Pertains to Cryonics, which is our best bet for immortality until we solve the aging issue (i.e., we hopefully stay cryopreserved until immortality is achieved.) At least with SENS/The Methuselah Foundation/Calico now getting attention and a bit of funding, there's hope here. One day, perhaps governments will consider aging "force" or "harm" and do the number one job government should do: protecting people from it (by funding research to prevent it.)
That one's a bit... silly. It's a surprisingly religious sentiment for Mr. LessWrong.
Yes, I have heard the shpiel. However, from the shpiel I've heard, cryonics is currently a faith-based ticket to God Only Knows Where. Very few people actually believe whole human beings can be resurrected from cryopreservation, and it's certainly never been actually done even in animal experiments, so why should anyone sign up?
Well then, the cryonicists say, let me tell you about neuro-cryo, which is cheaper. We can totally plausibly claim the information content of your brain is preserved in cryopreservation, or possibly brain plastination says gwern. Anyway, point being, you sign up, and it will result in a future friendly superintelligence reading your brain out into a computer to resurrect you someday...
To which I say, hold the fuck on you just skipped a whole lot of freaking steps there!
Hanson and Yudkowsky make the point that it's the best we've got (in one article, they put the chance of success at 5%), and that the alternative right now is nothing. Considering the relatively low cost, it's a gamble worth taking.
For the record, I've been signed up for a long time.
Edit: as for the tone, Yudkowsky has had the inspirational, secular techno-futurist new-age-ish sounding hope thing going for ages, as you probably know. It doesn't surprise me (and probably doesn't surprise him) that very reasonable people sometimes mistake it for the anti-skeptic / superstitious / actual new-age nuttery / cult types. I think part of the problem here is a kind of Poe's Law effect: if a rational, informed, intelligent person talks seriously about the likelihood of FAI, superintelligences, cryo, etc. in a positive, hopeful way, they're instantly mistaken for a nutcake.
>Hanson and Yudkowsky make the point that it's the best we've got (in one article, they put the chance of success at 5%), and that the alternative right now is nothing. Considering the relatively low cost, it's a gamble worth taking.
No, I would say that leaving money or life-insurance to my family when I die is worth more.
Besides, if someone developed a better, more evidenced "immortality treatment", I would want to have the money for that. Pascal's Wager is simply not acceptable for real life just because you wave your arms and go "Futuristic super-science!" instead of "Magic!"
>Yudkowsky has had the inspirational, secular techno-futurist new-age-ish sounding hope thing going for ages, as you probably know.
People would mistake it far less for cultishness if he didn't follow the optimistic futurist tone with prophecies of doom and requests for money in order to supposedly fund saving people from previously mentioned prophecized doom.
Which is a fucking pity, because there's so much there worth liking, but they kinda ruin it with the cult behaviors.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/wq/you_only_live_twice/
Pertains to Cryonics, which is our best bet for immortality until we solve the aging issue (i.e., we hopefully stay cryopreserved until immortality is achieved.) At least with SENS/The Methuselah Foundation/Calico now getting attention and a bit of funding, there's hope here. One day, perhaps governments will consider aging "force" or "harm" and do the number one job government should do: protecting people from it (by funding research to prevent it.)