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MrMind comments on Yet More "Stupid" Questions - Less Wrong Discussion
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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.