Excellent article. Other possibilities? Many of the world's leading virus experts and pandemic prevention bodies decided that they should be collecting viruses from out of the way parts of the world, and studying them in laboratories. It is at least possible that this caused the worst pandemic for a century.
I don't feel I can really judge if it's correct, but I find the argument plausible that to date, AI alignment and safety work has increased AI risk, and that certain kinds of alignment/safety work would increase risk in the future.
Many of those responsible for sharing information with the Soviets that allowed them to develop the atomic bomb claimed they were motivated by concerns about the risk of only one side having nuclear weapons (though I'm not sure I believe them, given their pre-existing politics). Giving Stalin the bomb surely increased the risk of nuclear weapons being used.
The defenders of freedom granted exceptional powers to defend against a would be dictator, who then go on to use those powers to become dictators themselves, are legion.
> Giving Stalin the bomb surely increased the risk of nuclear weapons being used
Surely? I think it's at least arguable (if not likely) that doing so reduced the risk - the only actual use of nuclear weapons came when the US was the only posessor. Would the US have been more likely to use nukes in the Korean War if no one else had them? Seems at least plausible.
Collecting viruses seems pretty ineffective, an AI will be able, if one cannot already, combine whatever it is that makes a virus in a program like what Midjourney does for art or ChatGPT does for words, and bam, "Hello Human, here's 100,456 potential extinction level viruses. Should I send any of them to the 3D printer?"
In Demon in the Freezer, Richard Preston (and this is like 20 years ago) said something to the effect of, "My virologist buddies make new viruses in the lab all the time as a hobby."
So, an AI helping someone doing this? It's game over if the wrong one gets out.
Reminds me of Frank Herberts White Plaugue and is probably something we're facing, if nanotech doesn't kill us first with synthetic virus-like robots.
As a sidebar, scientists have already dug up the Spanish Flu (bodies in the permafrost) and god-only-knows what things the US gov and the Russians have stored, i.e. small pox.
I'm actually more surprised than less that we haven't extincted ourselves already....almost seems a proof that the eschatology of some religion is true and God is protecting us so the we can't ruin his destructive apocalyptic plans already laid down in some Holy Book.
I think ultimately there aren't really "safe" options. Everything has consequences and side effects. It's just what tradeoff we as individuals can afford.
Social Work, and maybe now, unfortunately, anthropology.
Basically nutrition, psychology, and social work research suffer from the same research problems: small data sets, crappy 'reporting' by respondents, inadequate definition of variables, inability to adequately do double-blind tests, and so on. Most of it might as well be voodoo.
My favorite from some years ago was finally a decent test on salt intake. The researchers paid a dozen volunteers to stay isolated for a couple of weeks (as I remember) and fed them measured amounts of salt, after measuring their sodium level prior to testing. What they found was that each individual's body had a 'preferred' amount of sodium in the blood, and that their system strove to maintain that level. Add too much salt and the urinated it out, add too little, and the retained enough to maintain the balance. They, of course collected and tested all the urine.
Eventually we found the about 2% of the US population has a situation where the combination of diabetes and the gene lead to high blood pressure based on salt intake. The other 98% don't have a problem.
For instance, I love and crave salt. The amount I consume daily might cause some people to drop dead just from looking at it. I have never had a BP problem. I am now 76 and my BP is routinely around 130/75.
The problem in these three (or four) seem to me to be based on finding apparent correlations in a small group of cases using a data dredge in a very large number of frequently ill-defined variables. Do that and you can find all kinds of seeming correlations that don't actually exist. Then you weasel-word your way to a non-claim claim of causality by saying "there is an association between . . .". It's 99.9% bullshit.
I think the problem with anthropology was due to two things. The first was that there were enough cultures to study and few enough anthropologists to study them that, at least for a while, the first serious researcher could say whatever he liked about the culture without much risk of being contradicted. The second was that the field, perhaps as a matter of historical accident, had a strong ideological bias.
Left out behavioral economics, which seems to be getting weird, but I haven't followed it much for a while. I used some of Kahneman and Tversky's early work in my dissertation 30 years ago.
And saw this online today:
"Dennis Prager says "there are two kinds of psychological studies, those that confirm common sense and those that are wrong."
I would add that there are two kinds of psychological studies, those that confirm common sense and those that get you tenure and funding."
"One of these things is not like the others." That old line came to me today as I read your thoughts on cryonic suspension. On the upside, you grant that the objections to getting cryopreserved are fantasies. Let's take the fantasy of a soul (whatever that is -- it's not clear to me that a soul carries personal continuity). If the standard Christian view were correct, the soul enters the body at the point of conception. So there are millions of people walking around who were once cryopreserved embryos. There is no evidence that this caused a problem. If the divine plan is for you to go to heaven (or downstairs) on death, we have to ask what definition of death is this God person using. If God is using the sensible definition of information theoretic death, then God can either decide that you're not really dead but dead enough and take you straight to the afterlife, or that you are not. If not, you have to wait a while. It would make zero difference to you, since no subjective time passes. You will have only slightly more of an issue catching up with relatives who pre-deceased you by years, decades, or centuries. (Families in heaven must be ENORMOUS!)
Even that depends on what is officially not the mainstream view. The official view for most Christians is that you await bodily resurrection and return in Christ's kingdom on Earth. (My sense is that the official mainstream view differs from the actual mainstream Christian view, but I lack good data on that.)
The other supposed risks to cryopreservation are ludicrous fantasies: You might be enslaved (why use the time and resources to repair and revive someone as a slave when you can enslave people who are already functional or, you know, use robots and automation.) The Jerry Pournelle idea that you will be used for spare parts is just as ridiculous.
As to not knowing what sort of world you will come back to: We don't know that about our regular future either but don't usually kill ourselves to avoid that risk. Further, if we are brought back from cryopreservation, two things will be true: 1. Society has developed advanced medical technology that implies massive improvements in quality of life and lifespan. 2. There was a will to follow through on the preferences of those who made and funded their cryo arrangements. I would add that the best best is on an improving society, by extrapolating from the past. So, the risk seems small and the likely benefit enormous.
I was not conjecturing anything as specific as a Christian model, merely that consciousness was something independent of the physical body, with details unknown. The fact that I do not understand the nature of consciousness leaves a very wide range of possibilities.
Sorry, I wasn't meaning to limit your range of possibilities. I wrote "If the standard Christian view were correct" because so many people use that as a model. (I used to teach philosophy of religion in Southern California and had many Catholic students. At least, nominally. I often asked them how they imagined the afterlife. I got a lot of blank or startled and baffled looks.
My concern is that people grasp at all kinds of arbitrary and made up reasons not to take a chance on a future life. There are enough plausible concerns about the challenges of restarting a life without having to add fantastical imaginings.
It's good to hear that you did that. If it's not too personal -- and if *you* know -- could you say anything about why he wasn't interested? He seemed like someone who enjoying existing, thinking, challenging. Arthur C. Clarke apparently rejected the idea because he thought the person who was revived would not be him. I can't make sense of that on any plausible theory of personal identity. I would like to understand people's reasons/motivations better.
Are *you* interested, David? And, if interested but undecided, let's talk sometime, if you like.
There is no need to delve into science fiction for possible reasons cryonics may not work. One that is happening in varying degrees to more than one cryonics provider is the lawsuit lottery. Cryonics providers, to stay in business, insist that their members provide enough funding up front (usually by life insurance) to create a pool of savings that can keep the member frozen forever, subject to several, often unstated assumptions: the provider will not dissolve into a fight over its assets; there isn't any economic collapse that causes its funds to become worthless; and nobody decides it's worthwhile to file frivolous lawsuits against the provider just to capture or destroy that pile of money. I can't put specific numbers on these probabilities, but I'll bet the chance of any or all of them happening is at least 20% per century.
Of course, none of this makes cryonics not worth doing if you can afford it, since it is a one-sided wager comparable to Pascal's Wager, helped by some of its own requirements -- that is, if the future of the world turns out to be poverty or eco-catastrophe you can probably count on remaining dead.
(In case you didn't know, Max is a past president of Alcor.)
Given the nature of the essay, I wasn't looking for reasons it might not work, of which there are obviously a fair number, but for reasons it might make you much worse off instead of much better off. The one non-exotic reason it might be a mistake as that it's expensive, but that anyone considering it will take into account.
The large family thing isn't much of an issue, after 150 or so people at most, they'd all be strangers anyway -- unless we posit some magic, well, then, if that's the case, we could "know" a billion billion billion people and it would be no different (perhaps in that world we just get consumed into God).
But, your comment made me think, of the hundreds of living relatives I have on earth, I only talk to, or care about, a half dozen, perhaps, so in heaven? Yeah, who cares?
I make my own family here on earth, what would be different in the afterlife?
After suicide, the biggest proof of free will is walking away from the construct of "family of origin" and only being friends/family with those that deserve it.
I guess in heaven, since it's all perfect, everyone is a great person, but if that reality is true, I'll not be there (well, except by force) so I'll make do in hell, any of the realitives I actually like will be there as well anyway.
Reading your essay makes me ponder the implications of your framework on other life and death matters, like suicide. You mentioned in regard to cryonics that "bad as death is, there are worse things." This raises the question: under your framework, would taking one's own life be considered "playing it safe"? While the idea may initially seem paradoxical and deeply flawed for multiple ethical and psychological reasons, it does present an interesting contradiction that deserves exploration. Perhaps I'm missing something in your argument, and I'd be interested in your thoughts on this. To be clear, I'm certainly not suggesting or advocating for suicide; I'm just questioning the logical implications of your argument.
In your example, committing suicide isn't playing safe. You are avoiding the risk of something worse than death, but death itself is very bad and you are getting a certainty of that.
If you are almost certainly facing something worse than death, perhaps torture, then suicide might be as safe as you can play.
That makes sense. So then I guess -- if one is trying to play it safe -- the relevant question with cryonics is whether one is almost certainly facing something worse than death if it is successful.
That would be a reason not to do it. My point was only that you couldn't be certain that it was a good idea.
The more general point is that the "play safe" argument implies that doing X eliminates the chance of something very bad happening. Most of the time it trades the chance of one very bad thing, that your are thinking about, for another that you are not. It may still be worth doing but it isn't obviously worth doing, isn't a no brainer.
I'm confused by your claim about maize prices. Why would converting biofuel maize cropland to other use raise the price of food maize? I would have expected food maize cropland to be unchanged.
Is some of that land necessarily used for both? As in, perhaps certain farmers are growing maize for both purposes, and shutting down one use makes it profitable for them to shut down the other as well? Or is this a claim about speculation bubbles? Or something else? (I don't *think* I'm missing anything basic, but perhaps I am.)
Farmers grow maize. The biofuels program means that some of that maize, about 40%, gets turned into alcohol instead of being sold as food for humans or animals. That reduces the amount of maize sold for food, which raises its price.
The "other use" biofuels maize cropland would be converted to if we abolished the biofuels program is growing food maize, which is what that land was doing before there was a biofuels program. Not all of it would be used that way, since the increased supply would push down the price of food maize, just as the decreased supply due to maize being turned into alcohol instead of food pushed it up.
Perhaps; alternately, I might have misread what you said in the OP. Namely:
"We still have the program because converting a third of the US maize crop, about twelve percent world of output, pushes up the price."
I read that as "if we shut down the biofuel program, we would then have to convert biofuel maize cropland - about a third of all maize cropland - to some other use; that conversion would push up the price". That made no sense to me, since I would expect the price to go down, not up.
Maybe I should have read it as "one third of all maize cropland is *currently* converted to use for biofuel, which is pushing the price up, and farmers want to keep that price high; therefore, they will oppose any measure to shut down the biofuel program". This makes a great deal of sense to me, if I assume maize farmers have more influence than maize consumers. They probably do.
Was the latter what you meant?
(I think you meant to put a "What" at the beginning of your second paragraph above.)
See also Nutritarianism: It protects against heart disease, cancer and other risks by focusing on the healthiest foods on the planet. Nutritarian women can expect to live to between 97 and 108. It's slightly less for men. The so-called Blue Zone people live an extra eight years. Nutritarians in general live an extra 20 years. Sure, animal products have a few vitamins but there are thousands of micronutrients in plants, especially green veggies. It is impossible to be overweight on this plan. My cholesterol dropped over 100 points without a statin though I was already thin and eating healthily. See: https://www.drfuhrman.com/blog/210/beginners-guide
Imagine your brain (or body) gets frozen in such a way that the information stored is preserved, and later, you're awakened, it would matter not if there was a heaven/hell or a virtual construct simulation in which "you," i.e. your programming, went; there would merely be two of you.*
The unfrozen verison would simply be years (decades, centuries) ahead of the frozen verison. Essentially it's own person, an original "you" with its own timeline going forward, but shared past experiences.
Now, if there is no afterlife (a supernatural or materialistic one) then the information, assuming it's preserved without destruction and awoken, would mean they'd be one of you.
*Obviously, there could be a supernatural being that didn't allow your stored information to stay in the brain, i.e. the copy wouldn't be a copy at all, but not only the original, but the only original. I suppose this must be the position a religious person would make, sense they'd be hard pressed to say they thought 2 souls were possible.
Since the world we live in, i.e. reality, pretty much lands at a zero probability of a soul existing, then either you wake up and you're it, still you, still the original, OR we do live in a simulation and it seems fair to assume it's possible in that case that "you" is backed up on the server in the next level up universe, thus there'd be 2 (or more) of "you." However, whether the people or AIs that run that next level up actually respin the "you" on storage in that universe, who knows....I suspect they might since that's half the fun of having a virtual world.
You get spun up and find yourself among old friends you'd forgotten about while you were spending a lifetime "playing Earth v. 12454."
The question of the day is what character do you want to play next and well, whether you should feel bad copying yourself in the Earth v. 12454 seeing as a zombie apocalypse is coming right after you get revived. Sadly.
What I want is to continue to live, not just to have someone identical to me in existence. If someone created a perfect duplicate of me I would still not want to die.
The easiest way to conceptualize "continue to live" is with continuous consciousness. Since I don't understand the nature of consciousness I don't know how to go beyond that, how to distinguish between my being revived from freezing — still me — and my dying and a perfect copy being created.
Buying into the "perfect copy" arguments means buying into a reified concept of consciousness, whereby consciousness is a "thing" that can be possessed by certain physical structures.
During surgery, at least for me, there was no consciousness...unlike sleep, anesthesia is, at least in my experience. If I'd died in surgery but a backup copy of my brain had been inserted back into my body, how would I know?
I don't disagree that if your body was frozen and revived, it would be undisputably the "original" you, but in all other cases, brain scan to new clone or body, a virtual world you find yourself inside after death, or heaven/hell, the "you" that experiences that isn't "originally" you any more than a billion copies would be. They'd all be in the same boat, The Ship of Theseus.
Yudkowsky wrote an excellent piece on this idea of a "copy" and he essentially concluded that the physics prove there is no such thing as a copy here; even if your brain-body is replicated into a thousand "yous" each is the original.
But I agree, I want to continue to live as well. That said, I'd not mind talking to some of my copies, especially those that made better choices in those other Everett Universes in which I was rich and famous or something...
The thing with that erythritol study from my understanding is that it measured levels of erythritol rather than consumption of it. Your body actually produces it on its own, and we don't exactly understand why. It's possible it's elevated in people who are unhealthy as a byproduct of something, which has been seen in other substances. It should be studied more how this relates to consumption, but it's a single data point and very limited study
However, I will say that keto ice cream is probably quite unnecessary anyway if it's not saving you calories
Making maize more expensive would make growing maize a more attractive investment and so cause capital to be allocated to increasing maíz production. Should end up only a little more expensive than before due to marginal costs going up from using worse land on average, since it’s already produced at scale.
So there’d be a period of higher cost followed by cost going down to about normal. But overall humanity would be better off, assuming biofuels are a net good. Which they aren’t but the argument that enriching farmers makes poor people starve is used a lot and is usually false.
Global warming is necessary to some degree but it seems like an insane experiment to cause more than enough to maintain our current biomes. But of course we should use methods that actually work.
My grandfather had intuited that margarine was bad, and never strayed from using butter. He always referred to margarine as “axle grease”.
It doesn’t even do well as axle grease. The melting point is too low and its lubricity properties suck. 😁
My uncle still thinks Coca-Cola is engine cleaner. Works great for that too, but I sure drink Dr Pepper a lot.
Excellent article. Other possibilities? Many of the world's leading virus experts and pandemic prevention bodies decided that they should be collecting viruses from out of the way parts of the world, and studying them in laboratories. It is at least possible that this caused the worst pandemic for a century.
I don't feel I can really judge if it's correct, but I find the argument plausible that to date, AI alignment and safety work has increased AI risk, and that certain kinds of alignment/safety work would increase risk in the future.
Many of those responsible for sharing information with the Soviets that allowed them to develop the atomic bomb claimed they were motivated by concerns about the risk of only one side having nuclear weapons (though I'm not sure I believe them, given their pre-existing politics). Giving Stalin the bomb surely increased the risk of nuclear weapons being used.
The defenders of freedom granted exceptional powers to defend against a would be dictator, who then go on to use those powers to become dictators themselves, are legion.
> Giving Stalin the bomb surely increased the risk of nuclear weapons being used
Surely? I think it's at least arguable (if not likely) that doing so reduced the risk - the only actual use of nuclear weapons came when the US was the only posessor. Would the US have been more likely to use nukes in the Korean War if no one else had them? Seems at least plausible.
Collecting viruses seems pretty ineffective, an AI will be able, if one cannot already, combine whatever it is that makes a virus in a program like what Midjourney does for art or ChatGPT does for words, and bam, "Hello Human, here's 100,456 potential extinction level viruses. Should I send any of them to the 3D printer?"
In Demon in the Freezer, Richard Preston (and this is like 20 years ago) said something to the effect of, "My virologist buddies make new viruses in the lab all the time as a hobby."
So, an AI helping someone doing this? It's game over if the wrong one gets out.
Reminds me of Frank Herberts White Plaugue and is probably something we're facing, if nanotech doesn't kill us first with synthetic virus-like robots.
As a sidebar, scientists have already dug up the Spanish Flu (bodies in the permafrost) and god-only-knows what things the US gov and the Russians have stored, i.e. small pox.
I'm actually more surprised than less that we haven't extincted ourselves already....almost seems a proof that the eschatology of some religion is true and God is protecting us so the we can't ruin his destructive apocalyptic plans already laid down in some Holy Book.
I think ultimately there aren't really "safe" options. Everything has consequences and side effects. It's just what tradeoff we as individuals can afford.
All that I can say is that if nutrition research as a body isn't the worst research since 1900 it must surely be in the top three.
psychology, as revealed by the replication crisis, may be worse.
Other candidates?
Social Work, and maybe now, unfortunately, anthropology.
Basically nutrition, psychology, and social work research suffer from the same research problems: small data sets, crappy 'reporting' by respondents, inadequate definition of variables, inability to adequately do double-blind tests, and so on. Most of it might as well be voodoo.
My favorite from some years ago was finally a decent test on salt intake. The researchers paid a dozen volunteers to stay isolated for a couple of weeks (as I remember) and fed them measured amounts of salt, after measuring their sodium level prior to testing. What they found was that each individual's body had a 'preferred' amount of sodium in the blood, and that their system strove to maintain that level. Add too much salt and the urinated it out, add too little, and the retained enough to maintain the balance. They, of course collected and tested all the urine.
Eventually we found the about 2% of the US population has a situation where the combination of diabetes and the gene lead to high blood pressure based on salt intake. The other 98% don't have a problem.
For instance, I love and crave salt. The amount I consume daily might cause some people to drop dead just from looking at it. I have never had a BP problem. I am now 76 and my BP is routinely around 130/75.
The problem in these three (or four) seem to me to be based on finding apparent correlations in a small group of cases using a data dredge in a very large number of frequently ill-defined variables. Do that and you can find all kinds of seeming correlations that don't actually exist. Then you weasel-word your way to a non-claim claim of causality by saying "there is an association between . . .". It's 99.9% bullshit.
Just one man's opinion.
I think the problem with anthropology was due to two things. The first was that there were enough cultures to study and few enough anthropologists to study them that, at least for a while, the first serious researcher could say whatever he liked about the culture without much risk of being contradicted. The second was that the field, perhaps as a matter of historical accident, had a strong ideological bias.
And Margaret Mead was apparently easy to fool. I would think the language barrier alone would lead to a lot of mistakes.
Left out behavioral economics, which seems to be getting weird, but I haven't followed it much for a while. I used some of Kahneman and Tversky's early work in my dissertation 30 years ago.
And saw this online today:
"Dennis Prager says "there are two kinds of psychological studies, those that confirm common sense and those that are wrong."
I would add that there are two kinds of psychological studies, those that confirm common sense and those that get you tenure and funding."
Tw-eyed Jack
Is the plan to increase dependence on nuclear power because it is free of carbon emissions, “safe?”
https://open.substack.com/pub/1longtrain/p/the-bane-of-nuclear-energy?r=1zyuut&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
"One of these things is not like the others." That old line came to me today as I read your thoughts on cryonic suspension. On the upside, you grant that the objections to getting cryopreserved are fantasies. Let's take the fantasy of a soul (whatever that is -- it's not clear to me that a soul carries personal continuity). If the standard Christian view were correct, the soul enters the body at the point of conception. So there are millions of people walking around who were once cryopreserved embryos. There is no evidence that this caused a problem. If the divine plan is for you to go to heaven (or downstairs) on death, we have to ask what definition of death is this God person using. If God is using the sensible definition of information theoretic death, then God can either decide that you're not really dead but dead enough and take you straight to the afterlife, or that you are not. If not, you have to wait a while. It would make zero difference to you, since no subjective time passes. You will have only slightly more of an issue catching up with relatives who pre-deceased you by years, decades, or centuries. (Families in heaven must be ENORMOUS!)
Even that depends on what is officially not the mainstream view. The official view for most Christians is that you await bodily resurrection and return in Christ's kingdom on Earth. (My sense is that the official mainstream view differs from the actual mainstream Christian view, but I lack good data on that.)
The other supposed risks to cryopreservation are ludicrous fantasies: You might be enslaved (why use the time and resources to repair and revive someone as a slave when you can enslave people who are already functional or, you know, use robots and automation.) The Jerry Pournelle idea that you will be used for spare parts is just as ridiculous.
As to not knowing what sort of world you will come back to: We don't know that about our regular future either but don't usually kill ourselves to avoid that risk. Further, if we are brought back from cryopreservation, two things will be true: 1. Society has developed advanced medical technology that implies massive improvements in quality of life and lifespan. 2. There was a will to follow through on the preferences of those who made and funded their cryo arrangements. I would add that the best best is on an improving society, by extrapolating from the past. So, the risk seems small and the likely benefit enormous.
I was not conjecturing anything as specific as a Christian model, merely that consciousness was something independent of the physical body, with details unknown. The fact that I do not understand the nature of consciousness leaves a very wide range of possibilities.
Sorry, I wasn't meaning to limit your range of possibilities. I wrote "If the standard Christian view were correct" because so many people use that as a model. (I used to teach philosophy of religion in Southern California and had many Catholic students. At least, nominally. I often asked them how they imagined the afterlife. I got a lot of blank or startled and baffled looks.
My concern is that people grasp at all kinds of arbitrary and made up reasons not to take a chance on a future life. There are enough plausible concerns about the challenges of restarting a life without having to add fantastical imaginings.
I very much wish that your father had been cryopreserved. I very much hope that you will choose that option, David.
I suggested it to my father but he was not interested.
It's good to hear that you did that. If it's not too personal -- and if *you* know -- could you say anything about why he wasn't interested? He seemed like someone who enjoying existing, thinking, challenging. Arthur C. Clarke apparently rejected the idea because he thought the person who was revived would not be him. I can't make sense of that on any plausible theory of personal identity. I would like to understand people's reasons/motivations better.
Are *you* interested, David? And, if interested but undecided, let's talk sometime, if you like.
He didn't say.
There is no need to delve into science fiction for possible reasons cryonics may not work. One that is happening in varying degrees to more than one cryonics provider is the lawsuit lottery. Cryonics providers, to stay in business, insist that their members provide enough funding up front (usually by life insurance) to create a pool of savings that can keep the member frozen forever, subject to several, often unstated assumptions: the provider will not dissolve into a fight over its assets; there isn't any economic collapse that causes its funds to become worthless; and nobody decides it's worthwhile to file frivolous lawsuits against the provider just to capture or destroy that pile of money. I can't put specific numbers on these probabilities, but I'll bet the chance of any or all of them happening is at least 20% per century.
Of course, none of this makes cryonics not worth doing if you can afford it, since it is a one-sided wager comparable to Pascal's Wager, helped by some of its own requirements -- that is, if the future of the world turns out to be poverty or eco-catastrophe you can probably count on remaining dead.
(In case you didn't know, Max is a past president of Alcor.)
Given the nature of the essay, I wasn't looking for reasons it might not work, of which there are obviously a fair number, but for reasons it might make you much worse off instead of much better off. The one non-exotic reason it might be a mistake as that it's expensive, but that anyone considering it will take into account.
The large family thing isn't much of an issue, after 150 or so people at most, they'd all be strangers anyway -- unless we posit some magic, well, then, if that's the case, we could "know" a billion billion billion people and it would be no different (perhaps in that world we just get consumed into God).
But, your comment made me think, of the hundreds of living relatives I have on earth, I only talk to, or care about, a half dozen, perhaps, so in heaven? Yeah, who cares?
I make my own family here on earth, what would be different in the afterlife?
After suicide, the biggest proof of free will is walking away from the construct of "family of origin" and only being friends/family with those that deserve it.
I guess in heaven, since it's all perfect, everyone is a great person, but if that reality is true, I'll not be there (well, except by force) so I'll make do in hell, any of the realitives I actually like will be there as well anyway.
I can't tell what your comment is responding to.
Reading your essay makes me ponder the implications of your framework on other life and death matters, like suicide. You mentioned in regard to cryonics that "bad as death is, there are worse things." This raises the question: under your framework, would taking one's own life be considered "playing it safe"? While the idea may initially seem paradoxical and deeply flawed for multiple ethical and psychological reasons, it does present an interesting contradiction that deserves exploration. Perhaps I'm missing something in your argument, and I'd be interested in your thoughts on this. To be clear, I'm certainly not suggesting or advocating for suicide; I'm just questioning the logical implications of your argument.
I'm arguing that you usually can't play safe.
In your example, committing suicide isn't playing safe. You are avoiding the risk of something worse than death, but death itself is very bad and you are getting a certainty of that.
If you are almost certainly facing something worse than death, perhaps torture, then suicide might be as safe as you can play.
That makes sense. So then I guess -- if one is trying to play it safe -- the relevant question with cryonics is whether one is almost certainly facing something worse than death if it is successful.
That would be a reason not to do it. My point was only that you couldn't be certain that it was a good idea.
The more general point is that the "play safe" argument implies that doing X eliminates the chance of something very bad happening. Most of the time it trades the chance of one very bad thing, that your are thinking about, for another that you are not. It may still be worth doing but it isn't obviously worth doing, isn't a no brainer.
I'm confused by your claim about maize prices. Why would converting biofuel maize cropland to other use raise the price of food maize? I would have expected food maize cropland to be unchanged.
Is some of that land necessarily used for both? As in, perhaps certain farmers are growing maize for both purposes, and shutting down one use makes it profitable for them to shut down the other as well? Or is this a claim about speculation bubbles? Or something else? (I don't *think* I'm missing anything basic, but perhaps I am.)
Farmers grow maize. The biofuels program means that some of that maize, about 40%, gets turned into alcohol instead of being sold as food for humans or animals. That reduces the amount of maize sold for food, which raises its price.
The "other use" biofuels maize cropland would be converted to if we abolished the biofuels program is growing food maize, which is what that land was doing before there was a biofuels program. Not all of it would be used that way, since the increased supply would push down the price of food maize, just as the decreased supply due to maize being turned into alcohol instead of food pushed it up.
Perhaps I don't understand your question.
Perhaps; alternately, I might have misread what you said in the OP. Namely:
"We still have the program because converting a third of the US maize crop, about twelve percent world of output, pushes up the price."
I read that as "if we shut down the biofuel program, we would then have to convert biofuel maize cropland - about a third of all maize cropland - to some other use; that conversion would push up the price". That made no sense to me, since I would expect the price to go down, not up.
Maybe I should have read it as "one third of all maize cropland is *currently* converted to use for biofuel, which is pushing the price up, and farmers want to keep that price high; therefore, they will oppose any measure to shut down the biofuel program". This makes a great deal of sense to me, if I assume maize farmers have more influence than maize consumers. They probably do.
Was the latter what you meant?
(I think you meant to put a "What" at the beginning of your second paragraph above.)
Yes.
The keto diet is a disaster. " Michael Greger, MD from NutritionFacts.org offers a science-based approach. Check out: https://nutritionfacts.org/video/are-keto-diets-safe/ and https://nutritionfacts.org/video/is-weight-loss-on-ketosis-sustainable/
See also Nutritarianism: It protects against heart disease, cancer and other risks by focusing on the healthiest foods on the planet. Nutritarian women can expect to live to between 97 and 108. It's slightly less for men. The so-called Blue Zone people live an extra eight years. Nutritarians in general live an extra 20 years. Sure, animal products have a few vitamins but there are thousands of micronutrients in plants, especially green veggies. It is impossible to be overweight on this plan. My cholesterol dropped over 100 points without a statin though I was already thin and eating healthily. See: https://www.drfuhrman.com/blog/210/beginners-guide
Great article! It seems that perhaps Ice Cream isn't as bad as you believe, as there seems to be evidence that eating ice cream is good for you - it seems to lower diabetes. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/05/ice-cream-bad-for-you-health-study/673487/. There are also others who have found success on high fat diets: https://exfatloss.substack.com/.
What do you think of this? Is there anything in it?
I don't know. I have seen stories about that evidence.
And, bad as death is, there are worse things. Or, as John Stark said, "Live free or die: Death is not the worst of evils."
Wise words.
*And, bad as death is, there are worse things.*
Imagine your brain (or body) gets frozen in such a way that the information stored is preserved, and later, you're awakened, it would matter not if there was a heaven/hell or a virtual construct simulation in which "you," i.e. your programming, went; there would merely be two of you.*
The unfrozen verison would simply be years (decades, centuries) ahead of the frozen verison. Essentially it's own person, an original "you" with its own timeline going forward, but shared past experiences.
Now, if there is no afterlife (a supernatural or materialistic one) then the information, assuming it's preserved without destruction and awoken, would mean they'd be one of you.
*Obviously, there could be a supernatural being that didn't allow your stored information to stay in the brain, i.e. the copy wouldn't be a copy at all, but not only the original, but the only original. I suppose this must be the position a religious person would make, sense they'd be hard pressed to say they thought 2 souls were possible.
Since the world we live in, i.e. reality, pretty much lands at a zero probability of a soul existing, then either you wake up and you're it, still you, still the original, OR we do live in a simulation and it seems fair to assume it's possible in that case that "you" is backed up on the server in the next level up universe, thus there'd be 2 (or more) of "you." However, whether the people or AIs that run that next level up actually respin the "you" on storage in that universe, who knows....I suspect they might since that's half the fun of having a virtual world.
You get spun up and find yourself among old friends you'd forgotten about while you were spending a lifetime "playing Earth v. 12454."
The question of the day is what character do you want to play next and well, whether you should feel bad copying yourself in the Earth v. 12454 seeing as a zombie apocalypse is coming right after you get revived. Sadly.
What I want is to continue to live, not just to have someone identical to me in existence. If someone created a perfect duplicate of me I would still not want to die.
The easiest way to conceptualize "continue to live" is with continuous consciousness. Since I don't understand the nature of consciousness I don't know how to go beyond that, how to distinguish between my being revived from freezing — still me — and my dying and a perfect copy being created.
Buying into the "perfect copy" arguments means buying into a reified concept of consciousness, whereby consciousness is a "thing" that can be possessed by certain physical structures.
During surgery, at least for me, there was no consciousness...unlike sleep, anesthesia is, at least in my experience. If I'd died in surgery but a backup copy of my brain had been inserted back into my body, how would I know?
I don't disagree that if your body was frozen and revived, it would be undisputably the "original" you, but in all other cases, brain scan to new clone or body, a virtual world you find yourself inside after death, or heaven/hell, the "you" that experiences that isn't "originally" you any more than a billion copies would be. They'd all be in the same boat, The Ship of Theseus.
Yudkowsky wrote an excellent piece on this idea of a "copy" and he essentially concluded that the physics prove there is no such thing as a copy here; even if your brain-body is replicated into a thousand "yous" each is the original.
But I agree, I want to continue to live as well. That said, I'd not mind talking to some of my copies, especially those that made better choices in those other Everett Universes in which I was rich and famous or something...
The thing with that erythritol study from my understanding is that it measured levels of erythritol rather than consumption of it. Your body actually produces it on its own, and we don't exactly understand why. It's possible it's elevated in people who are unhealthy as a byproduct of something, which has been seen in other substances. It should be studied more how this relates to consumption, but it's a single data point and very limited study
However, I will say that keto ice cream is probably quite unnecessary anyway if it's not saving you calories
My understanding is that. although we produce erythritol, we produce it at much lower levels that result from consuming it.
Making maize more expensive would make growing maize a more attractive investment and so cause capital to be allocated to increasing maíz production. Should end up only a little more expensive than before due to marginal costs going up from using worse land on average, since it’s already produced at scale.
So there’d be a period of higher cost followed by cost going down to about normal. But overall humanity would be better off, assuming biofuels are a net good. Which they aren’t but the argument that enriching farmers makes poor people starve is used a lot and is usually false.
Global warming is necessary to some degree but it seems like an insane experiment to cause more than enough to maintain our current biomes. But of course we should use methods that actually work.