(personal prediction that 30minutes of exercise will increase my life expectancy by 4 years)
If you assume that you have, oh, 3 hours a day free time, living an extra 4 years means that you have an extra 1⁄2 year of free time.
As exercise is taken from your free time, this is only a good deal if 30 minutes a day for the rest of your life totals to less than 1⁄2 year. 30 minutes is 1⁄48 of a day, so 30 minutes over a year is 1⁄48 of a year. This means that if you expect to live any longer than (1/2) / (1/48) = 24 years, you should not exercise.
Of course, other factors come into play (if your life expectancy increases, your extra years may be spent retired, on the other hand, you’re more likely to be ill in those extra years, etc.)
And the less free time you have, the less exercise helps, because you gain less (each year of additional lifespan provides you with less extra free time) but you lose just as much (since your exercise comes out of your free time).
That assumes that you value time spent working or otherwise doing necessary things rather than freely chosen ones no more than time spent being dead. If your job is actually so bad that you are ambivalent between death and work, I suggest a rapid career change.
This does not require being ambivalent between death and work, but death that is only during work hours and work.
I’m pretty sure that most people, if they could fall unconscious at the start of work, wake up at the end of work, and find their work done, would take it.
If only 3 out of 24 hours of your time are better than unconsciousness in average (including weekends and holidays), and expect that to stay the case until just before you get senile, you’re doing something wrong. (There are plenty of exceptions, especially in the Third World, but few of them are hanging out on LW.)
What’s the point of earning all that money if you don’t have the time to spend it?
I’m pretty sure that most people, if they could fall unconscious at the start of work, wake up at the end of work, and find their work done, would take it.
I filled that question in my evernote “census”-tag for whenever I will do a mass survey on beliefs.
No, actually, it is. It shouldn’t matter whether the time is removed by
Dying by X length of time sooner.
Having an extra period of unconsciousness of length X stuck in the middle of the person’s life, and not dying any sooner.
Just because the person wakes up in case 2 and doesn’t wake up in case 1 doesn’t mean that the two aren’t equivalent; both involve the same duration of wakefulness, even if not the same number of wake-up moments.
If you knew precisely when you would die, and precisely how long you would be unconscious, and the date of your death was immutable except by these two options and your quality of life while aging was totally immutable, then maybe they’d be equivalent. But living your life further in the future increases the expected length of your life and quality of life, as well as getting you massive novelty benefits from living further into the future and seeing what is there.
Death is the cessation of ‘you’. All things after you die, are inaccessible to you, regardless of how much you value them. This is why death is the Minimum Fun Location. It is not sleep; sleep is not horrible, just a mildly unpleasant need. You are claiming that having to sleep twice as much across a 100-year lifespan is the same thing as dying at 50, and that’s an utterly ridiculous claim.
(if your life expectancy increases, your extra years may be spent retired, on the other hand, you’re more likely to be ill in those extra years, etc.)
I’d expect most of the life expectancy-increasing effects of exercise to also shift the age at which you’ll get ill by almost the same amount, while hardly affecting the age at which you’ll retire, so I’d guess most of the extra time would indeed be while you’re retired but still healty enough.
If you assume that you have, oh, 3 hours a day free time, living an extra 4 years means that you have an extra 1⁄2 year of free time.
As exercise is taken from your free time, this is only a good deal if 30 minutes a day for the rest of your life totals to less than 1⁄2 year. 30 minutes is 1⁄48 of a day, so 30 minutes over a year is 1⁄48 of a year. This means that if you expect to live any longer than (1/2) / (1/48) = 24 years, you should not exercise.
Of course, other factors come into play (if your life expectancy increases, your extra years may be spent retired, on the other hand, you’re more likely to be ill in those extra years, etc.)
And the less free time you have, the less exercise helps, because you gain less (each year of additional lifespan provides you with less extra free time) but you lose just as much (since your exercise comes out of your free time).
That assumes that you value time spent working or otherwise doing necessary things rather than freely chosen ones no more than time spent being dead. If your job is actually so bad that you are ambivalent between death and work, I suggest a rapid career change.
This does not require being ambivalent between death and work, but death that is only during work hours and work.
I’m pretty sure that most people, if they could fall unconscious at the start of work, wake up at the end of work, and find their work done, would take it.
If only 3 out of 24 hours of your time are better than unconsciousness in average (including weekends and holidays), and expect that to stay the case until just before you get senile, you’re doing something wrong. (There are plenty of exceptions, especially in the Third World, but few of them are hanging out on LW.)
What’s the point of earning all that money if you don’t have the time to spend it?
I filled that question in my evernote “census”-tag for whenever I will do a mass survey on beliefs.
If you wake up from it afterward, it is not death in the most important respect.
No, actually, it is. It shouldn’t matter whether the time is removed by
Dying by X length of time sooner.
Having an extra period of unconsciousness of length X stuck in the middle of the person’s life, and not dying any sooner.
Just because the person wakes up in case 2 and doesn’t wake up in case 1 doesn’t mean that the two aren’t equivalent; both involve the same duration of wakefulness, even if not the same number of wake-up moments.
If you knew precisely when you would die, and precisely how long you would be unconscious, and the date of your death was immutable except by these two options and your quality of life while aging was totally immutable, then maybe they’d be equivalent. But living your life further in the future increases the expected length of your life and quality of life, as well as getting you massive novelty benefits from living further into the future and seeing what is there.
Death is the cessation of ‘you’. All things after you die, are inaccessible to you, regardless of how much you value them. This is why death is the Minimum Fun Location. It is not sleep; sleep is not horrible, just a mildly unpleasant need. You are claiming that having to sleep twice as much across a 100-year lifespan is the same thing as dying at 50, and that’s an utterly ridiculous claim.
I’d expect most of the life expectancy-increasing effects of exercise to also shift the age at which you’ll get ill by almost the same amount, while hardly affecting the age at which you’ll retire, so I’d guess most of the extra time would indeed be while you’re retired but still healty enough.
Only if you expect to never retire.