Me too.
JEB_4_PREZ_2016
Honestly, do people in the West really think Arabs actually believe 100% of the nonsense they spout?
Yes. Maybe not 100%, but 75-95%.
Significant lifespan extension would change all of our cultural norms so much that it isn’t realistic to expect non-nerds to begin to wrap their heads around it in any meaningful way. And they sure as hell can’t be expected to change their minds about any of their core beliefs/values, let alone the fact that they don’t want to live “forever.”
If you asked me whether I’d like to live another thousand years (assuming no physical or mental degradation), I’d ask >myself “Why would I want to live 1,000 years?” and, failing to find an answer, decline.
Isn’t the obvious answer, “because, assuming your life isn’t unbearably bad, living the next 1,000 years has higher expected utility than not living the next 1,000 years?”
Responses like yours confuse me because they seem to confidently imply that the future will be incredibly boring or something. It’s possible, but the opposite could also be true. And even if it was unexpectedly bad, you’d still likely be able to opt out at any time.
Makes sense. Thanks for the reply.
If you enter into a short sale at time 0 and cover at time T, you get paid interest on your collateral or margin requirement by the lender of the asset. This is called the short rebate or (in the bond market) the repo rate. As the short seller, you’ll be required to pay the time T asset price along with lease rate, which is based on the dividends or bond coupons the asset pays out from 0 to T.
So, if no dividends/coupons are paid out, it’s theoretically possible for you to profit from selling short despite no change in the underlying asset price.
The question is, how much of this sentiment among the elderly is based on it being improbable that there will be affordable replacement organs or other “anti-aging” technologies in their lifetimes?
Some of us 20-somethings are trying to decide whether to (A) go into YOLO mode or (B) sacrifice utility for the next 60 years in order to maximize expected utility for the next 1,000.
If a dude’s ordering half a dozen hookers to his room, he doesn’t mind publicity for it.
I’ve always thought it was interesting to think what you would actually do with eternity… You could have kids...like 1,000 >kids. And fall in love every week. And win Nobel Prizes in everything. And travel to the edge of the Universe. Or create >your own Universe and be the God of it. Etc. Etc. There might be thousands of years of novelty in that. Maybe millions. >But the returns are diminishing. Just think of all the amazing stuff we completely ignore and are bored with already.
I understand that boredom is an issue for many people, but I never really get bored so it’s difficult for me to relate. 1,000 years of various things like the ones you mention seems like it would be a lot of fun to me.
“I would generalize the question, because the generalization applies broadly—whatever we profess to value, whatever we believe we value, why aren’t we expending more time and energy actually creating that value?”
Well, you value whatever you’re doing instead of going to the gym more than you value saving the world is what I was getting at. People value their own expected utility more than they value societal expected utility, even if most individuals in society would be better off if everyone somehow valued societal expected utility. Seems reasonably likely to me anyways.
Perhaps I misunderstood you; now it seems like you were saying “why do we hyperbolic discount?” or something to that effect.
Wireheading seems like a perfectly reasonable answer to me.
I think my “no free will believing self” causes me to model my future self more pessimistically, albeit more accurately, than my “free will believing self” used to.
More specifically, I now pretty much by default see my future self as destined to fail at achieving my current goals due to hyperbolic discounting and, among other things, unexpectedly low willpower striking at random times and lasting for random periods. So, my focus is mainly on continual massive upfront investment during the good times (the rare days when I’ve got an abundance of willpower) in order to mitigate these willpower failure risks and keep my productivity much more stable and higher in the long-run.
This probably isn’t necessary for most people, but I suspect it is a good tactic for those who, like me, are extremely volatile in terms of day-to-day willpower stores and who fail miserably at achieving their goals if they try to just “power through” at all times and ‘believe in the belief’ of free will.
But on a baseline day I consume between 1 and 1.5 gallons of water alone, not counting any water in the food I eat, or any other beverages such as almond milk.
That’s an absurd amount of water (not from food) to be consuming every day.
Also worth noting: LWers should be extracting more utility from their money than non-LWers.
And I still don’t understand why would I want to become an ideal utility maximizer.
If you could flip a switch right now that makes you an ideal utility maximizer, you wouldn’t do it?
where are the stupids? Half of the population is below the median intelligence, where are they? Where do they work? What kind of jobs do they take?
Clearly you’ve never worked at a big corporation.
I agree with the first sentence. “Akrasia” is just the brain being [quite reasonably] unsure whether its long-term goals are really worth the effort.
my utility function tells me to
God bless this post and God bless Aubrey de Grey.