A reason to see the future

Do not tempt Eliezer to make the last chapter of HPMOR available only in the event of a positive Singularity.

This proposal seems like taking advantage of something like the conjunction fallacy. The conjunction fallacy is where you assign a higher probability to more specific conditions than you do to more general conditions. I think that happens because people are more easily able to construct a story with more specific facts. Here, I think the fallacy is placing greater value on a future benefit that is specific than one does on the entire class of future benefits that includes the specific one. "I want to be alive in 2114 so that I can read that great Atwood book" is logically less valuable than "I want to be alive in 2114 so that I can experience all of the valuable things that I chose to experience then." But it is a whole lot easier to anticipate and set a value on reading that one book. Or, put another way, it is harder to get lost before coming to a conclusion when looking at the specific.

But maybe I am wrong about the basis of the conjunction fallacy. I couldn't find a name for the specific cognitive bias I think I see here. Nor could I find a name for the more general class that would include both the conjunction fallacy and this thing. I assign a high probability to me missing relevant information simply because I'm ignorant of where to look.

To net all of that out, I am thinking that it would be an effective tactic to market surviving into the distant future by promising very specific benefits.

Max L.

Instead of what the future offers me, I will enjoy all that I have to offer to the future. That includes tomorrow, but some distant days as well.

Honestly, I would say all (or almost all; extremes tend to be tricky) discussion of "why cryonics" is just incentivizing seeing the future contrasted with the disadvantages of signing up or not signing up. So far as I can think, any reason given for signing up, no matter how trite, involves an incentive to see the future.

Want to be cured from a disease (be it AIDS or death)? See the future. Want to experience a post-Singularity world? See the future. Want to not be utterly annihilated for eternity? See the future.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying your point is bad. I think we should take time, when discussing cryonics, to emphasize the good reasons for sticking around for the future. Most of us probably aren't signing up just cause we're afraid of death and we want a teddy bear to hold when we die. Cryonics isn't just an alternative to believing in an afterlife, and treating it as such is fatal. So, I think we should discuss the incentives for seeing the future. We already do that around here quite a bit.

But why would I want to read one of Margaret Atwood's books? Although there might be some humor value in contrasting her estimates about what the target audience for her books will be like with how history actually turns out.

I think it's an interesting thing to do but I must also point out that at some point singularity will boom and the work of today's artist or writer would be of small value to the society in a couple of decades. We also don't know how the future will shape up so the chances of producing something worth providing for the future is in doubt. But it's totally do-able for the coming 3-5 years.

I thought about saying that I want to see "the future" because Neoreaction might succeed and I would find myself in a high-tech aristocracy right out of 20th Century science fiction. But then I remembered something I saw on TV in what must sound like the before-times to you youngsters. I watched this miniseries about the Holocaust in 1978, during my last semester of high school:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_(TV_miniseries)

I remember a scene where one of the characters in a women's concentration camp says she wanted to survive the war because she anticipated that Europe would become Communist, and thus according to her beliefs, she would find herself in more socially equitable environment. It didn't quite work out that way after a few decades, however.

If I had to bet on social trends over the next 300 years, I would favor something like Neoreaction as the social model because the Enlightenment's social model in the bigger pictures deviates from long term norms, while Neoreaction has something like regression to the mean working in its favor. This prospect must put the feminist women who have signed up for cryonics in an interesting predicament: Do they want to survive, only to spend their resumed lives in a conservative, patriarchal society which wouldn't tolerate the behavior they took for granted in the early 21st Century?