I've looked because it's an interesting modesty argument: if older people reliably are more conservative and have more information, on what grounds do you not immediately become conservative yourself? (And variations thereof.)
Has anyone looked systematically at what projected older versions of themselves would think, based on what relevant groups of existing older folks think?...My dim recollection of studies is that on the whole as people age they tend to be less idealistic, more resigned to society the way it is rather than how it might be, and more constrained by realities of politics and economics (for starters).
There's an obvious confound: the aging itself induces negative changes. 'resigned' can just be a synonym for 'tired' or 'lacking in energy'. Aging also introduces many other negatives - your intelligence takes massive hits: http://www.gwern.net/DNB%20FAQ#aging I'm 24, so compared to my 60 year old, I'm something like 1.5-2 standard deviations smarter (disclaimers: average, z-scores over general population, I hope to do better, etc.).
My IQ is somewhere in the 130s, and a standard deviation is usually something like 12-15 points, so taking advice from my future self would be like taking advice from a normal 100 IQ person now! I don't pay terribly much attention to what such people say... I'd still pay a lot of attention to any message from the future because my future dim elderly self has all the fruits of my higher IQ periods to draw on, but this observation is enough to largely eliminate the interest of contemporary averages.
Also interesting is politics; here the confound is simply that the 19th-20th centuries have seen widespread partisan shifts in particular directions, which means age will correlate strongly with politics unless people are completely spineless. Here the evidence favors me not shifting my liberal libertarian beliefs, because that's the tendency of old people in general - to shift to be more liberal than their cohort began as: http://www.gwern.net/DNB%20FAQ#fn85
(This could just reflect pressure to conform by all the younger cohorts - but if you're willing to make excuses like that, the majoritarian/modesty argument goes right out the window in general!)
Upvoted for two reasons: links to interesting data sets, and discussing the stated topic rather than the ending example.
One thing that struck me in the 2011 survey was that 90% of LW respondents were under age 38. I'm 57 myself. It seems that often rationality in planning our lives depends on estimates of what values and utility functions we will hold in the future. Has anyone looked systematically at what projected older versions of themselves would think, based on what relevant groups of existing older folks think?
"You'll understand when you're older" is an annoying form of argument. Arguably there's some grain of truth there when a 7-year-old tells you that sex is disgusting and he or she will never ever think it's anything but incredibly gross. But you could explain hormonal changes that as a matter of empirical fact change opinions on that subject in the vast majority of cases. I can't think of anything that dramatic that distinguishes 60-year-olds or 80-year-olds from 20-year-olds.
My dim recollection of studies is that on the whole as people age they tend to be less idealistic, more resigned to society the way it is rather than how it might be, and more constrained by realities of politics and economics (for starters).
I don't presume to offer anything in this regard based on my age, and in any case I'm only a single person (a nihilist when pressed, but one who finds himself happier pretending not to be and working sporadically for rationality, truth, justice, love, and all that good stuff).
When I read of cryonics, what comes to my mind is the escalating costs of health care and (as I see it) the need to curb the development of expensive life-extending medical procedures. Cryonics sounds instead like an extremely expensive procedure. Maybe no one is suggesting it be covered by health insurance, and it's just an option that some people pay out of pocket for. Even so, the "health care is a right, not a privilege" sentiment will mean that if it was shown to work, everyone would want it, and (in my estimation) society would go completely haywire in an unpleasant way.
Now, the substance of the above has probably been discussed elsewhere at length; I raise it is an example because when I was 21 I would have thought of it very differently than I do now.