Because, After All

Today, many people have an unrealistic view of death. Death is something so far off that we somehow imagine it will never happen to us. Not really. It’s something vague that happens to old people. But then sooner or later it happens to someone you know. Not just death, but the dying process.

Let’s say it’s your mother. You knew she was sick, but you’ve spoken with her on the phone recently. Your kid sister has been taking care of her. You know abstractly that she is suffering, but you hope she will get better soon. She says encouraging things, she is putting a brave face on it.

You are familiar with the dictum that all things die, but somehow it never seemed to apply to your mom. She’s a living person, a sentient being, someone you love. You can’t imagine her not being there any more.

So one day you get the emergency call. You mother is on her deathbed. There are limited options. She can have an operation — very expensive, it might not work, but it’s your only shot at being able to speak with her again six months from now.

Imagine your horror when you find out your kid sister is considering letting her pass away. Letting her go on to her eternal rest. The doctor somehow thinks this is acceptable. Your mom even seems to be okay with it. But you wouldn’t have her with you. Somehow that just doesn’t seem right. Letting her go like that.

So you push on. You tell the doctor to do everything it takes You spend through your inheritance. Something like $200,000 worth of it. After all, what’s money compared to human life, that of someone you love? You’d feel selfish and miserly to give up and let her die so you could get your cut. It just wouldn’t be right.

And it works. Your mother survives for six months longer than she otherwise would have. Then she dies. You cry at her funeral. You tell yourself you treasured those extra moments. Your sister is sad too, but part of her seems just glad it is over.

How much different if she was signed up for cryonics? What if she died of pneumonia or some other technically treatable cause during those final few months, without spending the $200,000 on barely effective life extending treatments? What if instead she had lost her consciousness, perhaps forever (but perhaps not) six months sooner, and the $200,000 was placed instead into a trust fund to keep her brain supplied with liquid nitrogen for the next few centuries?

Never mind that she would have a new shot at existence. Never mind that her brain would potentially be repaired by nanomachines and brought back in a beautiful young body, or scanned and converted into a “computer program” that thinks, laughs, and feels like your mother did on her best days.

Instead, think of the suffering she was spared during those last months. Not just her, but your sister and other family members. In this regard we can measure the difference. In one scenario, she suffered for six extra months, in the other she was asleep for those six months.

With cryonics, you do not have to cede philosophical ground to death. You don’t have to nod your head and say it’s okay. It’s not okay. How could it be? A sentient being, someone you love — never being there again? We can’t not want to fight that. But that does not mean we can’t take chances, or that we can’t pick our battles.

The fact is if you are a cryonics patient, you don’t want a breathing tube stuck in your throat as you struggle for life while your brain slowly rots away. You want prompt cooling as soon as clinical death can possibly be established, with as little brain-affecting trauma as possible. It is simply not compatible with “heroic endeavors” as current medicine is practiced.

Cryonics puts you in a state where you can afford to wait for the cure to be perfected. In fact you must wait, it won’t work otherwise. During that time you can’t feel pain. The whole issue of whether passive / assisted dying is immoral or suicidal is side-stepped. The choice to freeze your brain instead of accepting that hopeless extra liver surgery is a hard choice, but not a defeatist one.

Human bodies are pretty much destined to wear out. That’s just the reality we live in. There’s no cure for it yet. They wear out painfully and unfairly, and it’s not that we owe it to God or Nature or any other entity to let it happen, it just does, as a scientific fact. So let us embrace that raw truth, and make our arrangements accordingly — with cryonics.

The topic of seasteading has received a lot of attention lately as billionaire Peter Thiel is apparently funding the creation of a seastead. The wonderful thing about seasteading, according to most of its proponents, is that one can use them to start communities that are closer to the libertarian ideal than modern democratic societies.

But what of those of us who are not libertarians, who believe that paternalistically enforcing our morals on others is sometimes a good idea? Does seasteading offer anything for us? Sure it does.

Seasteads are simply small, experimental countries. They can be as restricted or as loose as the owners prefer. This can also be a good mental exercise. Imagine if you will, a country where everyone follows rules optimized for your moral preferences. Would anyone want to move there?

Here’s a tyrannical country I would like to create, which I imagine would horrify most current proponents of seasteading, but would have (I think) certain advantages over libertarianism or contemporary democracy:

• Mandatory ongoing polymathic education.
• Mandatory daily exercise, mandatory daily consumption of the RDA of vitamins and minerals, prohibited meat other than fish, mandatory consumption of a certain quota of seaweed or algae.
• Mandatory training in hand-to-hand combat, but prohibited personal firearms. Optional training in the use of guns, especially for counter-terrorism and anti-piracy.
• Prohibition of lotteries and addictive forms of gambling.
• Mandatory or subsidized betting on future events.
• Prohibition of alcohol, coffee, and tobacco, but permitted nicotine and caffeine in their raw forms. (Cheaper to import that way, and nicotine is evidently not itself dangerous if properly diluted and taken in moderation.)
• Mandatory cryonics for anyone who dies, with constant standby available at all times (mandatory training for emergencies).
• Prohibited euthanasia, except for cryopreservation purposes.
• Prohibited sex outside of marriage, and divorce, but permitted marriage to multiple spouses and same-sex marriages.
• Progressive taxation based on wealth ratios, not specific amounts of money. Currency is a bitcoin analogue.
• Taxation of advertising that reinforces a brand or existing product rather than carrying new information.
• Stylish yet modest national uniform which alternates on different days of the week.
• Government allocates points to each person which can be spent on their choice among a set of standard-issue products that it bulk-purchases, which must be redeemed before they expire.
• Enforcement of IP for a limited time (e.g. 5 years), but for local productions only. Foreign IP not recognized.
• Mass transit, bikes, and walking, but no cars.
• Procreation requires a license, based on the demonstration of educational and interpersonal excellence, and physical stamina. Licensed procreators have large families in the range of 10 children. Others are given reversible sterility implants, and must adopt (typically from overseas) if they wish to raise children.
• A weekly ritual where people recite a commitment to rational thought, admitting their mistakes, and empirical testing of their beliefs.
• The determination of the Justice system is inverted in a random, yet small number of cases. For example a 1000-sided die coming up with a specific number could convict an innocent or set a guilty person free. This is to shatter the illusion of the law’s infallibility and make sure punishments are not too onerous.
• Defense and prosecution lawyers must switch sides at the last minute 50% of the time.

So there we have it. Does it sound cultish, tyrannical, or intolerable to you? Perhaps you would like it if you lived there for a few months — the initial sources of irritation might over time become points of national pride.

Perhaps you would modify a few variables, or do many things completely opposite, if you were creating your own small nation. But why, or why not? Which things would be the most important to change, and how would they make people’s lives better? What other ideas could I add to the list?

Divia, from More Meaning Than Magic has created a nice set of Anki decks, including one for Crucial Conversations.

Another that I enjoyed was How to Talk so Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk, which contains some suggestions that seem like they would work well with adults.

Anki is an open-source program that displays flash cards in a Spaced Repetition format. Gwern has written an in-depth review of this powerful memorization technique.

I haven’t read either of the books mentioned above, but the Anki cards seem to be understandable even if you haven’t. Perhaps simply playing these cards on a daily basis will make me a better communicator.

Referenced in a recent lesswrong post: Quantity always trumps quality.

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot – albeit a perfect one – to get an “A”.

Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

Where have I heard this before?

1. Stop theorizing.
2. Write lots of software.
3. Learn from your mistakes.

Quantity always trumps quality. That’s why the one bit of advice I always give aspiring bloggers is to pick a schedule and stick with it. It’s the only advice that matters, because until you’ve mentally committed to doing it over and over, you will not improve. You can’t.

When it comes to software, the same rule applies. If you aren’t building, you aren’t learning. Rather than agonizing over whether you’re building the right thing, just build it. And if that one doesn’t work, keep building until you get one that does.

Obsessing about quality rather than just going out and doing it is a personal weakness of mine. As a result I have accomplished a lot less than I otherwise could have — and if the above argument is true, it is likely that what little I have done has suffered in quality as well.

In laboratory experiments there is something called “throughput” — doing many small experiments can help correct errors in your model more quickly and inexpensively than doing many large experiments. This is one reason you might start with rodents, or even fruit flies, before moving on to trying something in primates and humans, even though the results are less likely to be directly applicable to what you want to know.

A book that changed my way of thinking recently is called Be The Hero by Noah Blumenthal. It tells the story of a man who becomes paralyzed by victim-like thinking, and meets up with an old friend who teaches him to think like a hero again.

Another good book which deals with the details on how to deal with situations in a mature and competent (i.e. heroic) manner is Crucial Conversations. I haven’t read it yet but I plan to as it comes highly recommended by Danila Medvedev. The wikisummaries version is good stuff.

Is walking safer than driving?

mobile on Overcoming Bias:

If the alternative is walking or biking, then the safest thing is to drive. If the alternative is staying home instead of going to a job that would give you a good income, then you are less prepared for health problems and the other vicissitudes of life, and once again you are probably safer driving.

This is somewhat context dependent. Are we assuming the same distance will be covered either way? Are we assuming that while you walk or bike, everyone else will drive? Are we measuring your personal safety or the average person’s safety as affected by your decision?

Many cities in europe are largely car-free. I imagine living in one of these and walking would be safer than living in a city with cars and walking, perhaps even driving. Using public transportation would be safer than driving.

Personally I have managed to move to a place where I can walk just a few blocks to work every day, which causes me to exercise regularly and is less stressful for a variety of reasons.

So here it is. I am using NearlyFreeSpeech.NET for hosting, and WordPress for a CMS.

Topics I’ll likely be covering: rationality, transhumanism, entrepreneurship, programming, psychology, and cryonics. These are just topics I have been known to find interesting in the past, enough to predict that I will enjoy writing about them in the future.

Any decent blog is a conversation. I will be linking to this from other forums and web communities I frequent, so feel free to stop in and comment on something I have said elsewhere.