TheJach.com

Jach's personal blog

(Largely containing a mind-dump to myselves: past, present, and future)
Current favorite quote: "Supposedly smart people are weirdly ignorant of Bayes' Rule." William B Vogt, 2010

Short cryonics talk slides

(Related post)

I had to perform a persuasive speech for a class last week, I decided to talk about cryonics. Here are my slides if anyone out there is interested. It's really basic information due to time constraints, but it might help you see an outline if you find yourself needing to give a similar short talk and aren't sure what to cover.

Also: it's funny how annoyed I am at myself for having a brain-fail during Q&A that I only realized afterwards. For some reason I said something implying "they" don't actually cut off the head, which is true of CI but not of Alcor unless you pay for full-body. I knew that, I even know what spinal vertebra they cut at! (Useful FAQ on the matter.) But it came out too generalized! Ah well.

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On rape accusations

Making the rounds of tech news buzz is a story about a certain figure publicly being accused of rape and/or sexual abuse. I hope it doesn't escalate and saturate the weekend feeds, it was happily flagged off the HN front page moments ago. Anyway, the way I see it, this is just another case of a phenomenon that's happened many times over the past few years, and I'm sick of watching it unfold yet again, so that's what I'm going to comment on rather than the case in particular.

I only have one response to such public accusations. I think it's a moderate response that should probably be adopted by others, because I don't see a saner way to approach such news. My response is: shut up or show your solid evidence.

Rape is a serious matter. It's a bad thing, it should be punished. Physical assault as well. Here's the catch: if you, the so-called victim, spend more than a second wondering "was that really rape/abuse?" then no, it wasn't, and you've lost any right to claim so in the future. Especially if you wait days, weeks, or months before mentioning it. If you have just been raped or abused, call the fucking cops. This goes for male-victim-rape or male-victim-abuse too, by the way. If this somehow isn't already ingrained into the public consciousness, it needs to become so pronto.

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