The questions about longevity was a bit confusing. You asked what the chance of somebody currently living would live past 1000 is, but it’s not clear whether a person who gets lives for some time less than 1000 years, then gets frozen and lives longer has lived past 1000 years or not.
Robin
May I suggest a different venue? That starbucks is fairly small, often crowded and there aren’t that many tables. We might be able to reserve some space at Carberries which is similar and close by.
The last meeting started at the Starbucks in Central Square but moved to the cafe in Harvest down the street. I think we should go to Harvest again but the locations are all so close together that it doesn’t matter that much.
This reminds me of a story I was told about somebody who got so drunk that he forgot he was drunk and drove a car...
Though testing your mental capabilities is useful, there are some problems of trying to access your own mental state. First, if you believe your mental state varies throughout the day, then shouldn’t your ability to access it also vary?
I’d say the tests provided by others are decent, but in many cases impractical or of limited use. Say you have to make an important boolean decision. You don’t know how sharp your brain is, but you do know that the longer you delay the decision, the worse the outcome will be on average. Depending on how quickly the value of the decision is decaying, it might not make sense to spend hours trying to access your mental state. I don’t know exactly how to solve a problem like this.
But I think that simplifying mental performance to a simple linear value doesn’t do justice to the complexity of the brain. I find that while my brain has good times and bad times, it’s generally more complicated than that. There are times when I can program or understand math well and there are times when my brain is better suited to writing or reading.
So you should try to access your mental performance in the domain of the tasks that you are trying to achieve. If you want to know how well you can do in trigonometry, try to remember the law of cosines. If you’re trying to study constitutional law, try to recall all the amendments to the constitution. By focusing mental performance into a specific type of mental performance, you get much more accurate assessments.
Three ways to increase your intelligence
Continually expand the scope, source, intensity of the information you receive. Constantly revise your reality maps, and seek new metaphors about the future to understand what’s happening now. Develop external networks for increasing intelligence. In particular, spend all your time with people as smart or smarter than you.
I’ll give an upvote to whoever knows the source of that.
How did this go? I’m sorry I couldn’t come, I’m not in Boston at present. I initially wanted to start a meetup but the poor turnout at the previous ones discouraged me.
I may be there, say 75% chance.
OK, so if take the homosexuality survey as a data point, we can say that selection bias in a survey can increase the reported rate of a behavior by 3 (5% homosexual in normal population, 15% when the survey is about sexual orientation).
If we assume the same increased rate applies in this case, we can divide 5% by three and get 1.666%, still far above the normal 0.36% of the general population.
I just went by and didn’t notice anyone, in fact it seemed like all the space was taken. Is it stil happening?
That’s a very good point. It seems there is some dispute about the numbers but the general point is that it would be a lot cheaper to fund SIAI which may save the world than to cryogenically freeze even a small fraction of the world’s population.
The point about life insurance is moot. Life insurance companies make a profit so having SIAI as your beneficiary upon death wouldn’t even make that much sense. If you just give whatever you’d be paying in life insurance premiums directly to SIAI, you’re probably doing much more overall good than paying for a cryonics policy.
From Yelp
“Cosi is a great sandwich chain. The fresh … Cosi is a great sandwich chain. The fresh bread is yummy. Yes, this one in particular is crowded, and yes it’s doesn’t have mind blowing atmosphere, but it has free wifi and constant freshness in the bread department. …” - Feb 23, 2010
Unfortunately I think that almost any restaurant or coffee shop will be crowded. It would be best if we could get a room at Harvard or MIT, but failing that it is possible to reserve a room at the main branch of the Cambridge Public Library. It would be worth looking into for future meetups, their info can be found here:
http://www.cambridgema.gov/cpl/aboutus/contactinformation.aspx
“Everything works by magick; science represents a small domain of magick where coincidences have a relatively high probability of occurrence.”
The same reign of terror that occurred under Robespierre and Hitler occurred back then in the fifties, as it occurs now. You must realize that there is very little actual courage in this world. It’s pretty easy to bend people around. It doesn’t take much to shut people up, it really doesn’t. In the fifties all I had to do was call a guy up on the telephone and say, “Well, I think your wife would like to know about your mistress.”
An upvote to the first person to identify the author of that quote.
Emancipate yourself from mental slavery, none but yourself can free your mind.
An upvote to the first person to correctly identify the first person to say that (the quote is often misattributed, you’ll get a downvote if you identify the wrong author).
I don’t know which it was.
But I’d say that you’re seeing the trees, not the forest.
The major point of the quote was that there’s a lack of courage in the world, the rest of the quote is just examples.
But LW isn’t reflective of SI, most of the people that voted on this article have no affiliation with SI. So the high number of upvotes is less reflective of SI welcoming criticism than LW being dissatisfied with the organization of SI.
Furthermore, this post’s criticism of Eliezer’s research less strong than its criticism of SI’s organization . SI has always been somewhat open to criticism of its organizational structure and many of the current leadership of SI has criticized the organizational structure at some point. But who criticize Eliezer’s research do not manage to rise in SI’s research division and generally aren’t well received even on LW (Roko).
Lastly, laughing at somebody when they call your organization a cult is not a convincing argument, they’re more likely to think of your organization as a cult (at least they will think you are arrogant).
Coworking probably won’t work well for introverts.
The problem is that (according to Kahneman and Tverksy) losses are felt more strongly than gains. So it requires a good deal of effort to not be offended.
Does CFAR feel developed enough that it would prefer money to feedback?
I.E, I presume there are many people out there who could help CFAR either by dedicating a few hours of there time thinking about how to improve CFAR or earning money to donate to CFAR.
I’m not sure if this is an event to celebrate, I think less posts by Eliezer is a bad thing.