The Creekside Preserve at dusk, Sunday, July 31, 2011.

I took this with my iPad 2:

Rich people prepare the future life of the poor?

From Fernand Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life, p. 184:

Luxury does not only represent rarity and vanity, but also social success, fascination, the dream that one day becomes reality for the poor and in so doing immediately loses its old glamour. Not that long ago a medical historian wrote: 'When a food that has been rare and long desired finally arrives within reach of the masses, consumption rises sharply, as if a long-repressed appetite had exploded. Once popularised [in both senses of the word - becoming "less exclusive" and "more widespread"] the food quickly loses its attraction... The appetite becomes sated.' The rich are thus doomed to prepare the future life of the poor. It is, after all, their justification: they try out the pleasures that the masses will sooner or later grasp.

How I know Jesus never healed or resurrected anyone.

If Jesus existed historically, had woo-woo powers over the human body because of his divinity, and used these powers to heal the sick and raise the dead, then I have an obvious question:

Wouldn't these treatments have stuck?

I mean, if Jesus had healed someone of, say, leprosy, wouldn't he also have healed this person proactively against all other diseases, including aging? It would seem rather cruel of Jesus to heal a leper, only for the patient to die later from cancer, kidney failure, the plague or something.

The same goes for Jesus' alleged resurrections. Wouldn't Jesus have spared Lazarus from having to die again, if he raised him from the dead in the first place because of his friendship with him?

I wonder about these questions, because we clearly don't see any of these people who received supernatural medical interventions from Jesus around now, which means that every last one of them must have died "off stage," so to speak, nearly 2,000 years ago.

Otherwise we would have to postulate that Lazarus in his deathless body still walks the earth in 2011 like a character from Highlander. Christians in my lifetime have put a lot of effort into trying to make the bible fit with our observable reality some how, hence the creationism and bible prophecy industries, which overlap to a large extent. (Christians who believe in one tend to believe in the other.) Yet I've never heard of an apologetic explanation for why all the people Jesus healed or resurrected have long since disappeared, unless Jesus' miracles come with a short-time warranty not mentioned in the gospels.

The kind of "diversity" progressives despise.

Progressives talk a great deal about the value of "diversity," so much so that when they get into academia, they enact policies with absurd consequences, as Heather Mac Donald describes in a recent essay.

Yet progressives clearly despise a kind of "diversity" which doesn't want to play along with their utopian fantasies: Self-reliant people, entrepreneurs, people who prefer their own company, loners, rugged individualists. I display some of the characteristics of those people myself, and I identify with them to large extent. (That probably accounts for my liking of H. Beam Piper's stories with his theme of the Self-Reliant Man.)

Yet progressives tend to frame us as bad people because we lack a sense of "empathy" and "community," we live "selfishly" and so forth. In reality they complain about us because we don't fit their view of human nature, and we present opposition to their political agenda. For example, when a progressive says "empathy," he really means something like "paying higher taxes." Individuals who can think of better uses for their own money and vote accordingly therefore seem "narcissistic" or "sociopathic" to progressives, especially if we also mention that we've read Ayn Rand's novels and like some of things she says.

This sheds light on what progressives really mean by "diversity": They mean a diversity of physical characteristics like skin color, but they don't mean a diversity of human minds (which probably also accounts for their IQ denialism). The sorts of human minds which shrug off progressive values which make no sense to them don't deserve special consideration in the progressive world view.

I imagine 22nd Century humanists will take a radically different view of things.

"Wait a minute. Humanists a century ago said, 'Death gives life meaning'? Seriously? How could anyone believe such nonsense?"

Or as Robert Ettinger phrases it:

The reactionaries, in their muddled thinking, cherish a delusion as dangerous as it is pathetic, viz., that somehow by rejecting biological improvement and extended life for themselves, by choosing humanity and mortality for their families, they can stay the tide of history and assure the perpetuation of their quaint and squalid little world. The danger lies in their reaction when it gradually dawns on them that they are only consigning themselves to oblivion in what is a quite needless and thankless sacrifice, that their descendants will neither emulate nor admire them. What will be their dismay, what their fury, when they perceive that they have cast themselves on the rubbish-heap of history, that they will soon be one with Australopithecus!

ABC News story about Robert Ettinger

Link (embedding disabled)

The video clip features Robin Hanson, who talks about how he and his cryonics-hostile wife have agreed not to talk about his cryonics arrangements.

BIG MISTAKE, Robin. Dump the bitch now while you still can, then assign power of attorney to someone who respects you (your wife clearly doesn't) and who will try to carry out your wishes for cryotransport.

And I don't care how "heartless" this sounds. Your survival takes priority over uxorial convenience and comfort.

Made of sterner stuff than the typical geek

Robert Ettinger, while flawed in many ways like everyone else, in one sense displayed a better sort of manhood than the typical geek or science fiction fan. He didn't just fantasize about becoming an "immortal superman," the phrase he uses in Man Into Superman; he then tried to figure out how to become one through the application of scientific rationality, and that led him to publicizing the idea of cryonics and eventually founding the Cryonics Institute, which has now cryosuspended him.

That separates someone like Ettinger from the sorts of guys, often holders of servility jobs, who put on costumes based on science fiction characters and go to, say, Comic Con.

Ironically one cryonicist ordered Ettinger to "Rest in peace" (it has the imperative form grammatically). I really despise that expression. I'd like to replace it with something like, "Don't get too comfortable in that dewar," because we want to see cryonauts resuscitated and back among us when it becomes feasible to do so.

Many people dismiss Robert Ettinger as a crank.

But at least he tried to apply some scientific rationality to the problem of getting people, himself included, to a time when the advanced state of health care could revive us from cryostasis and keep us in good physical and cognitive shape indefinitely. Mike Darwin in his reminiscence of Ettinger writes about how much mileage Ettinger got from the preliminary scientific and technological developments he knew of in the early 1960's when he wrote The Prospect of Immortlity:

In 1964 the discovery of DNA was only 11 years old. cloning, genetic engineering, routine organ transplantation (let alone heart and lung transplantation) were years to decades away. Detailed exposition of enabling technology such as molecular level cell and tissue repair were 30 years in the future. Nineteen-sixty-four was a time when vitalistic ideas pervaded both culture and medical science, and death was perceived in binary terms; a patient was either dead or alive, with no middle ground or intermediate states. Cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) had been invented by Peter Safar in 1960, only four years before the publication of The Prospect of Immortality and the first mass citizen training in CPR was still 8 years away: Leonard Cobb held the first citizen CPR training sessions in Seattle, WA in 1972. Passage of the Uniform Determination of Death Act did not occur until 1978, 14 years after the publication of The Prospect of Immortality. Successful cryopreservation of the first human embryo, a bundle of less than 60 undifferentiated cells, did not occur until 1983: 19 years after the publication of The Prospect of Immortality and 23 years after Ettinger first circulated his brief tract summarizing the idea of human cryopreseration as a means of medical time travel. At a time when most of the United States had no emergency medical system (EMS) and ambulances were hearses driven by Funeral Directors, the concept of cryopreservation as a vehicle to rescue by advanced medical technology was understandably incredible.

Cryonics depends upon a number of paradigm changing observations: Death is a gradual process rooted in progressive loss of biological structure (information) and is not a binary condition in most cases. Life does not depend upon continuous function or metabolism; widespread cryopreservation of human embryos was required to bring this idea into the public consciousness. Cryopreservation is possible for a wide range of cells and tissues, and even when uncontrolled freezing occurs, vast amounts of cell and tissue structure remain either intact or inferable (i.e., theoretically possible to reconstruct and restore to health and life from their damaged state). Advances in biology and medicine offer the prospect of growing new organs and regenerating or replacing damaged tissues; this is no longer considered wild speculation, but rather, is today progress expected by the public as a result of the logical progression of biomedicine. Finally, the ideas of nanoscale engineering and computation and their implications for cell and tissue repair (nanomedicine) are still not fully appreciated by the public, although understanding and acceptance of these ideas is growing.

In contrast to the degree of scientific enlightenment the cryonics argument requires to appreciate fully, a poll taken in 2010 shows that about two-fifths of the American population believes that Jesus will return to Earth by 2050! Many of the christians who criticized Harold Camping did so because Camping set dates, not because they reject Camping's eschatology. Compared with that degree of ignorance and superstition in the American population, Ettinger's world view makes him sound like he came from some advanced, futuristic civilization out of science fiction.

Cryonicists have a teachable moment here because of Robert's suspension, and I'd like for us to use it to get the framing to work to our advantage. More to follow.

Robert Ettinger, 22nd+ Century Man

Robert Ettinger reportedly deanimated and went into cryonic suspension yesterday, joining his mother, his two consecutive wives and many of his friends at the Cryonics Institute in Clinton Township, Michigan.

Robert and his second wife Mae Ettinger (née Junod) lived in Arizona in the 1990's, and I got to meet them once at cryonicist Don Laughlin's ranch near Kingman in June 1994. I told Mr. Ettinger how much his book Man Into Superman meant to me, and how I thought he deserved more credit for the "transhumanist" movement which had started to appear by then. I also asked Mae if I could buy a copy of her book The W-0-T position or self-actualization for women, the sort of book I wouldn't bother with now given my disillusionment with women (long story). She graciously mailed me a copy later.

BTW, my visit to Mr. Laughlin's crib had its surreal aspects because he displayed some of the accouterments of a James Bond villain: He owns a casino, though a downmarket one (more of the Texas hold'em variety than the baccarat sort); his ranch house in northwestern Arizona's high desert reminded me of the one owned by the casino magnate played by Jimmy Dean in the James Bond movie Diamonds Are Forever; Mr. Laughlin flew in from his casino, across the Colorado River in Nevada's southern tip, in a private helicopter; and he demonstrated one of his fully automatic weapons for some of his guests by firing it at a target. He did this at dinner time without warning those of us still eating at an outside table, however. I found the experience of unexpectedly hearing automatic weapons fire disconcerting. Fortunately I didn't see a white Persian cat on Laughlin's property. : )

From hindsight I wonder if the automatic gunfire had disturbed Robert even more, given his traumatic injuries and memories from the Second World War. I never heard anything to indicate that Robert suffered from a traumatic stress disorder like Jerry Leaf, however, and I don't recall seeing signs of his discomposure.

As others will document better than I can in the coming days, Robert started the cryonics movement with the publication of The Prospect of Immortality in 1964, a book scientifically vetted for its publisher by Isaac Asimov, who later dismissed cryonics as a bad idea for reasons extraneous to the science which I consider ill-argued. (More about that in some future post.) I've read the first book, but I can't say I have a strong "relationship" with it like I have with Robert's second book, Man Into Superman. In the summer of 1974 (I turned 15 that November), I bought a paperback copy of that book at the Skaggs drugstore & supermarket on the corner of 31st & Garnett in east Tulsa, about a half mile from where my family lived at the time. I think the company has since gone out of business. You can see a recent photo of the 40-year-old house where I spent my teen years here. I don't know the current occupants:



I have a lot to say about my experience with reading that book, but it would require a separate essay, which I've added to my list of writing projects on my iPad. For now I would just like to point out that while Man Into Superman gives an overly optimistic view of the state of cryonics in the early 1970's, when in reality things turned out badly because of "initialization failures," in other respects the book has worn well because Robert, who earned masters degrees in both physics and mathematics, grounded his speculations in the scientific literature of the time, and he also avoided setting dates unlike, say, Ray Kurzweil. He also displays a realism about human nature which I find lacking in F.M. Esfandiary's futurist writings from the same decade. (FM also suffered from a weak grounding in science and an uncritical acceptance of gee-whiz speculations from other popular writers.) In general Robert saw the potentials in a lot of new scientific discoveries and technological developments which placed him mentally way, way ahead of his contemporaries. His vision still reaches way ahead of most of us now. I wonder if the bit of the 21st Century Robert got to see disappointed him.

At any rate, apparently Robert received a quick cool down to minimize ischemic damage. If he passes through the right bottlenecks, he could awaken some day and see for himself how much of "the future" he got right. I would like to join him in that world.

From memory, as of today I've met the following people who have since entered cryonic suspension, and I got to know a few of them somewhat (not in chronological order of suspension):

Jerry Leaf

Paul Gentemen

Mae Ettinger

Robert Ettinger

FM-2030

Jackson Zinn

David Zubkoff

Thomas Donaldson

Paul Garfield

Wesley du Charme

I may have inadvertently left out one or two.

Too bad I don't get the Discovery Science Channel on our cable system.

I wish I did, just to have something more intelligent to watch on cable than the white-trash reality series set in swamps, junk yards, pawn shops or gun ranges, not to mention all the woo-woo shows about cryptids, ghosts, mystical artifacts, UFO's and doomsday prophecies. I hope the video of this segment goes online so that I can watch it anyway:

Cryonicists on “Can We Live Forever?”

On Wednesday, July 27th, 2011, a particularly interesting episode of “Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman” (Season 2) will air on The Discovery Science Channel at 10 pm ET/PT. The title of the program is “Can We Live Forever?”, and the show will feature not only biological approaches such as Alcor Scientific Advisory Board member Aubrey de Grey’s contribution and possibilities involving regeneration and DNA repair but also unusual approaches that include the possibility of uploading and even the possibility that people today might survive as vitrified brains with intact “connectomes” that can be either revived or uploaded in the future. For the latter topic, the crew visited 21st Century Medicine and interviewed Greg Fahy and filmed procedures in 21CM’s kidney and brain slice labs.

Of course, the progress in connectomics might wind up telling cryonicists things we don't want to hear. What will it imply about the prospect of "neural archeology," for example?

Levetiracetam & Alzheimer's

I find this interesting because my father started to have petit mal seizures in the late 1980's, where he would suddenly become confused and not remember his recent situation in life, like whether he still worked or not. The episodes of confusion and memory problems would pass, and after diagnosis he got on medication (Dilantin) to control his seizures. This happened several years before he started falling and I had to move him into assisted living. Now Dad apparently has Alzheimer's and requires nursing home care, which he fortunately receives at a decent facility in Siloam Springs, Arkansas. We already had a family history of epilepsy: My sister started having grand mal seizures at age 13, yet she has managed to control them with medication as well; she took Dilantin for a long time, but I haven't talked to her about her condition lately and her current medications.

So, did the onset of Dad's seizures in his 60's signal early-stage Alzheimer's?

Drug improves brain function in condition that leads to Alzheimer’s

An existing anti-seizure drug improves memory and brain function in adults with a form of cognitive impairment that often leads to full-blown Alzheimer’s disease, a Johns Hopkins University study has found.

The findings raise the possibility that doctors will someday be able to use the drug, levetiracetam, already approved for use in epilepsy patients, to slow the abnormal loss of brain function in some aging patients before their condition becomes Alzheimer’s. The researchers emphasize, however, that more studies are necessary before any such recommendation can be made to doctors and patients.

The effects seen in the study “could be like taking your foot off the accelerator or tapping the brakes, and possibly could slow the progression on that path [to Alzheimer’s],” said principal investigator and neuroscientist Michela Gallagher. “We need further clinical studies with longer exposure to the drug to, first of all, make sure with rigorous evaluation that the drug is effective in the longer term and, equally important, that it does no harm.”

The new study, presented July 20 at the International Congress on Alzheimer’s Disease in Paris, also shows that excess brain activity in patients with a condition known as amnestic mild cognitive impairment, or aMCI, contributes to brain dysfunction that underlies memory loss. Previously, it had been thought that this hyperactivity was the brain’s attempt to “make up” for weakness in its ability to form new memories.

The clinical study, funded by the National Institutes of Health, tested 34 participants, some of whom were healthy older adults and others who had aMCI, meaning that they had memory difficulties greater than would be expected at their age. Each person participated in a sequence of two treatment phases lasting two weeks each. Patients received a low dose of levetiracetam during one phase and a placebo during the other.

After each treatment phase, the researchers evaluated subjects’ memory and conducted functional magnetic resonance imaging of their brains. These scans were used to map brain activity during performance of a memory task, allowing the researchers to compare each individual’s status both on and off the drug. Compared to the normal participants, subjects with amnestic MCI who took the placebo had excess activity in the hippocampus, a part of the brain essential for memory. But when they had been taking levetiracetam for two weeks, the excess activity was reduced to the same level as that of the control subjects; memory performance in the task they performed also was improved to the level of the controls’.

The findings have possible implications for the progression to Alzheimer’s disease. Studies showing excess activity in the hippocampus in patients with aMCI have found that if these patients are followed for a number of years, those with the greatest excess activation have the greatest further drop in memory and are more likely to receive a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s over the next four to six years.

Other recent research provides a clue as to why this might be the case, says Gallagher, the Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences in Johns Hopkins’ Krieger School of Arts and Sciences.

“Because some of the physiology that creates Alzheimer’s disease in the brain is driven by greater brain activity, this excess activity might be like having your foot on the accelerator if you are on the path to Alzheimer’s,” Gallagher said. “So the next step in this line of research will be to test that idea to see whether reducing excess activity might actually slow progression to Alzheimer’s for patients with aMCI.”

Between 8 and 15 percent of patients with aMCI progress to an Alzheimer’s diagnosis every year, making aMCI a stage of transition between normal aging and neurodegenerative disease. At present there is no effective treatment to modify this progression before irreversible damage has occurred in the brain. It would be a significant breakthrough to slow the progression of Alzheimer’s, a disease that is expected to affect as many as 16 million Americans by 2050.

Levetiracetam, the drug used in the study, is an anticonvulsant that decreases abnormally high activity in the brain. It is combined with other drugs to treat certain types of epileptic seizures.

Speaking of science fiction and iPads

I recently read Fuzzy Nation, John Scalzi's so-called "reboot," based on current sensibilities, of H. Beam Piper's novel Little Fuzzy. I didn't like the new novel for a whole lot of reasons, and I laughed especially at the parts where the protagonist, whom both Piper and Scalzi have named Jack Holloway, uses a device which Scalzi calls an "infopanel."

Uh, hello, Mr. Scalzi? Did you mentally slip back into the 1970's when you wrote this "reboot"? Scalzi's version of Holloway, like Piper's, prospects for a unique kind of gemstone on an exoplanet, which means that the story has to take place many centuries into "the future," though Scalzi doesn't explain the part of the backstory about how interstellar travel supposedly works and how it can get people to exoplanets within their normal lifetimes . Yet his character's most technologically advanced device in this civilization resembles the tablet PC's we can pick up now at businesses like Walmart or Best Buy.

On top of that, the medicine of this "future" society hasn't advanced appreciably, so that people still age and die - though in fairness he shares this assumption with Piper.

Needless to say, I found both aspects of the novel underwhelming. Michio Kaku in his nonfiction book Physics of the Future, by contrast, postulates that by the year 2100 we'll have implanted computers, or at least ones we can wear like contact lenses - and that idea sounds more "futuristic" than Scalzi's portrayal of people in an even more remote "future" lugging around tablets. And, Kaku forecasts, medicine will start to make inroads into this mortality nuisance by 2100; in fact, Kaku tells a story about the life of an ordinary guy in the year 2100. One day, while discussing health matters with his medical AI which presents itself as a human-looking avatar, Ordinary Guy in the year 2100 asks it how he should structure his life now that he doesn't have the traditional signposts based on our biological development and decline. Why, if he doesn't age appreciably and won't likely become demented or otherwise disabled in the indefinite future, when should he retire?

I laughed at this as well, but I laughed benevolently. At least Kaku has started to get the right idea, though his silence about cryonics in the book may imply something about cryonics' current reputation as a "futuristic" technology; or at least it implies that Kaku doesn't take cryonics seriously for some reason. Nonetheless, cryonicists have discussed and written extensively about the problems of living a really, really long time, now going back nearly 50 years. You can find much of this literature on the internet.

And getting back to updating H. Beam Piper's novel, I have some ideas different from Scalzi's about how to do that. In my version of a Fuzzy novel, I would keep more of Holloway's personality and world view, which Scalzi essentially throws away, especially Piper's self-reliance to a fault which Piper writes into his heroes. I would also show Holloway as a radical life-extender, though I'd want to avoid making him too much like Lazarus Long (an understandable temptation, since Piper often writes like the poor man's Robert Heinlein); perhaps Holloway mines sunstones and lives frugally to save money for his next rejuvenation. But he would definitely use some technologies which signal a "futuristic" world, including a virtual computer interface in his eye which helps him to identify geological formations likely to contain sunstones, as well as medical upgrades which give him enhanced intelligence and superior stamina, coordination, strength and recuperative powers. These enhancements would definitely make him more than an ordinary hard case for anyone or anything which tries to fuck with him.

I finally bought an iPad 2 this week.

Plus an external keyboard a day later, when I realized that I could use the iPad 2 as a compact substitute for a laptop and write with a word processing app. I already have a list on its notetaking app of about a dozen writing projects of various lengths. I haven't owned a computer previously but used the company PC. Now I have some independence for my own purposes.

I can see why the iPad has generated so much enthusiasm. For one thing, it has leapt from the pages of science fiction novels, or off the screen from science fiction TV shows and films, if you prefer. For another, I can use it as an ebook reader, so now I have both my Nook and my Kindle accounts on it, along with Google's ebook reader. And for yet another thing, thinking further ahead, the iPad could provide a platform for telemedical uses, though I doubt it would give us a competitor for the Tricorder X Prize coming up soon; that will require some specialized technologies which Apple's engineers didn't have in mind for this product.

Basing post-1980's cryonics on a mirage?

I really have to wonder now. Source:

Scientific Education & Promotion of Cryonics

Throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s Alcor engaged in a vigorous program of public education and of the promotion of cryonics. Speaking engagements and outreach to the community were commonplace and an extensive package of scientific, technical and organizational information was mailed out to anyone who requested it.

Editorial Staff, Molecular engineering. Cryonics. Issue 45, April 1984 p. 5:

http://www.alcor.org/cryonics/cryonics8404.txt

Drexler, KE, Molecular technology and cell repair machines, Part 1. Cryonics. 6(12)1985; 16-24: http://www.alcor.org/cryonics/cryonics8512.txt

Drexler, KE, Molecular technology and cell repair machines, Part 2. Cryonics. 7(1)1985; 19-28: 7(1)

Wowk, B, Darwin, M, Cryonics: Reaching for Tomorrow, Alcor Life Extension Foundation (February 1989), Riverside, CA, 1990:

ISBN-01880209004:

http://cryoeuro.eu:8080/download/attachments/425990/AlcorReachingForTomorrow1989.pdf

A quotation looking for an application

From Prometheus Unbound, Act III, by Percy Bysshe Shelley:

The loathsome mask has fallen, the man remains

Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed - but man:

Equal, unclassed, tribeless and nationless,

Exempt from awe, worship, degree, - the King

Over himself; just, gentle, wise - but man:

Passionless? no - yet free from guilt or pain

Which were, for his will made, or suffered them,

Nor yet exempt, though ruling them like slaves,

From chance and death and mutability,

The clogs of that which else might oversoar

The loftiest star of unascended Heaven

Pinnacled dim in the intense inane.

I have a partly baked idea of writing a book about the "soft" aspects of cryonics, namely, the philosophical, social, economic, psychological, political, demographic, environmental and even, ugh! the religious issues people seem to get hung up on when they confront the cryonics idea as a serious proposal. I might use Shelley's verse on the dedication page, "To the Sovereign Individual."

Steven Pinker's new book worth a look

Coming out in October: The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, by Steven Pinker.

Apparently Pinker in this book develops and defends the claims he made in his TED talk a few years ago:



In the talk Pinker says that an inflection point in the downward trend of violence happened in Britain and the Netherlands around the beginning of "the Age of Reason" in "the 16th Century," which sounds about a century too early to me. Hmm. More evidence to support the speculations of the philosophes in the Radical Enlightenment? And more evidence to support the thesis that we've constructed ever-growing networks of trust and tribal inclusiveness through expanding trade?

FM-2030 also asserted, in his usual, hand-waving way based on flimsy evidence or wishful thinking, that we can look forward to declining violence in "the future." This time he might have made a reasonably accurate forecast, if Pinker's presentation of the case holds up to criticism:

Female beauty and intelligence combined, but going to waste.

The FuturePundit drew attention to this article earlier this year:

There appears to be some truth in the saying 'I'm more than just a pretty face' as studies carried out in Britain and America reveal that good looking men and women have an IQ almost 14 points above the norm.

The findings were based on the National Child Development Study and recorded the academic intelligence and physical appearance of 17,419 people throughout their childhood and up to early adulthood. A similar study was conducted using 35,000 Americans.

‘Physical attractiveness is significantly positively associated with general intelligence, both with and without controls for social class, body size and health,’ says Satoshi Kanazawa, a researcher at the London School of Economics.‘The association between attractiveness and general intelligence is also stronger among men than women.’

The study found that in Britain, women who are physically attractive have IQ’s 11.4 points higher than the average, while handsome men have an increased IQ of 13.6 points.

Support for the juxtaposition of beauty and brains is apparent in supermodel Lily Cole and actress Kate Beckinsale both Oxbridge graduates. But Kanazawa insists: ‘Our contention that beautiful people are more intelligent is purely scientific. It is not a prescription for how to treat and judge others.’

I share the FuturePundit's sentiment: "Since I want the future human race to be more beautiful and much smarter it is great to hear that these goals are very compatible."

Unfortunately, in the current culture, attractive women who can earn degrees from substantial universities often fail to develop themselves further. Consider: Danica McKellar (bachelor's in mathematics from UCLA); Lisa Kudrow (bachelor's in biology from Vassar); Natalie Portman (bachelor's in psychology from Harvard). Mayim Bialik never impressed me as attractive by gentile standards, though she reminds me of Jewish coeds I knew at Washington University in St. Louis whom I could have dated under better circumstances; but she did have some success as a child actress in the early 1990's, and she reportedly earned a Ph.D. in neuroscience. Instead of doing something productive with that educational investment, however, she apparently considers it more important now to act in a TV series.

I suppose economic incentives have something to do with this waste of human potential. On-camera work for attractive people in the entertainment industry currently pays "stupid money" compared with the wages available for cognitive work which produces more value for society, despite the trend towards the economy of the mind.

Aldous Huxley saw more of "the future" than he realized.

From Brave New World, Chapter Seventeen:

ART, SCIENCE–you seem to have paid a fairly high price for your happiness," said the Savage, when they were alone. "Anything else?"

"Well, religion, of course," replied the Controller. "There used to be something called God–before the Nine Years' War. But I was forgetting; you know all about God, I suppose."

"Well …" The Savage hesitated. He would have liked to say something about solitude, about night, about the mesa lying pale under the moon, about the precipice, the plunge into shadowy darkness, about death. He would have liked to speak; but there were no words. Not even in Shakespeare.

The Controller, meanwhile, had crossed to the other side of the room and was unlocking a large safe set into the wall between the bookshelves. The heavy door swung open. Rummaging in the darkness within, "It's a subject," he said, "that has always had a great interest for me." He pulled out a thick black volume. "You've never read this, for example."

The Savage took it. "The Holy Bible, containing the Old and New Testaments," he read aloud from the title-page.

"Nor this." It was a small book and had lost its cover.

"The Imitation of Christ."

"Nor this." He handed out another volume.

"The Varieties of Religious Experience. By William James."

"And I've got plenty more," Mustapha Mond continued, resuming his seat. "A whole collection of pornographic old books. God in the safe and Ford on the shelves." He pointed with a laugh to his avowed library–to the shelves of books, the rack full of reading-machine bobbins and sound-track rolls.

"But if you know about God, why don't you tell them?" asked the Savage indignantly. "Why don't you give them these books about God?"

"For the same reason as we don't give them Othello: they're old; they're about God hundreds of years ago. Not about God now."

"But God doesn't change."

"Men do, though."

"What difference does that make?"

"All the difference in the world," said Mustapha Mond. He got up again and walked to the safe. "There was a man called Cardinal Newman," he said. "A cardinal," he exclaimed parenthetically, "was a kind of Arch-Community-Songster."

"'I Pandulph, of fair Milan, cardinal.' I've read about them in Shakespeare."

"Of course you have. Well, as I was saying, there was a man called Cardinal Newman. Ah, here's the book." He pulled it out. "And while I'm about it I'll take this one too. It's by a man called Maine de Biran. He was a philosopher, if you know what that was."

"A man who dreams of fewer things than there are in heaven and earth," said the Savage promptly.

"Quite so. I'll read you one of the things he did dream of in a moment. Meanwhile, listen to what this old Arch-Community-Songster said." He opened the book at the place marked by a slip of paper and began to read. "'We are not our own any more than what we possess is our own. We did not make ourselves, we cannot be supreme over ourselves. We are not our own masters. We are God's property. Is it not our happiness thus to view the matter? Is it any happiness or any comfort, to consider that we are our own? It may be thought so by the young and prosperous. These may think it a great thing to have everything, as they suppose, their own way–to depend on no one–to have to think of nothing out of sight, to be without the irksomeness of continual acknowledgment, continual prayer, continual reference of what they do to the will of another. But as time goes on, they, as all men, will find that independence was not made for man–that it is an unnatural state–will do for a while, but will not carry us on safely to the end …'" Mustapha Mond paused, put down the first book and, picking up the other, turned over the pages. "Take this, for example," he said, and in his deep voice once more began to read: "'A man grows old; he feels in himself that radical sense of weakness, of listlessness, of discomfort, which accompanies the advance of age; and, feeling thus, imagines himself merely sick, lulling his fears with the notion that this distressing condition is due to some particular cause, from which, as from an illness, he hopes to recover. Vain imaginings! That sickness is old age; and a horrible disease it is. They say that it is the fear of death and of what comes after death that makes men turn to religion as they advance in years. But my own experience has given me the conviction that, quite apart from any such terrors or imaginings, the religious sentiment tends to develop as we grow older; to develop because, as the passions grow calm, as the fancy and sensibilities are less excited and less excitable, our reason becomes less troubled in its working, less obscured by the images, desires and distractions, in which it used to be absorbed; whereupon God emerges as from behind a cloud; our soul feels, sees, turns towards the source of all light; turns naturally and inevitably; for now that all that gave to the world of sensations its life and charms has begun to leak away from us, now that phenomenal existence is no more bolstered up by impressions from within or from without, we feel the need to lean on something that abides, something that will never play us false–a reality, an absolute and everlasting truth. Yes, we inevitably turn to God; for this religious sentiment is of its nature so pure, so delightful to the soul that experiences it, that it makes up to us for all our other losses.'" Mustapha Mond shut the book and leaned back in his chair. "One of the numerous things in heaven and earth that these philosophers didn't dream about was this" (he waved his hand), "us, the modern world. 'You can only be independent of God while you've got youth and prosperity; independence won't take you safely to the end.' Well, we've now got youth and prosperity right up to the end. What follows? Evidently, that we can be independent of God. 'The religious sentiment will compensate us for all our losses.' But there aren't any losses for us to compensate; religious sentiment is superfluous. And why should we go hunting for a substitute for youthful desires, when youthful desires never fail? A substitute for distractions, when we go on enjoying all the old fooleries to the very last? What need have we of repose when our minds and bodies continue to delight in activity? of consolation, when we have soma? of something immovable, when there is the social order?"

"Then you think there is no God?"

"No, I think there quite probably is one."

"Then why? …"

Mustapha Mond checked him. "But he manifests himself in different ways to different men. In premodern times he manifested himself as the being that's described in these books. Now …"

"How does he manifest himself now?" asked the Savage.

"Well, he manifests himself as an absence; as though he weren't there at all."

"That's your fault."

"Call it the fault of civilization. God isn't compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make your choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness. . ."

Now to the social science. You can read the popular explanation here; and the abstract of the paper here, which I quote in full:

According to the uncertainty hypothesis, religion helps people cope psychologically with dangerous or unpredictable situations. Conversely, with greater control over the external environment due to economic development and technological advances, religious belief is predicted to decline (the existential security hypothesis). The author predicts that religious belief would decline in economically developed countries where there is greater existential security, including income security (income equality and redistribution via welfare states) and improved health. These predictions are tested in regression analyses of 137 countries that partialed out the effects of Communism and Islamic religion both of which affect the incidence of reported nonbelief. Findings show that disbelief in God increased with economic development (measured by lower agricultural employment and third-level enrollment). Findings further show that disbelief also increased with income security (low Gini coefficient, high personal taxation tapping the welfare state) and with health security (low pathogen prevalence). Results show that religious belief declines as existential security increases, consistent with the uncertainty hypothesis.

The "COMMITMENT PAGE" from John W. Loftus's new book

From The End of Christianity, by John W. Loftus. I don't recall another book in the freethought genre which has an action-oriented nudge in it:



Of course, Loftus got the idea from religious tracts, like this page:



I'd like to see atheists reframe the debate in the U.S. by assuming that of course our side won the culture war, at least in the area of religion. From now on the religious obsessives live in our world; we don't live in theirs any more, much less do we have to accommodate their absurd demands.

Article about Tulsa's organized atheists in "Freethought Today"

Welcome to 21st Century. I grew up in "rapture ready" Tulsa in the 1970's, and from hindsight I wished I knew of a local atheist group to join just to have some relatively sane people to talk to:

Secular humanists: the natural leaders of a civilized planet

I tend to view secular humanists as immigrants from "the future." Like immigrants across oceans, they've brought their culture with them, and they've set about to apply it in a new environment.

I've also known a few people who have grown up as atheists. To me they seem almost like characters from some advanced civilization out of science fiction.

Lenina Crowne? OMF!

I've started to play around with the idea of writing a lengthy essay about my experience of re-reading Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. I read it the first time in my junior year of high school and interpreted it at the time as the ultimate teen boy's fantasy; but much has happened to me since then, so I'll probably have new and different thoughts about the novel this time around.

For one thing, I notice that Huxley's novel assumes a high level of cultural literacy with a cutoff point of circa 1930. He alludes to many people and things in the early 20th Century which mattered greatly at the time; but modern readers probably won't catch or understand the allusions without some kind of study guide.

For another thing, he disrespects his female character Lenina Crowne and fails to use her adequately as one of the novel's interpreters, but she seems to have leaped off the pages and served as a prototype for vacuous women in the real world. I can just imagine Lenina as a young woman in 2011, working for a fashion magazine, hooking up with a series of men, yakking and texting on her cell phone much of the day, taking random digital photos and posting inanities about her life on her Twitter and Facebook accounts. When the male characters in the novel approvingly refer to Lenina's body as "pneumatic," I wonder if Huxley had intended ironically for that word to convey its other meaning, because Lenina has many "spiritual" sisters in the early 21st Century.

And for a third thing, the discussion between Mustapha Mond and the "Savage" about the rationale for the utopia's social model and its absent need for a god anticipates recent theorizing about the role of safe, modern environments in causing the implosion of religious belief in many developed democratic countries.

"A History of Humanity to 3400 AD: Daily Life," by Thomas Donaldson (1979)

Mike Darwin recently posted on his Chronosphere not-a-blog about his efforts to scan and upload his archive of cryonics literature going back to the 1960's. He feels that no one really appreciates his project - but I do, and I would like to thank him for it.

I found the following article by Thomas Donaldson among Mike's scans, for example, which I've extracted and published separately here:

History to 3400 AD

I recall subscribing to this publication, which went through a name change from Life Extension to Long Life, in the late 1970's. Despite its hand-drawn graphs and illustrations and its cheap-looking format, the energy, enthusiasm and vision of this zine from the 1970's strike me. The current periodicals from Alcor and CI just don't compare. Does that say something about what the cryonics movement has lost in the last 30 years?

Donaldson in this piece from 1979 speculates about what "ordinary" goods could look like in the coming centuries based on several assumptions, some of which he doesn't state. Explicitly he says that we don't fall back into a Malthusian trap, so that the human population stabilizes after the year 2000. (That hasn't happened yet.)

Throughout history, rather than expand our population to the limit possible we have chosen to RAISE our level of life. What could make some one believe that we will differently in the future? With immortality we can even expect this tendency to increase: why should I create children as competitors for myself, who will only use resources that I MYSELF can use?

He also assumes exponential economic growth and a corresponding growth of real income per capita, ignoring inflation. In other words, he implicitly assumes that we don't reach hard limits to economic growth by, for example, entering into something like Tyler Cowen's Great Stagnation and getting stuck there indefinitely. Therefore he extrapolates that in the far-future year 2000 we'd have a per capita income of $20,000_{1979 dollars}, and that this figure would increase by about a factor of ten every century.

Donaldson also assumes, implicitly, that no wild card events happen, and that we continue to enjoy relative social and political stability over the long run. The Singularity idea hadn't gotten into circulation until Vernor Vinge propagandized for it in the late 1980's, so Donaldson may not have known about it yet.

And Donaldson also assumes implicitly that additional wealth doesn't lose its marginal value above some level we may have nearly reached (like in Gunther Stent's scenario of the "Golden Age"); or that trends like "mindfulness" and voluntary simplicity don't come to dominate the culture and cause people to lose interest in additional economic progress.

With those conditions given, what does Donaldson forecast? He writes:

If we take Table No. 1 seriously it tells us something quite profound. The future is not just a matter of a lot of gadgets and electronics. We can understand a lot about daily life if we imagine a world where EVERYONE makes 1 million dollars in REAL MONEY, goods and services. People in 2200 will ALL have the kinds of things that millionaires have today. We will not gry to imagine gadgets and electronics at all, instead we will notice that there are right now an immense number of things needing no special technology in themselves but inaccessible to nearly everyone because of simple COST. It is technology that will reduce this cost so that everyone can have them.

And he gives some examples based on our current experiences with tangible things:

1. "We will privately own many goods of sorts that are now shared."

Just as we now own private automobiles, in the coming centuries more and more people will own their own aircraft. (Donaldson doesn't call them "flying cars"!) Donaldson also envisions that people will own private libraries comparable to city libraries. Years ago, the California businessman and former L.A. mayor Richard Riordan reportedly bought the entire library from a defunct Catholic college and set it up in his mansion; apparently Donaldson thinks that in the future many of us would have homes comparable to Riordan's with tens of thousands of books in them. Donaldson didn't foresee that instead we could have handheld electronic devices which can store entire libraries in digital format, along with digitized music and video, in addition to having access to an ever growing supply of information on the internet.

We could also have our own research laboratories and scientific equipment like particle accelerators; a lot of ordinary geeks would have the resources to play Tony Stark if they wish. And we could individually own more and more land just for the scenery, with no neighbors nearby and no uninvited visitors allowed; though I don't see how that could work for scarce scenery like the Grand Canyon.

2. "With wealth our possessions will also get bigger."

Donaldson thinks that land area owned per capita would increase by a factor of 100 every 200 years, though his figures in TABLE NO. 2 make no sense. Earth has a land surface area of ~150,000,000 km², so if you assume a stable population of 6 billion, that allows everyone about 0.025 km² of land per capita, roughly a square about 158 m on a side. Donaldson's table implies we would reach the crossover point before 2200. Where does all that extra "land" per capita come from, if the population doesn't shrink? From space colonization?

And who knows if we would want to own ever bigger tracts of land, vehicles, homes and spaceships? What would I do with a flying machine on the order of 1 km in length, for example? I could see having my own large spaceship, of course.

3. "Houses, vehicles, other possessions would become more differentiated."

So we could see the houses of "ordinary" people start to resemble the houses of the wealthy: Summer houses, winter houses, houses for special events, specially designed houses for unusual family and relationship arrangements which will become more common in the future. For example, I've heard that some home builders in Utah specialize in designing and building homes for polygynous families where the wives and their respective children require separate living spaces. If polyamory becomes more mainstream in the future, housing designs will probably evolve to reflect the needs for those currently uncommon relationships as well.

Houses in remote areas or in harsh climates might grow larger and larger and have specialized spaces for people who prefer cocooning so that they don't have to go anywhere for long periods. Robert Heinlein describes a house like that in Canada in his novel Friday. I could also see the desirability of a megahouse in metro Phoenix during its stillsuit season. When you double the linear dimensions of a structure, you increase its surface area exposed to the environment by a factor of 4, but its volume by a factor of 8; so that the ratio of surface area to volume halves, and you get savings on heating or cooling each unit of its interior air volume. In a sufficiently large house, you could have home entertainment rooms, fitness rooms, artists' studios, private art galleries, scientific or invention labs, libraries (if you want to own physical books), music rooms, greenhouses to provide fresh fruits and vegetables, private chapels for the religiously inclined, and possibly even automated clinics in the house for routine medical emergencies like diagnosing and setting a broken bone.

And then we could have rooms for purposes we can't even imagine now. Some people in 2011 have media rooms in their homes which resemble miniature command centers like the ones in movies. Imagine if you had to explain the function of that room to someone who lived before the invention of electrical power, photography, the telephone and the telegraph.

4. "Wealth means also that everyday things would be made far more elaborately."

Donaldson thinks that robots would prepare our meals and produce one-off goods at home for us, but he sets dates which seem too remote to me. The production of industrial-quality goods at home could happen well before 2100, if fabbing becomes practical and results in functional and aesthetically pleasing items. The the idea that people in Future World would groom and dress themselves more elaborately also shows up in science fiction.

And then Donaldson has a lengthy section about the economic institutions in his scenario. Automation won't create serious long-term unemployment, he thinks. Most importantly, machines can't make our decisions for us about what we want, and they can't consume the goods they produce for us in response to those desires. Donaldson writes:

Means by which we can express our desires about the future will therefore become more and more developed. Just as now, some political means will occur; however we can expect also an elaboration of present sharemarkets and futures markets to deal with development of all kinds of future goods. We may see, for instance, a FUTURES MARKET in ideas for inventions, so that people will buy and sell the right to buy (or sell) a holograpic picturephone not yet invented. To make such choices, people would need knowledge, and markets would become more and more differentiated, with people specializing in specific types of goods. Other than immediate consumption, this market would be the main economic activity engaged in by people of 2500 on. It will therefore dominate life and self-image in the same way as employment does now.

Donaldson, in other words, apparently thought of something like prediction markets as a mechanism for making decisions about the directions of progress in the coming centuries.

Donaldson also extrapolates that people over the long run will earn proportionately less income from wages, and more income from invested capital, just as wealthy people have done for generations. That will have consequences in the political sphere favoring economic conservatism.

Next Donaldson discusses longevity. Donaldson writes:

I do not expect many or even any changes in basic structural design of human beings (wings, a third eye, fur . . .). Biological changes, however, include much more than structural design; the leading change will be longevity. Means will be known to keep people alive for longer and longer times, and the standard of "health" will rise. Even now we see mortals of 60 who speak of themselves as "healthy"; common deformities such as diabetes, asthma, or myopia will become curable relatively soon.

However, even if people's probability of deanimation decouples from "age," they could still deanimate from misadventures and from "accidents of medical treatment." Donaldson thinks that you might need to go into cryonic suspension repeatedly, every time you deanimate from one of these causes over the centuries, to wait it out until a more advanced state of health care can revive and restore you. If you deanimate in 2700 from a cause of death with no known treatment in that year, by going into cryonic suspension you could benefit from the health care providers in the year 3000 who have learned in the intervening three centuries what they need to do to help you.

Donaldson also speculates about how this superlongevity will affect human behavior:

Increased longevity will affect society and values. Private organizations would support longterm projects, such as basic research, only funded by government now. People will concern themselves with cosmic disasters which may only happen in thousands of years: explosions of the Galactic Center, instabilities of the Solar System. Less need for constant creation of new people will cause roles of men and women to become quite close to one another; differences between the sexes in dress, ways of walking or talking, and social behavior will become far less.

I have my doubts about the last part because of the limits of human plasticity. The birth rate in the U.S. has declined dramatically since the peak years of the Baby Boom, yet men's and women's behaviors have diverged even farther in some respects. Many American women born since the 1970's talk in ways I find odd and annoying, for example, and not like the men from the same generations. If anything, male and female behaviors could become more distinct because of increased sexual competition as progress in medicine makes people more attractive.

Apart from modifications for longevity, Donaldson displays a bias against the idea of making more radical alterations to the human body:

Through history, we have adapted to new environments by invention rather than biological adaptation. Rather than changes in basic structural design of human beings, what is most likely instead is ability to design tools, artifacts, furniture, machines, all with attributes of life able to sense and respond to our internal states as if they were part of ourselves. We would not so much make people with wings, for example, as design an attachment to ourselves with which we could fly: a whole creature, with a brain to control its own motion and sense how we wished to move, that we could put on or off like a jacket. Every for sensory or brain tasks we would have the same devices: rather than a permanent third eye, instead an attachment letting us see X-rays with the same facility as we now see with our own eyes, or artificial brains giving their wearers powers to process information of many different kinds. We see this trend already in pocket calculators. People will wear these, and have them always with them, in the same way as they now wear clothing now [sic]. We will seem to them like naked savages.

Donaldson shows a lack of imagination here. Do people in 2011 who don't carry late-model smart phones with them seem like "naked savages"? The people in Future World might consider it gauche to go through daily life decked out with equipment, so that they either (1) do without, (2) have some of it embedded, or (3) have their robotic servants keep it handy for them nearby.

And then Donaldson ends his essay by arguing that with the giantism trend in wealth he foresees, our assumptions of an acceptable standard of living will change so that in a few centuries, for example, only "poor" people will own homes measuring 100 m on a side, which they bought second-hand instead of having them custom-designed and so forth. Again Donaldson shows a lack of imagination. In 2011 the Amish seem to live in "poverty" by many Americans' standards, but Amish families own businesses and real estate and often have hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars in net worth which they hide with their simple lifestyle. They have wealth in reserve for when it counts, in other words, like when a major illness strikes someone in the family; and they take justifiable pride in their self-reliance. No doubt communities with similar value systems will exist in future centuries where the members live quietly. obscurely and frugally among their more ostentatious neighbors.

On the whole Donaldson's essay has the merit of specificity. He presents some vivid and plausible examples of wealth in the future, without postulating anything extraordinary or weird apart from successful life extension, rejuvenation and revival from cryonic suspension.

And yet Donaldson's essay also reveals a conservative mentality in some ways. It reminds me of H.G. Wells's complaint about the futurology which existed in the early 20th Century:

'Let us admit,' said Keppel, 'that this is attempting the most impossible of tasks. The hypothesis is that these coming supermen are strong-witted, better-balanced, and altogether wiser than we are. How can we begin to put our imaginations into their minds and figure out what they will think or do? If our intelligences were as tall as theirs, we should be making their world now.'

'In general terms,' persuaded Dr. Holdman Stedding, gently obstetric as ever. 'Try.'

'Well, perhaps, in general terms, we may be able to say a few things at least about what their world will not be. You—what do you find in all these Utopias and Visions of the Future of yours? I suppose you get the same stuff over and over again, first of all caricatures of current novelties—skyscrapers five thousand feet high, aeroplanes at two thousand miles an hour, radio receivers on your wrist-watch. . .

In other words, Donaldson doesn't explore how people in future centuries might live if they did become vastly wealthier in real terms, but they didn't want to buy "caricatures" of current goods like houses the size of entire towns (with a town's goods and services built into them, in effect), flying vehicles the size of aircraft carriers and huge particle accelerators for their children's science fair projects. Donaldson also doesn't deal with the fact that even by the 1970's, rich people generally had to consume many of the same goods and services available to ordinary people. Billionaires in 2011 can't buy better electricity, gasoline, wireless phone services, prescription drugs, music recordings or books than everyone else buys. Their physicians graduate from the same medical schools as everyone else's physicians, and these physicians know just as much about keeping their patients healthy as the physicians with downscale practices know. The trend towards the collapse of billionaires' advantages as consumers will likely continue and put lower bounds on the stigma of having a house of "only" 100 m in length.

Nonetheless, I've always admired Thomas Donaldson, now in cryonic suspension, for writing about the future as a serious personal proposition, and in a way which challenges our usual presuppositions about it. I got to talk to Thomas a few times in the 1990's. I can't say that I liked him personally; he reminded me of the other Ph.D. mathematicians I've known who view themselves as a superior form of life, so he struck me as a bit arrogant. But I respect him immensely, and I hope we can resume our acquaintance some day, however many centuries we'll have to wait.

One of the more unsettling things I've read lately

I have the impression of Patri Friedman as the third-generation product of a libertarian cult. In multi-generational cults the adherents adopt certain beliefs which may make sense within the context of the cult's world view, but which sound weird when outsiders hear about them. Presidential candidate Mitt Romney has become the butt of jokes about the magic Mormon underwear he might wear, for example.

For another example, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, the second-generation product of libertarian cultism, has complained recently about the government's tyranny in favoring low-flush toilets and fluorescent light bulbs, two products which generate grievances in libertarian literature. Yet when Senator Paul said this at a public hearing in the Senate, he met with ridicule from people with more mainstream views.

So Patri Friedman has announced that he has made arrangements for cryonic suspension for both himself and his family. I don't consider that necessarily cultish, of course. (When someone gets cryonics to work, as in the first successful revival of a functional person, people will stop calling cryonics "denial," "false hope," and the other familiar dismissals, and call it something more like "extreme trauma medicine" instead.) For some reason high-school dropout and work-avoider Eliezer Yudkowsky got involved, and Friedman recounts the following conversation between his 5-year-old son Tovar and Yudkowsky:

Patri: Hey Tovar, I'm signing you up for cryonics.
Tovar: What's that?
Patri: What that means is, if you die in a car accident, we're going to freeze you until someday in the future hopefully someone will bring you back AS A TRANSFORMER!
Tovar: Yay, AWESOME! Who will bring me back?
Eliezer: Ahem. Me. Well, indirectly.
Tovar: You? How?
Eliezer: Who makes Transformers?
Tovar: Primus!
Eliezer: Well, who made Primus?
Tovar: I don't know.
Eliezer: I'm like whoever made Primus to make the Transformers.
Tovar: oh.

I laughed at this, but something about the exchange also made me uneasy. If the Friedmans celebrate christmas (I wouldn't assume that, of course), would Patri have Yudkowsky put on a Santa suit and tell Tovar that he owns the workshop at the North Pole which makes the toys Tovar gets for christmas?

This exchange also sheds some light on Yudkowsky's delusions of grandeur. Wikipedia describes the character Primus from the Transformers franchise as:

the "benevolent" godlike entity in the fictional Transformers comic universe who fought against the Chaos-Bringer Unicron. The Lord of the Light, Primus is the being who created the Transformers to help him defeat Unicron.

Yudkowsky thinks he can create a "godlike entity"? And Friedman goes along with this? What other weird beliefs does Friedman plan to indoctrinate into Tovar as he creates yet another generation of libertarian cultists?

Ayn Rand's alternative humanism in "The Humanist" magazine

Just a brief reference in an article titled, "Real to Reel: Ten Classics in Humanist Cinema":



I think Ayn Rand's more durable legacy will come not from her melodramatic fantasy life, but from her promotion of "shrugging" as a way for society's alpha producers to escape from progressivism. Jeff Bezos provided an example of "shrugging" the other day in response to California's new tax on internet trade. This decentralized, dispersed form of resistance by leaving progressive abusers will probably have more staying power than the irrational fixation many libertarians have on getting Ron Paul into the White House, despite their criticism about using political, top-down solutions to problems in other areas.