November 2009
9 posts
1 tag
Cryonics and personal identity
Some people think that they could achieve immortality by “uploading” their consciousness to a computer. Roughly, the intuition is that a computer could execute the same function as the brain yielding an entity with the same memories and the same basic personality and other psychological characteristics.
Bryan Caplan thinks that’s crazy, and I doubt he’s alone in having...
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Developmental surprises
Making aid effective is difficult. We get it wrong a lot; sometimes that means we just didn’t help much, but sometimes that means we made it worse. The MIT Poverty Action Lab has a list of “best buys,” that is, interventions that have proven to be successful and really cost effective too. Most are the sort of things you might expect, but some seem a bit odd.
Deworming in...
LHC warming up
People are getting excited about the Large Hadron Collider again. When it comes to large dramatic science machines like the Hubble telescope or the Very Large Array, it’s hard not to get excited. It’s clear that we have a lot of romance about space, and that physics is a very prestigious field — name four physicists and four chemists or four biologists and I can bet you’ll...
The manhunt for Evan Ratliff
Wired has a writeup of a project they set up wherein one of their writers attempted to shed his identity entirely and build a new life undetected while his editor at Wired organized a internet and real-life-wide manhunt to track him down. Ultimately he was found out, but it’s a fun story and well worth the read.
Some parts that I found interesting: a really good way to disguise yourself if...
Utilitarianism and the organ lottery
Is it ever OK to kill one person to save five? What if it’s just a random person on the street? What if it’s a societal institution that we all sign on to in the same way that we agree to taxes or the draft? The proposal to create an organ lottery has been around for a long time now. That is, a random societal lottery like the draft lottery that would randomly select among people with...
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Is killing worse than letting die?
I had a conversation this weekend about what sorts of things philosophy majors would be much more likely to say than similar but non-philosophy major college students. I think philosophers would be far more likely to say that there’s not a morally relevant difference between active and passive euthanasia. That is to say, it’s no worse to kill than to let die.
For a lot of people...
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What if everyone spoke English?
Suppose in a few decades, everyone in the world spoke English. Would that be a bad thing?
Some people have strong opinions about “language death,” to the point where there are several different entire ideologies devoted to the preservation of minority (or even much larger) languages. See the language ecology movement, or see EU policy on promoting minority languages.
I’m not...
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Stickking to Stuckk
The name Stuckk comes from Stickk, a site that helps people sign self-binding contracts. It’s basically a formalized version of telling your friend, “Here’s $20. Only give it back if I lose 10 pounds this month.” Except with Stickk, you hand over your credit card information, and it charges you if your “referee” says you failed to keep your commitment (giving...
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Why scientists should blog
Seed magazine has a really fascinating article on Saturn’s moons. It’s a cool read and you should check it out if you’re as amazed by space as I am. I want to talk about a different part of the article.
Seed links to the blog of one of the authors of the paper under discussion, where he talks about some of the academic drama that went on behind the scenes. I’m hardly the...