Wikipedia’s current events portal is relatively minimalist and low-noise. It’s not prioritized very impressively.
pcm
Karma: 289
supporters of cryonics happily stop looking for alternate life-extension strategies almost as soon as they discover cryonics
I see no such pattern. Among people I’ve met, there’s a high correlation between support for cryonics and practicing calorie restriction, and a moderately high correlation with attending life extension conferences.
The few people I can think of who may be using cryonics as a reason for losing interest in alternatives are the ones who think cryonics has a much greater than 50% chance of working.
the consensus is that these techniques are likely to offer a higher success rate once they are perfected
The consensus I see is more like “nobody knows whether they’ll work”.
Bankruptcy is normally means having debts that can’t be paid, and Alcor goes out of its way to avoid having anything that could be a debt, and is careful to maintain funds that can be used to continue to keep its patients preserved. This kind of conservatism comes at some cost in its ability to grow, so it doesn’t require unusually good management to have a higher than normal chance of continuing to exist.
There seem to have been two cryonics organizations that failed (CSC and CSNY). Some patients at CSNY were unharmed by that failure, so having your organization fail doesn’t automatically imply death. Plus people have learned from those failures.
From http://blog.givewell.org/2012/03/26/villagereach-update/:
We are also more deeply examining the original evidence of effectiveness for VillageReach’s pilot project. Our standards for evidence continue to rise, and our re-examination has raised significant questions that we intend to pursue in the coming months.
I had donated to VillageReach due to GiveWell’s endorsement, and I found it moderately easy to notice that they had changed more than just the room for funding conclusion.
I question whether it’s wise to make new rules during a financial crisis. I predict that a mature futarchy will set rules in advance of a crisis that will better deal with it than rules made during the crisis would. (In an immature futarchy, markets will influence deciders somewhat like how polls influence them now).
If you can afford pasture-raised chicken or grass-fed beef, the animal suffering consideration becomes less important than if you’re eating factory-farmed animals.
No, mainly because Elon Musk’s concern about AI risk added more prestige than Thiel had.
One of the stronger factors influencing the frequency of wars is the ratio of young men to older men. Life extension would change that ratio to imply fewer wars. See http://earthops.org/immigration/Mesquida_Wiener99.pdf.
Stable regimes seem to have less need for oppression than unstable ones. So while I see some risk that mild oppression will be more common with life extension, I find it hard to see how that would increase existential risks.
Offline practice: make a habit of writing down good questions you could have asked in a conversation you recently had. Reward yourself for thinking of questions, regardless of how slow you are at generating them. (H/T Dan of Charisma Tips, which has other good tips scattered around that blog).
Crickets at $38/pound dry weight are close to being competitive with salmon (more than 3 pounds needed to get the equivalent nutrition). Or $23/pound in Thailand (before high shipping fees), suggesting the cost in the U.S. will drop a bit as increased popularity causes more competition and economies of scale.
I’ve done well at stock market speculation over the past 12 years. It took me 20 years of doing it to become good at it. If I’d had LW available when I started I expect I could have become good in around 5 years.
One of the difficulties was that with most strategies, 1-year returns are sufficiently dominated by luck that the feedback is nearly useless.
The contest might be valuable if it lasted close to 5 years and wasn’t a winner-take-all event. Would that attract any participants?
Ethical Diets
Some of what a CFAR workshop does is convince our system 1′s that it’s socially safe to be honest about having some unflattering motives.
Most attempts at doing that in written form would at most only convince our system 2. The benefits of CFAR workshops depend heavily on changing system 1.
Your question about prepping for CFAR sounds focused on preparing system 2. CFAR usually gives advice on preparing for workshops that focuses more on preparing system 1 - minimize outside distractions, and have a list of problems with your life that you might want to solve at the workshop. That’s different from “you don’t have to do anything”.
Most of the difficulties I’ve had with applying CFAR techniques involve my mind refusing to come up with ideas about where in my life I can apply them. E.g. I had felt some “learned helplessness” about my writing style. The CFAR workshop somehow got me to re-examine that atititude, and to learn how improve it. That probably required some influence on my mood that I’ve only experienced in reaction to observing people around me being in appropriate moods.
Sorry if this is too vague to help, but much of the relevant stuff happens at subconscious levels where introspection works poorly.
Signing up didn’t bring me peace of mind, except for brief relief at not having the paperwork on my to-do list.
I’ve heard other cryonicists report feeling something like peace of mind as a result of signing up, but they appear to be a minority.
how much should I use this as an outside view for other activities of MIRI?
I’m unsure whether you should think of it as a MIRI activity, but to the extent you should, then it seems like moderate evidence that MIRI will try many uncertain approaches, and be somewhat sensible about abandoning the ones that reach a dead end.
I suspect attempted telekinesis is relevant.
I started alternate day calorie restriction last month. I expect it to be one of the best lifestyle changes for increasing my life expectancy.
I’ve become comfortable enough with it that it no longer requires significant willpower to continue. I think I have slightly more mental energy than before I started (but for the first 17 days, I had drastically lower mental energy).
I have a longer post about this on my blog.
Methylfolate (currently 5mg/day—due to MTHFR 677TT genes), which seems to improve my mood.
Vitamin D3 (5000 IU/day) - blood tests show that results in levels considered healthy.
Glutathione, Oxaloacetate, Aniracetam, and Calcium d-glucarate, mostly due to Dave Asprey’s writings.
I just started the probiotic from General Biotics.
I occasionally take Kratom as a stimulant, rarely more than 1⁄4 teaspoon per day.
Part of it is that deflation in the early 1930s meant that workers were overpaid relative to the value of goods they produced (wages being harder to cut than prices). That caused wasteful amounts of unemployment. WWII triggered inflation, and combined with wage controls caused wages to become low relative to goods, shifting the labor supply and demand to the opposite extreme.
The people who were employed pre-war presumably had their standard of living lowered in the war (after having it increased a good deal during the deflation).
I won’t try to explain here why deflation and inflation happened when they did, or why wages are hard to cut (look for “sticky wages” for info about the latter).
I attended the June rationality camp, and had mixed feelings about it. But I’ve also attended parts of it (such as sessions to test new units) before and after, and I’ve seen a significant improvement over time.
For instance, the unit that’s called Panic here is one of the best, but hadn’t been developed in June. I’ve attended two versions of it, and the second one was clearly better than the first.
The Comfort Zone Expansion convinced me that I have irrational fears that may cause problems and that I didn’t understand well before taking it. But I’m skeptical of the “entertainment guaranteed”—I found the June version unpleasant. They’ve improved it since then, but I still don’t see how it can entertain a group of people with widely varying comfort zones.
It’s hard to tell how much benefit I got from it, because the changes are subtle and likely to build slowly as I alter my habits. (Rereading this comment, I see that I’ve only made a little progress on the “be specific” advice).