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But it is a gigantic nuclear furnace, where hydrogen is built into helium.
Yes, but you are one of the LW people.
I’m kind of the opposite. My ‘gut’ feelings tend to rate most things as being dangerous, and I rely on my awareness of actual risk to be able to do pretty much anything.
I don’t think I obsess over risk either—but that’s maybe because I have been doing this all my life :-). I also don’t think my life has not been worth worth living—quite the opposite, or I wouldn’t have signed up for Cryonics!
Surely you already take into account how dangerous various activities are before deciding to do them?
Everyone has different thresholds for how much risk they are willing to take. Anyone that does not take risk into account at all will die very rapidly.
I haven’t significantly changed my willingness to take risks, but then again I have always been very risk averse.
I would never ride a motorbike or go mountaineering etc. I eat well, don’t smoke, try to avoid stress and exercise regularly.
I did all these things even before I took cryonics seriously . This is because it was obvious that being alive is better than being dead, and these things seemed like obvious ways in which to preserve my life as long as possible.
If I found out tomorrow that cryonics was proven to NOT work, I’d still continue crossing the road very carefully.
If you were hit by a car tomorrow, would you be lying there thinking, ‘well, I’ve had a good life, and being dead’s not so bad, so I’ll call the funeral service’ or would you be calling an ambulance?
Ambulances are expensive, and doctors are not guaranteed to be able to fix you, and there is chance you might be in for some suffering, and you may be out of society for a while until you recover—but you call them anyway. You do this because you know that being alive is better than being dead.
Cryonics is just taking this one step further., and booking your ambulance ahead of time.
PM sent with details.
As a parent you make a great many decisions for your children that effect their lives in ways great and small. This is not simply your right, but your duty. Cryonics is just one of the many choices you will have to make.
Not pushing your parents towards it is another issue, but have you even discussed the possibility of it with them? My parents were surprisingly positive of the idea when I discussed it with them, and are now actively researching it. Previously, they were not aware that it was even a serious option.
I find it rather odd that no one has answered the original question.
I’m signed up, and I’ll be your friend.
I have two kids. If left to their own devices, they would eat the tastiest things on their plate, then stop (then complain about being hungry an hour later). They would never eat anything remotely healthy, and subsist entirely on chocolate if given the choice.
Since we have evolved to value fat and sugar as being the tastiest substances, children do have to be taught/persuaded to eat healthy food.
They also do need to be told when to go to bed. The times at which we have tried to let them set their own bed times have resulted in them trying to stay awake as long as they possibly can, until they fall asleep in the middle of whatever they were doing. They almost never voluntarily go to bed, no matter how obviously tired they are.
Well, the future will certainly be full of mostly strangers. If you can’t convince any of your current friends/family to sign up, you might be better of making friends with those that have already signed up. There are bound to some you would get along with (I’ve read OOTS since it started :-) )
If I ever have any success in convincing anyone else to sign up for cryonics, I’ll let you know how I did it (in the unlikely event that this will help!).
Did you become vegetarian, despite the fact that you couldn’t persuade anyone else? Did your decision at least make some people at least consider the option seriously?
Do it anyway. Lead by example. Over time, you might find they become more used to the idea, particularly if they have someone who can help them with the paperwork and organisational side of things. If you can help them financially, so much the better.
If you are successfully revived, you will have plenty of time to make new friends, and start a new family. I’m not meaning to sound callous, but its not unheard of for people to lose their families and eventually recover. I’m doing everything I can to persuade my family to sign up, but its up to them to make the final decision.
I’d give my life to save my family, but I wouldn’t kill myself if I found myself alone.
I work out regularly, eat healthy, and I am signed up for Cryonics. One data point for you :-)
I don’t take the test. There are likely to be a LOT of rare diseases with similar cost/benefits, possibly enough so that you could spend every waking moment being tested for something.
I don’t consider this decision to be equivalent to my ‘inflicting’ death on those that happen to get the disease(s).
A bird is a warm-blooded organism with circulatory lungs.” How close did I come?
So if I removed the lungs of chicken, you would no longer consider it a bird? Or if I surgically modified some other creature (e.g. a pig) to have circulatory lungs, you would consider this to be a bird?
This kind of argument is why it is pretty difficult to come up with a comprehensive set of features for a broad category like ‘bird’. Often the best you can do is produce a set of examples demonstrating the category. Humans are pretty good at such pattern recognition from a set of data.
Like a lot of things, it is hard to define, but you know it when you see it :-)
I thought it was hopeless before I discovered Evo Psych. Now it’s just very difficult.
Quickly debiasing the human race seems a bit optimistic :-) Knowing Evo Psych at least makes it possible to make better predictions, and take more effective action. How can this be a bad thing?
You think that there are people who read evolutionary psychology and were pleasantly surprised?
I was VERY pleasantly surprised. Suddenly an enormous set of previously baffling data (i.e. the behaviour of most of humanity) began to make sense :-)
It’s hard to fix the root cause of a problem without understanding it.
I donated $50 this time.