Really, anyone focused on maximizing their expected lifespan should be interested. A while back at LessWrong someone came up some rough figures for how many years of life you lose from sleeping little (as I do). Their point was that it was a worthwhile tradeoff, but some might disagree. Second, in response to an appreciation of survivalism as hedging, a commenter linked to an Argentinean’s lessons for surviving collapse based on what he actually lived through.
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April 29, 2010 at 12:24 pm
A while back at LessWrong someone came up some rough figures for how many years of life you lose from sleeping little (as I do).
As an insomniac, I don’t want to know the answer to that question!
April 30, 2010 at 7:36 pm
Remember the slogan from Animal House: “Knowledge is good”. Ignorance of the effects of insomnia won’t protect you from them. Knowledge could help you deal with them.
May 19, 2010 at 5:47 pm
To be clear, I don’t think I’m trying to maximize my expected lifespan. I’m trying to persist as a conscious entity, something less than that seems absurd to me.
May 19, 2010 at 6:19 pm
Glad to see you’re still alive. I think according to Julian Barbour’s conception of time there are only a finite number of possible configurations of the universe, with each one corresponding to a Now or moment in time, meaning that you can only even theoretically live a finite amount of time. Would living one Now less be absurd?
Feel free to reinterpret the heading as referring to maximizing the probability that you survive until the escape-velocity of lifespan-expansion.
May 19, 2010 at 11:05 pm
TGGP,
You’ve probably been exposed to my phrasing “earthy survivalism” before -I chose to leave it out of my last comment but it’s usually the context of my attempts to persist.
That’s how I handle various expert views that my attempt to persist is doomed or built out of a logically flawed foundation.
May 19, 2010 at 11:37 pm
Google has no results for “earthy survivalism” or “earthly survivalism”. Combining “Hopefully Anonymous” and survivalism isn’t much better.
May 20, 2010 at 2:02 am
For earthy survivalism I’m referencing people who try to stay alive in the moment, and in a vessel more conservatively like how conscious people seem to have existed in heretonow.
So, SENS over immediate cryonic preservation, cryonic preservation over digital uploading, and the general flailing struggle to survive as a living conscious entity in the face of arguments that I should try to accomplish other life goals such as maximize my happiness or maximize a finite lifespan because of expert views endless conscious persistence is impossible/incoherent, etc.
May 20, 2010 at 9:55 pm
So how do you view a less sleep now for less life later tradeoff? Sleep is cryonics-like, but death is as deathy as it gets.
May 21, 2010 at 7:38 am
I haven’t read the link yet, but my instincts here are for moderation. Having said that, I seem to need dramatically less sleep than most people the past couple years, just 4 consecutive hours every other day on average. I can’t force myself to sleep more than that and I seem highly functional and healthy.
May 21, 2010 at 9:17 pm
My guess is that many of those people with reduced lifespans from lack of sleep thought similarly of themselves. And I say that as someone who sleeps little (though apparently more than you).
May 22, 2010 at 4:12 pm
You could be right. I wonder if there are two different low sleep populations: sickly vs. healthy and low on the sleep needs spectrum.
My gut tells me I’m healthy and low on the sleep needs spectrum, but I appreciate this data point from you.
May 20, 2010 at 2:43 am
“… views endless …”
should read “… views that endless …”