Comment by dragonwriter
6 days ago
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.