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gwern comments on Cryonics is Far, Cord-blood is Near - Less Wrong
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Comments (11)
Look at the wiki summary:
'socially close folks with unstable traits' - hm, I'm sure that has no connection with cryonics and the 'hostile wife phenomenon'.
What the stable vs. unstable distinction refers to is that in far mode a person's behavior is more likely to be seen as resulting from the person's general, stable dispositions (their traits) while in near mode the person is seen as responding more flexibly and variably to the particulars of the situation. "Unstable traits" is a misleading phrase, because near-mode thinking involves seeing others as less trait-like.
For instance, Trope & Liberman (2003) write that "According to CLT, global traits constitute high-level construals of behavior, whereas situation-specific states constitute lower level construals of behavior" and describe a study which, "[c]onsistent with CLT, ... suggests that people are more likely to use abstract, decontextualized trait concepts in predicting distant-future than near-future behavior."
Trope, Y., & Liberman, N. (2003). Temporal construal. Psychological Review, 110, 403-421.
I see. I was initially titling this post the opposite, 'Cryonics is Far, Cordblood is Near', but then after looking through the list and thinking about hostile-wives, decided to swap it. Well, regardless of which label fits on which practice, the contrast is still striking. (I'll swap it back, unless you think that'd be even more wrong?)
Your willingness to swap the labels around like that suggests that you're trying to force in a near-far distinction that isn't actually there.
Or the willingness suggests I am able to admit that I made a mistake.
It's not clear to me that the two practices differ on the near/far dimension. The passage suggests that cord blood is more popular than cryonics, so maybe that should be the headline (unless you have more to say about why you think they differ in popularity).