Depressed Metabolism

Peter Thiel, one of the few original minds in the life extension and accelerating-technological-change community, is featured in a short interview at Wired. Thiel seems to be aware of the limitations of extrapolation of trends:

We’ve been living in a unique period of accelerating technological progress. We’ve gone from horses to cars to planes to rockets [...]

Singularity skeptic Mark Plus drew my attention to the following blog post. The author writes that:

Chalmers’ (and other advocates of the possibility of a Singularity) argument starts off with the simple observation that machines have gained computing power at an extraordinary rate over the past several years, a trend that one can extrapolate to a [...]

David Stove’s book The Plato Cult and Other Philosophical Follies is a remarkable collection of essays. As a staunch positivist ,the author is not impressed with most of what constitutes “philosophy” (or the quality of our thinking in general). As Stove laments in the preface, “there is something fearfully wrong with typical philosophical theories.” But [...]

In sensationalized accounts of cryonics, explicit descriptions of cryonics procedures, and that of neuropreservation in particular, are used to invoke a negative response in the reader.  Some bioconservatives have argued that disgust experienced in response to certain ideas and practices is “the emotional expression of deep wisdom, beyond reason’s power fully to articulate it” (Leon [...]

Max More, founder of the Extropy Institute, and one of the few futurist thinkers with a solid understanding of the philosophy of science, outlines his current views on the global warming controversy after being identified as a “denier” and “anti-science” by  some of his (transhumanist) critics:

We skeptics (okay, “planetary traitors” if you prefer) actually hold [...]

Most contemporary philosophers and social scientists have little interest and understanding of logic or the physical sciences and  therefore have little to offer to those who want to understand the philosophical aspects of knowledge. The following five books have been written by thinkers who have a great respect for science and the importance of empirical [...]

The Scientific Conception of the World: The Vienna Circle (Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung: Der Wiener Kreis)

Whenever there is a major economic event (a rapid decline of stock prices, a spike in the price of oil, high unemployment, etc.) the media can be counted on to feature a person who was predicting these events all along. This should not be surprising because there are so many professional economists and commentators who [...]

David Wallace Croft is an Alcor member in the Dallas area where he lives with his wife Shannon and five children, Ada, Ben, Tom, Abe, and Ted.  He is employed as a Java software developer and is a part-time doctoral student.  His contact information and his weblog are available at www.CroftPress.com.

1. How did you first [...]

How seriously should we take William Warren  Bartley’s The Retreat to Commitment? Despite its emphasis on critical inquiry, the work has a lot of elements that would place the book in a more obscure tradition.
The first thing that strikes the reader is the enormous number of pages that are devoted to the “search for identity” [...]

Less Wrong is a community blog devoted to refining the art of human rationality:
Over the last decades, new experiments have changed science’s picture of the way we think – the ways we succeed or fail to obtain the truth, or fulfill our goals.  The heuristics and biases program, in cognitive psychology, has exposed dozens of [...]

The association of cryonics with “transhumanism” seems inevitable but is problematic.  It seems inevitable because cryonics should be most attractive to people with a very positive perspective on the future capabilities of technology. Barring rapid advances in mitigating aging, cryonics  offers the only credible option for transhumanists to become a part of that future. It [...]

The philosopher Karl Popper has published on a wide variety of subjects but his most lasting contribution is his answer to the problem of induction by drawing attention to the asymmetry between verification and falsification. A theory can never be proven, but it can be falsified. Popper’s falsification criterion can also be used  to distinguish [...]

For most of the decade one of the authors of this blog maintained another website called Against Politics to disseminate information about the theory and practice of a depoliticized society. Topics that held Against Politics together included non-cognitivism, contractarianism, polycentric law, and an emphasis on the work of thinkers such as David Gauthier, Jan Narveson [...]

According to those who research them, capuchin monkeys think only about two things: food and sex. As a result, the vast majority of their behaviors are also geared toward the acquisition of food and sex. Not surprisingly, these desires can be exploited to teach the monkeys other behaviors. However, no one has ever observed animals [...]

A recently conducted study brings a warning to technophiles who think that the facts are all that matter when informing a group of people about a new technology. The fact of the matter is that the message matters more.
In their article “What drives acceptance of nanotechnology?” (Nature Nanotechnology), the Cultural Cognition Project and the Project [...]

Molecular nanotechnology pioneer and cryonics advocate Eric Drexler has launched his own blog called Metamodern: The Trajectory of Technology. This is what we can expect:

In this blog, I’ll discuss current progress in science and technology, often with a specific perspective in mind: how current progress can contribute to the development of advanced nanosystems. This system-building [...]

The Dutch psychologist Piet Vroon once opined that philosophy has lost much of its relevance because it  has lost touch with the (natural) sciences. Although philosophers associated with logical positivism and critical rationalism made great efforts to discipline the practice of philosophy by encouraging logical thinking and verification (or falsification), so far their efforts must [...]

On Barely A Blog, Ilana Mercer reports on Robert Aumann’s recent inaugural lecture of the Center for the Study of Judaism and Economics at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies.  Robert Aumann, who won the 2005 Nobel prize in economics with Thomas Schelling, is known for his work on repeated games and the role of [...]

What is the relationship between individual choice and collective choice? What should be the domain over which a democracy chooses? Prevailing answers to these questions are an important factor affecting the size of government. One argument why imperfect foresight should favor limited government, or no government at all, involves the difference between how individual and [...]

In the introduction to his collection of writings, Socratic Puzzles, Robert Nozick writes that  he never responded to the sizable literature on Anarchy, State and Utopia. His natural inclination would be to defend his views. As Nozick notes, “How could I learn that my views were mistaken if I thought about them always with defensive [...]

Can politics become an addiction? A more realistic question is to ask why politics is an addiction for so many people. The most straightforward answer would be that a compulsive interest in politics just reflects a natural preoccupation with advancing one’s interest (or that of others). But as was discussed in the previous installment, The [...]

Is it rational to vote? For most people the question may seem absurd but quite a few economists and political scientists have made the claim that it is not. The reasoning is that in large elections the probability that your individual vote will decide the outcome is so small that voting is a futile exercise. [...]

At The Hoover Hog there is a fascinating interview with Alan Dawrst on utilitarianism and suffering:

In practice, the world really is a big pond with kids drowning all the time: There are billions of people suffering from preventable poverty, disease, and violence, billions of animals enduring dreadful lives on factory farms, and orders of magnitude [...]

Perhaps no political philosopher has done as much painstaking work to review the legitimacy and need for political authority as Anthony de Jasay.  What makes de Jasay’s work stand out is his ability to engage with the technical arguments of political economists and philosophers without sacrificing common sense. For example, de Jasay understands the complications [...]

Nine-Banded Books has done the world a great favor in publishing a new edition of L.A. Rollins’ The Myth of Natural Rights. Although one could argue that in one sense it is a mixed blessing because it indicates that there is still a need for such a book. While the idea of natural rights seems [...]

In an insightful post on the blog Overcoming Bias, economist (and Alcor member) Robin Hanson argues that proposals to halt stock trading or short selling  during times of crisis are akin to banning bad news:

“The fact that newspapers report a lot less news on this crisis on weekends shows that most crisis news now comes [...]

In a recent opinion piece for Forbes, legal scholar Richard A. Epstein draws attention to the political philosophical aspects of the financial meltdown:
Fannie and Freddie didn’t design their horrific lending policies by chance. No, behind this lending fiasco lay the strong collective preference for the “patterned principles” of justice that Robert Nozick attacked so powerfully [...]

All politics is redistributive. Although this is often hidden from view through appeals to the social contract, democracy, and the common good, the recent attempts to reward unsound business practices with taxpayers’ money make even the most sophisticated appeal to the “common good” look suspicious. Although advocates of liberty have offered persuasive accounts about the [...]

One of the most puzzling aspects in the discussion about the current financial crisis is that the situation is treated as a form of “market failure” that the Federal Reserve is simply faced with. One does not have to be a strict adherent of the Austrian School of Economics to consider the possibility that public [...]

In 1940 the American author Lothrop Stoddard published an account of wartime Nazi Germany called “Into the Darkness.” Although the book is supposed to be an objective account, it is not difficult to note the restraint the author needs to exercise to not be more critical, if not scathing, about many aspects of the Nazi [...]