Cool.
Having clarified that: can you say more about why the distinction (between belief in belief in cryonics, and genuine but non-internalized belief in cryonics) is important in this context? That is... why do you bring it up?
Well, if someone had belief in belief in cryonics, they might say that cryonics would preserve people and allow them to be brought back in the future, but every time they have to make a falsifiable prediction based on it, they'll find an excuse to avoid backing that prediction. If they're willing to make falsifiable predictions based on their belief, but go on behaving the same as if they believed they only had an expectation of living several decades, they probably only have a far mode belief in cryonics.
It takes different input to bring a far mode belief into near mode than to convince someone to actually believe something they formerly only had belief in belief in.
Today's post, Mere Messiahs was originally published on 02 December 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
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This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Superhero Bias, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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