Pet Project
Citation Graph
System to make it easier to navigate the wealth of scholarly information on a topic. Most useful for Wikipedia would be a page and talk page for each peer reviewed study.
Description and interactive mockup: https://citationgraph.com
Cryonics
Statement of beliefs
- I do not believe there is any magic or non-physical phenomena that determines who a person is.
- I believe that all information which makes a person them is encoded in their physical body, and the important information is encoded in the brain.
- I believe that this information degrades over time, not instantaneously upon death.
- I believe that cold temperatures would slow the degradation of this information.
- I believe that the extent of future technology is uncertain, and that no human can state with certainty the limits of future technology.
- I am not aware of any reason in Biology or Information Theory preventing the preservation of this information by freezing for hundreds of years. (Consider that memories are often redundantly encoded [1] and that this would present opportunities for Error detection and correction .
- There is a non-zero chance that if a modern hard drive were shattered, future technology would be able to piece the puzzle back together, read the data, and print a new hard drive. Similarly there is a non-zero chance that future technology will be able to read, error correct, and print a new brain.
- Even if this copy of you is not technically you this does not cause cryonics to become pseudoscience. For more information see The Teletransportation Paradox . One can choose cryonics if they only want a copy to be resurrected in the future (for example, so their descendants could ask historical questions.) Personally I think that copy would effectively be you, despite the fact that you had previously been dead.
- Engaging in cryonics is a gamble that may or may not pay off, similar in nature to paying for health insurance or investing in nuclear fusion. According to today's understanding of science there is a non-zero chance that many patients will be recoverable. This is completely unlike astrology or homeopathy, where we have reason to believe there is a zero percent chance of success.
- Entire organisms have already been frozen and revived with intact memories. Just like with nuclear fusion and all that remains is scaling it up to be useful.
Conflict of Interest
- I have no conflict of interest in the subject of cryonics unless you count signing up.
Pseudoscience categorization flaw
According to current rules of pseudoscience classification, the following should have been classified as pseudoscience:
- Storing crime scene evidence in the hopes that future technology would be able to recover the latent information
- Attempting to investigate nuclear fission because it couldn't be tested yet
These things are completely different than the following:
- Homeopathy
- Cupping
- Sacred Geometry
- etc.
Grouping them together into the same category actively does a disservice to and misleads the public. There should exist a distinction between theoretical technology that does not break any laws of nature, vs. things our understanding of science asserts has no basis for working (e.g. astrology). Thank goodness Wikipedia wasn't around in the 1950's to convince everyone that "storing crime scene evidence in the hopes that future analytical methods would recover latent information is pseudoscience and should therefore be abandoned".