Leftwingers and rightwingers have psychologies that are profoundly different in some ways. One way we might expect they’re different is in relation to the fear of death. A variety of literature on Terror Management purports to show either that fear of death drives us toward the political right or that fear of death polarises us towards more extreme forms of our current beliefs. Since we will all die, politics and other big cultural projects become strategies for managing the fear of death. For those especially prone to these fears, death sculpts what they believe.
"The flattering explanation is that libertarians are more open to new things. The unflattering explanation is that libertarians tend to be at the center of their mental universes in a way that makes them extra eager to escape death"
The point on the Libertarian/Marxist distinction is interesting.
I agree that it makes sense that Libertarians are more interested in cryonics - the idea of preventing death from limiting one's autonomy seems fairly straightforward.
In contrast, it doesn't seem obvious to me that Marxists would be less in favour of cryonics than the general public for strong ideological reasons. Just like any other procedure in a socialised healthcare system, there's no reason life extension procedures couldn't be funded by the state and provided en masse to the entire citizenry. My suspicion is just that cryonics has been historically Libertarian-coded, and thus Marxists are more likely to oppose it for cultural reasons?
(Shameless self promotion warning)
Either way, I think Marxists specifically, and the public generally, would be more on board with the prospects of these technologies if they were marketed as something that should be provided broadly to the general public, and in a way that would have broadly positive social impacts on the world. That's exactly what I tried to do with my book coming out in November, called 'The Future Loves You: How and Why We Should Abolish Death': https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-future-loves-you-9781802063806
I could imagine it easily enough, and I suspect most people could, if they thought about it. Suppose that you are at the point of legal death, due to organ failure. There's a willing and suitable donor but, for reasons, it will take a week to organise the transplant. Cryonics has reached the point where freezing someone and reviving them is safe and straightforward. I would certainly agree to be frozen in that case.
OTOH, having had to consider the possibility of dying of cancer (false alarm, fortunately), the idea of being frozen indefinitely in the hope that both a revival technique and a cure would be found sometime never occurred to me.
Do keep in mind that the average "libertarian" who reads ACX is going to be very different from the average American who votes for the libertarian party. In fact I think they might be better described as entirely different ideologies, with the rationalist version being based around a moral theory that we should give other people the freedom to choose how their own lives are lived plus data showing that free-market policies tend to have better outcomes, whereas mainstream libertarianism is more about people advocating for the removal of restrictions that they personally find annoying.
To be fair, the former group is really what a libertarian is, and the latter is just a generic rightist position dressed in a veneer of libertarianism. I raised concern about readership of ACX skewing the results myself below, but I actually think that effect is likely to be least important in the libertarian group, where ACX readers are probably going to be least dissimilar from their (genuine) ideological bedfellows at large.
Don't you think that 'readers of ACX' strongly selects for cryonics interest (and other things) in a way that makes it difficult to draw broader conclusions?
In other words, I would expect that ACX readers of both left and right would be significantly different from their wider ideological group members. As in, an ACX-reading leftist is likely to be significantly different from a randomly-selected leftist from the general population, just as an ACX-reading rightist would be. And, most problematically for the attempt to draw broader conclusions, they may well be more similar to *each other* in some respects than they are to their normal ideological bedfellows. I think this could be a particularly strong effect in relation to far-out ideas such as cryonics, where opinions are likely to be substantially shaped by irrational considerations (e.g. an average leftist may well oppose cryonics because they think it's an arrogant rich-person thing, or kind of tech-bro-coded, or a right-winger might be more likely to distrust certain technologies and implementations of medical science, have more fear of novelty or a more pessimistic attitude about the future).
In short, I think there's a strong possibility of a false negative here arising from the survey sample (although I know Scott himself has vigorously disputed concerns about this more generally).
"The flattering explanation is that libertarians are more open to new things. The unflattering explanation is that libertarians tend to be at the center of their mental universes in a way that makes them extra eager to escape death"
I laughed out loud, thanks
The point on the Libertarian/Marxist distinction is interesting.
I agree that it makes sense that Libertarians are more interested in cryonics - the idea of preventing death from limiting one's autonomy seems fairly straightforward.
In contrast, it doesn't seem obvious to me that Marxists would be less in favour of cryonics than the general public for strong ideological reasons. Just like any other procedure in a socialised healthcare system, there's no reason life extension procedures couldn't be funded by the state and provided en masse to the entire citizenry. My suspicion is just that cryonics has been historically Libertarian-coded, and thus Marxists are more likely to oppose it for cultural reasons?
(Shameless self promotion warning)
Either way, I think Marxists specifically, and the public generally, would be more on board with the prospects of these technologies if they were marketed as something that should be provided broadly to the general public, and in a way that would have broadly positive social impacts on the world. That's exactly what I tried to do with my book coming out in November, called 'The Future Loves You: How and Why We Should Abolish Death': https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-future-loves-you-9781802063806
I could imagine it easily enough, and I suspect most people could, if they thought about it. Suppose that you are at the point of legal death, due to organ failure. There's a willing and suitable donor but, for reasons, it will take a week to organise the transplant. Cryonics has reached the point where freezing someone and reviving them is safe and straightforward. I would certainly agree to be frozen in that case.
OTOH, having had to consider the possibility of dying of cancer (false alarm, fortunately), the idea of being frozen indefinitely in the hope that both a revival technique and a cure would be found sometime never occurred to me.
Do keep in mind that the average "libertarian" who reads ACX is going to be very different from the average American who votes for the libertarian party. In fact I think they might be better described as entirely different ideologies, with the rationalist version being based around a moral theory that we should give other people the freedom to choose how their own lives are lived plus data showing that free-market policies tend to have better outcomes, whereas mainstream libertarianism is more about people advocating for the removal of restrictions that they personally find annoying.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcllE7fx8-I
To be fair, the former group is really what a libertarian is, and the latter is just a generic rightist position dressed in a veneer of libertarianism. I raised concern about readership of ACX skewing the results myself below, but I actually think that effect is likely to be least important in the libertarian group, where ACX readers are probably going to be least dissimilar from their (genuine) ideological bedfellows at large.
Don't you think that 'readers of ACX' strongly selects for cryonics interest (and other things) in a way that makes it difficult to draw broader conclusions?
In other words, I would expect that ACX readers of both left and right would be significantly different from their wider ideological group members. As in, an ACX-reading leftist is likely to be significantly different from a randomly-selected leftist from the general population, just as an ACX-reading rightist would be. And, most problematically for the attempt to draw broader conclusions, they may well be more similar to *each other* in some respects than they are to their normal ideological bedfellows. I think this could be a particularly strong effect in relation to far-out ideas such as cryonics, where opinions are likely to be substantially shaped by irrational considerations (e.g. an average leftist may well oppose cryonics because they think it's an arrogant rich-person thing, or kind of tech-bro-coded, or a right-winger might be more likely to distrust certain technologies and implementations of medical science, have more fear of novelty or a more pessimistic attitude about the future).
In short, I think there's a strong possibility of a false negative here arising from the survey sample (although I know Scott himself has vigorously disputed concerns about this more generally).