= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
ciphergoth 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.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (465)
Thank you for the calm, insightful response :)
If someone had linked me to a "one and done" article, I'd feel a lot more confident that this is a standard argument with a good/interesting answer. Instead I mostly got responses that seemed to work out to "I'm not a terribly nice person so it was simple for me" and "you're not a terribly nice person so it should be simple for you".
If there is a "one and done" you want to link me to, I wouldn't object at all. I've read most of LessWrong, but not much else out there. I don't think I've seen this specific objection addressed before.
My mind seems to be weird in a lot of ways. For cryonics, it seems to come down to: cryonics is a far-off future thing, therefore my Planning mode gets engaged. Planning mode goes "I have more money than I need to survive. Why am I being selfish and not donating this?"
I'm not real inclined to view this as problematic, because on a certain level charity does feel good, and I like making the world a better place. On the other hand, I also grew up with a lot of bad spending habits, so my short-term thinking is very much "ooh, shiny thing, mine now".
I will say that the idea of a $28,000 operation that gives me six more months in a hospice really bothers me - it's a horrifically irrational or selfish thing to think I'm worth that much. If push came to shove, I'm not sure I'd have the courage and energy to refuse social norms and pressure, but the idea bothers me.
Eliezer raises a good point, that one can do both, but it implies a certain degree of financial privilege. Thus, there's still the open question of priorities. While psychologically we have "different budgets" for different things, all of those do fundamentally come out of one big budget.
When people say "I'd only accept that argument from Rain", it makes me wonder if I should be pursuing cryonics or being more like Rain. It's only very recently that I've had much of any financial flexibility in my life, so I'm trying to figure out what to do with it. I'm trying to figure out whether I want to become the sort of person who is signed up for cryonics, or the sort of person who funnels that extra money in to charity.
If you are currently donating everything you practically can to charity, fair enough, don't sign up for cryonics.
If you think you should but haven't yet, then sign up for cryonics first. As a person with one foot in the future, you're more likely to do what the future will most benefit from. As someone who avoids thoughtful spending because you feel like you should spend it on charity, you'll end up at XKCD 871.
Cryonics only makes the difference between your seeing the future and your not seeing the future if 1) sufficiently high tech eventually gets developed by human-friendly actors, 2) it happens only after you die, 3) cryonics works, 4) nothing else goes wrong or makes cryonics irrelevant. For the median LessWronger, I would put maybe a 10% probability on the first two combined and maybe at most a 50% probability on the last two combined. So maybe at best I'd say something like cryonics gives you two and a half toes in a future where you used to have two toes.
I mean "one foot in the future" to refer to your resulting psychological state, not to a fact related to your likely personal future. I think it's pretty unlikely I'll be suspended and reanimated - many other fates are more likely, including never being declared dead. But I think signing up is a move towards a different attitude to the future.
Is this just a plausible guess, or do we have other evidence that it's true, e.g. people spontaneously citing being signed up for cryonics as causing them to feel the future is real enough to help optimally philanthropize into existence?
It's a guess.
If there were a one-and-done answer, I think this'd be it.