“A Proactive-Pragmatic Approach to the Legal Status of Cyberminds”

I have to admit, I don't get the whole "Terasem" thing.

"Will superintelligence come with superwisdom?"

"Hyperagency and Hope: Critiquing Human Limitationism"

Max More: "Hyperagency and Hope: Critiquing Human Limitationism" from Metanexus Institute on Vimeo.

Max More on "Morphological Freedom"

"Slouching towards idiocracy"

From Razib Khan's fascinating Gene Expression blog:

I would like to add that even if the median human intelligence is decreasing, the current generation has the largest absolute number of very bright people alive at any given time. This is a natural function of the large human population. If the stability of civilization rests not on the median human, but the coordination and mobilization of large numbers of cognitively gifted humans, then perhaps we should not worry too much in the short to medium term. Even with stabilizing world populations we’ll have a generation or two of large numbers of brights before differential fitness of the smart and dull really start eroding the numbers of the former.

The existence of so many mentally handicapped people also shows an inherent problem with speculations about building libertopias on, say, the oceans: About a third of the adult population in organic societies, as opposed to artificial ones in utopian experiments, needs some level of zoo-keeping because it can't take of itself properly and pull its own weight, and not just because of cognitive deficiencies. My 48 year old sister has had to live with our mother her entire adult life because of epilepsy (controlled with medication), borderline retardation and, we now suspect, high-functioning autism, even though she can hold down a job as a cashier at a Wal-Mart. Yet she has had numerous health problems, covered by health insurance, which have already cost more than her lifetime's earnings could buy if she had to pay for her treatment out of pocket.

Because so many people have problems like my sister's, developed countries have to divert resources through political means to take care of them, at the expense of the more self-reliant people. Would seasteading libertopias have room for prisons, homeless shelters, drug rehab centers, psychiatric hospitals, nursing homes for elderly poor people like my recently deceased grandmother, and other zoo-keeping institutions? And what about the employable people like my sister who still can't generate enough net wealth to sustain themselves?

If you accept the frame of viewing government as a "business," and its citizens as "customers," then the libertopian seasteading proposal announces that its proposed new model of "government" doesn't want to "do business" with a good chunk of humanity. By leaving the people of the abyss on land, the libertopian seastead continues the trend in capitalism of privatizing gains and socializing losses, in this case through literal segregation.

More light on Max More's recent thinking

From La Spirale interview:

Considering that the choice of evolution or stagnation belongs to each of us, what practical advice would you give to La Spirale’s readers willing to improve their well-being, cognitive abilities, longevity, but also to be actively involved in the evolutionary scenarios previously evoked?

I would advise readers to:

• be around other people with strong goals and healthy habits
• be dynamically optimistic (focus on positive opportunities and then make them happen)
• pay particular attention to the ways in which you think and decide. Regularly study and apply the principles of rational thinking (including being aware of standard biases). Make yourself read/listen to those with whom you most disagree.
• keep an eye on new advances, such as personal genetic testing, but focus on the crucial basics of regular exercise, healthy and moderate diet, adequate rest.
• get involved with an support the most practical projects with transhumanist goals, e.g., life extension initiatives.
• make your voice heard in comments sections of online newspapers, magazines, blogs, etc.
• stay flexible

Perhaps Max felt the need for a career change in his 40's. I can certainly understand that. Why not add "Run a cryonics organization" to your Lazarus Long List?

"Apotheosis and Perpetual Progress," by Max More, October 2010

Interesting Christmas present

Congratulations, Max. Welcome to the Desert of the Real:




I suspect Max could use some help, which I plan to offer when I visit him next month. I had no clue until this morning about this development. In an interesting bit of synchronicity, the new order at Alcor might help plans I had already thought about for a few months. Specifically, I have some ideas I'd like to discuss with Max about widening the population of human minds to work on solving cryonics' many problems; the problem-solvers don't necessarily have to want cryonic suspension for themselves. For example, something like InnoCentive might help us make the necessary progress, basically by advertising for people we don't know to "hire" themselves, at their expense, to find solutions for well-posed technical problems in competition for the prize money we offer.

At the very least he'll liven up cryonicists' meetups in Scottsdale as the resident philosophe and a generally fun guy, more than I can say about myself. He could turn these gatherings into a transhumanist version of the Baron d'Holbach's salons in mid 18th Century Paris, though we don't have a Diderot-like figure that I know of to add contrast.

And as an improvement above the ground state of simply not fucking up, I'd like to work with him to make Alcor's existence in the second decade of the 21st Century something which will reflect well upon me by association. I wish I could say that Alcor's CEO's in the decade just ending didn't participate in some facepalming episodes, during my period of relative disengagement; but I can't.

In a recent interview, before Alcor's announcement, Max also has this to say about not getting too caught up in "transhumanism" at the expense of practical reality:

One way in which, too often, I see people waiting for their friends from the future to solve our problems is in personal health maintenance and longevity efforts. Even some of those who strongly advocate life extension still fail to take relatively easy steps to live longer and more healthily. So, one piece of advice to enthusiastic young transhumanists is: take care of your own health. Building on that, I would urge them to develop themselves emotionally as well as intellectually.

In addition, give serious and regular thought to making money, preferably doing something you love that’s pro-transhumanism. Building personal wealth makes you independent, allows you to afford more expensive early-stage technologies, and means you can afford to fund worthy research efforts. Not all of us excel at making money, but it should never be disparaged in favor of more intellectually “pure” choices.

Well, damn.

Apparently Perry Metzger couldn't make his appointment with the libertarian talk show last night. I'll keep monitoring that show's website to see if I can catch him on a later appearance.

I would like to have asked Perry about the holdup in Eric Drexler's "nanotechnology," considering that Drexler introduced the idea in his PNAS paper in 1981. Yes, do the math. The mysterious, far future year 2011, now just days away, marks the 30th anniversary of waiting for the Parousia based on Drexler's speculations about "nanoassemblers," though he doesn't use the term in the original paper. I don't see those do-anything devices around us today.

By contrast, in other technological fields, 30 years separate biplanes from the SR-71; 30 years separate the first transistor from the Apple II personal computer; 30 years separate the first laser from lasers' pervasive uses in all kinds of unexpectable areas, including the clinical trials of LASIK eye surgery.

But with Drexler's "nanotechnology"? The real world of technological progress has behaved like it doesn't exist, while appropriating the name for things we used to call "chemistry" and "materials science." It doesn't support "nanotechnology's" case to point to molecular biology as the proof-of-principle for Drexler's fantasies. People have found ways to get molecular biology to do technological things in the past 30 years because the underlying scientific principles work in their favor. Consequently men like Craig Venter have something to show for their careers, while the "nanotechnologists" just have some computer simulations disconnected from reality, even if some academically bright people have created them. As the late Richard Smalley, a real chemist with a Nobel Prize to his name, chastised Eric Drexler, "But, no, you don't get it. You are still in a pretend world where atoms go where you want because your computer program directs them to go there."

Unfortunately for cryonics, survival doesn't happen in the "pretend world" of "nanotechnologists." It happens in what we understand as the "real world," without getting into a philosophical discussion of what that means! The rebooting of cryonics, if it ever happens, will have to include the proverbial "going back to the drawing board" about revival scenarios based on what can really happen technologically, not on what we can fantasize about which ignores the principles of physics. In the meantime, we can make progress in the here-and-now in managing cryoprotectant toxicity and improving brain vitrification, among other challenges.

Timothy Ferriss = Dos Equis beer mascot?

You know: The Most Interesting Man in the World.

I'd like to start the meme of telling Most Interesting Man jokes about Ferriss, because he sounds phony, and his book dubious.

How about, "He visits ghosts on Christmas Eve to show them the error of their ways"?

Oh, I so look forward to this!

The "nanotechnology" Kool-Aid drinker Perry Metzger will appear on a live, call-in radio show on Tuesday. I'll try to get through and inject some reality into the discussion. Later I'll probably download the podcast and make additional comments on my blog:

A warning sign I've noticed in Match.com profiles

If a woman in her profile tells about all the traveling she's done, and how much she loves to travel, I consider that a bad sign:

She spends too much money, and she wants to find a man with money to fund her additional journeys.

By contrast, in my way of thinking, if you have a decent place to live and you earn enough every month to pay your bills and keep the fridge and pantry full, then you don't need to go anywhere. Put the money left over in the bank.

Scraps and leavings, indeed.

Not encouraging so far. Why do these disgusting fat women feel the need to post photos of their girl parts on Adult Friend Finder?

On the other hand, I like having the freedom to say what I want about women's foolishness. How can women retaliate against me? By withholding sex? They've relinquished that means of modifying my behavior, so they shouldn't complain about what I write.

Australia, apparently a healthy place to live

From Gapminder. Australia might work out as another cryonics stronghold, given its general health-orientation and secular outlook.

The overall trend seems encouraging as well, though have we bought those gains through an investment of nonrenewable resources?

Connoisseurs, hard pasts and science fiction

As soon as I read that Google's ebookstore opened, I went there and downloaded an ebook version of John F. Carr's biography of H. Beam Piper. Unfortunately the file presents a reduced sized page on my Nook, making it hard to read on that device.

As I suspected, the biography supports my impression of Piper as a kind of Walter Mitty personality. Piper knew a lot about firearms and other antique weapons, he read a lot of books, and he probably had to deal with lowlifes as a night watchman on a railroad. But he lived largely in his head compared to the circle of friends with "hard pasts" he had in the early 1950's. (Cryonicist Jerry Leaf comes to mind as a similar sort of character who claimed he had a history of "wet work," or so I've heard):




Carr thinks that if Piper, born in 1904, hadn't committed suicide in 1964, he might have become financially successful in the later 1960's, along with some other highly regarded authors, as the market started to pay more for science fiction stories. I doubt Piper would have lasted that long for health reasons, given his poverty, his inability to save money from sales of his writings, his heavy drinking, his smoking and his bad diet. So much for Piper's example as the "self-reliant man" he celebrated in his published fantasy life.

Robert Heinlein, by contrast, also grew up poor, but he had a supportive marriage with his third wife Virginia, he planned his literary career towards making more money, he probably lived frugally, and he probably also had a financial floor beneath him if he continued to draw his disability pension for his service in the U.S. Navy, cut short by tuberculosis, and got health care from the Veterans' Affairs system. Basically Heinlein had more going for him than Piper. Given their similar world views, and their common editorial relationship with Astounding's John W. Campbell, they could have organically become close friends.

Trying to put it together

Apparently the husband of the woman I refer to as She Who Must Not Be Named (SWMNBN) has announced his alienation from her; he has also physically abused her at least once, to the point of breaking some of her bones; he has kept a mistress on the side for a few years to meet his sexual needs; and SWMNBN has only recently learned about this other woman.

So now the husband brings his mistress into the house and, SWMNBN implies, invites other people (both male and female) over for group sex or swinging, with SWMNBN excluded from the action.

This sounds like a white trash soap opera. I guess the estranged husband wants to get more of the scraps and leavings than SWMNBN offered, while he still has the physiological ability to enjoy them.

I don't know if the husband still has his cryonics arrangements, however. He worked for Alcor in the 1990's, and he even had his marriage ceremony with SWMNBN performed in Alcor's patient care bay, where they keep the cryogenic dewars with the suspendees. (I have to admit: That creeped me out a little. It sounded like something I'd expect from Dr. and Mrs. Phibes.)

The husband's inferred sex life does fit the profile of what I've heard about other straight male cryoncists, so I find the Twittered story I've pieced together plausible.

Setting the record straight about something

Larry Johnson in his book Frozen does NOT claim that Alcor employees struck Ted Williams's frozen head for fun, despite what you might have heard from the irresponsible who don't bother to check sources. Instead Johnson claims that he saw Alcor employee Hugh Hixon, a man in his 60's with a history of heart problems and probably some deterioration in his fine motor control, strike TW's head accidentally:



I didn't witness this alleged event, so I don't know if it really happened. Given the problems I have with Johnson's book regarding things I do know about, I feel inclined to doubt this particular passage.

More head-scratching stuff

Laetitia, are enjoying unicorn hunting with Brian? Don't forget, you need to recruit 3 per week or else you'll be in big trouble...

Nice performance Laetitia Baudoin, keep it up? The video was very 'revealing' ...With 100+ condoms delivered per week, you guys are busy...

An Alternet article knocks Peter Thiel.

From 5 Right-Wing Scumbags Bankrolling Dangerous (and Plain Weird) Conservative Causes:

Right-Wing Sugar Daddy #5: Peter Thiel

This super-wealthy technodork, who made his money cofounding the PayPal online payment service and being one of Facebook’s earliest investors, is using his cash to influence hearts and minds, albeit in a significantly different way from the previous right-wing sugar daddies we’ve examined. For instead of funding right-wing political campaigns, advertising blitzes and think tanks, Thiel is instead trying to influence his fellow libertarians to flee society, not change it.

Thiel officially lost faith in American society after the 2008 presidential election and he confessed on the Cato Institute’s Web site that he thought democracy and freedom were no longer compatible. The big reason for this, Thiel said, was that over the past century too many people went on welfare and women got the right to vote. Since welfare recipients and women are “two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians,” Thiel reasoned, then “the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’” has become “an oxymoron.”

To rectify this, Thiel sunk more than $500,000 into the hilariously bone-headed “Seasteading” project being headed up by Patri Friedman, the grandson of famous conservative economist Milton Friedman. With money from Thiel and other like-minded rich libertarians, the seasteading project aims to build large, floating, concrete platforms in international waters where libertarians can live without the greedy hands of Uncle Sam taking their hard-earned cash.

They also plan to make money for themselves by using these platforms as intranational havens for drugs and prostitution, since no legal authority would be able to arrest them out in the open waters. And presumably, women living on the platforms won’t have any say in how the seasteads are run, lest they transform these aquatic libertarian paradises into scummy socialist hellholes. Thiel is also interested in funding transhumanist life-extension projects, as he has given the Methuselah Foundation excess of $3.5 million to ensure that he and his buddies can haunt the Earth with their presence for at least the next few hundred years.

When you think about it, Thiel’s devotion to dopey libertarian escapism, while elitist and horribly sexist, actually makes him the most palatable of all the right-wing sugar daddies we’ve examined. Unlike Scaife, Adelson and the Wylys, Thiel doesn’t want to influence how we think about the world. Rather, he wants to flee the wretched mediocrity of his fellow fleshbags and escape to a no-girls-allowed cyber-treehouse out in the middle of the ocean. To which I say, “You go, Galt!” The only tragedy is that if Thiel succeeds he likely won’t bring any of his brethren with him to the seastead platforms. Because what America needs now more than ever is for a bunch of its self-appointed Atlases to go shrug themselves.

The incoherence of anti-Fed propaganda

I find the anti-Federal Reserve propaganda bizarre, for several reasons.

One, it promotes false urban legends, like the claim that the Fed never gets audited, despite easy-to-find evidence to the contrary.

Two, it often promotes conspiracy theories about the Fed's origins, like the one about the meeting of some politicians and financiers at Jekyll Island in 1910 to come up with ideas for a central bank. Ooh, spooky. So what if some of the eventual Fed's stakeholders had a meeting? Around the time of the Constitutional Convention, many early Americans accused the Framers who met in Philadelphia in 1787 of forming a conspiracy to enslave the American people with their new Constitution, a bit of American history you don't hear much about these days from Constitutional fundamentalists. What if someone today published an anti-Constitution book calling the U.S. Constitution "The Creature from the Pennsylvania State House"? Not even Glenn Beck would take the author seriously.

Three, the people who created the Federal Reserve System all died decades ago. Dead people can't tell us what to do with our central banking institutions now, a fact which also demonstrates the pointlessness of conspiracy theories about the Fed's origins.

Four, the Federal Reserve System does not create money out of "thin air." The U.S. Government agrees to accept Federal Reserve Notes as payment for taxes, and nobody considers the money he pays in taxes "thin air." The "thin air" argument will make sense the day the government refuses Federal Reserve Notes and demands beaver pelts or other stores of value to discharge tax obligations.

Five, the propaganda presents us with false alternatives: Either keep the status quo, or else "abolish the Fed." If the Fed's behavior causes problems, why not just put it under better regulation instead?

Six, the "abolish the Fed" idea also raises the prospect that the Fed's private owners could argue that they deserve compensation from the U.S. Government for a "taking" under eminent domain, as outlined in the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution. The Fed- haters argue that the Fed's owners wouldn't deserve compensation because they ran an illegal organization, despite the fact that the Fed has existed in good legal standing, and in plain sight, for nearly a century. But what if the courts decide in favor of the Fed's owners, and rule that the U.S. Government, using our tax money, owes them some colossal figure for their property? Do the Fed-haters want to get rid of the Fed so badly that they'd agree to pay onerous additional taxes as the price of its abolition?

Another perspective on the "nanotechnology" mirage

I've recently finished reading physicist James Kakalios's popular book, The Amazing Story of Quantum Mechanics. I bought Barnes & Noble's ebook version and read it on my Nook, a gadget I now use every day.

Kakalios describes in a simplified way how modern technologies which have developed rapidly in our lifetimes, and which would have sounded science-fictional 50 years ago, for example lasers, microprocessors, solar electric panels, LED's, computer memory and magnetic resonance imaging in health care, have all exploited quantum mechanics deliberately. By getting the underlying physical principles right in emerging technologies, the physicists, inventors and engineers who work in these areas have shown that they can produce the goods in a timely fashion. "Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed," a principle I've heard attributed to Sir Francis Bacon. (I suppose in my preferred E-prime I'd write that as, "To command nature, you must obey nature.")

So why hasn't that happened in Eric Drexler's clankety-clank vision of "nanotechnology"? Because Drexler's proposal engages in something like quantum mechanics denialism?

And I repeat: I have no emotional investment in Drexler's reputation. I do, however, have an emotional investment in staying alive, and if Drexler's ideas suck, we need to discard them and move on to potentially better ideas. But apparently other cryonicists have gotten stuck in sunk-costs reasoning, emotional attachments to pet ideas and other cognitive biases, and they don't want to consider my suggestion.

I mean, seriously, we've wasted a whole generation chasing this phantasm. People in their 20's today were born around the time Drexler began to construct the propaganda machine for his ideas in the 1980's, and many of them have started their own families by now (and therefore added to the supply of human minds traumatized by the knowledge of their mortality), with no "nanoassemblers" in sight. Meanwhile, the technologies which exploit quantum mechanics have shown progress.

I also wonder why transhumanist conferences even bother now to feature speakers about "nanotechnology." They might as well offer their podiums to someone who claims that Tony Starks's fictional "arc reactor" will come along any time now and solve our energy problems. Those "nanotechnologists" look like middle-school boys with their science fair projects compared to a real empirical scientist of the caliber of Michael R. Rose, who now also regularly appears at these kinds of conferences:

One reason why Ron Paul doesn't impress me.

In the long run, from a utilitarian perspective, Ron Paul might cause less harm by indulging his conspiracy fantasies about the Federal Reserve System than by pursuing his attack on modern medicine:

Go post your conspiracy theory nonsense somewhere else.

Nobody in his right mind views American life before 1913, specifically before the Federal Reserve System, as some kind of utopia because people had "real money" back then based on gold

Dear Mark;

I clipped this comment of yours from economic collapse. I stuck it here, well because, I had to I guess.

Apparently nobody sees the irony of a libertarian like Ron Paul wanting to use the power of the state to rob the Fed’s private owners of their property rights. Libertarians object to the government’s terrorizing and looting of other private businesses. If Paul succeeds in destroying the Fed, wouldn’t its owners deserve compensation for this taking under the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution? And what colossal amount of money would that cost us in additional taxes?

And given the Fed’s allegedly bad example as an experiment in privatizing the functions of the government, wouldn’t its demise also bode ill for other privatization efforts on the libertarians’ agenda? “We want to privatize function X of the government.” “Oh, you mean like the Federal Reserve System? What a disaster that turned into!”

I am a staunch libertarian and although one might see irony here, I fail to see the irony at all.

You see it was government and greedy bankers who put the bank panic together in 1907 and used that as evidence- the sales pitch that President Wilson bought into.

The power Ron Paul is using is not the states. In fact, the Constitution specifically says the power of government rests in it's people. We are not conferred power-we are supposed to have it. That was the original idea although many folks' believe we survive at the mercy of the state.

Once it is understood that bankers are able to strip this country of it's wealth- that it is able to do this by controlling the QUANTITY of money then you will understand how this works.

They are able to create great giant bubbles by creating enormous amounts of cheap and easy money through the issuance of debt. When they have completely saturated the U.S. and the world with debt- the bubble bursts. You have been stripped of your wealth. They now own your house. That 15 trillion we owe? They have pledged you into slavery. They have promised their creditors that you will work and pay taxes. That is their only collateral. You.

A government owned fiat currency can work. Lincoln proved it with the greenback. The quantity can be controlled. That system worked. It failed to work when the greedy private bankers got their grubby mitts on it and the greenback was taken out. Every depression/recession that has occurred since 1913 occurred because the FED manipulates the QUANTITY of currency. The secret of oz or the zeitgeist series explain this best.

Please don't get caught up splitting hairs. If you care about this country at all, getting rid of the FED is an excellent place to start.

December 11, 2010 1:20 AM

God damn it.

I've had to learn quickly in the business of finding my way around the hook up and dating sites. This profile sounded plausible to me:



So after initiating contact with this individual, who gave the name "Mandy," I received the following solicitation under that name from email address incubusfan2009@hotmail.com:

Thanks so much for contacting me here sweetheart. I was wondering if you would be interested in getting together one night this week? I was thinking we could grab some dinner, get to know each other a bit and see what develops; ) I hope you understand Im not looking for anything serious and need this to be as discreet as possible. There are so many people on that site and I'm afraid of anyone seeing me. I even know a couple people from work that are members...:o. So I'm sending you this private invitation to see ALL of my pics ;). I'm on an exclusive site that hand picks their members by pre-screening. I get to choose who I invite. That way I know exactly who will see me which eliminates the risk of being noticed. You can find me under mandy101

I'm Sooo excited to get this going!

Just click on this link...
http://www.marriedneighbor.com/profile/mandy101
(If you can't click on it, copy and paste the entire link into your browser's address bar)



Talk soon!
Mandy

I reported this profile to Adult Friend Finder for abuse.

And people wonder why I have the adversarial attitude I do towards women.

Foreign women posting phony dating profiles

In just a few days I've gotten pretty good at detecting women in less developed or former communist countries who post phony profiles on dating sites like Match. I even had one who claimed in an email that she lived in Texas but emailed me from Kuala Lumpur because she had traveled there to shop for antiques.

Yeah, right.

I've derived a certain pleasure from reporting these fraudulent profiles to Match, given that my history of often negative experiences with women has conditioned me to treat them with suspicion, sometimes escalating to hostility if I get bad vibes off of them. If I've accidentally reported a legitimate but generic-sounding one - well, that serves the American woman right for not showing much of a personality, or perhaps for not displaying good writing skills, when she advertises for men.

I've noticed a few profiles like those on Adult Friend Finder as well, but more often the women post photos of their girl parts, or describe the sexual itches they want someone to scratch. The features on those profiles support their American provenience. Their exhibitionism still causes me some discomfort, given my sheltered life; but at least I respect their honesty.

As for Match, which doesn't allow explicitly sexual profiles, I want to read ones which show something about the women's personality, instead of crap like "I'm a caring person." In other words, in my quest for female companionship, I'd prefer to read the stories women tell about their lives, like how they outgrew their enthusiasm for Twilight when they realized the stupidity of the novels and films, or the first time they kissed a boy and how that made them feel, or why they got the kinds of tattoos they have. But I see relatively few profiles like those on Match, compared to the ones which sound like the prattle of beauty pageant contestants.* By contrast, outside of mate-seeking situations, women can post quite opinionated things on their blogs.

I wonder why they do this when they search for men. Perhaps because, according to evolutionary psychology, sexual selection favors the genes for "personality," and therefore for narrative focus, more in men than in women? Men tell stories and jokes, sing, dance, make music, draw pictures, confabulate myths to explain the world, argue about abstractions and do other things which lack obvious utilitarian value; and they often do those things better than women. Evolutionary psychologists speculate that in fact these behaviors arose through sexual selection; women's brains interpret expressive behaviors as signals of the men's reproductive fitness, which translate into sexual desirability and the perpetuation of the enabling genes into future generations. Do women display weaker personalities in their quest for male companions because they don't want their personality signals to compete with the men's? Perhaps they tone down their own personalities as a signal of submission.

* A few years ago, L.A. radio talkshow host John Kobylt noted the vacuousness of alleged messages from the Virgin Mary, as transmitted by Marian contactees. Kobylt said that they make the Virgin Mary sound like a beauty pageant contestant, instead of an exalted supernatural entity which got to talk with God for a long time and might have learned some divine wisdom currently inaccessible to us mortals. Wouldn't you expect the Virgin Mary to tell the world something astounding and thought-provoking, given those assumptions?

The sexist in me says: Not necessarily. Consider that the alleged communications come from a chick.

More weirdness from She Who Must Not Be Named's Twitter page

WTF?

And Laetitia, you do know that Brian has thousands of hours of videos of you @ work & on dates, right? Only seen a few hours of it myself...

And to think that I had a vivid erotic dream about SWMNBN the other night. She wound up marrying a man who apparently stalks another and probably younger woman.

Pareto's sex rationing

I read a few years ago that male sexual activity displays something like Pareto's principle: About 20 percent of the straight men get 80 percent of the sex.

That means that the straight guys in the 80 percent fraction of the male population have to compete for the scraps and leavings in the 20 percent of the sex women grudgingly offer them. I say "grudgingly," because these women consider the 80-percenters second, third, fourth, etc., choices as sex partners.

That could explain a lot, and not just my situation. It could also explain my father's apparent absence of a sex life until his early 30's, despite what Alfred Kinsey's research showed about American premarital sexual activity in the 1940's and 1950's; and then his having to marry an unattractive woman like my mother.

Brian Wowk explains cryonics' predicament.

From Less Wrong:

Except for the very small number of people who choose to sign up for it, practically no one values or cares about cryonics. No one takes the time to learn its premises, its history, the technologies it's predicated upon, or what technical elements will ultimately determine its success or failure. There are no schools or generally-recognized standards. No one cares. This includes mainstream medicine and mortuary science. . .

Against this backdrop, it's not credible that there is a conspiracy among cryonics companies-- companies run by people who want cryonics for themselves --to suppress a tide of experts who could easily step in and do cryonics better. There is no corps of knowledgeable physicians or morticians ready and able to deliver cryonics services that is being displaced by incompetent lay people.

So what do cryonics organizations do? They train lay people and Emergency Medical Technicians to do tasks suited to those levels of expertise. They use morticians to help with some aspects of cases, including vascular cannulation. They contract with sympathetic medical professionals who help with expertise-intensive aspects of cryonics cases when they can, ideally multiple professionals for redundancy. They hire full-time medical professionals for certain roles when they can afford to do so, and when candidates can be found. Or they allow their members to contract with companies, like SA, who do the above.

This mixture of people is then cast into world where they must perform these unscheduled procedures at short notice anywhere within the country, and sometimes beyond. Where they must lug hundreds of pounds of equipment and perfusate to do it. Where sometimes they have to wait weeks at bedside, only for the patient to recover. And where there is no mainstream infrastructure, support, or understanding of what they do. And, recently, where they are bitterly criticized when cryonics cases fail to meet the same standards as scheduled mainstream medical procedures with entire hospitals, universities, and industries that support them.

There have been claims that cryonics has not progressed in 40 years. Leaving aside the enormous improvements in the cryopreservation process itself, it would be instructive to critique reports of past cryonics cases performed only by morticians without today's bedside teams. What was the E-HIT (equivalent homeothermic ischemic time) when the mortician was called after someone legally died, then packed them in unstirred ice with no cardiopulmonary support? What anticoagulants or ischemia-protective medications were administered? What perfusate did the mortician have, and what happened when it was perfused by an unsterile high pressure embalming pump?

With great irony, it is actually a sign of progress in cryonics that cryonics procedures are now being held to the standards of mainstream medicine. Twenty five years ago, there were raging debates about whether the kind of mortician response I describe above was completely sufficient for cryonics. Really.

Brian's Wikipedia page.

The United Kingdom, a loser country

I can see why certain British critics of cryonics have such a shitty outlook on their lives:

BRITAIN IS FREEZING TO DEATH

Peter Thiel on America's future fatigue

Thiel says:

"One of the things that's gone strangely wrong in the United States is that the future is not really being thought about as a major idea anymore,"

Probably understandable, given the current dominance of the entitlement and rent-seeking culture in American society.

But how much of this future fatigue also results from the nonarrival of fantasy-tech like Eric Drexler's "nanotechnology"?

Focusing on the wrong side of the problem

Why do people, who hear of my situation, focus on me as an allegedly failed agent?

I don't necessarily have control over this; women exert the gatekeeping function. If anything, women have failed me.

Besides, the evidence in the genome suggests that a minority of men over the long run father the majority of descendants. That implies uncounted generations of sexually rejected men who came and went without passing along their genes. I had the odds working against me from birth, especially considering that my father married relatively late (age 31) because he had trouble attracting women as an undesirable beta male himself, judging from my mother's appearance. He might not have even had a girlfriend before he met my mother, a fat woman from a hillbilly family about a dozen years younger than him who certainly never had a boyfriend until then. He never told me much about his adult life before he married mom, and he certainly didn't advise me about finding girlfriends during my maturation. That probably reflects the void in his own experience during his youth.

By contrast, women have a much easier time of it, even unattractive ones like mom. Just lie back and think of England. . .

Real men hate Christmas -- and Christ.

The mindlessness of Christmas has annoyed me for years. Every season, the same stupid songs, the same old TV shows and movies, the same jokes, the same decorations. For once I'd like to see Santa take the baby reindeer with the birth defect behind the workshop and shoot him.

And I'd like to see the parallel universe where George Bailey grew a pair and learned to say NO! to his feckless relatives and townspeople.

And I'd like to see the parallel universe where Scrooge gave Bob Cratchit a box of condoms so he'd stop fathering so many defective children, along with some financial advice so Cratchit could invest his way out of poverty.

Of course, Santa might have a problem killing Rudolf if Magneto shows up first and recruits the mutant reindeer for his army. "You are a god among insects, Rudolf; never let anyone tell you different."

Interesting quote from Steve Bridge

From his review of Matt Ridley's book The Rational Optimist, in the 2nd Quarter 2010 issue of Cryonics magazine:

Ridley, though obviously a libertarian, often refers to “the group mind” as the reason the human race progresses. It’s an interesting term for a libertarian to use. I want you to remember that the human race is made up of individuals – like you – who move things along by making individual discoveries and decisions. The world is not going to develop cryonic suspension or life extension and then just hand it to you. If you want these technologies to work for YOU, you can’t be all pessimist or all optimist. You must help us fill the glass.

If someone is either too optimistic or too pessimistic, they will miss signing up for cryonics. The positivists will assume that everyone will be saved in the great sweep of humanity to the future. The negativists will say, why bother, we’re doomed anyway. If you are either one of those — please stay away from me and from everyone else at Alcor. We don’t have time to listen to you.

If you consider yourself to be optimistic about the future, great. Stay active in making that positive future come true. Make the individual decision to sign up for cryonics, work to improve your community and city, support education and libraries, interact with your fellow humans and persuade them to help with positive goals.

If you are pessimistic about the chances of cryonics working or about the future of your country or the human race, don’t just sit on your back end and gripe about it. Become an ACTIVE pessimist. Sign up for cryonics so you can find the problems and help solve them. If they get solved, we can help you find other things to be an active pessimist about, I promise.

I try to do my small part.

BTW, Steve in this review contrasts Ridley's case for "rational optimism" with the forecasts of a capital-A Apocalypse based on environmentalism and the hostility towards industrial production and trade characteristic of the left. I'd like to see more critical thinking applied to the right's analogous doomsday beliefs, like the Hyperinflationary Economic Collapse promoted by the Jehovah's Witnesses-like Austrian economists.

Philipp Blom in his new book, A Wicked Company: The Forgotten Radicalism of the European Enlightenment, speculates that Western culture inherited the belief that humanity faces a secular Final Judgment because Christianity really won the culture war fought by the Enlightenment, thanks in part to the influence of the paranoid oddball and defector to religion Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Blom suspects that we would have outgrown this way of thinking if the outlook of Holbach's and Diderot's school of philosophes had prevailed instead. This raises in my mind the question of what the Chinese, now the economically and politically ascendant society in the world, think about "the future," given their culture's long history of independence from the Christian world view.

I've extracted the article.

Mark's Profile in Cryonics

My profile in "Cryonics" magazine

Flip over to page 8. I've lost about another 30 lbs. since those photographs:

Open publication - Free publishing - More magazine