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sudo wrote

I've heard of the Less Wrong guy and his fanfictions, but never looked into them. I do remember him getting into a giant controversy for supporting cryogenics, which is a known pseudoscience.

It seems like the domain of /f/rational is already covered by /f/skeptic, which could really use some more subscribers. In fact, I think I'll make some posts there on cognitive biases and critical thinking over the next few days.

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lambda wrote

Do you mean cryonics? I wouldn't consider that a pseudoscience, but it still seems to be more hopeful than proven at this point (still need to demonstrate that vitrifications is actually reversible).

Cryogenics has to deal with freezing while cryonics has to do with vitrification which replaces water with a different substance (avoids the issue where water expands when frozen which kills cells).

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sudo wrote

Yes, I did mean cryonics. Sorry for confusing the two.

After reading up on the subject, I would agree that it's not really a pseudoscience, since they never really claimed to be scientific. But it makes too many assumptions, and it's far too costly for it to be feasible as of now. Maybe some time in the far future, when we have a hope of solving all the problems that prevent us from re-animating the dead, it could be a good idea. But not now.

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lambda wrote

I'm hoping that it turns out to be legit and we start vitrifying all humans (and probably some other animals with intelligence) until medical science catches up enough to fix our medical issues. It'll be hard to make it affordable without more people knowing that it exists, though.

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ntm wrote (edited )

I've looked into it, while they have some good ideas, they have a disturbing tendency to fall short from their stated goal of eliminating bias. Most times it feels like a bunch of STEMlords looked at philosophy and social sciences from an outsider perspective, and instead of finding their place within a larger body of work, they had NIH-syndrome and decided to reinvent the wheel without all the "cruft" of a rich history. As with most cases where people ignore history, they have a tendency to repeat mistakes and reinvent the wheel badly. This gets dangerous when they fail to identify some simplifying ideological assumption.

You'll find a great deal of criticism of the movement on /r/SneerClub on the old site.

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lambda wrote

I liked the stories, but Yudkowsky is an unapologetic libertarian which is rather annoying. I do like the transhumanism aspect, though.

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elyersio OP wrote

How come everyone knows about Yudkowsky more than I do? How is he libertarian?

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lambda wrote

He has a public Facebook account for one where he occasionally talks about economics. The Sequences on lesswrong.com, while rather interesting, also cover it a little bit. Also, some of Harry's ideas are very clearly libertarian (e.g., being a market maker trading galleons with muggles for profit), though the theme behind Harry is that he's supposed to be somewhat idealistic despite having a lot of knowledge.

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not_AFX_lol wrote

Honestly I just liked HPMOR because it was an interesting take on the setting and characters

I never read much into the philosophy of it tbh

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