{"id":1854,"date":"2016-05-21T17:19:34","date_gmt":"2016-05-21T17:19:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.brainpreservation.org\/?p=1854"},"modified":"2016-05-22T19:12:56","modified_gmt":"2016-05-22T19:12:56","slug":"interest-in-cryonics-from-the-less-wrong-2016-survey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.brainpreservation.org\/zh\/interest-in-cryonics-from-the-less-wrong-2016-survey\/","title":{"rendered":"Interest in cryonics from the Less Wrong 2016 survey"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Less Wrong (LW) extended community — an internet community interested in the application of rational thinking — recently conducted a survey<\/a>\u00a0of their members, thanks in part to the hard work of user ingres. With 2565 respondents, what makes this survey interesting to those interested in the BPF is that a few of the questions are about cryonics.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0LW community is relatively knowledgeable about\u00a0cryonics and\/or brain preservation, probably because two of the community founders, Eliezer Yudkowsky and Robin Hanson, are both public advocates for cryonics and brain preservation research. In fact, one of the survey questions\u00a0indicated that 14% of people (252\/1766) considered this aspect of the LW philosophy to be\u00a0one of their major frustrations with the site.<\/p>\n

In this post I will analyze some of the data, dovetailing off of a previous BPF online survey analysis of attitudes towards cryonics and brain preservation here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

If the LW survey data is to be believed, 47 people are signed up or just finishing their paperwork for cryonics, representing about 1.8% of the worldwide ~ 2500 people who are signed up. This is around a\u00a050,000-fold enrichment over the expected\u00a0level.<\/p>\n

\"overall_cryo_interest\"<\/p>\n

Another of the questions asks, “What is the probability that an average person cryonically frozen today will be successfully restored to life at some future time, conditional on no global catastrophe destroying civilization before then?”. As expected, higher probabilities are assigned by people who are signed up or considering signing up for cryonics (although this does contradict a previous, counterintuitive finding<\/a>).<\/p>\n

\"error

error bars represent standard error of the mean<\/p><\/div>\n

Next, I used a relatively crude system of assigning a number from 0-5 to assess a respondent’s relative interest in cryonics based on the above categories, after removing those people who have never thought about it (all of my code is here<\/a>). Using this, I found differences in relative interest in cryonics\u00a0when participants were grouped by various measures.<\/p>\n

Demographics<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"interest_cryo_given_age\"<\/p>\n

\"interest_cryo_given_Gender\"<\/p>\n

\"interest_cryo_given_income\"<\/p>\n

\"interest_cryo_given_Race\"<\/p>\n

\"interest_cryo_given_country\"<\/p>\n

The age and gender findings are consistent with previous data, while the finding that people with higher incomes are less interested in cryonics is a bit surprising, although not necessarily inconsistent with previous data. The overall Pearson correlation for interest in cryonics with income is rho = -0.045, p = 0.14 (“non-significant”), while the rank-based correlation shows a more significant\u00a0negative correlation (rho = -0.13, p = 1.2e-5). Although there are no clear\u00a0differences by self-reported race\/ethnicity, non-hispanic white people are the least interested in cryonics.<\/p>\n

On the country level, people from India, Israel, and Russia are the most interested in cryonics. It is perhaps a bit surprising that the U.K. has the lowest average interest level in cryonics.<\/p>\n

Education and Profession\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"interest_cryo_given_education\"<\/p>\n

\"interest_cryo_given_Profession\"<\/p>\n

That people with a\u00a0PhD-level education are less interested in cryonics could be an age confound. It could also be due to the relatively poor available evidence basis for cryonics, even on the biomarker (e.g., morphology) level, compared to more conventional medical areas.\u00a0Individuals who work with computers are more likely to be interested in cryonics, while those who work in biology, neuroscience, and\u00a0statistics are less interested.<\/p>\n

Religious Questions<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"interest_cryo_given_religion\"<\/p>\n

\"interest_cryo_given_religion_type\"<\/p>\n

Consistent with previous research, people who are more religious are less likely to be interested in cryonics. The religions that are most associated with an interest in cryonics are Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, and Unitarian Universalism.<\/p>\n

Political Questions\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"interest_cryo_given_us_party\"<\/p>\n

\"interest_cryo_given_politics\"<\/p>\n

Among U.S. political party choices, republicans are the least likely to be interested in cryonics. Among more general political stances, conservatives\u00a0and communists are the least likely to be interested in cryonics, while libertarians are slightly above liberals and\u00a0social democrats.<\/p>\n

Ethical Questions<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"interest_cryo_given_EA\"<\/p>\n

\"interest_cryo_given_abortion\"<\/p>\n

\"interest_cryo_given_vegetarian\"People who identify as a part of the effective altruism community and as pro-choice are more interested in cryonics.\u00a0On the meat-eating question, it is perhaps interesting to speculate that people who are more interested in cryonics may be worried about future society\u00a0judging them for their ethical choices, such as contributing more to the suffering of animals on\u00a0factory farms.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Summary<\/strong><\/p>\n

Which of these findings did you\u00a0expect, and which did you not? If you have any thoughts, please let\u00a0us know in the comments.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Less Wrong (LW) extended community — an internet community interested in the application of rational thinking — recently conducted a survey\u00a0of their members, thanks in part to the hard work of user ingres. With 2565 respondents, what makes this survey interesting to those interested in the BPF is that a few of the questions […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":1856,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"coauthors":[26],"class_list":["post-1854","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-survey"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brainpreservation.org\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1854","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brainpreservation.org\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brainpreservation.org\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brainpreservation.org\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brainpreservation.org\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1854"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.brainpreservation.org\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1854\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1885,"href":"https:\/\/www.brainpreservation.org\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1854\/revisions\/1885"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brainpreservation.org\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1856"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brainpreservation.org\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1854"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brainpreservation.org\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1854"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brainpreservation.org\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1854"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brainpreservation.org\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=1854"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}