nova

7 ms·

91.
by nova 13y ago
> You might imagine a different existence, but that doesn't change the facts, or the hand we're dealt. Yeah why bother with fixing >20% infant mortality, or eradicating polio, or dying from infections we now easily cure with
92.
by nova 13y ago
You are of course entitled to your own personal philosophy, as am I. That doesn't mean I have to silence my disagreement. And in fact I find that "viewpoint" totally incomprehensible. I can asure you, I loved my mother much,
93.
by nova 13y ago
Yes. I guess it's a psychological mechanism to cope with the horror, like Stockholm syndrome.
94.
by nova 13y ago
Well, that the most horrible thing I've read in a long time. So we'll have to agree to disagree that fucking death is a gift .
95.
by nova 13y ago
> We don't know what the mind is We're pretty sure the mind is what the brain does. > nor how it works. We don't need to, for this purpose. This is a low-level dump of all the information stored, to enable (much) later
96.
by nova 13y ago
> As it stands today, cryonics is an act of faith, not science. Current cryonics is perhaps too crude to work, or you can cast doubt on the long-term sustainability of the organizations, or whatever, but that doesn't make it an act
97.
by nova 13y ago
> Who's to say that an "early" death is not in fact a gift for the living? You've got to be kidding. (A very dark kind of humor, I guess)
98.
by nova 13y ago
This will only be a problem if technology is monopolised by a few. So another reason to worry about intellectual property.
99.
by nova 13y ago
I recommend Robert Kass' article "Statistical inference: the big picture" for a related point of view on that issue, which should be obvious but it's easily forgotten in practice.
100.
by nova 14y ago
I feel you. The deathism of this thread, on a site read by technically-oriented people, where problably many agree with the computational theory of mind really makes me lose hope in the human kind. It's not thinking that cryonics is not wor
101.
by nova 14y ago
Well the obvious and well-know difference is that land is naturally scarce, but patents are just artificial scarcity. But it doesn't really matter. What matters is: Does it work?. Private land works. Mostly. With a few caveats. There are a
102.
by nova 14y ago
No. Research would still be done by private companies. But we would pay them directly with money, instead of with an artificial monopoly. It's not free market anyway. These companies could focus on pure research, and leave manufacturing to
103.
by nova 14y ago
And this is why medical research should be directly funded by goverments, exactly like they fund military research, the cost shared among the developed nations, and directly throw away the patent system.
104.
by nova 14y ago
What kind of capitalism are you talking about? Patents are government-granted monopolies. Nothing further from free markets.
105.
by nova 14y ago
This is the real, real, real death: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information-theoretic_death The other "deaths" are just technical shortcomings due to lack of research.
106.
by nova 14y ago
> Under this scenario, I don't see why anyone would develop new plants. I wonder how anyone does anything at all without receiving a fucking de jure monopoly first. Opening a store? Not without exclusive license from the city first! Thi
107.
by nova 14y ago
More IP craziness.
108.
by nova 14y ago
... "Death is bad," said Harry, discarding wisdom for the sake of clear communication. "Very bad. Extremely bad. Being scared of death is like being scared of a great big monster with poisonous fangs. It actually makes a great deal of sens
109.
by nova 14y ago
It doesn't help that most research papers are behind paywalls, or in forgotten books long out of print but still in copyright (and owned by the publisher, not the author), buried and not scanned theses, or technically published in patents b
110.
by nova 14y ago
About the first ones: Unless you are a libertarian transhumanist, I guess.
111.
by nova 14y ago
> Civil Disobedience means accepting that what you are doing is illegal and dealing with the consequences. Period. Why? So they can thoroughly stomp you and nobody else get the idea? So many moral demands for the little guy and not for
112.
by nova 14y ago
Exactly. Acknowledgement of authorship and perhaps some very limited temporal monopoly on commercial use only, perhaps 10 or 15 years since publication. That's the difference between encouraging creativity and protecting parasitical mon
113.
by nova 14y ago
I don't understand this. Big companies are good at finding loopholes. They have the size advantage. Taxes and regulations may slow big companies, but they completely kill small businesses. It's the old proposal to tax the rich and powerfu
114.
by nova 14y ago
I wonder how many people have died because of inefficiencies caused by the patent system, or just the whole healthcare thing. I don't know if the medical patent landscape is a wasteland like the software one, but probably it's not the best
115.
by nova 14y ago
> When these stop, you're dead. Assuming as hypothesis that cryonics or some other technology manage to preserve all the information about your mind processes and that we can reinstantiate them in a new substrate, what is exactly the di
116.
by nova 14y ago
The point is that "you" are already a slightly modified clone of "you" one hour ago. Personal identity is in the causal continuity, not in being made of the "same" atoms, which doesn't even make physical sense. So the true death is the info
117.
by nova 14y ago
> Death is not a failure of the design. It's an integral part of it. And that's Stockholm syndrome at its maximum expression.
118.
by nova 14y ago
People also die because of late or never materialized medical technology. We just prefer that people die from inaction (because is "normal") than from mistakes. This may be psychologically attractive because we avoid SEEING all the blood an
119.
by nova 14y ago
> Based on inflation, these books should be about $80-90 per volume now (if we assume that $22 in 1977 was a reasonable price). And based on the fact that books and other "intellectual" goods may be expensive to create, but only as a on
120.
by nova 14y ago
It's funny, because intellectual "property" is actually the opposite of real property: a state-mandated monopoly, long ago useful because it only was for a few years (and it only mattered to publishers who owned presses), but now a hindranc

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