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FiftyTwo comments on Mentioning cryonics to a dying person - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (72)
Likewise, it seems a large generalisation, and other facts about the person in question seem more relevant (e.g. age, educational background, financial situation.)
Really? Just knowing we are discussing a female instantly lets you chop the base rate down to something like a third or fourth or maybe less. That's pretty impressive to me, and I don't actually know that any of those factors are better predictors.
(Nor, I strongly suspect, do you, even though you want to think that it's a large generalization and not a useful one.)
The most obvious other factor I was thinking of was age. My mental model of an average 20 year old of any gender is far more likely to be open to cryonics than a 50+ year old. I would think there would be massive cultural diffferences in feelings about death, religion, speculative technology, etc. that would massively shift their likely evaluation of cryonics. [But I confess I haven't looked into data on this.]
Age is also more useful as it gives you more categories than (standard) gender, subdividing by decade say gives you 5+ categories in the adult population not 2(ish).
I will acknowledge that the phrasing of your original comment "women don't like cryonics" caused it to stand out more to me than it otherwise would, so I began to critically consider it. But I still think my comments about other factors are valid.
A 20 year old is also much more likely to not worry about death, and be unable to spare a thousand bucks a year or so. As well, modern 20 year olds come from an era where cryonics is a joke they see on TV (Futurama), and not a real possibility like it was for people at the start in the '60s or '70s.
If your age inference is right, shouldn't we see a lot of young people in cryonics? But recall that one of Eliezer's cryonics was about a cryonics conference aimed at recruiting young people; not the sort of thing you do if you're reaching them very well... This also lines up nicely with my previous post about the increasing cost of cryonics due to ending grandfathering: it was previously supportable because cryonics was growing, but now...?
It also means your inferences are less reliable because your total n is being split over 5+ groups and not just 2.