Interest in cryonics from the Less Wrong 2016 survey
The Less Wrong (LW) extended community — an internet community interested in the application of rational thinking — recently conducted a survey of 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.
The LW community is relatively knowledgeable about cryonics 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 indicated that 14% of people (252/1766) considered this aspect of the LW philosophy to be one of their major frustrations with the site.
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.
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 50,000-fold enrichment over the expected level.
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).
error bars represent standard error of the mean
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). Using this, I found differences in relative interest in cryonics when participants were grouped by various measures.
Demographics
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 negative correlation (rho = -0.13, p = 1.2e-5). Although there are no clear differences by self-reported race/ethnicity, non-hispanic white people are the least interested in cryonics.
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.
Education and Profession
That people with a PhD-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. Individuals who work with computers are more likely to be interested in cryonics, while those who work in biology, neuroscience, and statistics are less interested.
Religious Questions
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.
Political Questions
Among U.S. political party choices, republicans are the least likely to be interested in cryonics. Among more general political stances, conservatives and communists are the least likely to be interested in cryonics, while libertarians are slightly above liberals and social democrats.
Ethical Questions
People who identify as a part of the effective altruism community and as pro-choice are more interested in cryonics. On the meat-eating question, it is perhaps interesting to speculate that people who are more interested in cryonics may be worried about future society judging them for their ethical choices, such as contributing more to the suffering of animals on factory farms.
Summary
Which of these findings did you expect, and which did you not? If you have any thoughts, please let us know in the comments.
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Excellent work Andy! Fascinating. I wonder if the UK’s lower interest in Cryonics vs the US is causally related to its generally lower level of optimism toward the future. I find dystopic thinking to be much more prevalent in the UK, and it is no wonder to me that the US , vs the UK and other Commonwealth Countries, is the place where most protopic literature and movies (for example, superhero comics, movies and the like) have traditionally emerged. We seem to have a stronger future optimism here. I don’t know if evidence truly supports this, but it is my current impression from both travels and years of reading the foresight literature of these countries. Thanks again for this post!