If there’s a nearby plasma bank, plasma donations can pay around $20, a couple times a week. Not a lot, but pretty easy/low-stress if needles don’t freak you out too much. To make it go faster, be sure to drink plenty of water fluids and don’t eat too much fatty foods.
lsparrish
Karma: 2,726
I’ve been eating less meat lately for a reason that has nothing directly to do with animal suffering. Rather I have been experimenting with a lifestyle of nutrient powders, aka DIY Soylent, to substitute for meals. The recipe I settled on happened to be vegan, since it uses soy powder as the main protein source. One could substitute whey (the main Soylent is whey based) or meat based protein, however I am thus far happy with the taste and effects of the soy version.
Anyway, I don’t know how widely this practice is likely to spread. It makes remarkable sense to me, and people like me, but perhaps not to the majority. I am attracted to novelty to an above-average degree, and not particularly attached to eating (as long as I can be full/satisfied). The idea that humans can live (not just live, but thrive) on a bit of powder, oil, and water, is somehow fascinating and thrilling—more so than the idea of surviving on lettuce and veggie burgers, which sounds like more of a boring halfway solution. The reports of less sleep / more energy / better cognition (which seem true to my experience so far) also caught my attention—perhaps for the same reasons that transhumanism seems like a good idea.
So maybe when advertising veganism to transhumanists specifically, Soylent / quantified self / powder based diet is a good pitch. Market it as “cyborg food” or something. Yes, animals suffering is bad, we get that… But if we focus on animals suffering, what happens? Lab research gets subjected to a bunch of new regs that slow things down, while the food factories in their arrogance keep cranking away and making us look like idiots. The economics are strongly in favor of the meat industry continuing for as long as people remain attached to their meat products, ensuring that they are the last to go despite doing more harm and less good than labs. And as a transhumanist, I really want the labs to succeed—at least on the important life extension related stuff.
I agree with others that vegetarianism is likely more practical and addresses other concerns besides suffering. However, perhaps there is a lot of utility that could be gained in the near term by e.g. keeping factory-farmed animals high on morphine for most of their lives. Would this impose additional costs that keep it from being economical? One would be food purity—people might not like morphine in their meat/eggs/milk.
Idea: Perhaps animal rights activists could accomplish their goals more efficiently by promoting powder based foods along the lines of Soylent.
It isn’t hard to make a cheaper soy based version, and the energy and cognitive benefits appear to still be there. Also, you don’t have to directly sell people on the values shift where animal suffering matters in the same way human suffering does, rather you can put them in a position where they no longer feel obliged to defend animal suffering as less significant than human suffering because they just happen to no longer be eating animals.
It appears to have other utilitarian benefits as well, which is part of what makes it a potentially easier sell than ethically motivated veganism.
Speculatively (but reasonably, given the available anecdotal evidence): Higher average IQ in the population (which causes disproportionate economic gains relative to the individual economic benefit of higher IQ), higher economic productivity due to less sleep requirement and better energy levels, easier weight loss due to less exercise resistance.
Less speculatively: Reduced shipping costs (hence CO2) due to lack of water weight for the dry material, reduced heart attack rates due to increased oat flour and olive oil consumption, reduced food preparation time, more balanced/consistent nutrient intake.
Honestly, I think you did great. Your remarks were on point and very down to earth. There was a lot of high-minded speculation going on, and of course these are people notoriously good at that, so it was nice to have a “random lesswronger” in the mix who could humbly point out the (to our way of thinking) obvious.
Life is a wonderful example of self-assembling molecular nanotechnology, and as such gives you a template of the sorts of things that are actually possible (as opposed to Drexlerian ideas).
Except that Drexlerian ideas are very alien compared to life, and are also physically possible (according to Nanosystems).
That is to say, everything is built from a few dozen stereotyped monomers assembled into polymers (rather than arranging atoms arbitrarily), there are errors at every step of the way from mutations to misincorporation of amino acids in proteins so everything must be robust to small problems (seriously, like 10% of the large proteins in your body have an amino acid out of place as opposed to being built with atomic precision and they can be altered and damaged over time), it uses a lot of energy via a metabolism to maintain itself in the face of the world and its own chemical instability (often more energy than is embodied in the chemical bonds of the structure itself over a relatively short time if it’s doing anything interesting and for that matter building it requires much more energy than is actually embodied), you have many discrete medium-sized molecules moving around and interacting in aqueous solution (rather than much in the way of solid-state action) and on scales larger than viruses or protein crystals everything is built more or less according to a recipe of interacting forces and emergent behavior (rather than having something like a digital blueprint).
You are generalizing to all of physics from the narrow band of biochemistry. Biochemistry is aqueous, solvent-based, room-temperature-range, and evolved. It is not comparable to e.g. printed circuitry on a silicon chip.
So yeah, remarkable things are possible, most likely even including things that naturally-evolved life does not do now. But there are limits and it probably does not resemble the sorts of things described in “Nanosystems” and its ilk at all.
There are sure to be limits. However, the limits are probably nothing like those of life. Life is kind of useful to point to as an example of how self-replicating systems can exist, but apart from that it is a very misleading analogy. (At least, if we’re talking about hard nanotech, which is what MNT usually is used to refer to and what Drexler focuses on. Soft nanotech that mimics or borrows from biology is incredibly interesting, but different.)
reasonably easy to put together.
Confirmed. Tasty too. I got the supplies on the way home from work today, sans olive oil (which I had already) and potassium (which I ordered online). It’s not the cheapest way in the world to eat—it cost around $80 including the potassium. Most of the supplies will last 30 days, but some (oat flour, cocoa, and soy protein) will run out sooner. The potassium should last longer. A 30-day supply of everything would probably be around $100-$120.
Any ideas to make FAI parallelize better? Or make there be less UFAI resources without reducing economic growth?
This seems analogous to the problem of marketplace investments. If you have good evidence that investment X is going to be worth twice as much tomorrow, your preference becomes to own as much as possible. But if your investment is high enough to impact the scarcity level, it becomes twice as expensive today, which could occlude or even negate the reasons it was going to be worth twice as much tomorrow in the first place. With that information in mind, your preference regarding how much to invest is different.
There are economies of scale involved. Cheaper hardware (like a gaming GPU) costs more electricity, but can be purchased off the shelf. Custom ASIC hardware is dramatically more energy-efficient, but you need a pretty significant investment to get started. When that economy of scale is maxxed out, there are further optimizations to be tackled like superconducting electronics, quantum computing, thinsat arrays, and so forth.
Bitcoin hoarding for charity: Buy some amount of bitcoin, and keep it in a series of of wallets dedicated to various causes. Precommit to hoarding all of the amounts for a significant time, but spend the ones with the most warm-fuzzy results the soonest because that results in pumping up the value of bitcoin.
Eventually, at a point where the value cannot be pumped further by expending more on warm-fuzzies, spend hoarded amounts on utilitarian-optimal causes in a way that leverages economies of scale to achieve maximum impact.
This result could be seen as making dollars less trustworthy, rather than bitcoins. After all, the account that was seized was dollars, and the violated regulations appear to only apply to dollars and other kinds of government money.
Two possible suggestions could be coherently made involving the use of premortem cryonics for people who legitimately prefer to be dead rather than go on living in their current state:
“Since they are going to die anyway, it is better to euthanize them in a way that maximizes research.”
“Since they are at risk of killing themselves, it is best to cryopreserve them in a way that maximizes their chance of being reanimated and cured of their depression.”
The two positions are fundamentally distinct and optimize for different outcomes.
In the first case, the main concern is the potential research material that goes to waste every time someone kills themselves under uncontrolled circumstances. It does not concern itself with the possibility of preserving the individual patient, and focuses instead on the utilitarian gains that improving the state of the art in cryonics would bring for others.
In the second case, the main concern is the lives that are directly wasted due to people killing themselves off for good when in reality they would be fine with cryonics, and their preferences are not insistent on death. This argument does not concern itself with improving the state of the art, but is concerned with the ongoing and potentially preventable loss of life from suicide.
Either loss—the individual life, or research that could radically extend lots of lives—is a tragic one which could perhaps be avoided, if premortem cryonics were permitted by society. However, the two arguments have different strengths and weaknesses which make them hard to use.
The first makes no assumption about whether cryonics currently achieves its objectives, only that the lives of people who are committing suicide would have some use for research that might improve cryonics. On the other hand, it relies on the moral notion that people who want to commit suicide should in fact be free to do so, and that research scientists who actively participate in that event are not in some way morally tainted, threatening the basis of civilization, or otherwise losing more than they gain by doing so.
(In case it’s not already completely obvious to everyone, I’ll spell it out: The humane advantages from perfecting cryogenic suspended animation technology in humans would be HUGE, as it would bring an immediate end to death from every disease and buy many decades of pain-free time for patients to have their illnesses cured.)
The second relies on the notion that cryonics patients are not actually dead in the sense that we are worried about, that cryonics is better thought of as an alternative to suicide, and so forth. Instead of simply being dead, the patient is accepting a risk of being dead when all is said and done. This becomes a question of risk tradeoffs—the risk that you will kill yourself during a future depressive episode and/or die of aging, versus the risk that cryonics doesn’t work.
The main problem though is that if you don’t have an audience with a fairly sophisticated grasp on transhumanism and utilitarianism already, and a respect for the chances of cryonics working already, they are going to be mindkilled pretty quickly by the apparent endorsement of taking advantage of suicidally depressed people.
This is a horrible plan for maximizing human survival rates. Downvoted.
Human brains are relatively unique in their size. You can of course do relevant research on other mammals, but higher primates (let alone exotic creatures like dolphins, whales, and elephants) are extremely expensive and attract the negative attention of animal rights activists. Horrible PR, even if you are doing humane (non-revival) experiments. Rodent research is a good idea, but many of the fundamental problems for human cryopreservation do not apply due to the drastic difference in brain size.
Waiting for people to pass through agonal death prior to experimenting on them is a pretty horrible research strategy too, because that adds complicating factors of zero relevance to the actual problem of cryonics damage. It’s better than nothing though, and is both legally and ethically defensible. It should also be possible to do non-revival experiments on terminally ill patients who meet criteria for lethal medication.
All we need is to reduce damage sufficiently for future science to do its job. Revival experiments (except maybe for small critters like C Elegans, or for tissue samples) are a waste of time at this point in the tech tree. Eventually we’ll get there with whole brain revival, but it will be many years before that happens, during which many people will die of old age.
Somewhat counterbalancing the disutility from the likelihood that more people would (almost certainly, in my opinion) opt for this, is the fact that if it works, it would actually save them from death from committing suicide. So your assessment of cryonics chances of working (under ideal conditions) definitely matters here.
If you are new to a scientific topic, note that the first half of a paper often tends to summarize common knowledge within the field that is necessary to understand the conclusion. Often this is more readable/interesting than the rest of the paper, suggesting that you can spend more time reading scientific papers by skipping the denser and more original parts.
Anyone bidding on a Bitcoin is not bidding on a productive project.
It seems that the same goes for gold, real estate, and so forth when they are used as a store of value. The difference is that unlike bitcoin, these things have other productive uses that they could be put to, less expensively, if they weren’t being used as a wealth-counting mechanism.
Are you talking about bitcoin or conventional sovereign currencies?
Bitcoin. Traditional currencies have the same problem though, in that they tend to have variable, policy-based inflation rates that confuse the markets. I am arguing in favor of a something designed for price stability, enforced by algorithmic means in accordance to demand.
The future supply of bitcoins is much more certain than the typical currency out there because it’s laid down in advance.
Sure, the physical supply is laid out in advance, but the amount available to do transactions with at any given time, or even in the long term, is not. There’s no reliable way to predict who will choose to sit on their coins (possibly even cryptographically putting them in an unspendable stasis for an unknown amount of time) versus spending them on useful trades or engaging in short-term speculation. The market is rendered more stochastic, with more of a butterfly effect, more black swans, and so forth. Each and every transaction is impacted to some degree by this hidden complexity, which negatively impacts the use currency’s use value.
I can at least imagine that your position is correct. But I still think that attaching a complex set of beliefs regarding the future value of a currency’s individual units generates noise that makes them less useful as units of price value, and really less valuable as a medium of exchange. Added complexity to a given calculation makes it harder to perform, resulting in a relatively slower, clunkier economy, with high probability of buyer’s remorse and so forth arising from miscalculation.
Don’t get me wrong; I am overwhelmingly pro-bitcoin, and see it gaining massive value for reasons I’ve stated (destroying/locking a sum of bitcoins is an extremely efficient way to add recognizable value to another currency), but I have reservations about the specific scenario of it directly filling the niche occupied by cash such as dollars, i.e as a method of. fulfilling long term contractual obligations, pricing goods, and so forth.
Yes, it is very different, if we are talking about core motivations. The main point of powdered cyborg food is to be cool for transhumanist hacker types (by virtue of being convenient, useful, inexpensive, cognition-boosting, and liberating oneself from the conventional norms and hassles of food dependency), and not to save helpless suffering animals.
However, just because cyborg food is not motivated by animal rights does not mean that it does not serve the interests of animal rights. The main competitors in the cyborg food market are soy and whey, neither of which is flesh based (although some whey contains rennet from calf stomach). Contrast to conventional food, where veggie burgers play second fiddle to aggressively marketed and addicting meat products.
Whether the whey based version is harmful for animal rights is debatable, given its status as a waste product from cheesemaking. Purchasing whey does support the dairy industry, but since we are talking about replacing meals that contain cheese, it could actually reduce demand for cheese and thus reduce milk production overall. Under current market conditions, casein (cheese protein) is more expensive than whey protein, despite representing 80% of the protein content of cow’s milk.
If it were to become a primary food product (as opposed to a niche bodybuilding product), particularly if there was a reduced demand for cheese, I expect that whey protein would become more expensive, and thus would probably be disfavored as a base for cyborg food on grounds of cost. Thus it is probably not straightforwardly analogous to the chicken wing example in Peter’s post.