Joshua_Blaine

• Joshua_Blaine 22 Nov 2013 13:48 UTC

  56 points

  on: 2013 Less Wrong Cen­sus/​Survey

  Survey taken.

  I found the Europe question awesome because I, incredibly luckily, had checked Europe’s total population for a Fermi estimate just yesterday, so I got to feel like a high accuracy, highly calibrated badass. Of course, that also means it’s not good data for things that I learned greater than ~1 day ago.

New Monthly Thread: Bragging

A Story of Kings and Spies

• Joshua_Blaine 28 Oct 2014 23:09 UTC

  35 points

  on: 2014 Less Wrong Cen­sus/​Survey

  The ritual has been completed. I await my karmic reword, as per tradition.

  There was a lot of good variance in the calibration questions (for me), so nice job thinking of them! Gur ivqrb tnzr dhrfgvba va cnegvphyne fhecevfrq zr jura V ybbxrq hc gur nafjre, nf rira nf n uhtr Zvarpensg sna V unqa’g ernyvmrq vg orng bhg frpbaq cynpr ol 3 zvyyvba.

  Also, in a fit of needless cleverness, I made my public key decryptable (by my private key) into a plaintext message that works as an extra layer of identification in the case that I win the money.

• Joshua_Blaine 7 Oct 2014 19:07 UTC

  31 points

  on: Oc­to­ber 2014 Brag­ging thread.

  To start off with something everyone here will be interested in, I’ve recently and finally finished the first part of my video version of The Useful Idea of Truth (LW post here, Youtube link here). It seems well liked, and I’m even wondering if I should’ve posted it to Main. To understand what finishing this project means to me may be hard, as it means a lot. I have learned a ton doing this, and am really happy with the final look. My previous video editing experience was basically putting still frames and videos in sequential order with a spoken voice overtop. I’m 18 years old. I’m 18 and inexperienced and I just made something that I consider on par with CGP Grey in production quality, and he’s been making videos professionally for years. It’s so great to look at one of my idols, say “I bet I could do that too,” and then actually do it. There’s a real-world benchmark for this skill I’ve never really done before, and I matched it. I’m developing as a person, learning and training new skills, and it’s feeling great. Of course, at >80 hours for that 6 minute video, my production rate isn’t so great, given I still have schooling and work to worry about. I’m sure I can optimize, slim down, and otherwise improve my workflow, and I’d love to just jump right into doing this full-time, cranking out LW videos every other week, but I can’t. I’ve got a bit of a pipe dream, of course, that crowd-funding or an official sponsor could keep me going until Youtube add revenue/​Subable/​Patreon can support me, but I’m not confident there’s room in people’s budget for something like this work to become a priority for them.

  Less of public interest, I have made a lot of progress with my schooling. This last spring I made an arrangement with my High school to do my Senior year somewhat differently than is standard. Thanks to advanced placement classes completed in previous years, I had only 3 credits needed to graduate, so I had the option to just do those 3 courses at my own pace, over the summer. 2 have been completed (yay me, I can self-motivate!) , and all I have left to finish is my English 12 class. 4 days ago, I buckled down and finished the 1st of the 4 papers I need to do. The reading needed for the others is getting done quickly, and I’m happy with what progress I have done already. I look forward finishing High School without having to actually go to school, and the validation of my previous feelings toward self-paced lessons is nice.

• Joshua_Blaine 7 Apr 2015 22:08 UTC

  29 points

  on: Even bet­ter cry­on­ics – be­cause who needs nanites any­way?

  First off, I love that you’re actively pursuing alternative methods of human preservation. That’s awesome, and I hope you manage to find some useful ideas in your search. However, I fear that this approach in particular doesn’t really solve the problem that cryoprotectants successfully do (toxicity briefly aside).

  without cryoprotectants the water will expand upon freezing, and break the cells.

  This line in particular is my biggest point of contention. I am by no means an expert in this field, and my understanding may be moot in this context, but the expansion of water-ice crystals isn’t the central concern for frozen biological cells. A quickly found source claims that:

  Since ice is essentially pure H2O, ice formation can increase the concentration of minerals in the remaining cytosol to a toxic level. The increased mineral concentration in the cytosol will cause water to be drawn in from the surrounding cells by osmosis, which can cause the cell to swell and burst.

  Alcor’s official FAQ also says that:

  When tissue is slowly cooled, ice first forms between cells. The growing ice crystals increase the concentration of solutes in the remaining liquid around them, causing osmotic dehydration of cells.

  Your method doesn’t prevent the formation of ice crystals, it merely changes the structure of the crystals, and at what temperature they form, so I suspect harmful cell osmosis can still occur. Of course, I could be insufficiently understanding why ice crystals effect the mineral concentration of cytosol, or the order in which certain biological areas freeze under variable conditions, and your smaller ice/​lower freezing temperature would successfully prevent this issue. I don’t believe this is necessarily the case, given your explanation, but if anyone who’s more studied in these fields could speak up, I’d be happy to defer to their expertise.

[Link] An­i­mated Video—The Use­ful Idea of Truth (Part 1/​3)

• Joshua_Blaine 12 Aug 2013 21:34 UTC

  26 points

  in reply to: Rukifellth’s comment on: New Monthly Thread: Bragging

  You’ve now been marked as having tier 4 human usefulness by Clippy the Paperclip Maximizing AI due to the (now increased) iron content of your otherwise useless & fleshy body. The nano-swarm is on its way now.

  You may prepare for processing as you see fit.

• Joshua_Blaine 4 Sep 2013 21:31 UTC

  25 points

  in reply to: Tim_Walters’s comment on: You Only Live Twice

  I understand this is from ages ago but is worth a response. See the Wiki page on Deep hypothermic circulatory arrest (a procedure used in some surgeries today):

  Deep Hypothermic Circulatory Arrest (DHCA) is a surgical technique that involves cooling the body of the patient and stopping blood circulation.

  The procedure requires keeping the patient in a state of hibernation at 12 − 18 degrees Celsius with no breathing, heartbeat, or brain activity for up to one hour. Blood is drained from the body to eliminate blood pressure. [emphasis mine]

  The existence and success of this procedure seems like incredibly strong evidence in favor of people having a purely chemical identity stored in their head. When timely applied and non-lossy preservation techniques (which I consider modern cryonics to be) are used, you should be able to be successfully re-animated.

• Joshua_Blaine 2 Aug 2013 17:49 UTC

  20 points

  on: Ra­tion­al­ity Quotes Au­gust 2013

  The best solution to a problem is usually the easiest one.

  -- GLaDOS from Portal 2

• Joshua_Blaine 12 Aug 2013 1:31 UTC

  18 points

  in reply to: RolfAndreassen’s comment on: New Monthly Thread: Bragging

  +1 for doing a genuinely uncomfortable thing. Nice job.

• Joshua_Blaine 4 May 2014 22:25 UTC

  17 points

  in reply to: philh’s comment on: May Monthly Brag­ging Thread

  You made a thing that’s being used by other people. People who are paying you to use it. That’s pretty great!

• Joshua_Blaine 26 Jul 2013 19:08 UTC

  17 points

  in reply to: CrimsonWool’s comment on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 25, chap­ter 96

  Unless, of course, the machinery for caring is much simpler when it’s simply “care” vs “not care”. Pretending to care could be a much more complicated neurological adaptation that would be more wasteful than just implementing a nice “Sympathy” subsystem.

  I mean, the way humans model each other’s behavior is by looking at our own self in other people’s scenarios, and then making minor adjustments for accuracy’s sake, since they think a little differently. I mean, why would you invent an entire subsystem just for understanding other people? That’s insane! YOU HAVE AN ENTIRE BRAIN ALREADY, AND EVERYBODY’S BRAIN IS REALLY DAMN SIMILAR, RIGHT?

  Now, once you have this “self modeling and adjustment” system in place, actual caring makes a lot of sense. oh, pretending to care about your family and tribe is useful? here, i’ll just slap on an extra module here. we’ll call it Sympathy. It kinda works like this: you’v got that model of your brother you use to predict his behavior, right? It’s running on the same hardware YOUR mind is, and you care about YOUR mind, right? so we’ll just switch that “care” knob to the on position for your bro, alright? There. ha. now he’ll respond by viewing you as a valuable resource!

  That “Really Intelligent Sociopath Who Accurately Predicts Every Scenario In Which Pretending To Care Is Useful And Rarely Makes Wasteful Mistakes Regarding That Decision” module seems a little bit costly to implement. Honestly, it’s just easier to actually freaking care about other people, albeit in a silly, ignorantly applied human way.

  (I side with Harry on this one, in case you couldn’t tell.)

• Joshua_Blaine 3 Sep 2014 22:06 UTC

  14 points

  on: Open thread, Sept. 1-7, 2014

  My work on converting The Useful Idea of Truth into a video is going well. I didn’t successfully anticipate the time that would be necessary to finish, but things are getting done at an acceptable pace. The best thing I can say, for sure, is that the overall style and presentation of the work has come a nice way forward since the start of this project, especially after working in some of the suggestions and impressions I’ve gotten from people.

  

  (Included here is a short GIF of one of the recent portions that I’m particularly fond of, so additional criticism and suggestions for improvement are especially welcome.)

• Joshua_Blaine 8 Apr 2015 1:38 UTC

  13 points

  in reply to: maxikov’s comment on: Even bet­ter cry­on­ics – be­cause who needs nanites any­way?

  That’s a very sound (pun partially intended) insight, and I don’t immediately see a significant reason for why that shouldn’t be the case.

  However, humans aren’t perfectly uniform spheres of water (to borrow from a common physics joke), so some concerns do still exist. Namely: Pressure might propagate through them less predictably/​quickly than just water, and different areas of the body might begin freezing at different pressures/​in different orders (which can, however, be countered by raising pressures quickly).

  I have updated significantly in the direction of “This idea might actually be very valuable to cryonics proponents,” for sure.

• Joshua_Blaine 11 Aug 2013 17:53 UTC

  13 points

  on: New Monthly Thread: Bragging

  META COMMENT THREAD: KEEP ALL META DISCUSSION HERE

  Anything you do or don’t like about this thread, post here. Feedback fosters improvement.

• Joshua_Blaine 12 Aug 2013 3:07 UTC

  11 points

  in reply to: SolveIt’s comment on: New Monthly Thread: Bragging

  Did you really co-author that paper just this last month?

  Also, an Erdos number of 2? that’s… that’s just not fair, and I am incredibly jealous.

• Joshua_Blaine 12 May 2014 22:42 UTC

  10 points

  in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Open Thread, May 12 − 18, 2014

  This is beautiful and really useful seeming. I’m happy it exists, so thanks for making it.

Oc­to­ber 2014 Brag­ging thread.

• Joshua_Blaine 6 Nov 2013 3:00 UTC

  9 points

  on: Open Thread, Novem­ber 1 − 7, 2013

  Does anyone here have any serious information regarding Tulpas? When I first heard of them they immediately seemed to be the kind of thing that is obviously and clearly a very bad idea, and may not even exist in the sense that people describe them. A very obvious sign of a persons who is legitimately crazy, even.

  Naturally, my first re-reaction is the desire to create one myself (One might say I’m a bit contrarian by nature). I don’t know any obvious reason not to (ignoring social stigma and time consuming initial investment), And there may be some advantage to having one, such as parallel focus, more “outside” self analysis, etc. I don’t really know much of anything right now, which is why I’m asking if there’s been any decent research done already.

  What links here?

  • Tulpa Refer­ences/​Discussion by Vulture (2 Jan 2014 1:34 UTC; 21 points)