An addition to my armory?

Big 5 Sporting Goods has a model 1891/30 Mosin-Nagant rifle on sale for $100. I can't complain about the price, but could I get one in fireable condition? I'd have to take it to a gunsmith first for an inspection. Otherwise I'd just keep it as a collectible.

Apparently I can find good deals on the ammunition for that sort of rifle; I imagine a lot of surplus ammo from former Soviet bloc countries went on the market after the end of the Cold War. Ballistically the round falls into .30-06 territory, and if I luck out with a serviceable surplus rifle, it could come in handy as part of my survival kit.

As I recall, during the 1960's my family lived in north Tulsa, not far from Tulsa's predominantly black neighborhood. Because of the urban rioting at the time in America's bigger cities, my father bought a surplus .303 British Lee-Enfield rifle to defend us in case it happened in Tulsa. Fortunately he never needed to use it.

Max More's statement as Alcor's new CEO

From Cryonics magazine, 1st Quarter 2011:



Max writes:

Some organizations build vehicles. Others develop software. Alcor aims to allow its members to beat death. (I say “beat” not “cheat” because, of course, death isn’t a person with any kind of legitimate claim.)

I've said something similar for quite awhile now. The phrase "cheating death" projects the theory of mind to where it doesn't belong, and it frames cryonics as an inherently immoral activity.

Thirty years ago I was quite hopeful that, by now, we would have made major progress toward that goal. But we haven’t. That fact is one of the major reasons why I applied for the job of Alcor president and CEO. We probably won’t find a cure for aging very soon. Many of us need another path to the future. Cryonics seems to be the only plausible option.

Welcome to the real 21st Century, Max. I've pointed out the improgression in the things which really matter for years, and I have no patience left for the transhumanist and singularitarian goofs (notable example) who keep prattling about "immortality" in this century. Let's see what Max can do to reverse cryonics' decline.

"Microbotic" surgery of the eye?

Too bad my cable system doesn't carry the Planet Green channel so I can watch Dean Kamen's TV series Dean of Invention. I'll have to pay for downloads of the episodes from Amazon.

I heard an interesting story about Kamen yesterday, but I don't know yet if it will develop into something which matters to me personally.

Kind of a "slow hunch" I've had lately.

Regarding the Atlas Shrugged movie (part 1 so far), something about that has bothered me, and I've only recently figured out what.

One, Objectivists might come to regret exposing their foundation myth to an audience not already indoctrinated to interpret the story in the way they want. People could very well pick up on the story's absurd or unintentionally funny aspects, especially if the film interests them in reading Rand's novel. For example, I don't think Rand anticipated changes in American culture so that John Galt's adult virginity, love-obsessional stalking and underemployment despite his college education would work against him now as a "heroic" figure; he resembles the sort of character who gets profiled as an unsub threatening hapless women in Criminal Minds and similar police procedurals.

And two, if this film and its still unproduced parts 2 and 3 accurately portray Rand's message, would film audiences drawn from demographic reality embrace a movie which says, in effect, that they deserve to die because they don't meet Rand's fantasy standards for proper human existence?

In other words, if the film manages to inspire the right combination of derision and repulsion in the American people, we might finally see the Ayn Rand puffery put to rest.

When does cryonics' time arrive?

Since Ray Kurzweil's name has come up in the news again lately, I'd like to say for the record that I don't consider him a complete bullshitter, just a partial one. He does raise some interesting ideas, for example, his claims that inventions depend on other enabling technological trends to succeed as new products, and that he has found a way to predict when the windows of opportunity open.

This shows about as well as anything Kurzweil's reasoning:

For years, I had been predicting that someday, blind men and women would be able to use a pocket-size reader to read anything they wanted as they went through the day, from the labels in their clothing to the baking instructions on the back of a muffin-mix box. Now Maurer wanted to know when I thought that day would come, and I predicted that the actual hardware for sufficiently powerful digital cameras and pocket computers would be ready in four years, by the second quarter of 2006. Developing the software, I added, would also take four years, so the Kurzweil Cos. and the NFB had better get started on the project right away.

Right on schedule, the digital cameras and pocket computers with the specs that we needed became available last spring. Our software development project was completed on time, and so we introduced a new, portable reading machine for the blind this past July. Today, there are on the order of a thousand blind people reading all the print they encounter as they go through the day. Other companies have taken notice and are starting to develop competing products. As a result of our technology forecasting, however, we have a nice jump on the market.

To what do I owe this exquisite sense of timing? The simple truth is that timing is key to success as an inventor, so I've spent the past 30 years studying the rate by which information technology advances. Being an engineer, I gathered data on technology trends in different fields and built mathematical models. What I discovered is that understanding the timing of technological change is not as mysterious as most people think it is. In fact, I found that the models were surprisingly predictive, and today I have a group of 10 people at the Kurzweil Cos. helping me gather data and build these models.

Of course, you could criticize this for showing, say, confirmation bias. What about Kurzweil's other predictions based on similar extrapolations for products which haven't arrived yet? How much money did he waste on those? Buckminster Fuller apparently came up with something similar to Kurzweil's method, graphing technological trends in his record-keeping project, the Dymaxion Chronofile (now archived at Stanford University), to try to show what he called "gestation rates" for technological revolutions; yet we don't have "sustainable abundance for all" and live in geodesic domes now, as he apparently predicted for arrival by the 1980's(!).

Assuming that Kurzweil's technique does have some validity, though perhaps not as much as he claims, could we apply it to the problems cryonics faces? What metrics should we look at to determine our timing for the factors of cryonics' success? This might shed light on the "initialization failures" one long-time cryonics activist has written about lately. It might also suggest other technological trends we should watch which have a bearing on the project.

For example, I endorse the idea of looking at the development of medical apps for smart phones. The smart phone shows signs of becoming a platform for solving the problem of learning when something has gone seriously wrong in our bodies so that we need medical attention. A proper civilization in the 21st Century would put a stop to this primitive business where we go through life in ignorance about our health until we suffer from illnesses we can't ignore. Diagnosing conditions like diabetes, elevated LDL levels, leukemia, heart arrhythmia or kidney failure early could make huge differences in your health prospects. (It wouldn't surprise me if China and other East Asian countries do this with smart phones ahead of Western countries, if they haven't started already.)

Yet how often does science fiction assume a model of medical ignorance, where the patient has to go to the "futuristic" sick bay on a stretcher, the physician waves his gadget over the patient because he doesn't know yet what to make of the patient's condition, and then he often says something like, "He's dead, Jim"? With the telemedical potentials of the smart phone, a physician empowered by this technology would already have data in advance about the patient's medical history and vital signs, including some preliminary blood work, and he could get a jump on the task of diagnosing and treating the patient. In the cryonics context, this technology could vastly improve the ability of cryonic suspension teams to predict, or at least get a warning about, a member's imminent cardiac arrest, with the goal of reaching the cryonicist in time to start the suspension procedure with minimal ischemic damage to the brain.

You'd think with all the technophiles in cryonics, a lot of cryonicists would have already thought of this; but I haven't seen much evidence of that so far, with one notable exception.

Though the lag probably shouldn't surprise me. Aging "futurists" have a way of acting and sounding dated quickly, as FM-2030 demonstrated by still using his "space age" speak, like an Austin Powers sort of character, in the post-space age era we had clearly entered by the 1990's. Similarly, cryonicists who still consider Drexler's "nanotechnology" feasible sound to me like they live mentally in 1991 instead of 2011. Yesterday's imagined "futures" becomes our real past soon enough; we can see the contrast between the fantasy and the reality, and often have a good laugh at our youthful folly.

Another reason to disrespect the University of Tulsa

I found a blogger who complains about the oversupply of law degree graduates coming from the nation's "third tier" law schools. Of course, the unemployability of so many additional lawyers also reflects the fact that the parasites have overwhelmed their hosts' carrying capacity; and to make things worse for the potential parasites, they often graduate from law school with absurd amounts of non-dischargeable debt in the form of student loans.

But I digress. I liked his post about the University of Tulsa's College of Law, especially his slam at the administrators who help themselves to some of the gratuitous money going into the university's coffers:

Administrator Pay: Head over to page 19 of the University of Tulsa’s 2009 IRS Form 990. There, you will see that dean Janet Levit made $201,320 in TOTAL COMPENSATION, for 2008. To gain a better insight into the overal higher education scam, go to page 18 take a look at how well university "president" Steadman Upham did that year: this pig made $588,051 in base compensation plus $1,034,178 in "estimated amount of other compensation from the organization and related organizations. Yes, this "educator" made $1,622,229 in TOTAL COMPENSATION - in 2008 - as the "president" of this third tier university.

An experiment I'd like to try.

My father never liked pharmacy as a career. He wanted to major in engineering at the University of Oklahoma, but his ignorant mother thought that engineers ran trains. (Some family stories just sound too absurd to make up.) So he majored in pharmacy instead, a livelihood which his mother could understand, but which robbed him of job satisfaction.

After my father dies, I'd like to write OU and see if it would revoke his pharmacy degree.

BTW, my father's systematizing tendency suggests a neurology somewhere on the autism spectrum.

John Bruce on the Singularity

Definitely worth a read:

The Singularity Again!

What gets me is that the same people who say that global warming hype is baloney (hello, Glenn Reynolds) buy into this Singularity balderdash.

People with fringe beliefs often predict apocalypses as a strategy to get heard in noisy media environments. Austrian economists have done that for years with their prophecies of hyperinflationary collapse.

A rant about the Zeitgeist Movement

A host of an atheist podcast critiques the utopian wishful thinking behind Jacque Fresco's proposals and the Zeitgeist Movement which has metaphorically snatched Fresco from his deathbed:



I talked to Fresco on the phone a few times in the 1980's and 1990's. He said he knew FM-2030, and like FM he assumes an environmentalist model of human plasticity where you can create perfect people through operant conditioning. To the best of my knowledge, FM's name hasn't shown up in Zeitgeist propaganda, though FM's utopianism, similar to Fresco's, wouldn't seem out of place there. Unlike Fresco, however, FM emphasized radical life extension and the hardening of the human body to make it much more resistant to death by misadventure.

A political orientation I can just about relate to

The article doesn't describe how an atheistic Strict Father world view fits into George Lakoff's taxonomy of political orientations, however:

A Place on the Right for a Few Godless Conservatives

I already knew about Razib Khan from his worthwhile Gene Expression blog. I'll have to look into Heather Mac Donald's writings now.

Perhaps this signals a trend towards a form of evidence-based conservatism which tries to distance itself from the nuttier aspects of fundamentalist christianity, Objectivism and Austrian economics.

This passage in the article struck me:

. . . Ms. Mac Donald respects many religious people she knows. But she suspects that they can embrace religion only because it has been so altered by secular values.

“We live with a religion that has been tamed, told to mind its manners and told to speak when asked to speak,” she said in an interview this week. “I won’t dwell on those outmoded religious activities that one is not supposed to remind religious advocates about, such as the burning of heretics and books, pitchforking the wrong type of Christian and opposition to liberal political reform.”

Others have noted the trend towards "taming" religion so that we can invite it into mixed company without causing awkward situations. People have basically capitulated to "secular values" when they argue that religionists enjoy better health, raise better-behaved children, report greater happiness and so forth - though the evidence doesn't necessarily support those claims.

By contrast, the allegedly great thinkers in the christian tradition would not recognize today's versions of christianity which emphasize personal fulfillment in this world. John Calvin, for example, created a theology which has the effect of making christians who take it seriously chronically anxious and even despondent in this life.

Tyler Cowen on Bloggingheads.tv

Ray Kurzweil promotes himself on the radio.

I just have to shake my head in disapproval.

I have no reason to expect women to act in my best interests. In fact, I have no reason to think that women have cared about me at all in my adult life. Therefore I tend to identify with patriarchy a component of my working world view.

Unfortunately transhumanism tends to attract human nature denialists, from both the left and the right. Left denialists, for example, think we can abolish the organic segregation into sex roles and have women run things just like men, despite the historical evidence to the contrary. Right denialists think we can abolish the state and go live in libertarian seasteads, even though states arise through the same Hayekian processes as markets.

And don't get me started on the reality-denialism currently plaguing cryonics. I don't have the stomach for that today.

Happiness, the new sex?

One of my correspondents asked if I had a copy of Saul Kent's 1974 book Future Sex in connection with writing an article for a forthcoming issue of Cryonics magazine, and I started to think about why the publishing fad for sex books circa 40 years ago came and went. Oh, new books about sex still appear in print or in ebook formats; but they don't generate the interest and controversy that the ones which came out in the 1960's and 1970's aroused. People these days who look at the original edition of Alex Comfort's famous sex manual laugh at its drawings of hairy naked hippies, for example, a fact which suggests that that specific book hasn't aged well.

The liberatory agenda behind this genre of literature has largely succeeded, I suppose, so that sex has become considerably less mysterious for Americans who have come of age since the 1970's. Those books filled a need during a particular era in American history when Alfred Kinsey's reports, the Pill and antibiotics changed the conditions of sexual behavior, and Americans in, say, my parents' generation, wanted to overcome their ignorance of the subject by reading what alleged experts like Masters & Johnson, Albert Ellis, David Reuben, etc. had to say about it, while also re-evaluating traditional moral beliefs about sex in light of new perspectives on it. Not that the ignorance has gone away, but at least with sex education in the schools and with all the unsupervised information about sex on the internet, youngsters have practically no barriers to finding out what they want to know about how the boy parts and girl parts work.

So, has something replaced sex as a major cultural obsession, suggested by the quantity of books published about it? Well, I get the impression that happiness in the last decade has become analogous to sex in the 1960's and 1970's. Judging from publishing fads, apparently America went from a sexually suboptimal society to a society of suboptimal happiness, and many Americans have turned to books on the subject by alleged experts like Buddhists and positive psychologists to try to figure out how to do the happiness thing better, just as their parents and grandparents had turned to sexual self-help books decades ago.

I don't quite know what to make of this. Does the obsession with happiness based on criteria other than material possessions derive from satisfaction with current living standards, perhaps as another consequence of the Great Stagnation?

Not the way I'd visualize the movie

A proper film adaptation of Atlas Shrugged would have to capture its weirdness. I would have given it a Sky Captain treatment, where in post production you use CGI to stylize the heroes' faces (Rand describes them as consisting of intersecting planes, which makes me wonder if she suffered from something like prosopagnosia), and distort the villains' faces into the uncanny valley, much like she portrays them in the novel.

Yes, Rand did have the peculiar idea that your world view can literally write itself on your face, making you either physically attractive or repulsive depending on your "sense of life" or whatever empirically challenged notion she used to rationalize her beliefs. Considering that she wouldn't qualify as a heroine in her novels based on her looks, perhaps she suffered from a cognitive deficit in processing faces after all. A mischievous film maker could put in an actress which looks like her in a minor villain's role, perhaps as Ma Chalmers.

A debate I'd watch with a bag of popcorn

Tyler Cowen versus Ray Kurzweil: The Great Stagnation versus the Singularity.

Only after hearing both of these guys talk, I think they should hire actors to play them to make the debate more interesting.

If the debate allowed questions from the audience, I'd like to ask Kurzweil, or his proxy with the authority to speak for him, (1) does he have cryonics arrangements? (I've heard conflicting stories, one of them from a well placed cryonicist who said Kurzweil didn't, at least at the time this individual told me); and (2) assuming he answers yes to (1), does Kurzweil have any ideas for pulling the cryonics movement out of its apparent state of decline?

BTW, I didn't just recently think up the possibility of the cryonics movement's decline. I've had a sense of that for a number of years. Cryonics has apparently fallen off the list of futuristic speculations you'd invite into mixed company, if you compare Ed Regis's treatment of the idea (more ironic than respectful, though at least Regis gives cryonicists a hearing) in his book published two decades ago, with the summary dismissal of cryonics in a similar book by someone else published recently.

Ray Kurzweil, the next FM-2030?

And I mean that in a bad way: FM went around telling the world about our "countdown to immortality" right up to the time he suffered from cardiac arrest and needed cryonic suspension.

I wish Ray Kurzweil would shut up about becoming "immortal" by whatever date he's pulled out of his ass lately (FM picked 2010, as I've drawn attention to), go back to the lab and apply his remaining cognitive reserve towards something useful. I suggest that he lend his authority, before he squanders it all, towards an open innovation project to get cryonics to work.

Instead he insists on making as ass of himself to the world, and a growing number of people have sized him up as a crank:

2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal

Singularitarianism?

The Immortal Ambitions of Ray Kurzweil: A Review of 'Transcendent Man'

Another sign of cryonics' decline?

Cryonics, according to Mark Stevenson in his new book, An Optimist's Tour of the Future, doesn't even deserve consideration as a serious "transhumanist" idea any more. He compares it to Alex Chiu's internet-famous immortality rings:



Stevenson also uses the phrase "cheat[ing] death," which shows the projection of the theory of mind to where it doesn't belong. Just substitute "god" for "death" to see what I mean. No such person called "death" exists for us to "cheat."

Why do Future People "deserve" something that we don't?

I have doubts about E.Y.'s contributions to the world, considering that to the best of my knowledge he's managed to live to his 30's without having to get a real job so far. But occasionally he says something interesting, like his description of "simplified humanism":



I've noticed a similar version of the moral confusions Y. discusses in this talk. Cryonics' critics often argue that even if the people of some future society could attain negligible senescence and had the ability to revive cryonauts in good shape to share in that state of radical life extension, the current batch of people who want to reach that society through medical time travel don't "deserve" survival, apparently based on some theory of humanist ethics.

Well, why would the people in Future World "deserve" it? What does the year of your birth have to do with it, or the means you took to access that medical option?

In other words, if traditional humanist ethics says something to the effect that people born before, say, the year 2200 don't "deserve" negligible senescence because of historical accident, but the ones born on or after that year do, just from the fact that the technology of their time allows it, then Y's Simplified Humanism would say that everyone deserves negligible senescence, regardless of your year of birth or whether you had to spend time in cryonic suspension along the way to attain it.

Of course, a humanist could go the other way to advocate some social mechanism to make sure that all future human lives end "on schedule," regardless of how far medicine advances. I don't know of anyone who has taken that position, unless you consider the voluntary human extinction movement a heretical offshoot of humanism. (I consider it more the bastard offspring of Buddhism and radical environmentalism.)

I do not recommend XXXCupid.com.

Others have made similar assessments.

I suspected the site had something wrong with it when it listed photos of mostly attractive women allegedly living in Nevada as viewers of my profile, along with suspicious email from a few of them.

Just another piece of experience (I wouldn't necessarily call it "sophistication") to add to my mostly sheltered-life résumé, I suppose.

"Life Extension and Overpopulation," by Max More

Life Extension and Overpopulation

Malthusianism applied to the elderly?

From US Government Debt and Social Security: Some Basic Facts, by the blogger "Lord Keynes":

The real issue with future social security benefits for retired generations is whether output in the future will support both retirees and the working population with rising living standards for all. Frankly, I think that the continuing advancement of science and technology will provide productivity increases in the future sufficient to allow rising standards of living for all segments of the population. The attack on social security for the elderly reminds me of Malthusianism, the wretched and anti-human ideology that was utterly discredited in the 19th century. Some miserable modern conservatives are convinced that welfare for the elderly will bankrupt future governments. Like them, Malthus was convinced that charity for the poor would bankrupt his nation. Malthus was completely wrong because he simply did not understand the power of modern science and technology to increase output and productivity (although I don't think much of Marx, here he was an astute critic of Malthus).

The Great Stagnation thesis does throw this blogger's premise about "rising standards of living" into question, of course.

I have a problem with the idea of a rising "standard of living" if it doesn't translate into the things I care about. I'd rather have affordable and adequate health care than the option to buy another generation of smart phones, tablet PC's and other goods pushed upon us as signs of "accelerating technologies." I'd also like to earn enough money to put the majority of my net income into savings. Matt Ridley in his recent book emphasizes the power of fact that we all work for each other in the economy through the division of labor, comparative advantage and trade (though I question the contribution from people who hold ridiculous and ill-paid servility jobs.) But that can work out in two contrary ways: If you have people who work for you and pay you a net income from the money they get from selling their labor, you tend to become wealthier over time in financial terms. If you have people work for you mainly by producing the stuff you buy, then you'll wind up poor.

Consider the asymmetrical relationship between a landlord and his tenants, for example. The tenants work for the landlord, in effect, by earning money somehow so they can pay him the rent in exchange for using his real estate. The landlord does work for his tenants to the extent that he buys and maintains the rental properties he offers on the market. But who has the better financial situation over the long run?

The same goes for the relationship I'd like to have with producers of trendy electronic goods. I don't have to own smart phones, tablet PC's and other hot gadgets with short ownership cycles, but I would like to buy stock in the companies which produce and sell these things. In that way, I'd have lots of other people working for me when they buy these products so that the companies pay me dividends and the stock I'd own in them would rise in value.

Mike Darwin's new blog

CHRONOSPHERE: THE END OF TIME

From Mike's explanation for his venture into blogging:

Approximately every fifty years, the accumulated wisdom and experience of an entire generation is wiped out. Yes, some tiny fraction of the knowledge can be (and is) captured in books and other ‘media.’ But knowledge is not wisdom; wisdom is a property of the conscious mind imbued with memory and experience. Wiping out all the hard won accumulated wisdom (and in reality most of the real knowledge, in the bargain) of each human generation is incredibly wasteful – and destructive. This was unavoidable in the past, and it was tolerable because we were barely better than beasts, and we played only with mortals’ things. But it is no longer acceptable. Quite apart from the terrible injustice that death represents for the individual, it is no longer a tenable option for us as species. It has become an expense we can no longer pay, a debt we can no longer afford to service.

Consider this timely analogy. One of the great problems in economies is the loss of institutional memory for infrequent, but disastrous events. Just about the time the last individuals are dying out from the previous round of economic madness and irresponsibility, another round occurs. This timing is not coincidental; you have to live through some kinds of errors and experience them for yourself, before you can avoid them in the future. That’s exactly what a big part of becoming an adult , and growing up are all about; everybody knows you can’t tell a child, or teenager, about ‘responsibility,’ or about being taken advantage of, or about how to manage money wisely. That kind of knowledge comes only through experience. At present, we are manipulating technologies so vast and so powerful that we will get only one chance to get it right (and that only if we are lucky). There will be no forgiveness for playing the technological equivalent of 1929, over and over again, as we have just done now.

It is time for us to grow up and to recover the ‘lost secret of immortality,’ and embrace our duty to shepherd ourselves, as well as all those we love and care about, to the end of time as we now know it.

The challenge we face now is to understand, and to own time itself; the Chronosphere, the very last frontier. It is a world without death, and a world without time. If you have the courage and the fortitude to engage in the battle for it, it can be your world, and I invite you to join us in the quest for it. But be warned, it is not a world that will be easily won, but it will be the only one worth inhabiting.

Mike Darwin

Yes, the Mike Darwin whose writings from the 1980's I admire has returned.

In case anyone ever wondered

I never got the payoff from having a college degree. Around the time I turned 30, I realized that my math degree from the ridiculous University of Tulsa wouldn't open doors for me, so I lost interest in mathematics and wrote off my college experience as a waste.

I've gotten the alumni association to remove my name as a member because I don't respect TU and the kinds of people who thrive in that environment.

More on FM-2030's Life-Support Suit

FM-2030 describes the Life-Support Suit in his 1973 book titled Up-Wingers:



And his archive, now held by the New York Public Library, apparently includes the following sketch:



So FM had thought about Life-Support Suits for quite awhile. But how far did he get with the idea? I hope someone digitizes enough of his archive and publishes it online to show me that.

Tablet PC's for telemedicine

Given Tyler Cowen's thesis that we've entered the Great Stagnation because we've already grabbed all the low-hanging fruit, will advances in telemedicine make that much difference in health outcomes? In other words, does telemedicine represent slightly higher, but still nutritious, fruit? Or does it more resemble vaguely fruit-tasting junk food?

Nonetheless, something like this still looks pretty cool:

LifeBot® Slate Preview: 1.5 pound tablet advanced mobile EMS emergency telemedicine system with DREAMStm developed with the U.S. Military.

Phoenix, AZ, USA January 29, 2011: LifeBot, LLC announced today a preview of the most powerful portable light-weight tablet for real-time management of critical patients located in remote emergency rooms, ambulances, satellite facilities or intensive care units. At only 1.5 pounds weight the LifeBot® Slate enables unprecedented portability and functionality in a mobile healthcare solution that brings high definition interactive voice and video communications that facilitate access to patients and physicians in real-time no matter where they are located. This system also allows for live transmission of critical patient physiological data using LifeBot® DREAMStm software developed with U.S. Army Materiel Command, Texas A&M, and UTHealth Science Center at Houston.

From the I-Didn't-Make-This-Up file

Awhile back I blogged about Pareto's sex rationing, where 20 percent of the men get 80 percent of the sex, while the remaining 80 percent of the men have to fight for the scraps and leavings in the remaining 20 percent of the sex. I have found some empirical evidence for this claim from a study (PDF) conducted by the Centers for Disease Control.

I interpret this table as follows: 22.6 percent of the men aged 15-44 report 15 or more female sexual partners in their lifetimes. That means that 77.4 percent of the men in this study report having 0-14 female sexual partners in their lifetimes.

I find it hard not to conclude from studies like this that women find most men sexually yucky, and that they grudgingly put out for Mr. He'll-Have-to-Do when they can't interest the one in five men they really want to inseminate them.

I had no clue for much of my adult life that human mating works like this. I find my late enlightenment about it saddening sometimes, but also liberating because it sheds light on my generally negative experiences with the opposite sex.

Transhumanist humor

In my version of the cartoon, the senior gentleman would say, "In my day, you inseminated a human female, and the sperm and egg would combine through random chance."

Nanotech as cryonics' "bad version" of revival

Eugene Shteyn's blog directed my attention to a piece by cartoonist Scott Adams, where Adams writes the following:

I spent some time working in the television industry, and I learned a technique that writers use. It's called "the bad version." When you feel that a plot solution exists, but you can't yet imagine it, you describe instead a bad version that has no purpose other than stimulating the other writers to imagine a better version.

For example, if your character is stuck on an island, the bad version of his escape might involve monkeys crafting a helicopter out of palm fronds and coconuts. That story idea is obviously bad, but it might stimulate you to think in terms of other engineering solutions, or other monkey-related solutions. The first step in thinking of an idea that will work is to stop fixating on ideas that won't. The bad version of an idea moves your mind to a new vantage point.

Shteyn comments:

Essentially, the goal is to shift your thinking from a real-world implementation to the outcome you want to achieve by whatever means possible: flying monkeys, gnomes, magic wands, and etc. Maxwell's demons would also be great candidates for implementing a "bad version" that eventually leads to great solutions.

Unfortunately many cryonicists, who apparently lack a sense of irony, have latched onto "nanotechnology" as the panacea for our needs. After better qualified scientists thrashed that idea bloody, we should have recycled medical nanobots as "the bad version" of a revival scenario, then worked our way towards scenarios which make scientific sense. Instead of doing the sensible thing, some cryonicist dead-enders have kept building on the bad version, adding more and more epicycles to an idea which in itself won't pay off because it apparently gets the physics wrong.

As I keep emphasizing, cryonics needs rebooting, and this rebooting requires that we find non-bad versions of ideas to improve suspensions and devise feasible revival strategies.

What happened to FM-2030's "life-support suit"?

This article (PDF) dated 1979 says that FM had started to work on "a design for a life-support suit," which he later calls an "Immortality Module" in Countdown to Immortality:



Now, I find this interesting because it implies that FM sought hands-on involvement in building a component of the future he wanted, instead of just fantasizing and philosophizing about it.

Given what I can infer about FM's personality, however, it doesn't surprise me that apparently nothing came of this project, despite FM's market deadline of the mid-1980's. One, AFAIK FM lacked scientific, medical or engineering training, though some inventors without formal education have nonetheless had successful careers by finding collaborators who do. Two, the technology of the 1980's probably couldn't do for him what he wanted from a life-support suit. Three, assuming he had a practical idea, he might not have succeeded in attracting the necessary funding. Four, he might have faced regulatory hurdles as well. And five, FM seemed deficient in the areas of attention span and work ethic, so he might have lost interest when he realized how much exertion his invention would require; in fact, in Are You a Transhuman? he even attacks the value of long attention spans in one of his self-tests!



I don't consider the life-support suit necessarily a bad idea. It has more going for it than jetpacks and flying cars, and we already see apps for the current generation of smart phones which offer telemedical functions, a key component of the life-support suit's imagined advantages. I just don't see people wearing life-support suits as street clothes any time soon.

Tyler Cowen discusses "The Great Stagnation."

"Getting ready for the 1990's"

The fact that FM-2030 in the late 1980's thought he had the authority to tell people how to "get ready for the 1990's" strikes me as odd, if not risible, especially from hindsight. Even in developed countries, the conditions of life don't change that much over the time scales of human lives. If anything, the rate of change which characterized much of the 20th Century has decelerated in certain ways, as Tyler Cowen's thesis about "The Great Stagnation" argues. What would FM have said when confronted with the evidence of the 20-aughts as a net economic zero in the U.S. according to some metrics, for example? A few countries have prospered in absolute terms, by contrast, notably China; but they still have a lot of the "low-hanging fruit," as Cowen calls it, to mix their labor with and turn into wealth. China's living standards could very well converge with those in other developed countries, and then stagnate like the rest.

So, what can we say about the idea of "getting ready for the 1990's" in 2011? First of all, does the concept of "getting ready for decade X" make sense when applied to other decades? Did people like FM make a living by advising business leaders and government officials about "getting ready for the 1890's," for example? or the 1790's? or the 1690's? What made the 1990's so special that we needed to "get ready" for an arbitrarily numbered series of years?

Secondly, consider every adult alive today, even the current crop of youngsters turning 18 this year. We all seem to have muddled through the 1990's just fine without following FM's nanny-like advice about diet, relationships, lifestyles and other matters.

And did FM follow his own "getting ready" advice? Not really. When he learned he had terminal pancreatic cancer, he should have moved to Scottsdale to stay close to Alcor, instead of continuing to travel. I don't think he got a good suspension, given the delays in transporting him from New York to Alcor after his cardiac arrest.

In case you wonder why I belabor such an obvious absurdity as "getting ready" for some decade in the Gregorian calendar, I do so because we still have people like FM around who keep postulating allegedly transformational decades in the 21st Century. It wouldn't surprise me if I encounter "futurists" who try to sell their advice about "getting ready for the 2020's," for example. Age does start to give you perspective on life, if not wisdom. I have less patience these days for the poseurs, charlatans and phonies who think they have some insight into "the future" that we have to receive from them to "get ready" for it.

Reactions to FM-2030's "futurism"

Naturally other people saw the problems with FM-2030's world view during his "first life cycle":

Stop With the Predictions

We do indeed live, as (author) FM-2030 points out, in a fast-changing, electronically interlocked world (“Are You Ready?” by Connie Koenenn, Jan. 11). One thing that hasn’t changed, apparently, is that a crank with a gimmick and a penchant for holier-than-thou jargon can make lots of money, even in our “post-industrial” society.

What FM-2030 has ignored (as do those who have never heard of him but who parrot his ideas) is that traditions, naming conventions, hierarchies, and old ways of doing things exist because human beings need them and the sense of anchoring and identity they provide.

Drastic changes in the human animal have been predicted or announced or attempted throughout recorded history, recently by the exponents of Marxism and fascism and more recently by the hippies and yippies. Yet in all that time, through intellectual, political and industrial revolutions, human nature hasn’t changed a bit-and is not about to transform itself overnight into the “fluid transhuman” because some guy with a name that sounds like a pop radio station teaches an Extension course at UCLA.

Written by Paul A. Berchielli and published by the Los Angeles Times on January 29, 1989

Also:

FM-2030 on Government

Re “Why Worry About Government? We’re on Automatic Fast Forward,” Commentary, Nov. 25:

FM-2030 (what a droll name, sounds like an e-mail nickname) raises important ideas on “traditional values” that need rethinking as we approach the 21st Century. Among them are traditional values about work and the work ethic. Business is downsizing and automating, government is looking to trim or dismantle programs, leading to even fewer jobs. High-paid employees receive “golden handshakes” or are simply fired to be replaced by lower-paid or part-time employees without fringe benefits. Increasingly, full-time workers earn poverty-level or lower wages. Yet we continue to celebrate the “work ethic” and propose to reduce or eliminate welfare, food stamps, infant nutrition programs, etc.

How can we even think creatively of FM-2030′s thesis that a postindustrial society will have sufficient prosperity so that people can “work less and coast more” when the current reality is that many people must work two or three jobs to meet basic needs and many people are in low-paying jobs that may be eliminated as we “advance” toward his ideal. Or, does he imply that an underclass, perhaps a very large one, is an inevitable part of society where the government is largely irrelevant?

PAULA SCHNEIDERMAN

Santa Monica

It’s comforting to know that there won’t be any shortage of precious irony in the future, if “visionaries” like FM-2030 continue to proliferate.

The main problem with his “Mr. Spock Goes to Washington” thesis is the one thing that ruins every social engineer’s paradigms: good old human nature.

Yes, in 2030 a kiss will still be a kiss, a sigh will just be a sigh, and guys are still going to fly into a jealous rage if they catch their significant other “encouraging new lifestyles to ensure intimacy and continuity in our new environments.”

Of course, most Americans are going to be busy preparing the right hemispheres of their brains for all the empowering leisure time those hard-working machines are going to create. After all, scanning back and forth through 5,000 cable channels of junk, instead of just 50, is much more mentally fatiguing than you might think. I’m sure my grandsons will take the aesthetic high road-holographically projecting reruns of “Charlie’s Angels” right into their bedrooms.

As for some new decentralized federal government which will rarely intrude in our lives and be virtually powerless to “decelerate the profound recontextings” of American life, don’t count on it.

There’s about as much chance of that happening as there is of living in a post-futurist/consultant world!

AD-2525

(a.k.a. R. TIM PHILEN)

Calabasas

Written by Tim Philen and published by the Los Angeles Times on December 2, 1994

A practical example of solar-electric power

"Our generators typically use more than 20 gallons of fuel a day. We are down to 2.5 gallons a day," said Doty, 3rd Squad Leader, with1st Platoon, 'I' Company, and Fulton, Mo., native. "The system works amazing. By saving fuel for generators, it has cut back on the number of convoys, meaning less opportunity for one of our vehicles to hit an IED."

Of course, this technology won't become a "sustainable" alternative to fossil fuels until it can produce at least, say, 2.5 gallons of net synthetic petroleum per unit of solar-electric panels using water and the atmosphere as feed stocks.

Oh, no! I have to get ready for the 1990s!

"Homo Sapiens, the Manna Maker," by F.M. Esfandiary

FM-2030 stood on somewhat firmer ground with this essay, published in 1975. He anticipates the later arguments for cornucopianism from Julian L. Simon and Matt Ridley. However, we still haven't seen the breakthroughs in energy he predicted to happen by the mysterious, far-future decade of the 1990's. Fusion energy? How can anyone still take that seriously? At least solar-electric panels work and have some limited applications.

"Sorry, We're Here for Eternity," by F.M. Esfandiary

Another of FM-2030's extremely premature predictions of "physical immortality," this one published in 1974.

"Void definitions" of atheism

Some atheists, notably Tony Pasquarello and PZ Myers, take issue with the definition of atheism as "the lack of belief in gods," which I call a "void definition," for want of a better term.

The Enlightenment-era atheist Denis Diderot likewise disagreed with the void definition of atheism. This implies that intellectuals in his time must have discussed the meaning of the concept, perhaps as Diderot and friends gathered around the Baron d'Holbach's table for the decadent food and wine the baron offered his guests when he held his salon. In Diderot's famous Encyclopédie, Diderot defines atheism (athéisme) as "c'est l'opinion de ceux qui nient l'existence d'un Dieu auteur du monde. Ainsi la simple ignorance de Dieu ne feroit pas l'athéisme. Pour être chargé du titre odieux d'athéisme, il faut avoir la notion de Dieu, & la rejetter."

Which as near as I can tell, translates into, "the opinion of those which deny the existence of a God as author of the world. Thus the simple ignorance of God is not atheism. To be charged with the odious title of atheism, it is necessary to have the concept of God, and to reject it."

In other words, "the simple ignorance of God," which approximates the void definition, does not define what atheism means in practice, according to Diderot.

Pasquarello likewise takes issue with the void definition, which he calls "Natheism," in this hard-to-find essay he published in American Atheist magazine several years ago. Pasquarello writes:

Atheism is, first and foremost, a claim about reality, about the contents of the universe. That claim is that reality does not include the entity normally called "God." In this respect, Atheism is much like heliocentrism, a theory about the relative positions and motions of various bodies in space, not about heliocentrists and their beliefs. Indeed, it would be a correct or true description of this solar system even if there were no heliocentrists, and never had been any.

Precisely the same point can be made for Atheism. It would be true that 'God' does not exist even if no Atheist had ever existed. Atheism is about the objective facts of reality.