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Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?

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Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?

#321

Post by Houshalter »

derrida wrote: post #164
mietek wrote: post #129

http://sens.org/ . Humans need more lifespan, badly. I’d have said AI safety, but it’s already on your list. Excellent. I’d also have said basic income. Good to know you’re on it. Meta-research. Academic publishing is obsolete, and knowledge should not be paywalled. How many researchers already make use of https://www.reddit.com/r/scholar or http://sci-hub.io/ ? Bacteriophages. Antibiotics are running out, while phag…

> Humans need more lifespan, badly. Do we? Or do we need more realistic perspective about death? Why quantity over quality? Seems there's a lot of quality improvements that could be made [1]. For instance, I read recently (can't recall source) that San Fransisco's homeless is the least happy in the world. Also that the top 1% in the world make over $35K a year, but there are far happier people than exist in middle Am…

I remember when I first deconverted. I was horrified that there was no heaven, and that my loved ones weren't waiting for me. That they were just gone forever. They didn't exist. They weren't happy, and I would never see them again.

I see many atheists carry on religious memes after they deconvert. Which is only natural, religion isn't just a single idea, it's deeply ingrained into our culture. One of those memes is that death is natural and ok. Which, if you believe in religion, it absolutely is. It's the way things are supposed to be according to a trustworthy higher power. There is a life afterwards that makes it all ok. People don't really "die", they just go to a different place.

I don't see anything ok about true death. It's natural, sure, but there's no law that says nature has to be good. We are the product of an uncaring universe and plenty of bad things exist that shouldn't. Death is one of those things.

So I came to the idea that if Heaven didn't really exist, we should build it. I was quite young at the time and influenced by science fiction. I thought that maybe future humans could invent time travel and come back in time and save people who died.

I've since come to the conclusion that time travel is very unlikely to be physically possible in our universe. But other advanced technologies, like curing aging, are certainly not. Perhaps even within our reach. And if backwards time travel might be impossible, we have invented a way to do forwards time travel with cryonics.

Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?

#322

Post by Ixio »

mietek wrote: post #201
untog wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. With overpopulation already a problem I'm not sure that living longer is a pressing need for the world. Better to help people make the most of the time they have allotted on this planet.

It’s not as bad as you think — “Don’t Panic”: http://www.gapminder.org/videos/dont-panic-the-facts-about-p... If you can’t spare an hour, please watch Rosling’s TED talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_...

Thank you for sharing "Don't Panic", watching that is really an hour well-spent.

Since permanent growth comes from fertility and as "Don't Panic" shows we're getting to a sustainable average of 2 child per woman, augmenting our lifespan will only increase our maximum population, not our population growth.

However I think YC research would be better spent trying to find better ways to fight climate change, world stability and/or lift billions out of poverty. This way if we ever augment lifespans in a significant way it will be available to more people and in a healthier world. Also lifting billions out of great poverty will have the added benefit of allowing more minds to work on issues like increasing life expectancy.

Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?

#323

Post by unusximmortalis »

djokkataja wrote: post #278

YC Research should fund research on synthetic consciousness based on human models of consciousness. Consciousness research is still un-mainstream enough that there's a common perception that no one has any idea how consciousness works or even what it is, even though we actually know quite a bit: In particular, the dynamic thalamic core theory of conscious experience (Google it, the author-posted paper requests you do…

Since I was old enough to understand neural networs idea, I imagined and I was sure that one day we will build an artificial brain, at first with less sub-components (brain areas) and then with more if not all that we know about with their functions. At that time the only thing I thought stops us from doing it is the computing power. In the meantime we grew enormously our computing power AND we invented the deep learning and a whole lot of faster AI learning algos yet we did not built an artificial brain. Or there are projects but I did not hear about it?...

Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?

#324

Post by lucb1e »

mlent wrote: post #306
jacquesm wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Car-->fridge distance matters a hell of a lot to her. That's interesting, is there a particular reason for this or is this a nice illustration of 'first world problems'? To have both a car and a fridge, the money to stock the fridge and then to trip over the distance from the car to the fridge (which can easily be made light enough by using a luggage trolley or by asking the s.o. to assist) as a major stumbling blo…

I'd agree -- as someone living in Europe, the idea of grocery shopping by car itself is already pretty luxurious. Worrying about the distance between car and fridge sounds silly when most of us are used to walking half to one kilometer (.7 miles) to the nearest supermarket and taking everything back by foot. Several times per week. Not to mention that many apartment buildings don't have elevators...

> as someone living in Europe, the idea of grocery shopping by car itself is already pretty luxurious

Wait what? As European students, my girlfriend and I already do groceries by car. My parents and her parents as well. My grandparents as well. Unless you happen to live next to the supermarket, everyone does as far as I know. What country are you from?

To me it doesn't sound luxurious to do groceries by car, it sounds like poverty to have to go by foot for a kilometer while carrying heavy grocery bags.

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