Survey of older folks as data about one’s future values and preferences?
One thing that struck me in the 2011 survey was that 90% of LW respondents were under age 38. I’m 57 myself. It seems that often rationality in planning our lives depends on estimates of what values and utility functions we will hold in the future. Has anyone looked systematically at what projected older versions of themselves would think, based on what relevant groups of existing older folks think?
“You’ll understand when you’re older” is an annoying form of argument. Arguably there’s some grain of truth there when a 7-year-old tells you that sex is disgusting and he or she will never ever think it’s anything but incredibly gross. But you could explain hormonal changes that as a matter of empirical fact change opinions on that subject in the vast majority of cases. I can’t think of anything that dramatic that distinguishes 60-year-olds or 80-year-olds from 20-year-olds.
My dim recollection of studies is that on the whole as people age they tend to be less idealistic, more resigned to society the way it is rather than how it might be, and more constrained by realities of politics and economics (for starters).
I don’t presume to offer anything in this regard based on my age, and in any case I’m only a single person (a nihilist when pressed, but one who finds himself happier pretending not to be and working sporadically for rationality, truth, justice, love, and all that good stuff).
When I read of cryonics, what comes to my mind is the escalating costs of health care and (as I see it) the need to curb the development of expensive life-extending medical procedures. Cryonics sounds instead like an extremely expensive procedure. Maybe no one is suggesting it be covered by health insurance, and it’s just an option that some people pay out of pocket for. Even so, the “health care is a right, not a privilege” sentiment will mean that if it was shown to work, everyone would want it, and (in my estimation) society would go completely haywire in an unpleasant way.
Now, the substance of the above has probably been discussed elsewhere at length; I raise it is an example because when I was 21 I would have thought of it very differently than I do now.
I’ve looked because it’s an interesting modesty argument: if older people reliably are more conservative and have more information, on what grounds do you not immediately become conservative yourself? (And variations thereof.)
There’s an obvious confound: the aging itself induces negative changes. ‘resigned’ can just be a synonym for ‘tired’ or ‘lacking in energy’. Aging also introduces many other negatives—your intelligence takes massive hits: http://www.gwern.net/DNB%20FAQ#aging I’m 24, so compared to my 60 year old, I’m something like 1.5-2 standard deviations smarter (disclaimers: average, z-scores over general population, I hope to do better, etc.).
My IQ is somewhere in the 130s, and a standard deviation is usually something like 12-15 points, so taking advice from my future self would be like taking advice from a normal 100 IQ person now! I don’t pay terribly much attention to what such people say… I’d still pay a lot of attention to any message from the future because my future dim elderly self has all the fruits of my higher IQ periods to draw on, but this observation is enough to largely eliminate the interest of contemporary averages.
Also interesting is politics; here the confound is simply that the 19th-20th centuries have seen widespread partisan shifts in particular directions, which means age will correlate strongly with politics unless people are completely spineless. Here the evidence favors me not shifting my liberal libertarian beliefs, because that’s the tendency of old people in general—to shift to be more liberal than their cohort began as: http://www.gwern.net/DNB%20FAQ#fn85
(This could just reflect pressure to conform by all the younger cohorts—but if you’re willing to make excuses like that, the majoritarian/modesty argument goes right out the window in general!)
My suggestion wasn’t that older people would be smarter or think more clearly, or even have access to some fount of wisdom that the young don’t have. It was that their values and preferences change. To take a made-up example (though more plausible than some I could think of), suppose that 95% of 60-year-olds say that they seriously regret having had any body piercings. If you at 25 are considering a body piercing, you might do your utility calculation figuring your enjoyment of it now on the plus side, and then subtracting your expected displeasure with it as you get older. This could conceivably come in to play on such questions as whether to spend those extra 2 years finishing your Ph.D. too.
Suppose 60% of practicing lawyers are miserable (because most practice of law is miserable). Bob the idealist is considering law school and expects that he will be happy practicing law. Then he learns the unhappiness rate and adjusts his expectation downward.
Is it more clear to say that Bob learned from an older cohort, or simply that Bob learned more about what the practice of law is like?
(Example changed because the piercing example equivocates possible mistakes by 16-year-olds and 25-year-olds in the 95% figure)
You can distinguish the two. Older folks can learn from younger ones based on specific experience. Consider: Bob might be considering law school as a career change at 40 and learn from a 30-year-old who started the practice of law at 25 that it was not fun.
You can certainly imagine that age itself, or things that strongly correlate with age, could bring a different perspective. Another trivial sort of example: you decide at 50 that you want to buy a home where you’ll never have to move again, and you are considering a condo that’s on the 4th floor with no elevator. The wisdom of 80-year-olds might say that’s unwise.
The point, of course, is to investigate to find less obvious examples—if any.
For some young people, there might be some discomfort in admitting this as a relevant source of data about how to live life.
The example I’ve read about of whether to finish your Ph.D. could even be relevant here. If someone did a survey showing that 75% of old folks who dropped out of Ph.D. programs wished they’d finished them, would that be relevant? It certainly wouldn’t decide the issue, but I think it would be a factor. And you’d have to factor in or out various cognitive biases.
(I was in exactly that position myself, and decided to finish the Ph.D. It made sense in my case because I didn’t have a burning passion to get on the next thing in life (nor did I know what that would be). But I was correct that I would never directly need it.).
You meant “equates” instead of “equivocates”? Even with that change I’m not sure quite what you mean. Maybe not that important.
The trouble with deciding whether to finish a Ph.D. is that the world changes. The value of a Ph.D. might be a good bit higher or lower in 50 years.
I definitely endorse this. It just wasn’t a problem for me and I was generalizing from one example when I shouldn’t.
In terms of how likely a decision is to be regretted, there’s an obvious difference between decisions by a 16 year old and decisions by a 25 year old. Learning that 95% of 60-year-olds regret body piercing doesn’t tell us about the difference we care about (decisions by the 25-year-old) because the majority of piercing decisions are made by those (teenagers) we expect would regret just about any major decision. The argument is weaker because the statistic doesn’t show what you assert it shows.
I strongly suspect that this effect utterly swamps any other effect. Although I’m less confident of this assertion than I was before looking at the study you cited.
Even if attitudes move towards mainstream among older cohorts faster than among younger cohorts, I get the impression that the mainstream is moving faster than the attitude change. A difference between first and second derivatives of attitude? Or am I still relying on stereotype?
Yes. The old people are still conservative-er, although they’ve moved a lot towards the younger cohorts’ attitudes.
Or positions can shift, on the scale of decades, due to arguments that actually make sense, even in normal people.
Radical notion, I know.
In this context, I always think of this quote, and test any “mature wisdom” that i hear (or find myself about to say) against it. (I’m almost the same age as Bart119.)
Upvoted for two reasons: links to interesting data sets, and discussing the stated topic rather than the ending example.
Or willing to update?
One man’s update is another man’s groupthink. Regardless, unless people are completely malleable in their opinions, age will correlate with politics.
Back in 2010 I was looking for data about how my “life in general” was likely to go using base rates from other people. The post was Seeking book about baseline life planning and expectations. Not precisely on target, but related.
For years before I had a crazy plan to use a system of digital watches, notes with time stamps, and a Polaroid camera if I ever discover a tattoo on my body indicating I have anterograde amnesia… but senile dementia seems like a much less crazy thing to make plans for because it is predicted to afflict a relatively large percent of the population in the future.
Based on thoughts and conversations around this topic in 2010/2011, it occurred to me that it might be valuable to lay some memories down in my relative youth to help in my declining years. From people who have experience with the elderly in their declining years, I heard that a major problem is that old people can become bitter and untrusting of caregivers and therefore become harder to care for than otherwise. Also they tend to feel like they aren’t in the right place and wander off. So my tentative conclusion is that if and when I “practice having a memory disorder” in advance, I should actively trust seeming strangers who help me, and try not to move around too much if my surroundings aren’t recognizable. But should also probably disable or massively filter my cell phone and email and whatnot, because I’ll probably be easy to scam.
Somehow, this seems all like a failure mode I should plan to avoid if I can, rather than updating in that direction now.
I wonder how much mistrust of caregivers is the result of actual bad experiences. In that case, the important thing would be figuring out procedures to improve the odds of only having good caregivers.
Second thought: avoiding bad caregivers is very important in itself.
Cryonics as it is right now is expensive, but not ridiculously so ($28,000 at CI ). If everyone was cryo-persevered at death the cost per person would drop dramatically. Meanwhile medical costs during the last year of life are already high: “Studies have shown that the 5% of Medicare patients who die each year account for 30% of Medicare’s costs, with 78% of last-year-of-life expenses occurring in the month before death.” here.
Dying costs, on average, $10k-$35k depending on where you live your last few months.
These costs are more likely to increase than to decrease. And they buy very few QALY (or even just plain non-adjusted years). Calling it quits a few months early and getting cryo-preserved could very well be a net savings once it’s a widely available option. And, if it ends up working, would have a much greater return in QALY.
Mike Darwin, FWIW, disagrees strongly. You might be able to get economies of scale for the storage part, but that was never a significant chunk of the cost. And formalizing procedures do not necessarily drive net prices down, as the massive decades-long increases in medical costs in the US and worldwide show...
I realize that there are links for this everywhere in various cryonics discussions, but this seems like a post ripe for having a link or a quote in it.
I upvoted anyway since I’m sure it would be easy for me to find such a link too.
...Actually, why don’t I go ahead and do that.
...Because searching less wrong gives me long articles whose references I would need to comb and googling “mike darwin increasing cost cryonics” doesn’t give me anything insightful without some more in depth searches which someone (in fact almost certain gwern) has already done and could do more easily than I.
Not from searching, just from reading Chronopause mostly. I’m not sure there’s any one place for it—doing a site search for ‘economies of scale’ turns up http://chronopause.com/index.php/2011/02/26/response-to-maxim%E2%80%99s-rant-about-automation-in-cardiopulmonary-bypass/
Which seems shorter and more informal than I remember his assessment being.
Once it’s shown conclusively to work no one will want it anymore :)
My impression is that cryonics advocates actually get pretty excited thinking about universal cryonics. See http://lesswrong.com/lw/2fd/a_proposal_for_a_cryogenic_grave_for_cryonics/
I don’t get the joke or reference, and it sounds intriguing. Does it mean that if people can be revived successfully into indefinite lifespans, then there would be no need to freeze people going forward?
My big problem with indefinite lifespans is that I think we’re already a warped society by having so many old people (meaning, say older than me at 57 :-)). I suppose if we could first keep everyone from aging and retaining their 25-year-old physiques and energy and mental status, that would address that to some extent. But if we get a world full of reasonably spry 80-year-olds, it doesn’t appeal to me. In my book of values, all else being equal, society is supposed to be half children.
Thought experiment: Suppose we suddenly developed the technology to revive everyone who has ever lived (they left some sort of holographic signal that Google finds it can read :-)). Would we want to? Historians would be overjoyed to revive selected ones because they would help us understand the past. But as a matter of restoring them for their own sake?
As a newcomer I’m sure these have been discussed over and over, and pointers to the relevant discussions are welcome in place of rehashing old arguments.
Yes. It is not a hard question. As a matter of funding priorities, it would come after being able to reliably feed (and otherwise care for) everyone currently living, but the ultimate answer is: yes, revive them if we can.
The essay you link is pretty unconvincing to me. But even if I grant what Eliezer says there, I’m not sure how it applies to Bart’s thought experiment. I can see the argument that the indefinite extension of human lifespans is just a natural extension of uncontroversial humanism (even though I disagree with the argument). We’d all agree that it would be a good thing to extend lifespans by 10 years, so why not 500 or a a million? A good ethical theory shouldn’t build in arbitrary thresholds.
I don’t see the analogous argument for Bart’s thought experiment. Why is reviving people who are already dead (many of whom have been dead for long enough that they do not have any living acquaintances who mourn their passing) a natural extension of humanism? Could you explain why you think Eliezer’s essay is relevant to Bart’s question?
If you value life over death, then choosing to leave people dead when you could restore their life seems like an exception to me.
If we revive only those who are mourned by the currently living, those newly currently living people we just revived will mourn others. After some amount of iterations, we will have revived everybody.
I think it is a hard question. The foundations of our societies would all be shaken to the core by the sudden resuscitation that doubles the earth population (even assuming as we must that we can feed them all). I don’t think “save or prolong any life of reasonable quality” scales up past a certain point. At a certain point the psychological quality of life of living individuals that comes from living in a society with a certain structure and values may trump the right of individuals who thought they were dead to live once more. (Humor: If you’ve been widowed three times, do you really want 3 formerly late husbands showing up at your doorstep? :-))
This is vague. Can you pinpoint exactly why you think this would damage people’s psychological quality of life?
Yes, it was vague. I’ll try to be more precise—as much as I can.
Suppose we do a pilot experiment in a small region on the Tigris and Euphrates where people have been living in high population densities for a long time. We have large numbers of people coming back from the dead, perhaps 10 times the current population? Perhaps with infant mortality we have 5 times as many children as adults—lots of infants and young children.
But the UN is ready, prepared in advance. There is land for everyone. We figure at least that the dead have lost the right to their property, so we put them all up in modular housing we make outside the present city.
But there are so many formerly dead, from older linguistic and cultural and religious groups, that they form their own political parties and take over the government.
I could go on, but it’s apparent to me that the social order is completely messed up. Now suppose I’m an Egyptian, and it comes to a vote: Do we want to implement this program in Egypt? Assuming that the as-yet-unresurrected dead don’t get a vote, I can see the proposal being voted down overwhelmingly.
My moral intuition is that the Egyptians have no moral obligation to resurrect their ancestors. They have a right to continue their ways of existence.
Of course, this is an extreme thought experiment, and arguing about details won’t be productive.
I have a similar intuition about, say unrestricted immigration. If someone said that utility would be maximized if anyone could move anywhere on earth they wanted, I have an intuition that I as an American have a right to resist that. The status quo has some weight.
Applying rationality to problems can go too far. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a lot of very smart, very thoughtful, very knowledgeable people thought Communism was going to be a great idea. But due to a few slip-ups and miscalculations, it turned out it wasn’t—which we can see with hindsight. No, they didn’t have modern notions of rationalism, but they had the best thinking of their day.
A truism is that if the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. It’s easier to compute utility on the level of individuals. You can spin a story based on that about what society should look like, but I think you might be biased by the fact that your tool can apply. If the alternative is, “My tools don’t have anything to say on that issue because of complex interactions among people and the entire fabric of society”, then you would be biased to reject that alternative.
I know this brings up a lot of issues, some of which should be considered separately. And I am ignorant of a lot of LW work. Pointers to other work welcome.
If bringing back everyone at once is likely to be overwhelming, it would still be good to bring back, and assimilate into modern culture, a generation at a time.
So, the working assumption is that the future society with mass-resurrection magitech is still running on democracy? In that case, yeah, makes sense to hold off a bit. Say, long enough that the born-after-the-present people who retain our values outnumber the previously-dead. Still seems kinda slapdash, though.
I think your intuition is leading you astray. If we had enough resources to feed and care for everyone who ever lived, we’d be able to scale up. Colonize the solar system, or the galaxy.
And if I had three dead wives, I’d predict that I’d like them all back. I’d expect they’d get along.
I’d expect they wouldn’t. Especially if they knew each other in life. “You married HER? I always knew you two had a thing!”
I suppose that there’s pretty strong evidence that most people select for things other than friendship/compatibility when choosing life partners. That seems self-evidently stupid to me—there’s a reason why not all flings should turn into life partnerships.
If so, you’re very lucky. It’s also important to consider more usual cases.
Some people are going to be awfully bent out of shape here. Most likely better than being dead, but they’re going to have needs.
Why would there be? Once you have the technology to bring people back from the dead, why freeze and unfreeze them first?
I’m pretty uncertain about my morality, but I do think I would prefer more happy lives all else equal, even if that means lots of old folks and few young folks. Not sure I would prefer reviving the holograms to people just having kids though.
I don’t remember any discussion along quite these lines. I think you’re good.
At age 36 I already feel too old at LW meetups.
There is a moment in one’s life where their quality of life starts depending on money they make. I’m not talking about having your first job—if you live at your parents’ home, they give you food and bed, and you are free to spend your money as you wish, you are not there yet. Even if you pay all your expenses at market rate (though you probably get a huge discount), you are only halfway there if your parents provide you safety; if they would be willing to pay your checks for some period if you’d happen to lose a job etc. I am speaking about a moment where if your income disappears, your quality of life would drop dramatically. This moment is IMHO what makes the large part of the difference.
I have seen this at the university—some people went there directly from a high school; some of them failed, had a job one year, and the next year succeeded to get at the university, keeping a part-time job. Despite the same biological age, the attitude difference between these two groups was huge. The first group was always interested in talking and having fun, the second group was focused on problem solving.
Having a metaphorical sword hanging above one’s head changes things. A rather big part of my time has to be spent making money, otherwise I lose my home. I don’t have enough time for my hobbies; and even when I have the time, I often feel too tired to do anything meaningful. Because I can’t do the things I want, I care even less about other people, except for very close friends. A lot of this would probably change if I had more free time (I feel my priorities shifting on weekends and vacations), but I can’t manage to have more free time for a longer period. And I don’t have children yet, so I suppose I will have even less free time in the future.
Other part of the story is that age brings experience—this is not automatic, but if you have tried a lot of things, then you statistically have more data about things. When I speak with younger people about their idealistic ideas, seems to me that they are missing the data, and they don’t even realize they are missing something important. (If saving the world is that simple, do you think you are the first smart and altruistic person to ever think about it?) Maybe it is not about idealism, but about expecting simple solutions to complex problems. If you would measure idealism not just by words, but by long-term persistence in face of obstacles, then maybe the difference in idealism would disappear.
Datapoint: I’m 41 and don’t feel too old for meetups, though I’m usually the oldest present unless David Gerard is there.
Sounds like a good argument for assembling your own safety net (enough savings to last several years) early in life, even at the expense of the other aspects of current quality of life (living in a smaller apartment, avoiding luxury spending etc.) Dependents (spouse+children) might make this impossible though.
Our bodies need to perform different roles as we age and mature. We’d also need different sets of skills depending on our current developmental phase. It would make sense for our brains to change too, that the developmental path of our brain is planned to make it undergo changes that’d make it more adapted to the tasks it’ll have to tackle over different developmental phases.
It’d make sense for our brain to be more fine tuned for grabbing resources from family when we’re a kid, to grow as fast as possible, then better tuned to search for sexual partners once we’re getting mature, and lastly, more fine tuned to take care of our kids once we got them.
And if there’s a mechanism which makes our brain undergo developmental changes along a pre-planned path, then we might also expect that past the age at which we reproduce, there’d be less and less evolutionary pressure to shape that developmental trajectory.
I don’t think either that evolution would have much of a reason to cleanly engineer a stable end-state after which development just entirely stops, and leaves you with a well-adjusted, perfectly functional body or brain. That may not be a trivial task after all.
These speculations are interesting. I think it’s always worth wheeling evolutionary thought up to a problem to see what it says.
However, surveying real people in our real, modern-day world seems far more direct.
Evolution is constantly making trade-offs, and (last I knew) the reason our bodies fall apart was that evolution didn’t have a strong incentive to keep them going. We last as long as we do because we take care of grandkids, maybe, and Jared Diamond suggested a reason for longevity was that an old person was a storehouse of knowledge.
There could still be an evolutionary advantage in staying smart after you can reproduce if you can help your children and grandchildren survive.
It’s really too bad, because it seems that rationally one would become less risk-averse as one got older, as one had less and less to lose.
You mean rationally from an evolutionary point of view? You have less to lose from a bold decision, but perhaps you have much less to gain and that predominates. As a young guy you can take off into the wilds with a young wife and another few couples. Chances might be 90% you’ll be killed, but if you do make it to the new land, you might start a whole new population of people.
I think if you look at deciduous trees of the same species, the young trees get their leaves earlier in the spring than the mature trees. I think I’ve observed that. They’re “gambling”, because a late frost could kill them. But their chances of becoming a mature tree aren’t that great anyway, and they need to grab light before their elders shade them. The older trees can afford to be conservative.
As people in our modern society, there’s some tendency to relax as you get older. Older people encourage you to dance as if no one is watching? Not sure I believe that myself, though. :-)
″...the majority of men and women do not officially report themselves as having low levels of sexual desire until they are 75 years old.[8] Many would attribute this lull to partner familiarity, alienation, or preoccupation with other non-sexual matters such as social, relational, and health concerns.[6]” -Wikipedia
It’s expensive due to economies of scale and regulatory burdens. If it became popular much of the cost would presumably be stripped away. Vitrification and storage aren’t inherently expensive.