lsparrish

Karma: 2,704

lsparrish 1 Jul 2010 0:20 UTC
12 points
on: A Challenge for LessWrong
“Solutions looking for problems.”

Less wrongers of a more self-interest based frame of mind might consider banding together in groups of 2-4 and founding startups.

Or they could be nonprofits, if you prefer.

lsparrish 1 Jul 2010 1:22 UTC
7 points
in reply to: JoshuaZ’s comment on: A Challenge for LessWrong
Well, I’d say the notion of getting rich is self-interest-cognition-stimulating, but a productive business can certainly have a positive outcome for others, perhaps (due to scalability and feedback factors) even more than devoting time directly to charity. Generally, businesses provide more benefit (at least as subjectively perceived by the customer) than they receive. Kind of the point of a free market system.

Startups are indeed unlikely to succeed. But they don’t cost (relatively) much to start, and generally fail within a few months. Compared to the gains if you are in one that succeeds, the risk is not all that high. Also, diligent Less Wrong students should be able to mitigate many of the risk factors better than average startup founders. ;)

Another huge benefit aside from entry into the getting rich lottery is education, i.e. from the school of hard knocks. According to PG, places like Yahoo would prefer a person who has started and failed at a startup over someone who has simply graduated college. Failure brings experience. And failing at a startup is not a smear on your work history like getting fired from another kind of job would be.

The business model that works best, according to Eric Reis, Steve Blank, etc., is to develop a customer base from the very beginning. Start with something with basic functionality and start upgrading it as you get more user feedback. If nobody will buy it in its rudimentary form, you might not have a very good idea to begin with.

lsparrish 1 Jul 2010 22:11 UTC
0 points
on: Is cryonics necessary?: Writing yourself into the future
How much is gained by writing about yourself? Aside from personal development aspects, less than video-logging. But likely different information than video-logging. Possibly stuff buried in your childhood. Logging biometrics like heartbeat could be more total benefit than video-logging, but again different information. Having a combination could prove more useful in a synergistic manner than any one information source on its own, because comparing them against each other allows you to infer more information.

The same goes for cryonics. At a guess I’d say preserving the nanostructure of your brain to the highest technologically feasible level is going to be thousands of times more effective than all the digital and plain-english data in the world. But combined they would be significantly more effective, because of the data you can gain by cross-referencing different types of information.

lsparrish 2 Jul 2010 0:20 UTC
4 points
on: Open Thread: July 2010
Paul Graham has written extensively on Startups and what is required. A highly focused team of 2-4 founders, who must be willing to admit when their business model or product is flawed, yet enthused enough about it to pour their energy into it.

Steve Blank has also written about the Customer Development process which he sees as paralleling the Product Development cycle. The idea is to get empirical feedback.by trying to sell your product from the get-go, as soon as you have something minimal but useful. Then you test it for scalability. Eventually you have strong empirical evidence to present to potential investors, aka “traction”.

These strike me as good examples of applied rationality. I wonder what percentage of Less Wrong readers would succeed as startup founders?

lsparrish 2 Jul 2010 23:07 UTC
0 points
in reply to: wedrifid’s comment on: Open Thread: July 2010
Are you saying that LW readers suck at applied rationality, or are you disagreeing with the idea that applied rationality can help prevent startup failure?

lsparrish 3 Jul 2010 18:27 UTC
0 points
in reply to: wedrifid’s comment on: Open Thread: July 2010
Suppose we were to test it empirically and ⁹⁄₁₀ startups fail on their first attempt. Then test again and ⁹⁄₁₀ still fail on second attempt. That is not enough information to determine that a given person would fail 10 times in a row, because it could be that there is some number of failures <10 where you finally acquire enough skill to avoid failure on a more routine basis.

Given the fact that there’s a whole world of information, strategies, and skills specific to founding startups, I would be surprised if an average member of a given group of startup founders fails x times out of y when x/y first attempts also fail.

So it would be relevant (especially if you are, say an angel investor) how low the percentage of failures can be brought to with multiple attempts by a given individual, and whether a given kind of education (such as reading Less Wrong sequences, or a quality such as self-selecting to read them) would predispose you to reducing that number of failures more rapidly and/or further in the long run.

lsparrish 4 Jul 2010 16:04 UTC
0 points
in reply to: wedrifid’s comment on: Open Thread: July 2010
Here is the relevant quote from Paul Graham’s Why Hiring is Obsolete:

Risk and reward are always proportionate. For example, stocks are riskier than bonds, and over time always have greater returns. So why does anyone invest in bonds? The catch is that phrase “over time.” Stocks will generate greater returns over thirty years, but they might lose value from year to year. So what you should invest in depends on how soon you need the money. If you’re young, you should take the riskiest investments you can find.

All this talk about investing may seem very theoretical. Most undergrads probably have more debts than assets. They may feel they have nothing to invest. But that’s not true: they have their time to invest, and the same rule about risk applies there. Your early twenties are exactly the time to take insane career risks.

The reason risk is always proportionate to reward is that market forces make it so. People will pay extra for stability. So if you choose stability—by buying bonds, or by going to work for a big company—it’s going to cost you.

Riskier career moves pay better on average, because there is less demand for them. Extreme choices like starting a startup are so frightening that most people won’t even try. So you don’t end up having as much competition as you might expect, considering the prizes at stake.

The math is brutal. While perhaps 9 out of 10 startups fail, the one that succeeds will pay the founders more than 10 times what they would have made in an ordinary job. [3] That’s the sense in which startups pay better “on average.”

Remember that. If you start a startup, you’ll probably fail. Most startups fail. It’s the nature of the business. But it’s not necessarily a mistake to try something that has a 90% chance of failing, if you can afford the risk. Failing at 40, when you have a family to support, could be serious. But if you fail at 22, so what? If you try to start a startup right out of college and it tanks, you’ll end up at 23 broke and a lot smarter. Which, if you think about it, is roughly what you hope to get from a graduate program.

He also goes on to say how managers at forward-thinking companies that he talked to such as Yahoo, Amazon, Google, etc. would prefer to hire a failed startup genius over someone who worked a steady job for the same period of time. Essentially, if you don’t need financial stability in the near future, your time spent working diligently and passionately on your own ideas trying to make them fit the marketplace is more valuable than time spent on a steady payroll.

lsparrish 4 Jul 2010 16:53 UTC
19 points
on: Open Thread: July 2010
Cryonics scales very well. People who think cryonics is costly, even if you had to come up with the entire lump sum close to the end of your life, are generally ignorant of this fact.

So long as you keep the shape constant, for any given container the surface area is a based on a square law whereas the volume is a cube. For example with a cube shaped object, one side squared times 6 is the surface area whereas one side cubed is the volume. Surface area is where the heat gets entry, so if you have a huge container holding cryogenic goods (humans in this case) it costs much less per unit volume (human) than is the case with a smaller container of equal insulation. A way to understand this is that you only have to insulate the outside—the inside gets free insulation.

But you aren’t stuck using equal insulation. You can use thicker insulation, with a much smaller proportional effect on total surface area as you use bigger sizes. Imagine the difference between a marble sized freezer and a house-sized freezer, when you add a foot of insulation. The outside of the insulation is where it begins collecting heat. But with a gigantic freezer, you might add a meter of insulation without it having a significant proportional impact on surface area, compared to how much surface area it already has.

Another factor to take into account is that liquid nitrogen, the super-cheap coolant used by cryonics facilities around the world, is vastly cheaper (more than a factor of 10) when purchased in huge quantities of several tons. The scaling factors for storage tanks are a big part of the reason for this. CI has used bulk purchasing as a mechanism for getting their prices down to $100 per patient per year for their newer tanks. They are actually storing 3,000 gallons of the stuff and using it slowly over time, which means there is a boiloff rate associated with the 3,000 gallon tank as well.

The conclusion I get from this is that there is a very strong self-interested case as well as altruistic case to be made for megascale cryonics versus small independently run units. People who say they won’t sign up for cost reasons may be reachable at a later date. To deal with such people’s objections, it might be smart to get them to agree with a particular hypothetical price point at which they would feel it is justified. In large enough quantities, it could be concievable that indefinite storage costs are as low as $50 per person, or 50 cents per year.

That is much cheaper than saving a life any other way, but of course there’s still the risk that it might not work. However, given a sufficient chance of it working it could still be morally superior to other life saving strategies that cost more money. It also has inherent ecological advantages over other forms of life-saving in that it temporarily reduces population, giving the environment a chance to recover and green tech more time to take hold so that they can be supported sustainably and comfortably.

lsparrish 5 Jul 2010 3:13 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Morendil’s comment on: Open Thread: July 2010
Done.

Cryonics Wants To Be Big

lsparrish5 Jul 2010 7:50 UTC

47 points

185 comments3 min readLW link

lsparrish 5 Jul 2010 13:20 UTC
4 points
in reply to: JoshuaZ’s comment on: Cryonics Wants To Be Big
I envision a steady stream of new patients for one or more years after its construction. There would be a robotic system to place them, and they would be cooled prior to entry. Delivery mechanism could be as simple as lowering them on a chain, but I suspect getting them settled in stably would involve some kind of robotic mechanisms operating withing the container itself. It would make sense to stack with accessible spaces given to more repairable patients, But with high-precision robotic removal it shouldn’t be impossible to shuffle patients without shock. (They would be wrapped in something like fiberglass within their boxes to minimize this anyway.) On the other hand, it might be simpler to just take them out, assess them one by one, and place the ones that need to wait into a different dewar.

lsparrish 5 Jul 2010 13:40 UTC
6 points
in reply to: Roko’s comment on: Cryonics Wants To Be Big
And that is the dilemma.

But I notice cryonics is popular among the geek-set, which is not as small as one might think. Most cryonicists have computer science backgrounds. What would happen if IT companies and engineering firms started offering cryonics as part of their standard benefits package?

lsparrish 5 Jul 2010 13:56 UTC
7 points
in reply to: NancyLebovitz’s comment on: Cryonics Wants To Be Big
The largest imaginable is probably somewhere in the millions of cubic meters. Bringing in futuristic mass-beam tech (hey, it’s feasible with superconductors and you’re under cryogenic temperatures already) and you can go bigger than any building built to date, perhaps even hitting the kilometric cube—a billion cubic meters.

So we might say 30 meters is a relatively small one.

But even still, you are absolutely right that smaller ones are worth considering. In fact they are more worth considering because they can be done sooner. Every time you scale up by 1000, thermal transfer drops by 10. So if you just want to go from $22k to $2.2k, all other things equal, you can do this by going from 14 patients to 14000 patients.

The next wave of cryonics could take the form of relatively small (but still huge) urban cryo-centers that replace graveyards. A place like the UK where they are running short on grave spaces might be a good starting point for that.

Another important idea to look at is piggybacking cryonics onto other forms of cryogenic storage, or perhaps renting out storage in our cryogenic warehouses for other purposes as a source of funding.

lsparrish 5 Jul 2010 14:59 UTC
5 points
in reply to: Roko’s comment on: Cryonics Wants To Be Big
Absolutely true. The cryonics meme spread widely is more sustainable—and thus more useful—than if only a few people have it.

Not to mention the fact that it could raise the sanity waterline quite a ways. That is a benefit that would be of lasting value (and perhaps steer us clear of a few existential risks) regardless of whether cryonics works.

Obviously if we knew cryonics wouldn’t work it would not raise the sanity waterline to pretend otherwise—but the fact is that we don’t know any such thing. It is a quite valid assumption that it will work, as far as we can tell. And the cheaper cryonics is, the less sane the refusal to consider it becomes.

lsparrish 5 Jul 2010 16:02 UTC
10 points
in reply to: twanvl’s comment on: Cryonics Wants To Be Big
Here is a table with Alcor costs. Surprisingly, for a Bigfoot dewar the LN2 is less than half the total cost. The other big ones are janitorial work for the space around it and alarm systems.

lsparrish 5 Jul 2010 16:08 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Roko’s comment on: Cryonics Wants To Be Big
I’m not quite sure I understand the math, but it sounds like you are saying that since there is a tenfold increase in volume per unit area that means not only does less heat reach the cryogen there is more of it to be reached. So the energy efficiency is 10 times, but the storage capacity is also 10 times. Or am I barking up the wrong tree?

100 times as much slack time between refills, wow. That reduces a lot of costs and risks.

lsparrish 5 Jul 2010 16:11 UTC
1 point
in reply to: apophenia’s comment on: Cryonics Wants To Be Big
I wonder if there is a measurable talent distribution? Are any of the really famous hackers also cryonicists, or open to the idea?

Come to think of it, I haven’t heard of any.

Too bad. If there was a link between being a good hacker and being a cryonicist, that would make it an easier sell.

lsparrish 5 Jul 2010 17:28 UTC
16 points
in reply to: advancedatheist’s comment on: Cryonics Wants To Be Big
Early adopters are (relatively) crazy and have to put up with ridicule from their friends because it’s not cool yet. That’s just how it goes. The trouble is that cryonics has stayed in the early adopter phase for 40 years.

Suddenly I have the mental image of a t-shirt reading “I was into cryonics before it was cool.”

lsparrish 5 Jul 2010 21:27 UTC
3 points
in reply to: JamesAndrix’s comment on: Cryonics Wants To Be Big
What I had in my mind’s eye was more like this. Jar is probably not the best metaphor. More like a long-term warehouse.

lsparrish 5 Jul 2010 23:26 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Roko’s comment on: Cryonics Wants To Be Big
I’m not convinced it is much of a risk. Maybe if you’re assuming thousands of years will need to pass.

lsparrish

Cry­on­ics Wants To Be Big

Cryonics Wants To Be Big