Hopefully Anonymous

Average shmoe cryonically deanimates

Cryonics leader deanimates:

http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog/?p=800

This guy seems incredibly average to me in life achievements. In a world filled with brilliant egoists, who go to very extreme measure, very deviant from median behavior efforts for extra days of life, it is one of the biggest social mysteries to me why they don't attempt cryonic preservation, yet some relative shmucks like this guy do. Forget his weapons of mass destructions -where was Saddam Hussein's bunkered cryonic preservation chamber? Or the cryonics plans for any of the self-made billionaire on this slideshow?

http://www.forbes.com/2007/03/06/obituaries-billionaires-rich_07billionaires_cz_lk_0308obituaries_slide.html

Where are the cryonics facilities convenient to London? New York City? Tokyo? etc. Perhaps we're early in a shift. But it's weird to me that we're this early into it and that the rapaciously persistence maximizing in all other endeavors project an image of such disintrest in cryonics. I picture cult-masterminds bending the will of hundreds to guard their cryonically deanimated body -not to drink poisoned koolaid or to offer them teens for sex. I picture third world dictators creating modern day pyramid like fortifications to guard their cryonically deanimated bodies, not having themselves cremated after death. But middle class shmoe hobbyists are taking these steps to hold onto hope for future life? I am still awaiting plausible explanations for this counterintuitive state of reality, or, alternatively, confirmatory evidence that the most driven, successful persistence maximizers are lying to us about what they're doing regarding maximizing their persistence odds.

Start Cloning/Breeding Our Smartest Existential Risk Minimizers NOW!

The inspired quote is from Eliezer's recent OvercomingBias blog post. My reply is posted here as discussion bait for Psy-Kosh, and any other interested reader.

"To put a random number on it, I doubt that anything more than one-in-a-million g-factor is required to be a potential world-class genius, implying at least six thousand potential Einsteins running around today."
Let's hope it's not one-in-a-hundred-billion. Because then we may never see another potential Einstein.

For the life of me, I don't understand why no one else in the intelligent, persistent-maximizing space wants to start assembly line cloning/breeding our smartest existential risk minimizers besides me (and possibly one other person, I don't know if they're public about it). If this happened in the next few years, a lot of us could benefit from the potential accelerated breakthroughs starting 25-35 years from now. I think smart, open-minded folks (Eliezer, Robin, Aubrey) need to justify to us why they're not pounding the podium on this one NOW, at least anonymously.

Why Robin Hanson got tenure

Why Robin Hanson got tenure:

http://hanson.gmu.edu/TenureStatement.pdf

(Don't worry, there are no NSFW pictures)

A Response To The Type Of Blog Commenters Who Would Fail My Turing Test

Vladimir Nesov and Frank McGahon, I relate so little to either of your points of views that you don't even seem real to me. Like a few other posters in the OB space when confronting such a wishy washy valuing of the preservation or acknowledgment of the existence of one's subjective conscious experience, I wonder if you all even experience subjective consciousness. You're cavalier about your own to the point that if I was the administrator of a turing test, and I didn't have repeated experiences with humans expressing your point of view, you would both fail my administration of it.

Frank, you seem to miss my central, solipstic, point of view that all that's functionally real to me is the successive "nows" that my subjective conscious experience exists in. Your claim that there are things I should value more than maximize the its persistence odds is absurd, weird, and unrelatable to me. Of COURSE I would play the long odds of avoiding death by asteroid. That you think that somehow the asteroid argument would persuade me to be blithely hedonistic in that context illustrates how deep our disconnect is. I aspire to be hedonistic only to the degree that it maximizes my persistence odds.

And Vladimir, my interest in cryonics isn't contingent on it having a 50% probability of success as opposed to a .0001% chance of success, except to the degree I should invest in it as part of persistence maximizing strategy diversification. What's more relavant to me is the resources I should invest in cryonics, as opposed to SENS, personal wealth-building, etc. Cryonics isn't a stand-alone play contingent on whether it has "high probability" or "low probability" for me.

These people should get blogs and blog at least weekly

These people should get blogs and attempt to blog at least weekly (ideally daily):

1 & 2: Carl Shulman and Michael Vassar from Overcomingbias

3: Craig Ventnor (the eminent geneticist/entrepreneur)

4: Peter Theil

I'll blog more names as they occur to me.

Against a moratorium on germline human genetic modification

No moratorium on germline human genetic modification:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/humannature/default.aspx

Those of us who want to beat aging are under the real time pressure deadline of our pending mortality. We don't have time for moratoriums slowing down progress in learning about human biology. Push back hard against those that want to slow down the learning curve due to "yuck" bias. Or, to paraphrase the Matrix, come with me if you want to live.

Great posts recently from Dvorsky's sentient developments blog

Great posts recently from Dvorsky's sentient developments blog:

http://www.sentientdevelopments.com/

I've been a bit busy optimizing my finances, with good results. But as my hours stabilize, expect me to return to daily posting (maybe as soon as this week).

self-driving cars and accident-avoidance clothing: 2 huge steps towards practical immortality

Much gets made in the immortality aspirant community of SENS type approaches to cure biological aging death and Bostrom type efforts to reduce catastrophic existential risk. But right up there with both of these, to maximize my (and your) persistence odds is self-driving cars and (although I haven't seen this discussed much) similar artificial intelligence and sensing systems in clothing, to prevent injuries due to falling-type accidents. I don't have the numbers in front of me, but I think accidents dominate as the cause of death after cancer, heart disease, stroke, infectious diseases, and perhaps dementia. And the dominant causes of accident deaths, in my understanding, are human-error car accidents and slip-and-falls. The technological plan is already in place to fill the roadways with self-driving cars that should make car transportation at least as safe as commercial aviation transportation is today. And though I haven't seen it discussed, it shouldn't take much innovation to be able to create clothes that do things as simple as deploy strategically place airbags when they sense a human is rapidly falling in such a way that their head is likely to hit the ground with deadly force. Beyond that, it's easy to see how such accident avoidance "smart clothes" could protect us from injury in many fancier ways.

http://blog.wired.com/cars/2008/01/gm-says-driverl.html

Thoughts?

http://blog.wired.com/cars/2008/01/gm-says-driverl.html

Studying the limits of the smartest people

There seems to me to be a mythologizing of our most gifted thinkers. When discussing Von Neumann, common narrative elements include his ability to do relatively complex long division at a young age, but not as much about the mundane limits of his mathematical abilities. I think it would be useful to read more about these mundane limits, what's the most a Von Neumann or a Feynmann could do, before hitting walls of frustration.

I hunger for peak performance

In many ways, Groundhog's Day is the aspiring perfectionist's movie.The conceit of the movie mirrors the experience of many of us (certainly mine at least) of finding ourselves alive again each morning, and setting out through the largely familiar routine of the day's schedule, hoping for a more peak performance than the day prior.

I hunger for peak performance. I'm a denizen of various lifehack websites, GTD communities, the blogs and information spaces of professional organizers, certified financial planners, charted financial analysts, bar associations, CPA networks, fitness competitors, nutritionists, etc. Although these communities don't seem to overlap strongly with discussion of bayesian reasoning and philosophy of science communities, the overlap is natural in my own mind and in my own approach towards maximizing my persistence odds.

How else, ultimately, does one update one's knowledge and beliefs about the best way to manage their finances, their health, their time?

What do readers think. Even the best "life hacks" type blogs and resources fall far short of their potential, in my opinion. I could personal benefit from greater intelligence devoted towards personal improvement resources, and from greater community in that space.

Your thoughts on this, readers?