ciphergoth: (Default)
How do you tell a reasonable guess about what future technology might bring (eg a manned mission to Mars) from unreasonable guesses (eg teleportation)?

I'm inclined to think that you have to get down to the technical nitty-gritty. If you don't know the field, it might be reasonable to think that in the future we'll prove that our ciphers are unbreakable. Actually, for everyday useful ciphers, a proof that they are secure with no unproven assumptions is much harder than you might think if you've not studied CS. There's no reason I'd expect you to know that if you're not a computer scientist, but if your vision of the near future included provably unbreakable ciphers, I'd want to explain why that doesn't look very likely at the moment.

What do you think?
ciphergoth: (Default)
I may not reply to everything in that 159-comment thread but thanks to everyone who participated. I hope people don't mind if I carry on asking for your help in thinking about this. I might post articles on specific areas people raised, but first I thought to ask this: my Google-fu may be failing me. I'd appreciate any links anyone can find to good articles arguing against signing up for cryonics, or pointing out flaws in arguments made for cryosuspension. I don't mean South Park, thanks :-) I'm looking for something that really intends to be persuasive.

thanks again!

Update: here's some I've found If you find any of these articles at all convincing, let me know and I'll point out the problems with them. Update: while I am definitely interested in continuing to read your arguments, I'm really really keen to know about anyone anywhere on the Internet who seems well-informed on the subject and writes arguing against it. Such people seem to be strikingly few and far between, especially on the specific question of the plausibility of recovery. There's a hypothesis here on why that might be, but I'm not sure it's enough to wholly account for it.

Cryonics

Jan. 21st, 2010 09:29 am
ciphergoth: (Default)
I'm considering signing up with the Cryonics Institute. Are you signed up? I'd be interested to hear your reasons why or why not. It does of course sound crazy, but when you press past that initial reaction to find out why it's crazy, I haven't heard a really satisfactory argument yet, and I'm interested to hear what people think. There are many reasons it might not work, but are there reasons to think it's really unlikely to work? How likely does recovery need to be for it to be worth it?

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ciphergoth: (Default)
Paul Crowley

January 2025

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