A nice website, but of course I am looking at it from a position of a LW fan; I don’t know how it will seem to other people.
One part I didn’t like was the rationalization video about “why death isn’t so bad”. (Spoilers: because if you know you will die, it motivates you to do important things faster.)
To illustrate why it is bad, imagine the reversal: if you would get immortality, would you rather trade it for mortality (defined as: you will die in a random moment during the following 100 years) as a cool way of Getting Things Done? I would think such decision is quite stupid for several reasons. First, the random moment may happen even today; I don’t see how that helps you accomplish plans that take more than one day. Second, plans that require at least several decades of work become unlikely even if you work hard. Third, it limits the total number of plans you can accomplish.
Generally, the whole reasoning about the benefits of death is motivated thinking. We already know the bottom line (almost certainly we are going to die, probably quite soon); and the real reason is that our bodies are fragile, and it is extremely difficult to coordinate humanity on fixing this problem (all the necessary medical and technological research, plus the necessary economical and political background). That’s it. It would be too much of a coincidence if this situation would also be somehow optimal.
(However, optimizing the website for me could make it less attractive to an average reader.)
EDIT: The quotations from “The Last Christmas” should be formatted differently than the surrounding text. For example use dark grey font, and a vertical line on the left (something like “font-color: #333; border-left: 2px solid #333;”). Don’t separate different quotes by bullets, but enclose them in different “div” tags (with the vertical line it should be visible where the next “div” starts).
On the “Arguments” page, the different arguments should be probably formatted by headings (“h2″), not bullet points. I think in general that the bullet points look ugly, unless used for a list of short items.
Yes, I considered adding exactly that kind of status quo bias rebuttal to the note that some atheists argue that death isn’t so bad.
But I didn’t want to make it TOO LW-ey, and I’m hoping that by including that view, along with the views of the Methuselah people, and the cryonics people, that people would be able to take them all seriously without feeling like I was biased in my presentation
I’m open to adjusting that strategy, but that was my thinking behind it. Not to appear like an arguer, merely an unbiased presenter of information, who apparently took aging research and cryonics seriosuly enough to mention.
Thanks for the editing suggestions, I think you’re right. I’ll keep you in mind for other formatting points, if you don’t mind
A nice website, but of course I am looking at it from a position of a LW fan; I don’t know how it will seem to other people.
One part I didn’t like was the rationalization video about “why death isn’t so bad”. (Spoilers: because if you know you will die, it motivates you to do important things faster.)
To illustrate why it is bad, imagine the reversal: if you would get immortality, would you rather trade it for mortality (defined as: you will die in a random moment during the following 100 years) as a cool way of Getting Things Done? I would think such decision is quite stupid for several reasons. First, the random moment may happen even today; I don’t see how that helps you accomplish plans that take more than one day. Second, plans that require at least several decades of work become unlikely even if you work hard. Third, it limits the total number of plans you can accomplish.
Generally, the whole reasoning about the benefits of death is motivated thinking. We already know the bottom line (almost certainly we are going to die, probably quite soon); and the real reason is that our bodies are fragile, and it is extremely difficult to coordinate humanity on fixing this problem (all the necessary medical and technological research, plus the necessary economical and political background). That’s it. It would be too much of a coincidence if this situation would also be somehow optimal.
(However, optimizing the website for me could make it less attractive to an average reader.)
EDIT: The quotations from “The Last Christmas” should be formatted differently than the surrounding text. For example use dark grey font, and a vertical line on the left (something like “font-color: #333; border-left: 2px solid #333;”). Don’t separate different quotes by bullets, but enclose them in different “div” tags (with the vertical line it should be visible where the next “div” starts).
On the “Arguments” page, the different arguments should be probably formatted by headings (“h2″), not bullet points. I think in general that the bullet points look ugly, unless used for a list of short items.
Yes, I considered adding exactly that kind of status quo bias rebuttal to the note that some atheists argue that death isn’t so bad.
But I didn’t want to make it TOO LW-ey, and I’m hoping that by including that view, along with the views of the Methuselah people, and the cryonics people, that people would be able to take them all seriously without feeling like I was biased in my presentation
I’m open to adjusting that strategy, but that was my thinking behind it. Not to appear like an arguer, merely an unbiased presenter of information, who apparently took aging research and cryonics seriosuly enough to mention.
Thanks for the editing suggestions, I think you’re right. I’ll keep you in mind for other formatting points, if you don’t mind