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Konkvistador comments on On "Friendly" Immortality - Less Wrong Discussion
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Actually there is data on this. Why not crunch the numbers? Those born in 1941 are 70 today, but where 20 in 1961. Controlling for how getting older tends to make people more conservative, how do their opinions differ? Do you think people who don't update on social norms, signalling and values are likley to die significantly more than others? If not I think you will find a surprising shift in individual opinions over the decades from what I recall of when I was last doing research on something related.
If I accept that "social progress" is going to slow down, but not stop, by some factor, this does not seem a grave tragedy, compared to the dis-utility of billions of deaths. Isn't the whole reason we care about the speed "social progress" because we dislike the dis-utility incurred by those who wouldn't be incurring it in a different (better?) system?
A sufficiently long life in the improved system should outweigh any difference in the amount of time spent in suboptimal conditions. To pick one of your charged examples and put a face to it, wouldn't you say Alan Turing might have decided to stick around if he knew he would still be young and healthy in 2010 and society would be accepting of homosexuality?
Eh. Turing committed suicide after two years of chemical castration by hormone injections (which can significantly impact personality and cognitive functioning), I'm not sure he would have been willing to put up with 11 more years.
It's also not clear to me that LGBT rights would have advanced as quickly in the UK without Turing as a martyr, and so he might not have been looking at only 11 more years.
I don't think we know why he killed himself, but I'm not sure the prospect of social acceptance of homosexuality in a few decades would really have inspired him to stick around. In fact...he did have that prospect within reasonable expectations of his natural life. He had still lost his security clearance and probably considered his career to be over.