One of the proposed benefits of life extension is that it will help us long term plan as we will be around in the future, so we will be more likely to care about the long term future of the world if we live longer.
So is this true? Are we rational in this respect or will the mind recoil from thinking in time scales longer than 40-60 years even when we are living hundreds of years, due to biases intrinsic to the mammalian brain.
I don't have time to research this question right now, so I thought I would experiment by throwing out this question to lesswrong and see how people treat it.
Can you elaborate on why you believe that? I find it difficult to see how, if lifespans were still finite but measured in millennia instead of decades, it could not have major consequences for long-term planning (on the order of decades to centuries).
It's mostly an intuition backed up by observations of my own thinking around long-term plans; I don't think I would get any better at making them unless I were outright immortal. However, I'm not bad at making long-term plans to begin with. I suppose I could quite easily be an anomaly.