wemptronics
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User ID: 95
wemptronics
3d ago
Same. Quatar is a major producer of oil!
290. Does that make us general knowledge midwit eskimo brothers? I didn't follow the directions and guessed 5 answers on each section. I did not think I was firing wildly on 5th answers for any of the sets .
My lowest score was international knowledge which feels bad, stupid Nubians. I did feel like the test skewed Millennial male, especially the technical section, although I appreciated the effort for balance with sets like tools vs. make-up brands. Not what I was expecting from a Kirkegaard general knowledge test. Good fun thread post.
Yeah, I don't reckon you need to buy a bridge if you're swimming across.
Whatever, it's my sense of identity and willingness to subscribe to substrate-independent theories of consciousness. I would prefer non-destructive scans if they were an option, and might even wait if I didn't expect to die before it was a reality.
I'll be erring on the side of patience as a virtue irrespective of any other considerations, thank you very much. Sense of identity maybe not so much, but my willingness can change in a traffic jam.
Did I infer correctly that Nectome's crosslinking method is intended for the simulator end game, and fundamentally further or mutually exclusive with the "maybe someday medicine gets really good" revival hope of traditional cryo? The LW discussion didn't seem to talk about it as a pivot. I guess if you're in the market for cryo it's more like hedging and that's why it is presented and discussed this way.
This was in part a bait post for the thoughts of local enthusiast and medicine man, cheers!
wemptronics
8d ago
Well, who's going to invent this amazing life-saving radical biotech? Not you, you were busy having your body frozen. Or busy working out how to build the refrigerators.
It's a fair bet that humans will continue to be interested in modes of immortality, life extension, or techno-necromancy in 50, 100, and 1000 years from now. New refrigerants don't help crack the nut, no, but if Bryan Johnson's hero dose inspired shitpost grants him an epiphany in 50 years those refrigerants might enable a lot more people to benefit if the stewardship role of cryo works out.
From the LW comments:
It's not set up yet but we are broadly going to model it after Alcor's long-term patient care fund. Non profit. They survived for decades; no sense in changing something that isn't broken.
Aurelia also explained that they plan to encourage people to keep Alcor packages since Nectome doesn't plan to do any out of state retrieval. If you can, you fly to Oregon and get the best possible chance. If you can't, you've still got your standard freezer package. This is clever way to enter the small market, but one that is past due on innovation. Based on the tone of the LW commentariat this is very early days, so we are discussing start-up vaporware with proof-of-concept.
What about cryonics? What's new? Where else would I read new cryonics if not a pitch on LessWrong?
"Traditional" cryonics requires a crisis response to a customer's death. A person dies, people are alerted, and a plan is carried out to evacuate a body to administer cryogoo-- glycerol. That body is transferred to cold storage and suspended in liquid nitrogen with a barrier of one fancy cask. The liquid nitrogen creates extreme temperatures for preservation, around -192C, a temperature that comes with risks-- human tissue kept at -192C tends to be very fragile. Another pressing issue is that the goo filling-to-freezer process takes time, and bodies stop all kinds of maintenance after death. Dying with imperfect preservation means if someone did find a way to upload your brain to the Matrix, or reanimate your corpse, unless they've fully cracked the mysteries of regenerative medicine the experience may not be to your liking.
Why is this this culture war? Nectome's new method offers a workaround to the last problem: kill yourself.
The result is a protocol that my company, Nectome, has spent the past ten years developing. After years of experiments in the lab and in the field, learning about the complexity of end-of-life biology, and after refining our protocol to make it robust and repeatable for real people in real-world clinical settings, we are now ready. We've developed a whole-body, whole-brain, human end-of-life preservation protocol based on neuroscience first principles. We are capable of preserving every synapse and almost every protein, lipid, and nucleic acid throughout the whole body. Brains are connectomically traceable after preservation[1]. Our preservation is so comprehensive that current neuroscience theories imply it preserves all relevant information necessary for future restoration of a preserved person.
Nectome wants you to have the option to end your life so they can preserve your bits, bobs, and neuronal structure, increasing the chance you emerge intact down the line. You can read a slightly more detailed overview in this PDF from Nectome with citations. You can compare it to the big brand-name cryonics company in the US named Alcor. Alcor has facilities located in Arizona, which is a state with cheap land, no hurricanes, low humidity, and a favorable regulatory environment. Good things for long term groundskeeping. Unlike Alcor, Nectome plans to set up shop in Oregon. Also unlike Alcor, Nectome clarifies they will host no brains in jars with holistic, rather than trope filled, process.
We preserve the whole body, including the brain, at nanoscale, subsynaptic detail. We are capable of preserving every neuron and every synapse in the brain, and almost every protein, lipid, and nucleic acid within each cell and throughout the entire body is held in place by molecular crosslinks.
The business pitch relies on the fact that Oregon has MAID, colloquially known as assisted suicide. Rather than keep cells frozen in place with extremely low temperatures, Nectome's goo formula does more work to stabilize structures chemically, which allows a moderate preservation temperature at -32C. This process must be completed immediately following death. So if a client can plan around, or potentially induce, a state recognized terminal illness, they can purchase a flight to the state of Oregon, end their life, and receive the latest greatest chance at... something in the future. Don't want to miss the singularity or omnipotent medicine? No cryonics company promises anything like that, they usually only agree to look after your frozen bits for as long as is feasible.
About that, Nectome's founder is also involved with Eon Systems, a company currently working on brain emulators. They generated a viral story with apparent progress on a fly connectome earlier this month. Specific claims of hype are contested, but progress on mapping, building, and simulating brains seems real. Much has been written on MAID slippery slopes, but it seems we already have a current legal avenue to test a "freeze me" future with an upload waiting room. Take the upload to Elon Musk's Afterlife, which is a RuneScape clone by the way, replete with a procedurally generated non-stop feed of his greatest twitter hits at your finger tips into eternity, or until transcendent beings awaken you.
With so many sci-fi fantasies filling up the horizon, why not kill yourself and wait awhile? What did you think transhumanism meant, anyway? vibes? papers? essays?
U.S. Authorities Are Investigating Device Thrown Near Gracie Mansion
It is contemptible primarily because there's more than enough video footage that documented the event. This includes the first bomb that the guy threw, as well as the second bomb which was dropped as he made his attempted escape. A variety of footage with different angles was available on X.com 4 hours before this article was first published.
This fact is not mentioned at all in this article. If I was reading the article I would have no idea that any of these events were recorded by a dozen different cameras. I wouldn't know if NYT reporters saw the footage, ignored it, or why they did so. We know the NYT is aware of X for a few reasons, but chief among them is they relay an FBI statement from the platform at the end of this very article.
According to footage I saw, one device was thrown in the direction towards the protestor group, but fell short landing in a barricade. Individual counter-protestors and media at the scene, confused, immediately can be heard asking things like "What was that?" and "Yo this nigga threw a bomb, bro?" The suspect was seen retreating from the crowd of counter-protestors down the sidewalk while police reacted to a smoking, suspicious device on the ground. Police then pursued the suspect down the sidewalk where a second suspicious device was passed between the suspect and a second individual, now identified as Emir Balat and Ibrahim Nikk, before igniting it and dropping on the ground.
There's a lot of ways NYT journalists could incorporate these apparent facts and others from video footage to better inform the public. They can do this without making dubious claims or reporting solely on the questionable veracity of edited (though not all are) video uploads. Journalists are more capable craftsmen than you give them credit for.
The "suspicious device" doesn't bother me. They did not know if it was a real bomb and neither did anyone else. What they have done is used that one uncertainty to apply more extensive ambiguity to the story than it deserves. They've done this in a way where you, experienced reader, will defend them as they deliberately attempt to mislead you with the bare minimum. Then, next week, we'll get slew of articles on on a story that is based on footage which includes "what appears like police brutality" or "a racist Wendy's employee." All the caution and credibility of the Grey Lady can get thrown to the wind when deliberation ends differently.
The device had the appearance of a real bomb. Police reacted to it as if it was a homemade bomb. Stupid photographers ran up to it to snap cool photos of the suspicious device on the ground like they would an unexploded bomb. The suspect can be heard crying "Allahu Akbar!" before throwing this smoky device over the heads of counter-protestors. He threw it over the heads of counter-protestors towards -- in the direction of -- the anti-Islam protestor guy. That's the guy whose protest had generated all this controversy, but the NYT newsroom has not independently confirmed he was the target of the device. Sources inside the NYPD tell the Times these are important facts.
The fact that few, if any, are reported suggest the NYT failed to inform the public by using its own suspicious devices. I would prefer to conveniently get my news dope from a single, esteemed NYT reporter. It's annoying that I can't do this, because they're bad at reporting events such as this. Yes, this is just how news works, but that's more of a condemnation than anything else.
wemptronics
25d ago
Are we looking at the same chart?
Thank you. Yes, my eyes misinterpreted the blue hues on the YouGov page when I checked your comment this morning.
wemptronics
25d ago
overtaking the Tories
I was under a mistaken impression that was not only possible, but likely, and that they had already achieved something like similar polling after the long crash Tory crashout. In reality they've still only achieved a threatening trend nationally, albeit with plenty of hope, uncertainty, and some some convincing local performances-- yes?
I now realize I started to type too soon. This is a response to what I thought you wrote for a moment, but didn't really write. Posting anyway.
The UK right is pretty clearly willing to accept the left's electoral victory. Their reasoning, which is in my view correct, is that a left victory will result in very bad policies, which will in turn discredit the left further and rebound in their favor.
Does the UK right imagine themselves as patiently waiting, playing politics while the electorate learns the correct lessons? They don't give off an appearance of being that serious or prepared to me.
I know these polls are volatile -- more like (dis)approval polls of the current boss than anything else -- but stakes are potentially very high. "Treat all migrants as if they are citizens", enfranchise all residents with the right to vote, and accepting "responsibility for the climate emergency and support the people forced to move" are all things that would freak me out. If I read them on an official party platform and saw that party gain steam I'd think it's time to get serious about winning power. Among the numerous plans to stamp out out the last vestiges of industry and productivity there's also the casual pledges to do things like implement all "the reforms proposed" in a 2000 page report. This appears like a 15 year old legacy talking point, but it could also be the most popular pathway to smuggle in more media control.
I do not know too much about UK politics. There may be many good reasons to suspect the Greens will remain marginalized in politics and won't rub off on their failing Labour brethren-- at least not in consequential ways. If there's even a few reasons to take the rise of the Greens seriously, then the prospect of not-racist vote coalescing to empower the pack as many lefty gambits into platform, choose later party, even in limited form, that would scare the hell out of me. Expanding the franchise is already happening in a way that will favor whichever flavor of leftwardly one prefers. I wouldn't want to play chicken with any of this. Not unless I had immense trust in the system. That such a system would apply appropriate constraints until the voters are educated enough to reveal secret weapon Prime Minister Curtis Yarvin.
How much transparency or access should we expect from an innocent China scenario? Innocent China can be measured granularly with degrees of incompetence, recklessness, or malevolence, just as guilty dumb China can. There is nothing good that comes from transparency to China if it allowed something like a real, independent audit of files and personnel. Hopefully we live in the world where majorly culpable China would take more risks to fabricate details, or pretends to care about transparency, or disappears vulnerabilities more aggressively.
More likely we live in the world that would be equally powerless to the following consensus: China didn't fuck up, China fucked up, but nothing major haha, China fucked up kind of bad, but it's ok it's fixed, and Unnamed China mad scientists messed around, but CCP got it on lock no worries they all look about the same.
I think a position that is basically the consensus is a fine place. 80%+ of my betters say boring explanation is most likely. The remaining 20% are a hodge podge. So a probably Zoonotic position of expert thinkers with imperfect doubt is fine by me. What're you gonna do about it, demand the world embargoes China when you find they've fucked up? Sorry, that is probably reserved for China tried to kill everyone but failed.
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