Tachyon vs. Singularitarian Libertarian Math Nerds: Let's Read Less Wrong!

Sredni Vashtar · 2014-06-02 21:41:30

Tachyon said:
And I would say that the Old Left, which incidentally was not nearly as monolithic as you imply, did not always live up to the principles of equality it espoused.

Understatement on both counts.

But yes, we should move on. This line of discussion is bringing out the anarchist in me, and I don't like letting him out in these sorts of spaces because furniture gets broken and walls get tagged... >.>

Obā-san · 2014-06-02 21:42:40

Sredni Vashtar · 2014-06-02 21:47:33

Fun track.

Now... cryo-babies? What?

Odradek · 2014-06-02 21:48:01

Cryo babies, we'll make your dreams come true.

Cryo babies, we'll do the same for you.

Bee · 2014-06-03 13:15:49

If I can't afford cryo-tubes, can I just give my kid lots and lots of ice cream until their brain freezes? That's like, pretty much the same thing, right?

Klinotaxis · 2014-06-03 14:07:13

Yon Assassin said:
honestly everyone should buy their kids cryogenic tubes because cryogenic tubes are hella rad.

cryopreservation is interesting. i shall now talk about it because darcy is ridiculous. just gonna ignore half of what you say in favor of talking about how liberals are such fools for not paying attention to his favorite anime, orlando furioso.

first off "cryogenics" technically means production (genesis) of low temperatures (cryo) and isn't so much connected to cryopreservation - you don't need to be at absolute zero for it to work, that sorta thing. pedantic but worth noting.

when you're doing it specifically with humans you call it "cryonics" for reasons that will become apparent. on the other end of abstraction, the general study of life in cold temperatures is called "cryobiology".

secondly there are a bunch of neat legal issues. whether you can actually do this to a corpse sorta thing. i don't know shit about that, really, but i do think the ted williams case is kind of funny in a morbid way. alcor has been accused of playing baseball with his head.

so, thirdly, the science. as you probably know, cryopreservation is a thing lots of animals do, like worms. of course nothing animals actually do is adequate for the premise of cryonics, which is taking a corpse and hoping in the future it can get un-corpsed. wikipedia should give you some idea of how it goes in vertebrates:

For the wood frog (Rana sylvatica),
in the winter, as much as 45% of its body may freeze and turn to ice.
"Ice crystals form beneath the skin and become interspersed among the
body's skeletal muscles. During the freeze, the frog's breathing, blood
flow, and heartbeat cease. Freezing is made possible by specialized
proteins and glucose, which prevent intracellular freezing and
dehydration." ^[6]^[7] The wood frog can survive up to 11 days frozen at -4°C.

Other vertebrates that survive at body temperatures below 0°C include painted turtles (Chrysemys picta), gray tree frogs (Hyla versicolor), box turtles (Terrapene carolina - 48 hours at -2°C), spring peeper (Pseudacris crucifer), garter snakes (Thamnophis sirtalis- 24 hours at -1.5°C), the chorus frog (Pseudacris triseriata), Siberian salamander (Salamandrella keyserlingii - 24 hours at -15.3°C),^[8] European common lizard (Lacerta vivipara) and Antarctic fish such as Pagothenia borchgrevinki.^[9]^[10] Antifreeze proteins cloned from such fish have been used to confer frost-resistance on transgenic plants.^{[citation needed]}
Hibernating Arctic ground squirrels
may have abdominal temperatures as low as −2.9°C (26.8°F), maintaining
subzero abdominal temperatures for more than three weeks at a time,
although the temperatures at the head and neck remain at 0°C or above.^[13]

one of the major distinctions here is that these animals are, in some sense, alive. while large scale motions like heartbeat and breathing can stop, it's my understanding that cells continue to metabolize, etc. this puts another time limit in - the cells have to be able to continue living from the nutrients around them, which will run out without animal movement - and is pretty far from cryonics, which is done after a total cessation of metabolism ("death").

politically, this has resulted in a major split. the Society for Cryobiology, a scientific organization for cryobiologists, started banning cryonicists from membership in the 70s. cryonicists have their own societies now. you can read more about this conflict at alcor, an incredibly biased source ofc. (note that i am also a biased source, if i haven't made this obvious enough.)

so this is why you can find, e.g., Scientists Open Letter on Cryonics, signed by quite a few important scientists (e.g. Drexler) who are... mostly not biologists.

(in this respect it reminds me of mind uploading. it's easy to find a mathematician or physicist or something that thinks it's plausible. then, at CSHCOG, an important neuroscientist Sejnowski says we might be able to record the membrane voltages of a million neurons at a time, by 2030, if we really dump resources and know-how into it. my present job is working on simulations of single synapses at the auditory periphery (i.e. where neural signals corresponding to sounds are first produced) and it takes several pages of completely domain-specific code that takes several minutes to run one twentieth of a second of activity in one thousandth the amount of neurons a person has, and it doesn't properly account enough for spontaneous activity etc. it's just a totally different world in the biosciences.)

on the bottom of that you can also see links to many scientific papers on the subject. while several, like “Molecular engineering: An approach to the development of general capabilities for molecular manipulation“are essentially unexperimental (theoretical) pie-in-the-sky things, others have actual information on freezing and unfreezing animals.

of course cryonics people know this; the point is that the revival methods are totally distinct. cryopreservation in animals works by slow activity of life, while cryonics is keeping a person's physical informational properties available as best we can and hoping future technology will be able to reconstruct the person from that.

Justice4243 · 2014-06-03 15:55:45

Rule 1, guys.

This thread is quickly encroaching on "This is why we can't have nice things" territory at this point. Please keep the discussion on topic and about people's views.

Klinotaxis · 2014-06-03 16:01:23

if we're doing the "moderate direct insults are not okay but acting like most of the board is jacobins who are morons for supporting muslims burning gay people alive is cool because it's in full sentences" thing again i'm out.

Justice4243 · 2014-06-03 16:03:25

Actully my note was meant to convey that neither are okay.

Salix Babylonika · 2014-06-03 16:06:26

Fair 'nough.

I apologize if I broke any rules.

Mr. Darcy · 2014-06-03 16:09:59

If you think I'm calling most of the board morons for pointing out contradictions in their ideology, that's definitely not my intent. I'm sorry if that's how you hear it, and I'd like to drop the issue because it's quite tangential to Tachyon's thread.

Justice4243 · 2014-06-03 16:10:14

^^Thanks, but you have not to my knowledge.

It's just that things have gotten a little heated (which is understandable) and it would be nice if the thread didn't become more trouble than it's worth.

Mr. Darcy · 2014-06-03 16:19:47

Justice4243 said:
it would be nice if the thread didn't become more trouble than it's worth.

That's definitely not something I want to contribute to. I want it to continue long enough for Tachyon to get to the part where it's only rational to send Yudkowsky money so the AI god that's totally going to be created in your lifetime won't be unfriendly.

Salix Babylonika · 2014-06-03 16:20:27

Has anyone given Roko's Basilisk D&D stats yet

Odradek · 2014-06-03 16:29:37

It would be more overpowered than the Hecatoncheires.

Seriously, a hundred attacks a round? Who wants to roll that many dice? And Roko's would be even WORSE

Miss Miko Mayonegg · 2014-06-03 16:33:38

I peeked in here because I was curious about the dramas, and

I've heard that Less Wrong's mother site, Overcoming Bias

I burst out laughing at this phrase.

Odradek · 2014-06-03 16:34:22

Miko said:
I peeked in here because I was curious about the dramas, and
I've heard that Less Wrong's mother site, Overcoming Bias
I burst out laughing at this phrase.

why miko

Mr. Darcy · 2014-06-03 16:35:30

Things that are too overpowered for D&D:

Roko's Basilisk

The Hecatoncheires

Automatic firearms (a note in the Hesiod translation I have compares the Hecatoncheires throwing rocks to "a primitive man's conception of a machine gun".)

Sredni Vashtar · 2014-06-03 17:03:13

Typhon and the Leviathan are also worth noting, although I think that extends into god territory. But then, so do two of the three aforementioned.

Morven · 2014-06-03 17:27:33

Automatic firearms are worshipped as a God in large parts of the United States. So yeah.

Aliroz · 2014-06-03 19:23:08

Morven said:
Automatic firearms are worshipped as a God in large parts of the United States. So yeah.

Actually, I don't think that firearms have been considered sacred or holy, and I've never heard of any religion worshipping a firearm.

Of course, some people consider certain ideals to be sacred, in a religious way, that certain rights are inalienable.

Previous Calica · 2014-06-03 19:23:37

Odradek said:

Tachyon said:
^ I've heard a lot about Slate Star Codex of late. I'm curious, I must say, but not all that I've heard has been good.
It's mostly stupid, but occasionally there's something interesting.

Also he wrote a five billion page FAQ on why Moldbug makes no sense at any level, which is cool.

I don't know much about Slate Star Codex beyond said gigantic FAQ, but I do remember reading this about the sort of dissonance between his views and his social affiliations.

Previous Calica · 2014-06-03 19:25:19

Morven said:
Automatic firearms are worshipped as a God in large parts of the United States. So yeah.

And of course there's the flag of Mozambique, which has an AK-47 on it.

Tachyon vs. Singularitarian Libertarian Math Nerds: Let's Read Less Wrong!

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