow objectify me. No one can be good at everything, after all (at least, not in our pre-Singularity world).

So… are artists somehow fundamentally different from software engineers in this respect ?

Bugmaster 24 Aug 2011 20:56 UTC
3 points
in reply to: lessdazed’s comment on: [SEQ RERUN] We Don’t Really Want Your Participation
Ok, I think I see how I misinterpreted the original article. Eliezer (and you as well, I think) is not downgrading the contribution of artists; he’s just pointing out the original speakers’ hypocrisy. He claims that in reality, the speakers don’t feel that the artists have anything to contribute; but they publicly claim otherwise in order to appear more sophisticated (or something).

This statement I can agree with. Hypocrisy is destructive and wrong.

Bugmaster 25 Aug 2011 6:36 UTC
4 points
in reply to: fubarobfusco’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 8
Are you talking specifically about the bully whom the SPHEW took out (barely) ? Because I’m pretty sure that particular individual was deliberately proclaiming himself to be a bully in order to provoke Hermione’s attack. Hermione figured it out, too, but just a second too late...

Bugmaster 26 Aug 2011 1:29 UTC
1 point
on: On the unpopularity of cryonics: life sucks, but at least then you die
I skimmed the comments on this article, and it seems like the prevailing attitude is, “if you’re not signed up for cryonics, then you must either be irrational, or you must lack a desire to prolong your life (which means you’re irrational anyway)”. But I think that’s a false dilemma. There’s at least one other option: “you are rational, and you want to prolong your life as much as possible, but you’re not convinced that cryonics can actually accomplish this”. I personally fit into the latter category.

Do we currently have any evidence that it’s actually possible to revive a mammal after it had been cryonically preserved, with (and this is the key part) its memory intact ? Or is it the fact that, once your brain activity ceases, your personality is gone—in which case, even a transhuman Singularity-grade AI won’t be able to bring you back ? As I said, I’d very much like to live as long as possible (ideally, forever), but that doesn’t mean that I must therefore uncritically accept any proposal that promises to accomplish this.

Bugmaster 26 Aug 2011 2:42 UTC
1 point
in reply to: saturn’s comment on: On the unpopularity of cryonics: life sucks, but at least then you die
There are people whose brain activity has ceased, who survived and still consider themselves to be the same person.

I guess it depends on how you define “ceased”. As far as I understand, people who are in comas, or in shock, etc., still have a measurable level of brain activity (as well as metabolic activity, actually). When a person is cryonically frozen, however, all metabolic activity ceases (again, I could be wrong about this). This is rather a major difference. So, again, has anyone every successfully frozen and revived some complex mammal, such as a dog, and then verified that the dog still remembers all of its tricks after being revivied ? This would not prove that cryonics works on humans, of course, but it would be a pretty major piece of supporting evidence.

If you think living forever is worth money, it’s reasonable to sign up for cryonics even if it’s unlikely to work

I don’t think this is true. For example, imagine that I told you I had a magic bean that, should you eat it, will cause you to be instantly revived after death, in perfect physical and mental health; and that I will sell you this bean for $1000. Would you buy the bean ?

Most reasonable people will answer “no”, even though there’s a non-zero probability that the bean is, indeed, magical. There are at least two reasons for this:
- The probability of the bean being magical is quite low, so even though the payoff is high, the expected utility of buying the bean is still quite low.
- There are a lot of other things you could be spending that $1000 on, and they have a much higher expected utility.
(edit: fixed formatting)

Bugmaster 26 Aug 2011 3:52 UTC
0 points
in reply to: lsparrish’s comment on: On the unpopularity of cryonics: life sucks, but at least then you die
The magic bean scenario has a low prior, and you haven’t provided any evidence, just a claim, so it’s not really comparable.

Agreed, but I was arguing specifically against saturn’s apparent claim that you should spend money on any process that promises to allow you to live forever, no matter how unlikely (assuming that you actually want to live forever, of course, which we do).

Cryonics is not easy to prove if it works because the level of technology we are at is not anywhere near the theoretical maximum where repairing the damage of cryopreservation is concerned.

Is there good evidence to believe that the damage of cryopreservation (as well as the damage due to the brain losing oxygenation while it’s waiting to get cryopreserved) is actually reversible ? Furthermore, is it the case that preserving the physical structure of the brain is sufficient ? To use a crude analogy, if I were to unplug my computer from the wall socket at this very moment, the contents of this post that I am now typing would be lost forever, and no amount of future technology would bring them back—despite the fact that the physical structure of my computer hardware will be perfectly preserved, and despite the fact that my computer will resume functioning normally after I plug it back in.

Now, you might argue rationally in favor of allocating funding towards cryobiology research instead of your own future arrangements

I think that the question of “how should you allocate your money given that you want to live forever” is rather more complex than that. Here are some possible choices:
- Spend money on cryopreserving yourself, because this is reasonably likely to work.
- Spend money on cryonics research, because, while cryonics in its current state is unlikely to work, there’s a good chance it will improve given sufficient funding.
- Spend money on Singularity / friendly AI research, and forget about cryonics, because the Singularity is more likely to happen within your lifetime (and when it does, you’ll either become immortal or get converted into computronium by an unfriendly AI, frozen or not).
- Spend money on conventional medical research and life-extension techniques (things like curing cancer, curing Alzheimer’s, etc.), because neither cryonics nor the Singularity are likely to happen within your currently projected lifetime.
- Forget about all that and spend the money on a new car or whatever else makes you happy, because none of these other approaches are likely to succeed in time to benefit you personally, and you don’t care about future generations, only about yourself.
These are just some possible answers to the question of how you should spend your money; I’m sure there are many others.

Bugmaster 26 Aug 2011 17:01 UTC
0 points
in reply to: JAlfredPrufrock’s comment on: [SEQ RERUN] We Don’t Really Want Your Participation
FWIW, I do believe that non-poets and non-artists can express themselves without equations. That seems kind of like a no-brainer, otherwise we wouldn’t be able to communicate at all. Still, artists can probably express themselves better, on the average, than computer scientists and mathematicians. There’s nothing wrong with that; we’re good at one thing, they’re good at another, it’d be a boring old world if everyone was the same.

That’s just my personal opinion, though, I’m making no claim regarding whether Eliezer believes this or not.

Bugmaster 27 Aug 2011 1:16 UTC
1 point
in reply to: lsparrish’s comment on: On the unpopularity of cryonics: life sucks, but at least then you die
Yes there’s pretty good evidence that the physical structure of the brain is sufficient for long-term memories. … If human personalities were stored as dynamic processes, that would be a strong argument against cryonics, however this is unlikely to be the case; if they were, we would expect that hypothermia causes amnesia.

I was under the impression that hypothermia is not the same as cryonic freezing, and that even when a person is undergoing hypothermia, he still has brain activity. I am reasonably sure that the person is at least undergoing metabolic activity, because otherwise, in the absence of cryoprotectants, his cells would freeze and burst. I could be wrong about this, though.

As far as tissue damage is concerned, AFAIK our current technology is not advanced enough to even preserve human hearts, livers, and other organs (for the purposes of transplanting them into other patients). That is, we can freeze an organ, and we can thaw it, but in the process it is damaged beyound repair—and we’re talking about relatively simple organs here, not brains. As I understand it, the damage is caused by the following factors:
- Mechanical damage to cells due to thermal contraction (during freezing) and expansion (during thawing)
- Formation of ice crystals (mitigated but not entirely eliminated by cryoprotectants)
- Ischemic cascade (I didn’t actually know the name of this process, thanks for pointing it out)
- Slow diffusion and chemical reaction over long periods of time (which is why even simpler tissues such as plant seeds have a limited “shelf life” when frozen)
You say that this damage is not a “deal-killer”, but if this were the case, we could at least cryopreserve individual organs today (not to mention whole mammals). Cryonics advocates usually agree with me here, but postulate some form of future technology which will be able to repair this damage. I’m not sure what kind of technology could do that, though. Molecular nanotechnology is the most popular candidate, but I am not convinced that it could, in fact, exist (which is one of the reasons I’m not too enthusiastic about the Singularity, as well).

I’m not sure what you mean by this, though:

Note that unlike antiaging treatments, you can get immediate results

What do you mean by “immediate results” ? Cryonics is kind of the opposite of “immediate”, by definition.

Bugmaster 27 Aug 2011 1:18 UTC
0 points
in reply to: nshepperd’s comment on: On the unpopularity of cryonics: life sucks, but at least then you die

One of the papers referenced by Alcor in support of cryonics is this one. In this case, the patient seems to have been revived after having no electrical activity at all...

I don’t have access to the full paper, but I read the abstract as saying, “the patient had no EEG activity, but we detected another type of activity that indicates signals being transmitted from his nerves through his spinal cord, and processed by the brain”. See also my reply to lsparrish, below (or maybe above, I am getting kinda lost in this threading system).

Bugmaster 27 Aug 2011 1:25 UTC
3 points
in reply to: saturn’s comment on: On the unpopularity of cryonics: life sucks, but at least then you die

the choices available right now are basically cryonics or rotting.

I don’t think this true; and I enumerated some other choices in my reply to lsparrish, below. There are traditional life-extension technologies (Alzheimer’s cure, cancer cure, etc.), there are transplants (and stem cell research to produce them), then of course there’s the good old Singularity. There are also other ways to spend your money, period. For example, if it is the case (hypothetically speaking) that all of these life extension solutions have a very low expected utility, you might as well forget about it and spend your money on something that will make what little time you have left a little more pleasant (which includes things like donations to charity).

Bugmaster 30 Aug 2011 0:18 UTC
0 points
in reply to: lsparrish’s comment on: On the unpopularity of cryonics: life sucks, but at least then you die
Yes there is some metabolic activity in hypothermia patients. However, metabolic activity isn’t the reason for no ice crystal formation in hypothermia patients.

Sorry, my reply came out differently from what it sounded like in my head. What I meant to say was something like, “hypothermia patients still undergo noticeable metabolic activity, as opposed to cryonic patients, because the temperatures involved are much higher (among other reasons)”. So, you and I mostly agree here; still, what I tried to say is that hypothermia and cryopreservation are not entirely analogous.

The brain has a higher degree of vascularization than other organs, which is positive for cryonics purposes.

Can you explain why ? Is this because the higher density of blood vessels allows for higher densities of cryoprotectants to be delivered ? But isn’t this advantage offset by the disadvantage of having a more delicate structure that needs to be preserved ? AFAIK, you can lose a chunk of liver or a piece of skin with only a minor loss of function, but losing a piece of brain is a different story.

In any case, is there a reason why we can freeze and revive a rabbit kidney, but not a human one ?

Cracking due to temperature differentials is macroscopic in vitrification, thus doesn’t apply to “cells” so much as to tissues.

That actually sounds worse, not better...

Largely prevented (under ideal conditions) with prompt cooling.

How prompt are we talking here ? And isn’t this requirement at odds with your other comments ?

I don’t know why your interpretation of the phrase “deal-killer” would exclude the possibility of repairs using future technology.

Fair enough, I think I interpreted your comment too strongly. As for the future technologies, you bring up molecular nanotech, molecular biotech (for lack of a better word; MBT for short), and uploading (which I do accept as a continuation of self, so at least we can agree on this point). You say that the “most compelling arguments against MNT are because it would be too fragile to work in warm, wet conditions”; I actually don’t think that this is the most compelling argument against MNT, but that’s another topic. I also believe that uploading will require some sort of MNT, or something very close to it.

The problem I have with MNT and MBT is twofold:
- I am not convinced that it could work—at least, not to the extent that would be required in order to restore (either physically or as a software simulation) a brain that was cryopreserved using today’s technology. I can elaborate further if you want, just let me know.
- I am still not convinced that the current cryopreservation technology is even reversible in principle, due to some of the problems I outlined above.
This entire talk of “future technologies” sounds a little hand-wavy to me, to be honest. Yes, I understand that all kinds of really awesome future technologies could hypothetically exist, but I would need to see some compelling evidence before I become convinced that they are likely to exist.

I was referring to the outcomes of cryobiology experiments. You can experiment with new cryoprotectants and get meaningful results right away. … With anti-aging interventions by contrast, you cannot tell whether something is helping until the experimental animal reaches old age.

Oh, ok, I see what you meant. I have a few objections, though (as you probably knew I would, heh):
- Cryobiology experiments on lab animals do not necessarily translate directly to humans, for the same reasons that anti-aging experiments do not: the lab animals are “less humanlike” in their tissues as well as their genome.
- Anti-aging research specifically, and medicine in general, has an excellent track record. Life expectancies today are much longer than they have been in the past, and we are making good progress on at least delaying ore relieving the symptoms of Alzheimer’s, cancer, and other diseases associated with old age.
- I am not convinced that MNT or MBT will be developed sooner than we can “comprehensively cure aging”; but nor do I think that either endeavour will take “thousands of years” (it might take “hundreds”, though).
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that cryonics is a generally bad idea. I’m just saying that, as of today, there are better ways to spend your resources (i.e., money).

Bugmaster 30 Aug 2011 1:59 UTC
4 points
on: Book trades with open-minded theists—recommendations?
How about Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World ? IMO it is written better than The God Delusion, and it’s more fun to read.

Julia Sweeny’s Letting Go of God was also very entertaining, though perhaps it’s best to get it in audio format. She reads it extremely well.

On the other hand, I’d can not recommend using Sam Harris’s The End of Faith. It just reads like an angry Internet rant… I’m kind of surprised that the book is so popular.

And if you’re looking for something subversive, there’s always fiction ! C.S.Lewis isn’t the only one with tricks up his sleeve. I’d recommend Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light, which is one of my favorite books of all time.

Bugmaster 30 Aug 2011 2:03 UTC
3 points
on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 8
Is it just me, or is Hermione getting Flanderized into irrelevance ? Her initial role was to act as Harry’s partner and foil, but lately it seems that she’d become just another typical Gryffindor-style heroine… Utterly predictable and ultimately ineffectual.

Edit: fixed markup