26
Aug
2005
Fear Of Death And Muddled Thinking
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Robin Hanson has put up an interesting PDF-format paper on how the fear of death leads people to do precisely the wrong things to extend their healthy life spans. "Humans clearly have trouble thinking about death. This trouble is often invoked to explain behavior like delays in writing wills or buying life insurance, or interest in odd medical and religious beliefs. But the problem is far worse than most people imagine. Fear of death makes us spend fifteen percent of our wealth on medicine, from which we get little or no health benefit, while we neglect things like exercise, which offer large health benefits." People are also failing to understand and support the best branches of research into working anti-aging medicine - lack of foresight and planning for the future in this matter is not good.

Link: http://hanson.gmu.edu/feardie.pdf

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