Well, it has now become abundantly clear that the major departure from canon is going to be in attitude toward death. Ravenclaw rationality in place of Griffindor bravery is only one aspect of the central thematic difference.
I just happened upon a link from Robin’s “Overcoming Bias” blog to this article asking “Do protagonists of great novels have children?”. It occurs to me to ask whether anti-death activists have children. Is it the case that the kinds of people who sign up for cryonics don’t tend to want children? Does having a child change your outlook so that you can contemplate your own death with greater equanimity? Or am I completely delusional in thinking that there might be some correlation?
The technical term for “anti-death enthusiasts” is Methusalites.
Sex and death. It reminds me of the maintenance/reproduction axis.
Transforming reproductive resources into maintenance resources is widely thought to be responsible for the life-extending effects of calorie restriction.
That wasn’t what I had in mind, but you are right: natural selection does tend to play off one against the other. And a member of H.sap. does sometime find verself in one situation or the other, so it is natural that our psyche’s would be comfortable with either approach, depending on circumstances.
The r/K thing is a teensy bit different. That is more to do with offspring quality—with many vs few offspring.
The idea (from dietary energy restriction) is that organisms face resource-investment tradeoffs between self-maintenance and reproduction—and that circumstances and diet can affect where that tradeoff is made. If there isn’t enough dietary energy to support reproduction, what resources are available are devoted to maintenance—so the organism can live to reproduce another day.
It is a bit like K-selection taken to an extreme where no babies are produced at all—and all resources get invested in personal survival.
I’d be surprised if there’s any correlation. At least as a matter of anecdote I haven’t noticed any such correlation. IIRC from Eliezer’s descriptions the groups of people when he went to a cryonics meeting for young people resembled close to a representative sample of the population.
Also 25% of the people there were, iirc, children of cronicysts. That number goes up when you count parents. And we’re talking about an age group and demographic that isn’t having a lot of kids anyway.
Well, it has now become abundantly clear that the major departure from canon is going to be in attitude toward death. Ravenclaw rationality in place of Griffindor bravery is only one aspect of the central thematic difference.
I just happened upon a link from Robin’s “Overcoming Bias” blog to this article asking “Do protagonists of great novels have children?”. It occurs to me to ask whether anti-death activists have children. Is it the case that the kinds of people who sign up for cryonics don’t tend to want children? Does having a child change your outlook so that you can contemplate your own death with greater equanimity? Or am I completely delusional in thinking that there might be some correlation?
The technical term for “anti-death enthusiasts” is Methusalites.
Sex and death. It reminds me of the maintenance/reproduction axis.
Transforming reproductive resources into maintenance resources is widely thought to be responsible for the life-extending effects of calorie restriction.
You mean r selection vs K selection?
That wasn’t what I had in mind, but you are right: natural selection does tend to play off one against the other. And a member of H.sap. does sometime find verself in one situation or the other, so it is natural that our psyche’s would be comfortable with either approach, depending on circumstances.
The r/K thing is a teensy bit different. That is more to do with offspring quality—with many vs few offspring.
The idea (from dietary energy restriction) is that organisms face resource-investment tradeoffs between self-maintenance and reproduction—and that circumstances and diet can affect where that tradeoff is made. If there isn’t enough dietary energy to support reproduction, what resources are available are devoted to maintenance—so the organism can live to reproduce another day.
It is a bit like K-selection taken to an extreme where no babies are produced at all—and all resources get invested in personal survival.
I have a page all about this general topic: http://cr.timtyler.org/why/
I’d be surprised if there’s any correlation. At least as a matter of anecdote I haven’t noticed any such correlation. IIRC from Eliezer’s descriptions the groups of people when he went to a cryonics meeting for young people resembled close to a representative sample of the population.
Also 25% of the people there were, iirc, children of cronicysts. That number goes up when you count parents. And we’re talking about an age group and demographic that isn’t having a lot of kids anyway.
Eh? No, there were just a few kids, like 2 or 3.