There could be another reason EAs and rationalists specifically value life a lot more. Suppose there's at least a 1% chance of AI going well and we live in a utopia and achieve immortality and can live for 1 billion years at a really high level. Then the expected value of life is 10,000,000 life-years. It could be much greater too, see Deep Utopia.
Anecdotally, I agree with the secularization hypothesis. Does this imply people should be more religious?
I'm interested in a simple question: Why are people all so terrified of dying? And have people gotten more afraid? (Answer: probably yes!)
In some sense, this should be surprising: Surely people have always wanted to avoid dying? But it turns out the evidence that this preference has increased over time is quite robust.
It's an important phenomenon that has been going on for at least a century, it's relatively new, I think it underlies much of modern life, and yet pretty much nobody talks about it.
I tried to provide a evenhanded treatment of the question, with a "fox" rather than "hedgehog" outlook. In the post, I cover a range of evidence for why this might be true, including VSL, increased healthcare spending, covid lockdowns, parenting and other individual risk behaviors. Conditional upon it being true, I also consider why, drawing on evidence from economic models, evolutionary models, history, and decreased fertility.
Check it out here! https://linch.substack.com/p/the-rising-premium-for-life
I thought this was pretty interesting, I didn't realize it had gone up so much. Thanks for posting!