Scott Alexander surveys people's preferences between suffering and oblivion, finding split opinions and weak correlations between different scenarios and real-world beliefs. Longer summary

Scott Alexander conducts a survey to explore people's preferences between suffering and oblivion in various scenarios. He presents five hypotheses and tests them using the survey results. The survey includes questions about preferring death over a difficult life, choosing between long unhappy life and short happy life, and population ethics. The results show that people are indeed split on these issues, with strong feelings on both sides. There are weak correlations between answers to different questions, suggesting a general factor of oblivion-preference versus suffering-preference. However, this factor does not strongly predict views on population ethics. The study finds weak correlations between oblivion preference and support for euthanasia, interest in cryonics, and personal happiness. Shorter summary