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Tetronian comments on Convincing my dad to sign up for Alcor: Advice? - Less Wrong
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If you manage this in practice, tell me how.
I second this request. I've brought up transhumanism with ~10 of my friends, and every single one immediately jumped to this objection and thought of it as a knockdown argument against cryonics/life extension. I've experimented with a handful of replies ("birth rates fall as societies industrialize",
"who are we to impose our values on the future and decide who gets to live?", etc.) but in all cases I was unable to prevent overpopulation from becoming a stopsign.
What would happen if you tried the flip side: "religion is necessary because there is no other way to have a sustainable population level, even of hundreds of thousands - the population would shrink to zero".
I feel like I don't understand your point--can you clarify? Why would the population shrink to zero without religion?
Atheists have a low birth rate. I've heard the argument - why would world population grow to Malthusian catastrophe with life extension of a significant population?
Both statements depend on the fallacy that if one thing in a complex system changes absolutely nothing else will change, so the present equilibrium will spiral into a worst case scenario with no one consciously averting it and no self corrections within the system whatsoever.
Since the subject content triggers a mental block, you have to find the same rhetorical mechanism with benign content to form an analogous case they commit to, then show how the cases are analogous.
Gotcha, thanks for expanding that. I will definitely give it a try.