= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
gurugeorge comments on Why people want to die - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (174)
I think the concept of psychological neoteny is interesting (Google Bruce Charlton neoteny) in this regard.
Roughly, the idea would be that some people retain something of the plasticity and curiosity of children, whereas others don't, they mature into "proper" human beings and lose that curiosity and creativity. The former are the creative types, the latter are the average human type.
There are several layered ironies if this is a valid notion.
Anyway, for the latter type, they really do exhaust their interests in maturity, they stick to one career, their interests are primarily friends and family, etc., so it's easy to see how for them, life might be "done" at some point. For geeks, nerds, artists, and probably a lot of scientists too, the curiosity never ends, there's always interest about what happens next, what's around the corner, so for them, the idea of life extension and immortality is a positive.
Given that each bit of information will, on average, impart less information than the bit before it, each surprise you encounter is, on average, going to be less surprising than the surprise before it.
I'm not sure that this is true, or maybe I'm not sure that considering things on average is a good measure of surprise. Finding out you were wrong about something is much more surprising than learning something in the first place. Limited reasoners tend to discard alternative hypotheses when something fits the data well enough. Learning that the earth was flying through space around the sun even though it really doesn't feel like it is was much more surprising to me than it would have been if I hadn't seen the ground so stubbornly sitting still for most of my life. I feel like the more I learn, the more surprised I am when something is different than I expect it to be. I may be surprised less, but my increased confidence in my model makes those surprises all the more salient.
For a comparatively short lifespan, sure. Randomness dominates small sets of numbers.
Extrapolate that process out a hundred years, when it might be years between each significant surprise. A thousand, when it might be decades. Ten thousand, when it might be centuries.