Tim Freeman

Karma: 55

Tim Freeman 19 Mar 2026 1:02 UTC
1 point
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on: Neil deGrasse Tyson on Cryonics
Since then we did get cryonics to work and preserve memories for roundworms: “Persistence of Long-Term Memory in Vitrified and Revived Caenorhabditis elegans”
Not mammals yet AFAIK.

Tim Freeman 19 Mar 2026 0:55 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Neil deGrasse Tyson on Cryonics
Liquid nitrogen is generated using electricity, so you weren’t all that far off.
Liquid nitrogen is basically industrial waste that is left over after a useful industrial process, specially generating liquid oxygen. But you still have to carry it to the cryonics installation in a truck, which uses energy, even if the LN2 is free.
Cryonics storage gets cheaper at scale. The number of patients is proportional to the space, which is the cube of the length, and the boil off rate is proportional to the surface which is the square of the length. So boil off per patient is proportional to 1/number of patients.
Eventually you have to decide what people are worth and do a quantitative argument to figure out what you value more. I think people are incredibly valuable, but I haven’t done the quantitative argument. Assuming that people are worthless is assuming that cryonics is worthless and medical care in general is worthless, so that can’t be right.

Tim Freeman 7 Mar 2026 2:39 UTC
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in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Belief in the Implied Invisible
You left out where you have to say something about where we are in that large universe that evolved from that Big Bang. That is going to be a huge amount of data because, given many worlds, that is such a huge universe that even a position in that universe is huge.
We actually don’t need to uniquely identify our exact position; we just need enough be able to compute a next observed event. The locations of planets in Andromeda or mineral deposits deep underground would be computable from our exact position in the multiverse, but if we haven’t yet observed them they don’t have to be included in the bits required to predict the next event.

Tim Freeman 5 Mar 2026 21:57 UTC
1 point
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on: Righting a Wrong Question
Part of the process of coming to believe a verbal statement often includes a social requirement to claim to believe that statement. I call these “credal beliefs” because the profession of belief is often phrased as a creed.
For example, a well known creed is the US Pledge of Allegiance, which includes the words “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America”. It is obviously meaningless to pledge allegiance to a flag, since allies are entities one expects to cooperate with and flags are inanimate objects that don’t take action and therefore cannot be cooperated with. But clearly the intent was to get the people saying the creed to believe it in some sense.
This highlights another trait of a credal belief: the belief can exist only as a verbal statement and there is no requirement for the verbal statement to have any meaning beyond the social consequences of making the verbal statement. The words don’t have to have a meaning in the sense of having a definition or being part of a statement that predicts observations.
So it is possible for people who believe in consciousness or free will to be holding that belief credally. Credal beliefs have psychological consequences that I don’t understand well, but it is clear that the possibly hopeless search for a definition for the words in a credal belief isn’t part of the project of understanding the psychological consequences of holding it.
The opposite of this is to come across a word and presuppose that it must have a non-credal meaning and then start guessing what that meaning might be. Gemini tells me that this is called the Reification Fallacy. The mere existence of a word does not imply it refers to a thing that exists.

Tim Freeman 4 Mar 2026 5:26 UTC
3 points
2
on: Morality as Fixed Computation
The claim that “AI goal systems cannot be built around English statements” is not supported by the page it links to. Any solution humans might invent to the FAI problem is going to be renderable as English statements, so this implies that the FAI problem is unsolvable. If you want it solved, you should not make unsupported public statements that it cannot be solved.
The cited link https://www.lesswrong.com/lw/ld/the_hidden_complexity_of_wishes makes the more plausible claim that short intuitive English statements don’t make good wishes, and therefore don’t make good FAI solutions. I agree with that claim.
The claim “Can you patch this problem? No.” is supported by the same link I just mentioned. One solution is to define the AI’s notion of human values in terms of things that happened before the AI started running, so the AI doesn’t get to satisfy its notion of human values by modifying humans to want something else. If you want the problem to be solved, you shouldn’t put easily fixable bad ideas out there and then make a wrongly supported claim that patches don’t work. This fairly obvious easy fix sure looks like a patch.
Your choices seem to indicate that you want to discourage your readers from solving the problem. What are you trying to accomplish here?

Tim Freeman 20 Jan 2026 4:45 UTC
1 point
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on: Circular Altruism
I care about human culture and human genetic diversity and human long term survival. In the first example, if the 500 people share a culture or are related to each other, there might be worthwhile unique ideas or genes that are either preserved with certainty if I pick the more certain option, or lost altogether if I pick the option where all die with probability 10%, so I prefer the more certain option.
Similarly, if we have been fighting this thing for a while and there are only 500 humans left, I certainly prefer having 400 left with certainty over having zero left with 10% probability. We obviously can’t recover if everyone is dead.
In the real world where everyone is plugged into the Internet and we have 8b people and perhaps more population than we can support, and we assume the people are randomly chosen people, I very much don’t care what happens to 500 random people. We lose more than that every day due to people making bad life decisions.
People here are insinuating that scope insensitivity is somehow wrong, but I haven’t yet seen any argument as to why. I agree that intransitive preferences is wrong, but I don’t see any reason to add up the happiness and decide more people is better than fewer people when we have plenty of people and survival of humanity isn’t threatened either way.
The orthogonality thesis holds, right? If intelligence is compatible with having arbitrary preferences, there are lots of possibilities in that space for which total preference isn’t linear in the total number of happy people, so why treat that very small subset as somehow better?

Tim Freeman 7 Jan 2026 21:01 UTC
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in reply to: LG’s comment on: Absolute Authority
But then once you have an omnipotent God your ability to make predictions goes away. God could have willed something else, so when I raise the ball in the air and drop it I have to be surprised every time when it falls to the ground.

Tim Freeman 7 Jan 2026 21:00 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: LG’s comment on: Absolute Authority
But then once you have an omnipotent God your ability to make predictions goes away. God could have willed something else, so when I raise the ball in the air and drop it I have to be surprised every time when it falls to the ground.

Tim Freeman 31 Dec 2025 16:06 UTC
3 points
2
on: Comment reply: my low-quality thoughts on why CFAR didn’t get farther with a “real/efficacious art of rationality”
Here’s an additional hypothesis to consider:
- Rationalism is at odds with popular religions. (I have talked with a rational-seeming Christian I liked, and there are many Presuppositionalists, but rationalist Christians are a very small portion of Christians. Rationalist Christianity can be modeled as Bayesian reasoning with a flagrantly contrived prior. More reasonable priors give an astronomically low probability for religious claims, IMO.)
- Popular religions offer excellent reasons for people to cooperate. (Basically, God says to.)
- CFAR does not prominently offer a basis for cooperation for rationalists. For example, I searched this page for “cooperation” and the word appeared once in a comment, not in the main article.
- People desperately desire to cooperate with each other.
One solution would be to offer a story about how rationalist atheists can cooperate. I have most of such a story. Maybe I should get on with my writing.
Another solution would be to throw in the towel and start a rationalist sect of Christianity or some other religion. I don’t recommend this—the Biblical God is obviously evil, unless one accepts an unnatural redefinition of “evil”, so it is harmful to encourage people to regard that God or the Bible positively.
There is nothing that makes Christianity special in this context other than my lack of education about the other popular alternatives.

Tim Freeman 30 Dec 2025 5:29 UTC
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on: “Science” as Curiosity-Stopper
I was trying to find the bounds of my ignorance of physics yesterday and I realized nobody has a self consistent story of how a lightbulb works. Emission of photons requires quantum electrodynamics and there is no self consistent mathematical model of QED. Apparently the required integrals diverge at very small scales, and if you can get a paper describing how to fix that math through peer review, there are people who want to give you a million dollars.

Tim Freeman 30 Dec 2025 5:08 UTC
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on: Making History Available
The correct link for “fiction differs from reality in systematic ways” might now be this. Robin starts that page with a link to the scribd document he is summarizing. That document has been deleted. If someone has enthusiasm and ability to find a replacement link, please reply.

Tim Freeman 30 Dec 2025 1:29 UTC
3 points
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on: My Wild and Reckless Youth
In response to:
Traditional Rationality doesn’t have the ideal that thinking is an exact art in which there is only one correct probability estimate given the evidence.
The ideal process applies Bayes’ rule to the evidence and the prior probabilities to get the (posterior) probability estimate. Since there is no law saying what prior probabilities to assume, thinking is not an exact art in the sense used here. You might have meant that there is value in Traditional Rationality having this ideal even if we know it to be false, but in that case I don’t understand your point.
The prior isn’t trivial because one can model theism as doing Bayesian inference on a contrived prior. Take some reasonable prior, reassign the probabilities of all universes in which Christianity is false or meaningless to zero, scale to get the total probability back to 1, and use the result as the prior probability input to Bayes’ rule. This gives rationalist Christianity.
This contrived prior was selected with knowledge that Christianity exists, and newborns don’t know that, so it isn’t a prior that describes the inborn suppositions of any real person. But this crazy thing exists mathematically so we can’t say accuse Christianity or other theists of being irrational in the sense of failing to apply Bayes’ rule to some prior just because they are Christian.
Today, one of the chief pieces of advice I give to aspiring young rationalists is “Do not attempt long chains of reasoning or complicated plans.”
I agree with this, but it was amusing to find this sentence in your 2000+ page (according to Kindle) “Rationality” book.

Tim Freeman 2 Aug 2025 2:23 UTC
5 points
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in reply to: Kaj_Sotala’s comment on: It’s Okay to Feel Bad for a Bit
Shinzen Young’s Five Ways to Know Yourself https://www.shinzen.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/FiveWaystoKnowYourself_ver1.6.pdf uses the words “spacey” and “racy” instead of “hazy” and “crazy”, but they might be talking about the same thing. He has specific antidotes for each. There are YouTube videos in addition to the document I just cited. He has a newer book out that is probably about the same topics, but I haven’t read it.

Tim Freeman 2 Aug 2025 1:45 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Bridgett Kay’s comment on: It’s Okay to Feel Bad for a Bit
Would you be willing to share the koan?
I generally don’t believe that dreams or omens come from a place with some special connection to the truth, but if following a clue from a mysterious source is cheap, I generally follow it. If one doesn’t accept prompts to go on an adventure, one cannot reasonably claim disappointment if life has too few adventures.

Tim Freeman 2 Aug 2025 1:39 UTC
13 points
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in reply to: lsusr’s comment on: It’s Okay to Feel Bad for a Bit
I have known these people personally with broken bones from bicycling: two people each with a broken collarbone from mountain biking, one broken arm, one minor skull fracture that would only have been considered a bump if it were not observed with modern imaging equipment, and one broken pelvis. It also killed Steven Covey but I never met him.
The minor skull fracture was interesting because I knew the person to be successful at a job that required mostly conscientiousness. He fell during his work commute and was riding a bike that had no clear purpose other than being safe. He went back to the place he fell and tried to find some mistake he made so he could prevent a reoccurrence, and he couldn’t find anything he could have done differently given that he was commuting to work on a bike.
For context, I do not ride a bike, there is nothing about my life that would tend to make me meet bicyclists, and not I am not especially friendly, so there is no unusually large number of bicyclists passing through my life who chat about their injuries.
So I’m not sure I agree that bicycling is great for your physical health. I could easily believe is is good for the health of people who don’t fall.

Tim Freeman 2 Aug 2025 1:14 UTC
1 point
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on: Maya’s Escape
I liked the story. I could imagine a sequel where Maya persuades Jun to say something true about where he grew up, and maybe visit his peers or family there. He already leaked enough information about the place that perhaps disclosing its existence to Maya would not be a problem.

Tim Freeman 8 Oct 2024 4:55 UTC
6 points
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on: Struggling like a Shadowmoth
It is unreasonable to expect an output from biological evolution to do something reasonable in a situation vastly different from the situations it evolved in. In this case, you aren’t going to learn much from the state of mind of a human who has been tortured more than his ancestors could have been tortured.
Trying to extract guidance from that story seems like an example of generalizing from fiction.
I’m not sure how the rest of the article is connected to the fiction at the beginning. Given that people tend to generalize from fiction and get to false conclusions, I’m uncomfortable with taking it seriously.

Tim Freeman 29 Nov 2023 10:52 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Kaj_Sotala’s comment on: Book summary: Unlocking the Emotional Brain
My reading of the EMDR section was that the patient had panic attacks, did EMDR, then had a panic attack, and then either the patient ran out of money or it was time to write the paper, so we don’t know about the presence or absence of panic attacks after that.
On rereading that section, it is clear that there is no claimed period of time when the patient was observed not to have a panic attack during that period of time. The last panic attack was labelled as “mild”. I didn’t bother to read back to see if any of the other panic attacks were “mild” before success was declared.

Tim Freeman 29 Nov 2023 9:43 UTC
4 points
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on: Social Dark Matter
There is such a thing as a symptom pool. Some people who are having a difficult time instinctively acquire symptoms that are fashionable and signal their difficulty, but the symptoms are not related to the actual problem. The prototypical example for this, IIRC, is incidence of anorexia in some specific country (Hong Kong?). An anorexia awareness campaign caused that symptom to become fashionable and increased the apparent incidence much more than can be explained as an increased ability to observe the cases that were present before.

This applies to some but not all of the social dark matter being discussed in the OP. Like cosmological dark matter, there is room for debate about whether some instances of social dark matter are real or not.

Tim Freeman 18 Jun 2023 2:06 UTC
2 points
1
on: Answer to a question: what do I think about God’s communication patterns?
I would not categorize you as Christian. In my conversations with Christians, the unifying themes have been:
- God is good
- Heaven exists as a desirable place to go after you die.
- Jesus exists and has some significant role in getting you into Heaven.
You didn’t mention Heaven at all and you seem to regard Jesus as another iteration in the general improvement of moral examples instead of as someone special.

I don’t mean to imply that there is any reason for me to regard you as Christian. I’m just a little surprised, or maybe I have misunderstood you.

But to get back to the original question. My original question was indeed about what happens after death. I can clarify the question by pointing at these Bible verses:

2 Th 1:8-20: [Jesus or God] will punish those who do not know God and do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. They will be punished with everlasting destruction and shut out from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might on the day he comes to be glorified in his holy people and to be marveled at among all those who have believed.

John 14:6 has Jesus saying “No one comes to the Father except through me.”

These resemble ‘the downside of not being Christian is “demons eat your guts”’.

So, how do you deal with living in a world where these verses exist in the Bible, God is good, and God communicates in the way we discussed that limits the ability of many to come to the Father and avoid everlasting destruction?

Be aware that 2 Th is commonly considered to be a forgery. However, it is canonical according to Catholics and all the other Christian groups I know of.