As usual, it's mostly about framing the question. "Would you like to stay young, healthy and vigorous and live as long as you like?" is very different from "Would you like to live forever?"
My point is that a lot people really, genuinely don't want to live more than 80 years. Even ones who are already in their 70s. So asking "Would you like to stay young, healthy and vigorous and live as long as you like?" just gets the sincere, possibly correct answer that they'd like to live about 80 years. That may be what they really want.
Even ones who are already in their 70s
That's the wrong crowd, many of them are no longer young and vigorous, but full of stereotypes. You know, old dog, new tricks. Here is a better question to someone in their 20s or 30s:
People have already done this, and the answer people give is very often that, yes, they still don't want live past 80, and you've almost certainly heard people say this many times.
It's time to start entertaining the hypothesis that they're expressing their true preferences.
I think a few concepts get mixed together.
I don't want to die now. I'd quite like to live a lot longer than 70-100 years.
But I also don't want immortality, or to be more exact, enforced immortality.
Show me a fictional universe, no matter how Utopian otherwise where people are not allowed to die even if they want to and I immediately see it as a dystopia.
I don't want to live forever but the choice of death, the possibility of choosing to die, the possibility of choosing to stop being has immense value to me.
If you ask people "would you like to live forever" I think many would quite rationally say "no" since without qualifiers it's a pretty horrific concept.
If you ask people "would you like to live for 200 years", again, without qualifiers many might imagine another hundred years of growing even more frail but being kept alive by more and more tubes.
If you ask people "would you like the choice of remaining fit, youthful and healthy for a few hundred extra years with the choice of extending that later if you want to with your loved ones being offered the same option" I believe you'd get far far more people saying "hell yes".
Off...
Most people do not have open-ended interests the way LWers do.
Marvin Minsky said something similar a few years ago, to the effect that most people don't have "real goals," unlike the scientists Minsky knows who tell him that they have personal lists of problems that they would like to solve, but the problems will take longer than their current life expectancies.
Mike Darwin also mentioned this as a problem in an essay he published in Cryonics magazine back in 1984:
http://www.alcor.org/cryonics/cryonics8402.txt
Darwin thinks that the arrival of practical superlongevity will shake out a whole lot of people who can't use it constructively - they'll die any way, in other words - based on an analogy to how we still haven't adapted fully to the recent wealth revolution. He references Elvis Presley as an example of maladaptation to great wealth; but since Presley died in 1977 and most of you don't remember him, you might think of, say, Michael Jackson or those buffoonish Kardashians as more recent examples of people who have wealth that they don't know how to use well.
I don't buy any of the LessWrong-Personality-Theory stuff. People who are old and retired have accepted the inevitability of their death because doing otherwise would be very difficult emotionally. They are following ancient wisdom embodied in writings like the Serenity Prayer or the Enchiridion.
How many of these people want to die today?
Precious few I expect. Their daily rituals must still carry some intrinsic satisfaction. Perhaps they no longer hold long-term goals because they don't feel like they have enough time left to achieve them and enjoy their fruits. This does not seem unreasonable, though it may seem self-defeating from the outside.
As I've recently commented, I don't like the idea of living each day as though it might be your last, but if I were 80 years old it might make a certain kind of sense. At the very least, this late-game logic creates a sizable hurdle to getting an elderly person interested in something to the point where they become less apathetic about eventually kicking the bucket -- which is all we're really talking about here.
The way to convert deathists isn't to argue with them, but to get them interested in something. Twist them the way you're twisted.
Any suggestions on how to do this? Any examples of succeeding at it?
How much of this effect is an inherent effect of evolution + aging and how much is the effect of the surrounding social and cultural norms? Do elderly people who still have a well-established, high-status place in society and actively contribute to its well being also experience the sensation of "waiting for death?"
Upvoted because I think taking people's objections at face value is something we should be more open to. That being said, I'm a bit worried that the reason this has so many upvotes is because it tells us what we want to hear. (We're better than the common man! We have real interests and ambitions, not just staring into the water and waiting for a fish to bite!)
Not a comment on the argument in the post which seems like it could be roughly correct, but just to throw this out there:
I guess I'm even weirder than the typical LW'er.
Not only am I interested in a wide variety of subjects, I'm also married with a kid. The optimal raising of my child is just one of a wide variety of subjects I'm interested in on a deep level.
I also want to live forever.
If anti-aging technology was the medical standard, few would opt out of it. Many people would opt for voluntary suicide of some sort after 10^x years for x between roughly 2 and 4.
The claim that "people want to die" basically caches out to "if effective anti-ageing tech were available for free/cheap, then most voluntary suicides would just so happen to coincide with the present-day life expectancy of 80 years, or people would actually opt out of anti-ageing treatments entirely and decide to age".
Well, I find it extremely unlikely that...
I live in a small town full of retirees, and those few I've asked about it are waiting for death peacefully. When I ask them about their ambitions, or things they still want to accomplish, they have none.
I think this is cultural much more than it is biological.
The concept of retirement is both mostly cultural and fairly new. People retire, often at an arbitrary pension age cutoff, not so much because they can't work anymore (at the time of retirement), as because they aren't expected to; their age cohort retires together. This is also driven by capita...
As usual, Nietzsche got there first:
...The heaviest burden: What, if some day or night, a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life, as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life must return to you, all in the same succession and sequence — even this spider and this moonlight between the trees and even this moment a
But face it. You're weird. And I mean that in a bad way, evolutionarily speaking. How many of you have kids? Damn few. The LessWrong mindset is maladaptive. It leads to leaving behind fewer offspring.
It's surprisingly not weird. Birthrates in the developed world have plummeted precisely because achievements other than sex and children have become markers of status. Having a large family is no longer seen as an indicator of high status but as something that makes you a bit of a cultural oddball, and that attitude is spreading. Cultural evolution hap...
Birth control is widely available;
That doesn't explain why people choose to have small families. In the Iliad the 50 rooms filled with Priam's sons are a mark of his wealth and power, guaranteeing the success and continuity of his bloodline. They aren't an accident. In developing nations people are proud of their large families and they regard as unfortunate people who only have a few children. Birth control may enable the transition, but it doesn't explain the stark difference in attitude.
Social safety nets (and middle-class wealth) reduce the need for children as someone who feeds you in your old age;
Would you seriously argue that people choose to have children as a reasonably optimal selfish way of guaranteeing that they continue to have enough to eat once they're no longer capable of working?
If you children's chances to survive to adulthood are very high you don't need to give birth to that many;
Why not? It's certainly helps maximize my genetic fitness. In general is an animal discovers a new environment with plentiful resources and no predators it doesn't suddenly decide to have less children, since they now have a higher chance of surviving to adulthood. It certai...
Death just isn't that big a deal. The desire to live forever—even in a scenario where one could stay young and vigorous—seems very odd to me.
I grew up an Evangelical Christian. We took heaven very seriously and quite literally. Being obsessed with living forever in heaven seemed like a great idea at the time, though it may have been largely due to the fact a literal never-ending-human-oven version of hell was the only other option on the table.
When I stopped Christianing and started thinking, it took a while, but violent opposition to my death went away. O...
I think the concept of psychological neoteny is interesting (Google Bruce Charlton neoteny) in this regard.
Roughly, the idea would be that some people retain something of the plasticity and curiosity of children, whereas others don't, they mature into "proper" human beings and lose that curiosity and creativity. The former are the creative types, the latter are the average human type.
There are several layered ironies if this is a valid notion.
Anyway, for the latter type, they really do exhaust their interests in maturity, they stick to one c...
There are other ways to understand their answers.
I think you're on the right track with them being different from most of us, but I don't think you've identified many relevant differences.
Suppose that people mean what they say.
I suppose they do mean it, but how do they mean it?
Difference 1 We're much more literal and direct in our communications than most people. Do the polled think they are being asked an unliteral question? Are they choosing to respond in an unliteral fashion to what is taken as a literal question?
For example, are they taking it as...
There are all sorts of cultural reasons. It's certainly not just us who are having fewer children (I have 2, btw) - it's spread all over.
A lot of it is, raising kids well is a lot of hard work, and by the time you're done with the first batch you're wearing down, so you can't space it out. And if you didn't go the kids route up front, prioritizing anything else, then you don't even get that first batch. It doesn't need to be lambda calculus that keeps you out of the maternity ward.
Healthful longevity would go a long way to undoing that - if women in their ...
Transmission of ideas is not genetic. You don't need to have kids in order to propagate your ideas. What we need to worry about is to stay in the memetic pool. The genetic pool can go down the drain for all I care.
I'm highly skeptical that most people actually run out of stuff they take pleasure in over the course of a natural lifespan, or anticipate themselves doing so. Most people may have interests less "open ended" than are the norm here, but I haven't found that people interested in, say, football, tend to find that by their latter years they've had enough of football.
If immortality was available on asking, and some people chose to live forever to pursue their interests indefinitely, I think people who refused to follow their lead because they had simply had enough would be very much in the minority.
Interesting. In addition to that, how much of this lack of desires is sociological and related to self-perception? I mean, these elders probably perceive themselves as a periphery of society, as someone whose time has already passed, who shouldn't have any more ambitions. Will aging societies make businesses and entertainers cater more and more towards seniors (e.g. like this), thus making them feel as the central part of society that everyone else revolves around?
Slightly unrelated to the point made above, but there is one particular weird argument that always seems to come up (at least in my circle of friends and acquaintances) when talking about immortality.
I tell someone plan to live forever, and the response is "Not me! That must be terrible! Imagine being forced to watch as everybody you know dies. And what if humanity dies out? You'll be sitting on a barren world for all eternity. Imagine how bored you will get."
I call this the 'cursed with immortality' argument. It is of course utterly ridiculous, ...
Eh, I'm a lot less pessimistic about this, some of it is probably socially conditioned and can change with time. I think there's probably a difference between offering a theoretical rejuvenation pill to a healthy 65 year old retiree and offering it to a disabled, cancer-ridden 85 year old woman who is going blind from macular degeneration. I think as the pain of aging compounds with time, the rejuvenation pill looks more and more appealing. And I suspect that much of the "tired of life/ready to die" attitude old people have (to a certain extent t...
Twist them the way you're twisted.
Or rather, don't, unless you think they have so much agency that this change in temperament will improve their utility despite massively reducing their level of satisfaction.
". . .or things they still want to accomplish, they have none."
The job at that age is to use their remaining years to review their life as they have lived it, try to make sense of the many decisions they made, and come to terms with it.
I started on this project a bit late. :(
I think you need to be careful with the word "want". It's not terribly useful to think of desire as separate from choice. Instead, think of "of the choices X, Y, and Z, which do you choose".
Frames this way, retiree behavior makes sense. The choice they're making isn't "death VS eternal youth", the choice they're making is "spend my remaining time worried and unhappy VS spend my remaining time calm and relaxed". They may or may not consider the choice of "increase my remaining time a little bit by changing...
How many of you have kids? Damn few. The LessWrong mindset is maladaptive. It leads to leaving behind fewer offspring. A well-adapted human cares above all about sex, love, family, and friends, and isn't distracted from those things by an ADD-ish fascination with type theory. That's why they probably have more sex, love, and friends than you do.
The survey seems to confirm this - at least the part regarding about children, less so about relationships.
Data point: I have four children and I do have open-ended interests but it depends on the balance. Ch...
Honestly, I don't even find the prospect of living another decade all that exciting. If it's anything like its predecessor, my expectations are low. If I were to suddenly die in that time I wouldn't think it a big loss (albeit my family might not like it so much), but if I'm alive I'll probably manage to find some way to pass the time.
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. If I were...
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."
Related:
Robin Hanson's Life's Laminar Endgame - it could happen to you too: older people find themselves in another environment - and you are primed for that
George E. Vaillant's Aging Well - a successful life involves passing on your experience to the next generation
Don't think its a great example of "people wanting to die" as others have said below and gone into detail. I'm choosing to add to the conversation because I think there is a great takeaway from this and that is people value life for different reasons. They can crudely be defined as "simple-minded" or more appropriately "traditional" and represent a very large percent of the population. Those of you who grew up in rural areas like myself are likely very familiar with the archetype described by the OP. I think a great question f...
EDIT: I accidently deleted me entire comment here, intending to just add in this additional edit:
I’ve tried Zoloft (sertraline) and it wasn’t very good, and my 23andme profile tells me that some other drugs won’t be very great for me:
”…amitriptyline (Elavil), citalopram (Celexa), paroxetine (Paxil), and venlafaxine (Effexor). That makes those antidepressants 7 times less effective….”
”…The antidepressant drugs that are known to be substrates include citalopram, paroxetine, amitriptyline, and venlafaxine.”
On the other hand, it recommends that citalopram:...
The long-term solution: Sexbots. Of course, sexbots are the cause of, or solution to most long-term problems.
I disagree with the idea that the desire to die is normal for humans.
The vast majority of humanity, spanning hunter-gatherers to information economy techies, believe in some form of consciousness which continues after the physical body as passed away. They believe this to the point that, if you disabuse them of this notion, they'll enter a spiritual crisis and begin to feel that life is meaningless. The older people get, the more enthusiastically they believe this.
If the collective fantasy common to our entire species doesn't reflect an extremely powerfu...
Over and over again, someone says that living for a very long time would be a bad thing, and then some futurist tries to persuade them that their reasoning is faulty, telling them that they think that way now, but they'll change their minds when they're older.
The thing is, I don't see that happening. I live in a small town full of retirees, and those few I've asked about it are waiting for death peacefully. When I ask them about their ambitions, or things they still want to accomplish, they have none.
Suppose that people mean what they say. Why do they want to die?
The reason is obvious if you just watch them for a few years. They have nothing to live for. They have a great deal of free time, but nothing they really want to do with it. They like visiting friends and relatives, but only so often. The women knit. The men do yardwork. They both work in their gardens and watch a lot of TV. This observational sample is much larger than the few people I've asked.
You folks on LessWrong have lots of interests. You want to understand math, write stories, create start-ups, optimize your lives.
But face it. You're weird. And I mean that in a bad way, evolutionarily speaking. How many of you have kids?
Damn few. The LessWrong mindset is maladaptive. It leads to leaving behind fewer offspring. A well-adapted human cares above all about sex, love, family, and friends, and isn't distracted from those things by an ADD-ish fascination with type theory. That's why they probably have more sex, love, and friends than you do.
Most people do not have open-ended interests the way LWers do. If they have a hobby, it's something repetitive like fly-fishing or needlepoint that doesn't provide an endless frontier for discovery. They marry, they have kids, the kids grow up, they have grandkids, and they're done. If you ask them what the best thing in their life was, they'll say it was having kids. If you ask if they'd do it again, they'll laugh and say absolutely not.
We could get into a long argument over the evolution of aging, and whether people would remain eager to have kids if they remained physically young. Maybe some would. Some would not, though. Many young parents are looking forward to the day their kids leave.
A lot of interests in life are passing. You fall in love with a hobby, you learn it, you do it for a few years, then you get tired of it. The things that were fascinating when you were six hold no magic for you now. Pick up a toy soldier and try to play with it. You can't. Skateboarding seems awesome for about five years, and then everyone except Tony Hawk gets tired of it.
Having kids might be like that for some people. Thing is, it's literally the only thing humans have evolved to be interested in. Once you're tired of that, you're done. If some of you want to keep going, that's an accidental by-product of evolution. And there was no evolutionary pressure to exempt it from the common waning of interest with long exposure.
The way to convert deathists isn't to argue with them, but to get them interested in something. Twist them the way you're twisted.