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Locaha comments on Yet More "Stupid" Questions - Less Wrong Discussion
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How often do you think about death? (Not suicidally.)
I explicitly think of the goals of driving as 1) don't die, 2) get to destination. I do this because it helps me remember not to do dangerous things, and to not feel as bad about making wrong turns (because I feel like I'm doing badly at 2 but well at 1, rather than just plain driving badly). I don't visualize what dying in a car accident would be like or anything like that, though.
I think seriously about death of humans kind of often lately, but that's probably because of some circumstantial stuff lately. During more normal times, I think I don't think about death of real people very often, but do think about death in fiction sometimes.
(I also get the sense that I'm less horrified by death than is normal in this community.)
Daily, as it is part of standard Stoic practice (specifically, the technique of negative visualization, which I employ during before-sleep meditation).
Also curious about this. Have found meditating before bed can ruin a nights sleep and so am wary of experimenting with it.
Usually, when I mention meditation people have something like mindfulness meditation (or other Buddhist styles) in mind, but Stoic meditation is very different. You are in no way trying to empty your mind; actually it should be quite active.
The style I use involves replaying my entire day from waking in fast-forward with an imaginary observer-sage commentating on my actions, asking open-ended questions like "did it really make sense to worry about something over which you have no control?" or "don't you think you should have waited until you calmed down first before trying to talk about [emotional issue]?", etc...
It doesn't negatively impact my sleep very much, since it only takes 10-15 minutes and it has a definite end-point (just when my "ghost" enters my room to go to sleep) which makes me feel a sense of finality (if anything, I would guess this makes sleep easier).
Other than the negative visualization technique, how else does your before-bed mediation differ from your normal meditation and why?
My before-bed meditation is my only meditation, so it is normal (for me).
Many many times per day in the abstract sense of living things that stop since I am surrounded by them EVERYWHERE and often kill them myself.
Still multiple times per day, in the context of understanding that my remaining time is limited and unpredictable and I need to make good use of it.
Every two or three days in the context of "existing is WEIRD, and soon enough I will no longer exist just like 25 years ago."
It doesn't distress me, except when dealing with immediate effects of the deaths of people or other organisms that are dear to me, or could be easily prevented from being worse than they are.
Quite often, in the conquerer's mind. Three shall be the sons of Peverell...
At least once every day, as a motivational tool. I even created a spreadsheet that tells me how many days are left for me to live, and what percentage of life is already behind me (based on the projection from a bunch of actuarial tables).
That wouldn't work for me -- it would sound like plenty of time to me¹. (And that would happen regardless of what unit I² used -- 1,500,000,000 seconds? That's a lot of seconds! 50 years? A year is a helluva long time! 600 months? Why would you² use months of all units, are you² trying to fool me¹ or something?)
i.e. my System 1/elephant.
i.e. my System 2/rider.
I simply use days, I find they are sufficiently short to be grasped intuitively but not enough to create a huge number. Besides, probably less then 17132 left...
That number isn't anywhere near small enough to trigger near-mode thinking in me, and days would trigger the “weird choice of units for this” memetic immune defence reaction (though not as much as months).
So are you basically unable to think about death in a way that isn't far from you? I wonder how much this is common and/or relates to accepting a transhumanist point of view.
Yes, I pretty much am (except when driving or doing something similarly dangerous). At least, not about my death or that of other healthy young people in developed countries.
(Weirdly, though, I do often think about stopping functioning before legal death. It must be a combination of having read the parts of I Am a Strange Loop about Ronald Reagan's late life, my girlfriend working with Alzheimer patients on a daily basis, my grandpa starting to show long-term memory loss too, and, er, my having read the Yvain post I linked to in the previous sentence.)
I hear that's quite common among teenagers, at least according to the stereotype. (ISTR an EY post mentioning that, but I can't find it off hand.) I'm no longer a teenager myself, though.
Not very often. Usually less than twice per week. [happens to notice mare-of-night's comment] Oh, yeah, sure; except when driving.
I think more often about what happens before legal death.
I used to dream I died about twice or three times a week, for years. But that was more than a decade ago.
I do think about how unbelievable it is that I'm still the only freaking sane monkey out of 190 million around me who signed up for cryonics.
For most people, cryonics is a terrible use of resources. I'm entirely opposed to deathism, but I'd still never sign up for cryonics unless I had, as a rule of thumb, enough wealth to pay cash for it. It's too chancy for me to devote too significant a chunk of my wealth to it - the opportunity costs are too high for the gamble.
Do you have a back-of-the-envelope calculation for this finding? Something which illustrates for which values of 'chance of success' and 'value of success' and opportunity cost this holds true for? Obviously depending on those beliefs other people can be expected to agree or disagree with your conclusion, while accepting your reasoning.
I hadn't done the math when making the above post, but let's do some here. We'll assume that cryonics has a 10% chance of actually working, and that the added lifespan you'll get is equal to a 2% chance of dying per year(because they presumably won't have entirely conquered death when you get back, but they'll have better medicine than we do and presumably won't be bothered resurrecting you unless there's good reason). This means that the math works out to cryonics being the equivalent of buying an average of 5 extra years of life. You may want to also add some discounting for declining utility of lifespan, the fact that everyone you know will likely be dead, and for the fact that you're gambling, and I think my assumptions are generous, but we'll take 5 years as a baseline.
On the flip side, cryonics costs about $100,000 at present. You also need to factor in the costs of supporting yourself in your second life, unless your body will be getting repaired to the point where you can reasonably work again - with your hideously outdated skills, you're not likely to be getting a desk job, so you'll probably need to be young again to work. It's easy to say you'll take out insurance to pay for it, but insurance companies aren't in the business of giving away free money, so in practice you need to put up the present value of it over the course of your actuarial lifespan.
Mathematical utility calculations are generally only mathematical playthings, not serious numbers(I tried doing one in my first draft of this post, it said the breakeven for buying cryonics was $2500 of annual income, which is clearly absurd), so I can't judge it numerically. But you're dropping $100k on an extra five years of life. I don't think that can be justified if you're poor - you'd do better improving your guaranteed life than playing the lottery. If you have the cash, sure - it's a better cash sink than some. But it's a big gamble, and I don't advocate gambling with your life savings.
Not often. Only when I hear about someone dying or someone's life being in danger, or if I'm arguing against someone with a pro-death view.