Comment by hiAndrewQuinn
6 days ago
>Time is your most precious resource.
This is just false. Time cannot be your most precious resource, because there are many, many ways to push the likelihood of you dying tomorrow, next year, or next decade down considerably from where it is. Exercising, for example, or reaching a healthy weight, or quitting recreational substances like alcohol or opioids. Yet in reality we see a great many people who refuse to do any of these things, and statistically end up with less time because of it. Empirically speaking this is very strong evidence against time's claim to ultimate value.
It's true that there seems to be a maximum amount of time our unaugmented wetware can provide us, but something being finite does not make it the most important thing you have. I have a finite amount of money in my pocket, yet money isn't my terminal goal.
Your argument rests on rational choice theory, which is occasionally, in limited circumstances, a useful analytical framework, but insofar as it can be operationalized into a trstable form is fairly thoroughly falsified.
If people aren't, as we fairly well know they aren't, perfectly rational utility maximizers, than the fact that people do not consistently take an action or set of actions which would be utility optimal if a given proposition were true is not xounterevidence to the proposition.
It rests on much more limited evidence than that. You would realize that immediately if you didn't reflexively cast anything you didn't like hearing into a platonic shadow on the wall so you can sneer at it.
We're not talking Bryan Johnson here. People fail so, so often at taking any of the most absolutely obvious, well known, high ROI things they could do to actually increase the number of seconds they spend breathing that "erm but people aren't perfectly rational" doesn't cut it. By and large, they simply do not care that much.
I'm not arguing that it's logical, but I do think it's natural for humans to want to do the thing that pleases them now even if it costs them some unknown number of years of life in the unforeseeable future.
No, you misunderstand. I'm arguing it is logical for them to do that. You just have to stop looking at them as though they actually hold "maximize number of seconds alive" as their first, second or even third most important thing in life.