Dustin comments on On the unpopularity of cryonics: life sucks, but at least then you die - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (465)
I've met that guy-- I was talking about life extension with a random person-- he sounded like he was in his thirties. He didn't want life extension because his life was bad (ordinary job-- he was doing a survey for a bank, and this was probably about ten years ago) and he didn't want more of it and couldn't imagine things being any better.
Working conditions are somewhat better for Europeans (the author writes about a two-week vacation), but they aren't scrambling to sign up for cryonics.
Extended families are great if you're in a good one. My impression is that a fair number of people want to get away from them, but I don't know what the proportion is compared to people in nuclear families.
Michael Vassar had (has?) a theory that the three things which keep people trapped and which keep getting more expensive-- housing, credentialed education, and medical care-- are monopolized.
It would be interesting if, just as work on FAI has led to an interest in improving access to rationality, work on life extension leads to work on improving quality of life.
I like that theory of Vassar's because it fits my personal experience.
I was raised in an extremely religious household which caused me to miss out on advanced education. The internet has alleviated that to a degree, but the credentialed part certainly hasn't been alleviated. By the time I "woke up" from the indoctrination of being raised in such a religious household, I was already approaching 30 years old and relatively unwealthy while at the same time being stuck with the work skills I was taught while growing up...that is construction and remodeling of homes. While I have made the best of that by being self-employed, it certainly has kept me from doing what I really would like to do when I "grow up".
The internet has really been a boon for me as I self educated in software development and am slowly working to transition over to making my living from doing that. That's closer to what I would rather do, but I doubt I'll ever be able to get to the point where I can do what I really would love (research in any of the scientific fields I'm interested in...CS/medicine/AI/physics). At times this can be quite depressing and it feels like the person I was, was wasted.
However, all this makes me more of a fan of cryonics. Second chances and all that.