More People Signing Up For Cryonics
I’m featured in a new cryonics documentary [online now] that airs Monday 10PM ET on Fusion TV. The past year has been great for cryonics: In 2015, Cryonics Institute set a record for new...
Rockstar Research
Latest posts
Asparagus Metabolizes Into Neurotoxin Over 5x More Powerful Than PCP
Somewhere between 43-63% of people find their urine has a strong, unusual smell after they eat asparagus. Have you ever wondered why that is? In the late 1980s, researchers established that this pungent odor...
Cryonics Scientifically Proven To Work In Model Organism
Ever since cryonics was first conceived of 50 years ago, people have been waiting for scientific proof that it might actually work. Sure, scientists have been able to indefinitely cryopreserve human embryos for the...
Longevity Cookbook Indiegogo Launch Party
If we want to slow down and eventually defeat aging, we’re going to have to organize more concrete projects that directly address it. The Longevity Cookbook will both directly increase longevity *and* lay out...
Poker vs Tennis: Career Trajectory, Earnings, Exposure, and Costs Are All Similar
(Cross-posted excerpt from research I did for Raising for Effective Giving.) Professional-level poker and tennis are both competitive endeavors that take years to train for. The size of the player pools are similar. And...
Poker’s Positive Economic Impact; Including over 119,000 jobs
(Cross-posted excerpt from research I did for Raising for Effective Giving.) Amazingly, no one has ever calculated the full economic impact of poker. Some top line statistics on poker’s annual worldwide economic impact: $5.16...
Universal Tax Loss Harvesting
Excited to see that Betterment has upped its game by extending tax loss harvesting to all of their customers… including me. I wrote about this before when I explained why Betterment seems like the...
10 Actually Good Gifts Ideas
Miracle Fruit ($13) Why not mess with your loved one’s belief that they’re firmly in touch with reality? 64GB USB Stick ($20) The cheapest thing they’ll actually use sometimes. Dorco Pace 6 Plus ($21) Help someone you love kick the Gillette Habit and save 50% with essentially the same razors. Sugru Hardware Sealer ($22) Your smug friend with all the Apple gear is gonna need this when 100% of their…
Chore Reduction Device Cleans Your Clothes In 10 Minutes
You know how you hate doing laundry? Someone just solved that. That’s why I think the Swash is easily the most important tech innovation of 2014. The value proposition of this device is amazing....
Organic algae shot claiming to have over 65 nutrients… only has 2
I recently ate at a trendy health-food joint called Cafe Gratitude that sells $3.25 “live algae” shots. The most interesting thing about these shots is they claim to have “over 65 vitamins, minerals, amino...
Raising for Effective Giving
As an effective altruist, I’ve written before about how passionate I am when it comes to identifying and giving to the highest impact charities. So I was really excited this summer to join REG, the new effective giving...
3 Easy Ways to Improve eBay Giving Works
Apparently eBay has an option where you can sell things on their platform and have all the proceeds go directly to charity. This includes eBay waiving all their listing and selling fees and the...
Cost Analysis of Cryonics vs Longterm Intensive Care at Hospitals
Ever wonder how expensive end-of-life care is in the US? Or how cost-competitive cryonics might be for those who felt it offered a superior chance at life? This analysis was spurred by a hospital...
8 Bold Ideas From Rejuvenation Biotechnology
Here are the 8 most fascinating updates from this year’s Rejuvenation Biotechnology Conference… roughly in order of the credibility I place in each: 1. Hepatitis C is Cured – The only reason you haven’t...
Upcoming Rejuvenation Biotechnology Conference
50 top anti-aging researchers from around the world are coming together this Thursday for the Rejuvenation Biotechnology Conference in Santa Clara, California. The event is organized by SENS, a Bay Area research nonprofit dedicated...
We Could Cryopreserve Bone Marrow From Organ Donors — But We Don’t
A few months ago, Liz Parrish at Biotrove Investments interviewed me about how we could help cure cancer with cryopreserved bone marrow. It’s pretty simple really. Thousands of cancer patients need bone marrow transplants...
Improving Centralized AI Resources
Even though general purpose AI is years away, you can still knowably contribute to speeding up AI development right now — even if you’re not a programmer. That’s because most AI projects rely on...
Increase Longevity And Intelligence With Boosted Klotho Levels
Researchers recently found that a single gene may account for as much as 3% of total variation in human intelligence. If this result holds, it suggests some obvious strategies for developing new kinds of...
Superintelligence Is Coming
This is historic. Many authors have published books with a “call to action” about the importance of machine superintelligence (including at least 4 books in the past 2 years): Singularity Rising by James Miller...
Pre-Order Zero to One
If you’re gonna read one book about entrepreneurship this year, I recommend Peter Thiel’s upcoming book “Zero to One”. I read through it a couple months ago and enjoyed it a lot. It’s incredibly...
New Seventeen or Bust Client v28.5
Enhancements Include: Reduced memory usage Faster FFTs due to support for Intel’s new fused multiply add instruction Minor optimizations may give a small performance boost for AVX CPUs Improved benchmarking on multi-core machines
Grounding Morality in Morality
Is it possible to ground ethics in terms of itself without falling into circular reasoning or infinite regress? Scott Aaronson explains how MIT graduate student Tyler Singer-Clark is taking the first steps towards researching...
Spin For Good
Effective Altruist Opportunity: Spin For Good is running a $1000 money added online blackjack tournament this week that’s 100% for charity. I’m currently one of the leaders but I’d definitely welcome some friendly competition....
Betterment vs. Wealthfront vs. LendingClub
I’ve traded stocks and options for years now. I’ve used E-Trade, TD Ameritrade, Scottrade, ShareBuilder, and Fidelity. But I can’t really recommend working with these companies anymore. Actively trading stocks and options has been...
Ally vs. Everbank vs. Discover vs. Schwab
Created with Compare Ninja Almost everyone should use Ally as their primary bank. Their 100% ATM fee reimbursements and 0.87% savings rates will both earn you extra cash on the margin and no other...
Michigan Now Bragging About Their Students Dropping Out
UM has been reduced to (1) desperately trying to take credit for how great one of their engineering students is (since he got a Thiel Fellowship), while (2) simultaneously trying to avoid admitting that...
The Lac Diet
If you could design the ideal way to lose weight, it would probably look a lot like pumping fat and calories directly out of your body. And for some of us, nature has made...
Insider Trading Rates Reach 25%
Researchers find evidence that insider trading occurs in roughly 25% of mergers and acquisitions. That seems really low. Insider trading is one of the only profitable activities you can engage in as an investor....
A synthetic sex ratio distortion system for the control of the human malaria mosquito
Researchers have discovered and tested a new technique to engender a heritable shutdown of male mosquitoes ability to sire female offspring. This could be a much more efficient and rapid way to engineer the...
How to Automatically Track Anything With Beeminder
Want to track your goals? And make sure you don’t fail at the “forget to track your goals” stage? If so, check out my new guest post over at CFAR’s blog. It will teach...
54 Ways to Increase Your Happiness Set Point
Excellent roundup of ways to increase your happiness. Written by a friend of mine in San Francisco. Some of the top ones are probably things you’ve heard of: Exercise Keep a Gratitude Journal Spend...
Rat Park
Have you heard of the Rat Park experiments? Studies on rats addicted to morphine show that they’ll keep triggering morphine levers until they die…unless they’re not in cruel, unnatural cages where they’re severely distressed. Morphine-addicted...
Africa’s Surprisingly Good Decade
Africa has had surprisingly good economic growth, improved health, and improved governance in the 21st century. It’s a bit under-reported though so I mention this in case you also didn’t know that most things...
Are Beef Products More Humane Than Chicken?
My friend Julia is concerned with animal welfare. She seems to have been the first in the world to come up with this obvious-in-hindsight metric for evaluating animal calorie sources: how many food calories...
TL;DR Wikipedia
Immediate tumblr binge recommended.
Rationality As Habit
tl;dr: You probably need to practice rationality ahead of time in order to have it in the kinds of situations where you need it the most.
Google To Support Native Email Encryption
Google is set to support full native PGP encryption of emails so they can make it through all internet hubs without being snooped through. They’re in the final stages of paying bounties to hackers...
How To Get Bitcoin
This tutorial is meant for beginners who just want to get a stake in the future of cryptocurrency. 1. Get a bitcoin wallet There are many choices out there, but I still like Coinbase for...
Effective Altruism Survey
You might be interested in taking this effective altruism survey. There’s an effort to circulate as widely as possible, with the creator giving $250 of his own money to one participant. The results should...
Useful Science
Research findings explained in 5 seconds or less.
MIRIx: Independent Friendly AI Workshops
MIRI is seeking to fund Friendly AI researchers around the world. Apply now for funding to carry out your own Friendly AI research workshop.
New Method Increases The Power Of Genome-Wide Association Studies
Despite the proliferation of GWAS, the associations found so far have largely failed to account for the known effects of genes on complex disease. Standard approaches also struggle to find combinations of multiple genes that...
The 5 Biggest Risks To Human Existence
Anders Sandberg recently published his “Top 5” list of existential risks that humanity should be working to reduce: Nuclear War Bioengineered pandemic Superintelligence Nanotechnology Unknown unknowns Notable exclusions include climate change and asteroid impacts....
First Derm: A Good Direction For Medicine
I’m a big fan of new online medical services like First Derm. Instead of trying to schedule a doctors appointment when you have a skin problem, you just snap a photo with your iPhone...
Researchers Out Of Ideas; Trying Old Drugs On Everything
Hopefully we’ve already found all the drugs we’ll ever need. Because given the impossible costs of funding FDA trials for new drugs, researchers are now mostly just pouring effort into finding new uses for...
Arm Tutorial
Pretty much what I expect from the average YouTube tutorial these days.
Current Proposals For The Regulation Of Synthetic Biology Are Simplistic And Weak
Most attempts at regulatory policy for emerging technology are pretty bad. Which is a shame, since there are a few extremely dangerous research fields that could use better regulation. For example, a group of...
32 Ways To Get More Sleep
Sleep hacking isn’t all one thing. So I recommend a kitchen-sink approach to anyone struggling to get as much sleep as they would like. I’ve pointed out before that magnesium and darkness tend to help me. Greatist...
Protect Your Money With BillGuard
Sick of reviewing your credit card statements every month? Check out BillGuard for iOS (or Android). It verifies all your charges with you on your smartphone and points out ones it suspects are fraudulent....
All Math Isn’t Equally Worthwhile
As a mathamatician, I’m glad to see folks like Andrew Lih at Edge.org agreeing with me that calculus isn’t that important. It’s easily the least applicable technical prereq distracting people from mastering the most...