EDIT: Incorporated suggestions from comments: Moved off-topic parts into comments, improved formatting, corrected links.

Definition

The LW post Value Deathism differntiates between the illusory nature of death and the 'desirability' of death called deathism proper. This post is about the latter. Where desirability is meant in a general sense and not (only) in the sense of desirable for an individual.

I propose a different more neutral term for deathism: Senexism - from the latin adjective senex - old.  I propose this because death is only the end of an aging process and by focussing on the ultimate and emotionally disturbing result one loads the topic with negative connotations. Senescence on the other hand - though unwanted - has also positive connotations of experience and humility. This also nicely splits off (or reduces applicability of) death by accident. 

Outline

My defense is twofold. First I address the (emotional) pain and loss death causes and point out adaptive affects of the coping mechanisms humans have. Second I address the actual benefits senescence and death has - not for the individual but for the group. Thus the latter is an utilitarian argument for death actually.

I will provide current research results for these points. At the end I will conclude with an opinion piece on what this means for rationalists and an outlook how this applies in light of the singularity. 

I think I have problems with this:

Litany of Gendlin

What is true is already so.
Owning up to it doesn't make it worse.
Not being open about it doesn't make it go away.

And because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted with.
Anything untrue isn't there to be lived.
People can stand what is true,
for they are already enduring it.

Do you actually think that's true?

I honestly don't think I do. I think there are horrible truths that can wreck your life if you're not prepared to deal with them. I think it may *usually* be best if you self-modify to be able to handle them, so that you don't run into trouble later. But to say there's NO difference ignores the fact that your emotional reaction to things is ALSO part of reality.

I like the idea behind it but I don't think I can really endorse it. I'm struggling because I'd like to incorporate it into my project, but it feels too wrong. And while I'm okay with chopping up lengthy sequence posts to so they can be read out loud, rewriting this to match my beliefs... well, it's not exactly a crime against humanity but it's technically not the Litany of Gendlin anymore which ruins some ritual-oomph. (And the part that I'd most want to change is the last two lines, which are the most powerful part)

Ideally it would communicate: "Lying to yourself will eventually screw you up worse than getting hurt by a truth," instead of "learning new truths has no negative consequences."

This distinction is particularly important when the truth at hand is "the world is a fundamentally unfair place that will kill you without a second thought if you mess up, and possibly even if you don't."

EDIT TO CLARIFY: The person who goes about their life ignoring the universe's Absolute Neutrality is very fundamentally NOT already enduring this truth. They're enduring part of it (arguably most of it), but not all. Thinking about that truth is depressing for many people. That is not a meaningless cost. Telling people they should get over that depression and make good changes to fix the world is important. But saying that they are already enduring everything there was to endure, seems to me a patently false statement, and makes your argument weaker, not stronger.

Potential change I can think of that doesn't wreck it too much and keeps it similar enough that I don't feel too bad: "Not owning up to it will only make things worse." Artistically I think it might be better to change the wording to something like "Refusing to admit it will only make things worse," but then the change becomes big enough that I feel kinda wrong again.

Maybe refer to it as Litany of Gendlin', to distinguish it while staying classy.

SECOND EDIT: It's become pretty clear, looking a collection of comments, that Typical Mind Fallacy is at work here. Some people value truth and emotional response differently. My problem is that a) *I* value emotional response as the end, and my preference for truth, while extremely useful, is only there to facilitate emotional response in myself and others. b) I know there will be other people at the event in question who share my position.

In any case, I'd like advice from the people who believe the Litany is inaccurate (or at least are able to model people who believe that) on how to handle the situation.

This topic is in vogue, so here's my pitch.

My fellow humans, I have some bad news and some good news. The bad news is that you are likely to eventually enter an enfeebled state, during which you will not be able to independently provide for yourself. Even worse, you will at some point altogether cease to function and then you can no longer contribute to the things you care about. The good news is that both of those problems can be ameliorated by the same scheme – the creation of new humans. The new humans can provide us with the assistance we need as our own abilities diminish. And when we cease to function, the new humans can carry on with the projects we value.

Now, the thing is, creating fully functioning new humans is a huge project, consuming many man-years of work. A person engaged in preparing and outfitting a new human will need to sacrifice a lot of time that could otherwise be devoted to personal leisure and other projects. We currently have a volunteer system for replenishing the population and in many ways this works well. Not everyone is well-placed for creating humans while some people are in a good position to create many. But this system is not perfect and it can be exploited. There are some freeloaders who do not create humans even though they are in a suitable position to do so. Those same people almost always value receiving care in old age and value humanity having a future. But they are relying on the rest of us to provide enough new humans for this to happen while they can devote all their time to other projects and zero time to diapers with poop in them.

Sometimes the non-child-creators justify their decision by suggesting that the projects they are working on are especially socially valuable and thus they can spend time on them in preference to child-creation without violating their duty to society. While it is *possible* that this argument goes through in some cases, it seems suspiciously self-serving. What is especially worth taking into account is that if the humans in question really are so highly valuable, they would statistically have highly valuable offspring. Thus, it seems doubtful in the general case that high-value people refraining from procreating is a net gain for society.

[Poorly conceived section on my personal experiences removed.]

• Eliezer Yudkowsky was once attacked by a Moebius strip. He beat it to death with the other side, non-violently.
• Inside Eliezer Yudkowsky's pineal gland is not an immortal soul, but another brain.
• Eliezer Yudkowsky's favorite food is printouts of Rice's theorem.
• Eliezer Yudkowsky's favorite fighting technique is a roundhouse dustspeck to the face.
• Eliezer Yudkowsky once brought peace to the Middle East from inside a freight container, through a straw.
• Eliezer Yudkowsky once held up a sheet of paper and said, "A blank map does not correspond to a blank territory". It was thus that the universe was created.
• If you dial Chaitin's Omega, you get Eliezer Yudkowsky on the phone.
• Unless otherwise specified, Eliezer Yudkowsky knows everything that he isn't telling you.
• Somewhere deep in the microtubules inside an out-of-the-way neuron somewhere in the basal ganglia of Eliezer Yudkowsky's brain, there is a little XML tag that says awesome.
• Eliezer Yudkowsky is the Muhammad Ali of one-boxing.
• Eliezer Yudkowsky is a 1400 year old avatar of the Aztec god Aixitl.
• The game of "Go" was abbreviated from "Go Home, For You Cannot Defeat Eliezer Yudkowsky".
• When Eliezer Yudkowsky gets bored, he pinches his mouth shut at the 1/3 and 2/3 points and pretends to be a General Systems Vehicle holding a conversation among itselves. On several occasions he has managed to fool bystanders.
• Eliezer Yudkowsky has a swiss army knife that has folded into it a corkscrew, a pair of scissors, an instance of AIXI which Eliezer once beat at tic tac toe, an identical swiss army knife, and Douglas Hofstadter.
• If I am ignorant about a phenomenon, that is not a fact about the phenomenon; it just means I am not Eliezer Yudkowsky.
• Eliezer Yudkowsky has no need for induction or deduction. He has perfected the undiluted master art of duction.
• There was no ice age. Eliezer Yudkowsky just persuaded the planet to sign up for cryonics.
• There is no spacetime symmetry. Eliezer Yudkowsky just sometimes holds the territory upside down, and he doesn't care.
• Eliezer Yudkowsky has no need for doctors. He has implemented a Universal Curing Machine in a system made out of five marbles, three pieces of plastic, and some of MacGyver's fingernail clippings.
• Before Bruce Schneier goes to sleep, he scans his computer for uploaded copies of Eliezer Yudkowsky.

If you know more Eliezer Yudkowsky facts, post them in the comments.

I'm not sure about this, but presenting it anyway for scrutiny.

I was thinking that it doesn't matter if a concept is undefined, or even cannot be defined, if hypothetically speaking said concept can exist without any ambiguity within it then it is still a tenable concept. The implications, if this is true, would be that it would knock down Quine's argument against the analytic-synthetic distinction.

Your thoughts, Lesswrong?

Recalling first that life is a zero-sum game, it is immediately obvious that the quickest and easiest path to success is not to accomplish things yourself—that's a game for heroes and other suckers—but to tear down the accomplishments and reputations of others. Destruction is easy. The difficulty lies in constructing a situation so that that destruction is to your net benefit.