This seems to be the argument. I don't find it compelling it all. Can you help me understand why "tending toward a long view" is valuable? And how is accomplishing and enjoying more things always good indefinitely? I think enjoying and accomplishing things is cool, but I'd imagine there are some diminishing returns on almost anything.
A longer term view is valuable because it would decrease things like "it's OK to pollute, I'll be dead by the time it gets bad".
I'm hearing... "death is obviously bad and the only way you could disagree is because you are biased" and "more years can equal more utilons".
It's just that many of us don't see any benefit to involuntary death. (Voluntary death also remains unpopular, even in surprisingly bad circumstances). In fact, I don't know of any product which is marketed as being superior to another product due to having a shorter lifespan ("Because our product will cease to function unexpectedly, you can enjoy it more now before it does!"), while things like "lifetime guarantee" are routinely praised as positive. I mean, for houses, tools, toys, vehicles, pet animals, longer lifespan == better, and I don't see why it should be different for my children.
As a thought experiment: Most people would, if they could, take a pill that eliminated the effects of aging, but causes multiple organ failure at about their original life expectancy. You seem to agree that aging is inconvenient, so I assume you'd take this pill. Would you?
But what if that pill also extended your lifespan indefinitely, as well as curing aging? Not true immortality, of course, since your body would still be susceptible to disease and accident, but it would mean that every year you're as likely to die as you were last year, ie your chance of dying doesn't increase with age. Now, there are a lot of people who say death is a good thing. In the interest of pleasing these people, while also providing the elimination of aging, scientists develop a second substance, which causes multiple organ failure at about your expected lifespan. By combining this substance with the immortality pill, they create a cure for aging that does not have immortality as a side-effect. Which of these pills would you prefer, or would you reject both?
Now, if you're not a consequentialist, the second pill no doubt seems like it has the stigma of suicide, even though its effects are identical to a previous example which perhaps seemed both positive and non-suicidal. This stigma would vanish, even if the pill were identical, if the pills had been developed in reverse order, with the immortality pill being a refinement of the anti-aging pill to remove a substance that causes eventual multiple organ failure. Or perhaps simply the existence of both options would make them both repugnant to you, one because it stinks of suicide, and the other one because you don't want immortality?
On a different note, there are in fact some legitimate advantages of death by limited lifespan, and some that might be considered both advantageous and disadvantageous. A limited lifespan allows for permanent retirement. Solving death would be a huge problem for the politicians who have to kick people off retirement, with a risk that they'd rather go bankrupt than anger our elderly. A huge chunk of our taxes are estate taxes "aka death tax". Death is a great equalizer: it will eliminate any specific tyrant and any specific individual who is accumulating "too much" wealth. Making death technically not inevitable would decrease our courage to do dangerous or violent things, such as soldiering, volunteering to test drugs, violent or non-violent resistance to a corrupt regime. The combination of immortal tyrant with decreased opposition from internal resistance or external liberators, is particularly worrisome. Unlimited lifespan will increase procrastination. Death eliminates old people set in their ways from positions of power and authority, making way for new ideas. Death makes all your problems go away or become someone else's problems. With limited lifespans, you won't outlive your friends by more than ~100 years. Even with all that, there's an equally impressive list for the benefits of a longer lifespan, plus I can point to about 7 billion people who think living is better than dying.
As a thought experiment: Most people would, if they could, take a pill that eliminated the effects of aging, but causes multiple organ failure at about their original life expectancy. You seem to agree that aging is inconvenient, so I assume you'd take this pill. Would you?
I think I would, yes.
But what if that pill also extended your lifespan indefinitely, as well as curing aging?
I don't think so, no.
stigma of suicide
More than a stigma, suicide is very consequential. It's a deep trauma for many people surrounding the victim. I think it is a net...
Consider the following commonly-made argument: cryonics is unlikely to work. Trained rationalists are signed up for cryonics at rates much greater than the general population. Therefore, rationalists must be pretty gullible people, and their claims to be good at evaluating evidence must be exaggerations at best.
This argument is wrong, and we can prove it using data from the last two Less Wrong surveys.
The question at hand is whether rationalist training - represented here by extensive familiarity with Less Wrong material - makes people more likely to believe in cryonics.
We investigate with a cross-sectional study, looking at proto-rationalists versus experienced rationalists. Define proto-rationalists as those respondents to the Less Wrong survey who indicate they have been in the community for less than six months and have zero karma (usually indicative of never having posted a comment). And define experienced rationalists as those respondents to the Less Wrong survey who indicate they have been in the community for over two years and have >1000 karma (usually indicative of having written many well-received posts).
By these definitions, there are 93 proto-rationalists, who have been in the community an average of 1.3 months, and 134 experienced rationalists, who have been in the community an average of 4.5 years. Proto-rationalists generally have not read any rationality training material - only 20/93 had read even one-quarter of the Less Wrong Sequences. Experienced rationalists are, well, more experienced: two-thirds of them have read pretty much all the Sequence material.
Proto-rationalists thought that, on average, there was a 21% chance of an average cryonically frozen person being revived in the future. Experienced rationalists thought that, on average, there was a 15% chance of same. The difference was marginally significant (p < 0.1).
Marginal significance is a copout, but this isn't our only data source. Last year, using the same definitions, proto-rationalists assigned a 15% probability to cryonics working, and experienced rationalists assigned a 12% chance. We see the same pattern.
So experienced rationalists are consistently less likely to believe in cryonics than proto-rationalists, and rationalist training probably makes you less likely to believe cryonics will work.
On the other hand, 0% of proto-rationalists had signed up for cryonics compared to 13% of experienced rationalists. 48% of proto-rationalists rejected the idea of signing up for cryonics entirely, compared to only 25% of experienced rationalists. So although rationalists are less likely to believe cryonics will work, they are much more likely to sign up for it. Last year's survey shows the same pattern.
This is not necessarily surprising. It only indicates that experienced rationalists and proto-rationalists treat their beliefs in different ways. Proto-rationalists form a belief, play with it in their heads, and then do whatever they were going to do anyway - usually some variant on what everyone else does. Experienced rationalists form a belief, examine the consequences, and then act strategically to get what they want.
Imagine a lottery run by an incompetent official who accidentally sets it up so that the average payoff is far more than the average ticket price. For example, maybe the lottery sells only ten $1 tickets, but the jackpot is $1 million, so that each $1 ticket gives you a 10% chance of winning $1 million.
Goofus hears about the lottery and realizes that his expected gain from playing the lottery is $99,999. "Huh," he says, "the numbers say I could actually win money by playing this lottery. What an interesting mathematical curiosity!" Then he goes off and does something else, since everyone knows playing the lottery is what stupid people do.
Gallant hears about the lottery, performs the same calculation, and buys up all ten tickets.
The relevant difference between Goofus and Gallant is not skill at estimating the chances of winning the lottery. We can even change the problem so that Gallant is more aware of the unlikelihood of winning than Goofus - perhaps Goofus mistakenly believes there are only five tickets, and so Gallant's superior knowledge tells him that winning the lottery is even more unlikely than Goofus thinks. Gallant will still play, and Goofus will still pass.
The relevant difference is that Gallant knows how to take ideas seriously.
Taking ideas seriously isn't always smart. If you're the sort of person who falls for proofs that 1 = 2 , then refusing to take ideas seriously is a good way to avoid ending up actually believing that 1 = 2, and a generally excellent life choice.
On the other hand, progress depends on someone somewhere taking a new idea seriously, so it's nice to have people who can do that too. Helping people learn this skill and when to apply it is one goal of the rationalist movement.
In this case it seems to have been successful. Proto-rationalists think there is a 21% chance of a new technology making them immortal - surely an outcome as desirable as any lottery jackpot - consider it an interesting curiosity, and go do something else because only weirdos sign up for cryonics.
Experienced rationalists think there is a lower chance of cryonics working, but some of them decide that even a pretty low chance of immortality sounds pretty good, and act strategically on this belief.
This is not to either attack or defend the policy of assigning a non-negligible probability to cryonics working. This is meant to show only that the difference in cryonics status between proto-rationalists and experienced rationalists is based on meta-level cognitive skills in the latter whose desirability is orthogonal to the object-level question about cryonics.
(an earlier version of this article was posted on my blog last year; I have moved it here now that I have replicated the results with a second survey)