Software engineer at the Nucleic Acid Observatory in Boston. Speaking for myself unless I say otherwise.
jefftk
Karma: 18,968
The medical advice you’re relating sounds quite reasonable. It’s saying to consider base rates when making a diagnosis. If P(hoofbeats|horse) is the same as P(hoofbeats|zebra) but P(horse) >> P(zebra), then P(horse|hoofbeats) >> P(zebra|hoofbeats).
Most people don’t currently donate all their disposable income to charity.
I do. I give away all my earnings and my husband gives about 20% of his, so we live on a much smaller budget than most people we know.
While we live on a much smaller budget than many people, we still have disposable income that we could choose to spend on cryonics instead of other things. If cryonics cost $500/year you would still have $28/week in discretionary money after the cryonics spending. Whether this makes sense depends on whether you think that you would get more happiness out of cryonics or that $10/week. As for me, I need to read more about cryonics.
(Some background: As she wrote, julia is very unwilling to spend money on herself that could instead be going to helping other people. Because this leads to making yourself miserable, I decided to put $38/week into an account as a conditional gift, where the condition is that it can be spent on herself (or on gifts for people she knows personally) but not given away. So cryonics would not in our case actually mean less money given to charity.)
I believe the $2M = 2500 lives saved number that julia is using comes from the givewell.org evaluation of village reach:
http://www.givewell.org/international/top-charities/villagereach
It’s a pretty thorough review of the charity, and givewell understands that spending $100 on vaccinating N children does not mean N lives saved. They write:
“These assumptions yield an estimate of one additional child fully immunized for every ~$41 of VillageReach’s expenses … this would imply that VillageReach is averting a child death for every ~$545 it spends”
Julia’s calculation appears to be using $800 per life saved, which is even more conservative.
As her husband, I would rather she didn’t have a utilitarian incentive to either stay married or divorce. I should probably figure out some set of promises about how I would spend money in the event of a divorce so that the expected impact is closer to neutral from a utilitarian viewpoint.
Doing impractical things is classic signaling. The less practical the stronger the signal.
Talking to friends who had to wear uniforms, people found other ways to signal status: jewelry, fancier shoes, hairstyles etc. Is there a reason to think that kids spend less money/effort on status signaling if they’re required to wear uniforms?
I started reading this some, and it’s perspective is jarring. From the introduction:
“”″ Let’s be real here – maybe you had some good reasons for marrying your wife – but we both know what really counted was you wanting to have sex with her. You might have done that “Pro and Con” thing with a line down the middle of the page, but whatever was on the “Con” column didn’t matter a damn compared to “I get to screw her!” on the “Pro” side of the page.
I also know that apart from your hobbies, pretty much everything else in your life is just a hoop that you have to jump through to get back to having sex with her. “”″
They present as an authority on what people think, yet they are way far off in explaining my motivations for marriage and work.
Better than recency, perhaps the top scoring posts of all time?
A recommendation engine needs information about what posts you are glad to have read and ideally what posts you read but did not fund useful. So if the engine knows for each user (1) the set of posts they’ve read [1] and (2) the set of posts that they’ve voted up, then we have an evaluation criterion: did we choose to show people posts they voted up?
You’d then need to figure out features and write code for them so the learning algorithm could find user correlations. Set up a svm or something to get probability of upvoting given viewing. Then you use some sort of multi armed bandit algorithm so you continue to gather information.
[1] This isn’t perfect, because you can open a post without reading it. We could detect scrolling and log how much of it they actually read, but people might not like the privacy implications.
This was about a year ago: do you still hold this belief? Has eating like you described worked out?
Can you give an example of something labled a “modest proposal” that is actually advocated by the speaker? I’ve only seen those words as a way to draw attention to the satire.
that’s what you’re doing to me!
I was in the same state: I could type without looking as long as I didn’t think about it. I wanted to get where I could type while looking at the screen or copy from a piece of paper. I rearranged the keycaps on my keyboard in alphabetical order so that if I looked down I would mess up. After a painful couple of weeks (especially with complex passwords) I had convinced my brain that I didn’t need to be looking down to type.
My typing is not as good as yours, though, because I don’t really use all my fingers. I type plenty fast, but I overuse my inner fingers and move my hands more than you’re supposed to.
I still have not figured out how to find work shirts that won’t ballon when tucked in. I may be smaller than most people who give their clothes to the thrift store, or it may be there’s something about this I don’t understand.
That is an excellent concept: reverse suspenders.
I go barefoot a lot, including walking to work, so I’d need to figure something out with that. Possibly just putting on the shirt stays when I put on my shoes, socks, and dress shirt at work.
Total yearly welfare spending in the usa is $700 billion [1]. This includes federal, state, and local spending. This is being spent on around 50 million people [2] (that’s 1/6th of the population). So $14K/person. To get $200K/person you’d need there to be only 3 million poor people in the usa (1%) which is way to low.
This sounds like maybe 50% overhead, not 500% overhead.
Peer review isn’t magic trust dust. Looking at their website, I don’t see any details on their review process or why I should trust them.
It is now.
How Likely Is Cryonics To Work?
.03 seems really high for messing up the paperwork. Sure you might mess up the initial paperwork but then it will be noticed and fixed.
Do we know how common it is for someone who thought they were signed up for cryonics to not actually be frozen because something was screwed up with the paperwork? There’s the cryonics organization, life insurance, and your will. Maybe other things?
.06 seems too low for chance of dying in a circumstance where they can’t preserve you. Especially if one isn’t very old, the chance of death from sudden trauma is much higher than other forms of death.
If I die now (age 25) then yes, it’s most likely to be because of an accident. But I’m also unlikely to die now. Looking at overall causes of death, 5% of american deaths in 2007 were due to “accidents (unintentional injuries)”. Another 0.8% were due to homicide. I assumed that within the 18.6% of ‘other’ there might be ~0.2% of other similar things.
I could die of something like a heart attack while far from a hospital or something, though. So I should probably raise this probability to account for that. Do we know how common it is for people to die suddenly, of all causes (excluding accidents and homicide, which I’m already assuming are 100% no-freeze)?
Would 0.20 be better?
One can in many places (and the number of places is growing) engage in euthanasia. Even in the US people can directly take steps to drastically decrease their lifespans such as by self-starvation.
I don’t know if I would want to be euthanized/frozen if I thought my chances of revival were this low.
Alzheimer’s also has a very large genetic component, so if no one in one’s family got it one is probably safe.
In my case, I don’t think I have had any relatives with it. For the general case, I should probably put in a note.
I don’t know why you think the cryonic’s company running out of capacity should be that likely
Something might kill a lot of people at once. This is unlikely, but is it more than 1% unlikely?
If a company goes insolvent, unless this happens just when you are dying, switching to another insurance company should not be hard.
I had thought life insurance worked such that if when I’m 60 my company goes bust getting a new policy would be prohibitively expensive?
You seem to be underestimating the risk of anti-cryonics laws. There’s already such a law in British Columbia.
I didn’t know about this. That is worrysome. Would you put it closer to 0.25?
You also seem to be assuming that extraction of information from the brain is the only possible option rather than direct revival.
I am. Direct revival seems really impractical to me. Should it?
I also don’t know how you are combining these various probabilities. This could drastically alter the probability.
I convert all the probabilities of failure to probabilities of success by subtracting them from 1. Then I multiply them all and subtract the result from one:
P(failure) = 1-P(success) P(total_success) = P(success_a)*P(success_b)*P(success_c)*...This seemed to me to be the only way to do it, so I didn’t remark on it. Is this actually the right way to do it? Are there other ways that I should have considered? (I tried to deal with independence in footnote 3)
Jeff Kaufman. Working as a programmer doing computational linguistics in the boston area. Found “less wrong” twice: first through the intuitive explanation of bayes’ theorem and then again recently through “hp and the methods of rationality”. I value people’s happiness, valuing that of those close to me more than that of strangers, but I value strangers’ welfare enough that I think I have an obligation to earn as much as I can and live on as little as I can so I can give more to charity.