this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2024
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SneerClub

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Hurling ordure at the TREACLES, especially those closely related to LessWrong.

AI-Industrial-Complex grift is fine as long as it sufficiently relates to the AI doom from the TREACLES. (Though TechTakes may be more suitable.)

This is sneer club, not debate club. Unless it's amusing debate.

[Especially don't debate the race scientists, if any sneak in - we ban and delete them as unsuitable for the server.]

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Go West, Weird Man: The oddballs of the MAGA movement have nothing on Silicon Valley transhumanists - by Émile Torres (www.truthdig.com)
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[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

he signed up with a cryonics company called Alcor, which cryogenically freezes dead bodies so that they can be resurrected at some future date, when the necessary technology becomes available

wait wait wait wait, hold up, record scratch

I thought the cryogenics thing was about being frozen while alive so that you can be woken up in the future once we know how to extend human life to like hundreds of years or so, kinda like the Walt Disney urban legend. That at least has some intuitive appeal to it. Now you're telling me it's about literal fucking resurrection? Like they want to become lich kings or something? That's somehow an order of magnitude dumber, like you're not betting on "we figure out waking people up and cure cancer sometime in the future" you're betting on "WE WILL RAISE THE DEAD AND RELISH IN THE NEW AGE OF UNDEAD MAN"

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 6 points 1 month ago (2 children)

I was neutral to positive on cryonics until a friend went to sign up for it. (The one who introduced me to LessWrong.) Then I looked into it and was like "w h a t t h e"

[–] grumpybozo@toad.social 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

@dgerard I have a strong recollection that Keith Henson had intimate involvement with a cryonics project and actual published a rather harrowing account. Should be searchable.

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 2 points 1 month ago

yeah, he was in the Extropians

[–] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 4 points 1 month ago

It's actually not legal to freeze someone who's still alive, because the freezing process is decidedly lethal. They have to replace your blood to try and minimize cell damage from ice crystals and so on. Then there's the "budget" option where they just chop off your head and freeze that rather than mess with your whole body, for people with a very specific level of magitech in mind for their resurrection.

Now, there is a time in history where we got good enough at resurrection that they legally redefined death. In like the 70s they changed the definition of legally dead from having your heart stop to a cessation of brain activity because we got really good at restarting people's hearts. But it's a weirdly specific leap from "we can restart your heart" to "we can reconstruct you from just a head in a way that will have a meaningful and tangible connection to your current life", but not all the way to "we can reconstruct you ex nihilo by retracing the quantum echoes your life created in the Force or whatever".