The tl;dr is that my System I currently doesn’t care much if I’m signed up for cryonics or not, while it cares a great deal about being seen as weird. To System II it’s clear that signing up for cryonics would be more consistent, but probably also more selfish (I’d estimate a double-digit percentage of the money I don’t spend on cryonics will go to charity). So I could override my intuitive preference, but what I’d accomplish by doing so is higher utility for myself and lower utility globally, and why would I put in effort to do that?
Strongly disagree. The more people who sign up for cryonics the less weird it becomes, so your joining Alcor would have a positive externality. Two enormous problems facing mankind are death and short-term thinking. Widespread cryonics membership would mitigate both.
I wrote http://lesswrong.com/lw/jx6/on_irrational_theory_of_identity/ a while ago to explain more-or-less why I’m not signed up and hopefully draw some counterarguments, but the latter didn’t really materialize.
The tl;dr is that my System I currently doesn’t care much if I’m signed up for cryonics or not, while it cares a great deal about being seen as weird. To System II it’s clear that signing up for cryonics would be more consistent, but probably also more selfish (I’d estimate a double-digit percentage of the money I don’t spend on cryonics will go to charity). So I could override my intuitive preference, but what I’d accomplish by doing so is higher utility for myself and lower utility globally, and why would I put in effort to do that?
Strongly disagree. The more people who sign up for cryonics the less weird it becomes, so your joining Alcor would have a positive externality. Two enormous problems facing mankind are death and short-term thinking. Widespread cryonics membership would mitigate both.