Age changes what you care about

I think this has pretty noteworthy policy implications. Most policymakers are at least as old as this and many are much older, but only have baseline cultural attitudes towards death in order to cope. 

Many of these are totally false or epistemically bad (e.g. returning to nature or living on in other's hearts), so their mentality towards their existence ends up in a cycle of repeatedly getting broken down by truth until another house of cards of lies and justifications is built up again.

I know this isn’t really the point in the post, but I dont think the “roling five d10 every day” or even the “1d00 a year” are good models for the probability of dying. They make sense statistically, when only considering your age and sex, but you yourself knows for example if you have been diagnosed with cancer or not. You might say that you get a cancer diagnosis if the first four d10 are all 1s and the fifth is a 2 or 3. Then once you have the cancer diagnosis, your probability is higher, especially when looking months or years ahead.

The usual mortality statistics dont distinguish between unexpected death and expected deaths. Do anyone know how of a more accurate model of how it is revealed when you die? Im not looking for exact probabilities and not necessarily of the resolution of days. Just something more accurate than the simple model that ignores current health.

I take the opposite position, the rise of AI is now rapid enough that AI safety should be prioritized over anti-aging research. 

Sounds like you should get into life extension research! Or at least, support it with money.

This is one of the reasons why we should be hesitant about the plans for deliberately slowing AI progress that have gotten popular of late. One hundred fifty thousand people die every day. Almost none of these are cryopreserved. Those that are, we are still extremely uncertain if they can ever be recovered, even in a positive singularity.

Getting it right matters more than getting it done fast, but fast still matters. The price of half a second is the difference between life and death for someone, probably someone we’d come to love if we knew them.

(PSA:)
Hey you, whoever is reading this comment, this post is not an excuse to skip working on alignment. I can fully relate to the fear of death here, and my own tradeoff is focusing hard on instrumental goals such as my own physical health and nutrition (including supplements) to delay death and get some nice productivity benefits. This doesn't mean that an AI won't kill you within 15 years, so it's most likely not even a defect in a tragedy of commons to not work on it; it's rather paramount to your future success at being alive.

(Also if we solve alignment, then we can get a pretty op AGI that can help us out with the other stuff so really it's very much a win-win in my mind.)

If we somehow produced the sort of AI which EY wants, then I think you'd have radically underestimated the chance of being reconstructed from cryonically preserved data.

On the other side, you appear comfortable talking about 4 more decades of potential life, which is rather longer than the maximum I can believe in for myself in the absence of a positive singularity. I may also disagree with your take on selfishness, but that isn't even the crux here! Set aside the fact that, in my view, AGI is likely to kill everyone in much less than 40 years from today. Even ignoring that, you would have to be overstating the case when you dismiss "the downfall of society," because obviously that kills you in less than 4 decades with certainty. Nor is AGI the only X-risk we have to worry about.

If your interested in overcoming your fear of death, there was another LW post about an excellent book, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Denial_of_Death

I wouldn't get too worried about trying to convince that long term ambitions are usually sacrificed for shorter term ones. Since the vast majority, if not all, of the population likely discounts longer term things as well to varying extents, including LW posters, regardless of purported claims. 

In fact, I've yet to see anyone actually demonstrate an exclusive focus on the long term in a credible manner. So you shouldn't feel deficient regarding that.

It's good that you're in tune with your values, and able to focus on what feels most important. However, I think your timelines need updating in light of the flood of capabilities advances in recent months.

We're hitting the part of the exponential in AI progress where it seems increasingly clear that we don't get multiple decades, barring some unexpected deviation from the trend. With high P(doom|superintelligence), I would put your odds of personally dying due to misaligned AI significantly higher than those due to aging even at 49, though shifting the needle on your own preparations might be more tractable.

I'm having a disconnect. I think I'm kind of selfish too. But if it came to a choice between me dying this year and humanity dying 100 years from now, I'll take my death. It's going to happen anyway, and I'm old enough I got mine, or most of it. I'm confident I'd feel the same if I didn't have children, though less intensely. What is causing the difference in these perspectives? IDK. My 90-year-old friend would snort at the question; what difference would a year or two make? The old have less to lose. But the young are usually much more willing to risk their lives. So: IDK.

Honestly, even from a purely selfish standpoint, I'd be much more concerned about a plausible extinction scenario than just dying. Figuring out what to do when I'm dead is pretty much my life's work, and if I'm being completely honest and brazenly flouting convention, the stuff I've learned from that research holds a genuine, not-at-all-morbid appeal to me. Like, even if death wasn't inevitable, I'd still want to see it for myself at some point. I definitely wouldn't choose to artificially prolong my lifespan, given the opportunity. So personally, death and I are on pretty amicable terms. On the other hand, in the case of an extinction event... I don't even know what there would be left for me to do at that point. It's just the kind of thing that, as I imagine it, drains all the hope and optimism I had out of me, to the point where even picking up the pieces of whatever remains feels like a monumental task. So my takeaway would be that anyone, no matter their circumstances, who really feels that AI or anything else poses such a threat should absolutely feel no inhibition toward working to prevent such an outcome. But on an individual basis, I think it would pay dividends for all of us to be generally death-positive, if perhaps not as unreservedly so as I am.