There's something interesting about the way we as a species think about death. Say you're working on "immortality" or on "solving aging", and most people outside a small subset of the tech/SV crowd will think you're a megalomaniac or just plain crazy -- death is obviously a fact, and to attempt to overcome it pure hubris. Yet we spend an incredible amount of resources on prolonging life in various ways through lifestyle interventions, treatments, cures -- and handsomely reward and revere those who succeed in pushing our life expectancy ever so slightly upwards.
This is because chasing immortality with expensive but questionable procedures has a thousands of years long history (it's a safe bet this stretches into pre-history) of being an obsession of the ultra-rich, so far without success, but with plenty of tragedy (for others), waste, and/or comical self-pwnage.
Eventually, sure, someone might get it right, but it's easy to see why people would be dismissive.
I think one of the major issues is that people associate longer life expectancy with old age.
For most people, the idea of being kept alive by machines, bed ridden for decades into their 80/90s as far worse than death. They never consider that improvements could promise them a strong body and agile mind in addition to the extra years.
Who ever does the life extension technology marketing really needs to push the "keep people younger, longer" message.
It's worth noting, though, that people think of it this way because that's historically what life extension has looked like. I'm still ultimately in favor, but I see a nontrivial chance of a disaster scenario where "keep people barely alive till they're 150" is the low hanging fruit.
Often you can't opt out. My great-grandma was basically non-functional for her last decade: she couldn't move without assistance, couldn't taste anything, and seemed to be in constant pain. But her dementia came first, so by the time we started worrying about it, she couldn't think clearly enough to make any decisions about anything. We never put her on life support as such because we were pretty sure she wouldn't have wanted it, but there was no specific life-sustaining intervention to consider withdrawing, just a bundle of meds which each meaningfully improved her quality of life. So she kinda bumbled along in a cloud of permanent confusion and misery until the end.
I want to take a slightly different approach to this, as someone who thinks it somewhat is 'megalomaniacal' to fight death. I don't think it's because the attempt to overcome it is pure hubris, however. And I fear we will eventually one day succeed.
For me, it's because -- let's face it -- it'll only be available to the extremely wealthy and well-off. It won't be available to the average citizen. This will just further cause our immortal overlords to be able to concentrate power and wealth, even moreso than they're already doing. That's not a good thing. Death is the Great Equalizer (especially if there's a very progressive estate tax), and if it is conquered there's nothing to stop that anymore.
As to why we treat doctors and those who prolong life now differently, well, it's reasonably accessible to everyone, especially in a first world country. Sure, you might not get the cutting-edge treatment the rich and powerful can get, but you can get very good quality treatment and prolong your healthspan for a while based on what we have. And, even if you don't get the treatment the rich and powerful do, they are still going to die one day, so at least there's that.
I see no reason to believe that whoever figures out how to stop aging/death will open it to the public, or that it will ever be accessible to the populace. For me, it's a vanity project of the rich that will only harm the poor, and I think that quite decently fits the definition of megalomaniac.
For me, it's because -- let's face it -- it'll only be available to the extremely wealthy and well-off. It won't be available to the average citizen. This will just further cause our immortal overlords to be able to concentrate power and wealth, even moreso than they're already doing. That's not a good thing. Death is the Great Equalizer (especially if there's a very progressive estate tax), and if it is conquered there's nothing to stop that anymore.
Why would it only be available for the extremely wealthy and well-off? Where do you get the idea that such therapies must invariably be expensive?
Do you know what's really expensive? The imploding cost of healthcare, especially when concerning people who's entering old age.
That would be like saying we shouldn't develop mRNA technology because it will only be available to rich people.
> Why would it only be available for the extremely wealthy and well-off?
Why wouldn't it?
> Where do you get the idea that such therapies must invariably be expensive?
Because those with power and wealth will want to keep it from those who aren't as well off, and they control the pricing of it. It seems the logical endpoint to me.
I don't see them working on making it cheaper for the common person out of the goodness of their heart. And I see their desire to keep their power as stronger than their desire to worry about healthcare costs.
Maybe I'm super cynical and pessimistic, but if the cure for aging is found, I don't see it being made widely available, ever, for simple reason of power and politics. Humanity isn't at that point, and likely never will be.
1) The people making it can make more money. Sell it to the rich people first at a high price, then gradually broaden the market until you're selling near cost to as many people as possible. That's probably how it has to work out anyway but it gives you great price segmentation.
2) Governments can spend less money. Vast amounts of government money goes to expensive treatments for chronic age-related illnesses. It's a no-brainer for Medicare to cover anti-aging treatments even at fairly significant cost.
The only people who might want to restrict it to rich people are rich customers, and even they don't have a clear economic incentive for doing so. In fact, lowering costs for Medicare can help lead to lower taxes.
I don't see them working on making it cheaper for the common person out of the goodness of their heart. And I see their desire to keep their power as stronger than their desire to worry about healthcare costs.
Life isn't some game of throne that incentivized the creation of bloodthirsty ruthless power mongers except in some of the most dystopian place on earth.
Maybe I'm super cynical and pessimistic, but if the cure for aging is found, I don't see it being made widely available, ever, for simple reason of power and politics. Humanity isn't at that point, and likely never will be.
Economic and technological force might make such attempt at control a pointless exercise, especially since a cure will likely be made public by scientists.
> Life isn't some game of throne that incentivized the creation of bloodthirsty ruthless power mongers except in some of the most dystopian place on earth.
I mean, even in the United States I see people doing everything they can to hold on to power and wealth and accumulate more at the expense of those who don't have it, and who are simply doing their best to survive.
> Economic and technological force might make such attempt at control a pointless exercise, especially since a cure will likely be made public by scientists.
Might. But will the cure be made public by scientists if it's funded by those who don't want it public? And even if it is made public, will the average person have the resources to make it even if the cure itself is available? Will they be allowed to have those resources?
Wouldn't the cost of it roughly follow every other technological innovation? Extremely expensive and only affordable by the wealthy at first, then cost will go down over time as competition ramps up and economies of scale take effect.
I think this all is assuming that those who have the power to will allow competition to ramp up and the price to come down. I can't help but feel they won't with the cure for aging, as it's in a different category than other medical and technological inventions.
As I said in a reply to a sister comment, maybe I'm just cynical and pessimistic, but this is the one thing I don't see those who have money and power allowing to ever reach those who don't; if nobody had to age, it might threaten their power too much.
maybe it isn't so crazy, if you look at the increases in average lifespans over the fast couple centuries - prolonging lifespans is something humans seem to have a good track record with (at least at a high level)
"solving aging" is the above taken to the limit, which no one has ever even come close to solving ever - so the societal consensus is "why fight it"?
Yes. People get really confused when you try to take all these arguments apart and prove to them that we're not done with medicine as a science as long as there are untreatable conditions. And if there are no untreatable conditions any more, then what people would be dying of, barring accidents and crime? So it follows that the end goal of the development of medicine is to make people live forever, in perfect health.
Also, it's absolutely bonkers that what we consider good health is a function of one's age. If you have thin skin and brittle bones being 20yo, that's a serious illness. But if you're 70yo, that suddenly becomes perfectly normal.
Looking back at this story now, I think I disagree with its argument. Yes, old age today is a costly drain on modern western societies but mostly because people are living much longer. If our society was accepting of euthanasia for people who don't want to suffer in old age as it was of trying to keep the old living as long as possible then maybe the cost wouldn't be so draining. The idea that we MUST live for as long as possible without any sense of what the person who's living through the suffering of the diseases that become more severe with old age shows how little we value those people. If we really did value the elderly we'd ask if they want to continue to live or allow them to choose to end their lives with their own subjective sense of dignity instead. This isn't to say I'm opposed to any kind of medical research to improve life in our final years. Anything that retains physical autonomy and removes pain from old age is great but the obsession with death itself is problematic to me. In my opinion, life ain't worth living if it leaves me in an adult diaper being constantly pumped full of drugs to just keep myself sane with the pain and indignities.
You say the idea presented is “that we MUST live for as long as possible…”
But the author claims that isn't his idea:
> The argument is not in favor or life-span extension per se. Adding extra years of sickness and debility at the end of life would be pointless. The argument is in favor of extending, as far as possible, the human health-span. By slowing or halting the aging process, the healthy human life span would be extended. Individuals would be able to remain healthy, vigorous, and productive at ages at which they would otherwise be dead.
It reminds me the time I went a meeting of the MIT nanotechnology study group at the MIT AI lab and the president of Alcor (the "frozen heads in a bottle" company) showed up... If I remember right he'd been charged with murder because he'd been accused of freezing somebody who wasn't quite dead yet and had just been acquitted.
In addition to the usual crowd we had a large contingent of middle aged and older rich women who seemed offended that the people at the study group asked tough questions of the speaker.
My feeling was that these people didn't feel like they'd gotten enough out of life and wanted to pretend that biological immortality was possible. Lately I came across this TV episode
about someone with this attitude. Death is certainly not some tyrant that came recently, but it's something that's been part of life for at least a billion years.
One of the epigraphs at the beginning of Cormac McCarthy's 'Blood Meridian' is:
> “Clark, who led last year’s expedition to the Afar region of northern Ethiopia, and UC Berkeley colleague Tim D. White, also said that a re-examination of a 300,000-year-old fossil skull found in the same region earlier showed evidence of having been scalped.”
McCarthy's point is that violence is ancient, a deep part of us. But that doesn't make it good. It's a safe bet that one of the very first interactions between two organisms on earth resulted in one's annihilation; that doesn't mean we should go around killing things.
> it's something that's been part of life for at least a billion years
I know right. The dragon is just a way of life, and will be for all time. Anyone who tries to fight the dragon or even suggest it could be slain is a foolish nuisance.
I'm tempted to make a list of other things that's been part of life for at least a billion years. Hunger is just one of them. Do you think it's unfair how we completely managed to eliminate it? We didn't "fight it" - we crushed it. We won. Hunger just isn't a thing anymore. Not even in Africa, for a decade or two.
That story contains all sorts of infantile ideas, for instance the idea that society chooses to sacrifice the elderly instead of the young.
If civilization had some choice in the matter they might well sacrifice the poor so the rich can live on. Sacrifice the weak so the strong can live on, etc.
Life extension is a realistic goal and I am all for it. But that story is full of ridiculous counterfactuals and it irks me that a bunch of dittoheads sit around and congratulate themselves for believing it.
It's a metaphor, the mapping will never be perfect. Nobody calls Aesop's sour grapes fable silly because real foxes don't eat grapes. Say the dragon demands elderly sacrifices instead of allowing a choice - problem solved. I'm sure you can find other flaws, but points like that are pulling at the fringes instead of engaging with the core concept.
If you're in favor of life extension, I don't understand why you're bitter about other people who support it. I admit it's a... fairly self-righteous community, but for projects like this the more traction the better.
If a metaphor has enough problems than it is not valuable.
Aesop's fables largely represent "conventional wisdom" and I think fables are effective at that because people aren't going to be inclined to tear them apart.
If you're trying to communicate something unconventional people are going to tear the argument apart at every weak point. The fable structure itself suggests there is some group of people for whom this is "conventional wisdom" and are talking to each other rather than the larger community.
What is practical for life extension?
Watch your blood sugar. Get exercise. Manage stress. Eat a quality diet. Get reasonable preventative care. Protect your skin from the sun. (e.g. my wife has great skin even though she teaches horse lessons and works outside because she always wears a hat.)
I don't really understand why but I think I look a lot better than the cohorts of people born around the time I was that I knew when I was a child, in high school and college. If I had to attribute it to something it is that my level of career stress has been high at times but it hasn't been incessant. I'd contrast that to some 40-somethings I know who are counting the days to retirement.
It's not impossible that some drug or supplement could have a significant impact but (i) scams will outnumber real results, and (ii) even real results will have tradeoffs. For instance Metformin seems good for many people but it seems to blunt the physiological benefits of exercise.
I think you can add some years, maybe decades, to your lifespan and healthspan, but extending your life to 200+ years like Louis Wu from Larry Niven's Ringworld novel seems fantastic and even that falls short of 'cheating death'.
I think the dragon-tyrant here should be interpreted as a metaphor specifically for death through aging, and not death generally. Because death is not any single condition (representable through a token), but the vast set of states that vastly outnumber the set of "living states".
Solving the problem of aging wouldn't solve the problem death, curing all sickness wouldn't solve the problem of death, preventing all accidents wouldn't solve the problem of death.
Indeed, if we get philosophical (and transhumanist), we need to find a reasonable definition of death (and life), possibly detached from the necessity of continuous physical existence.
Related to this - If you want to read a story about a truly post-death world check out the YA novel Scythe. CGP Grey recommended it awhile ago (I assume he read it while developing his video on this topic) and it's an interesting (and very easy) read.
It seems like the metaphor is a bit meta? Tautological? Death is represented by death. This is a minor point, but distracting. Still... I hope for a well-supported contingent of warriors to slay the dragon. If not now, eventually.
My recollection of the story is a bit spotty and I can't re-read in full right now, but:
I think the point this is trying to make is that we accept death of old age as a natural fact and think it is odd to want to "solve" it, but wouldn't accept it at all if it were caused by some personified actor?
Of course we don't "just accept" it, we have long considered a large fraction of deaths "too early" and worked on postponing them with various treatments.
I think the idea is to draw a parallel between something we're repulsed by, find abhorrent, and feel we ought to eliminate (like a violent death from being ripped apart by a dragon) and something that we consider a natural and inevitable part of life but that doesn't really differ much from the first thing(death from aging).
It's a pretty common metaphor in transhumanist circles. I remember this piece comparing the elimination of "natural" unhappiness to the advent of painkillers making a strong impression on me: https://www.hedweb.com/hedab.htm
The prospect of a society with significantly extended lifetimes is absolutely horrifying. My opinion does not frequently align with Elon Musk, but I fully agree with him on this one. Death is necessary for human progress. People, at the large scale, are not sufficiently capable of changing their deeply held convictions when the societal circumstances around them change. We need a mechanism for obsolete ideas and minds to grow senescent and die off, or we will be forever stagnant and bound to the ideals of 250 year old people.
One reason old people are inflexible is that their brains get worse at making new neural connections. If anti-aging affects the brain too, then that will improve.
I think that what frustrates me about the "cure aging" crowd is that they quite easily step over the homeless opioid addict on their front porch in SF on their way to the latest lecture. "Aging can be defeated! Oh, but this individual in front of me represents an insurmountable problem." It's quite easy to justify anything you do if you've already decided that an infinite number of (hypothetical) future people will benefit...
I'll just play devils advocate a little bit here and say that I totally agree with both sides of this budding argument.
As someone born and raised in San Francisco / Marin I can confirm first hand how infuriating it is to hear and see millionaires indulging fantasy narratives about eternal youth, enlightenment, colonizing mars etc while the world around them that their children are going to inherit is falling apart. For people my age at the time (early 2000s) it was especially hard to be in cities where the roads were all falling apart, public transit was even less functional than other broken american cities, you would have to sit in traffic for 30-90 minutes just to get groceries or a sandwich and there were literally no job / career prospects for young people (still very true for my friends living in Marin).
With that said now that Im in an infinitely more livable / walkable / functional feeling urban space (Sacramento) and can see the Bay Area from a distance, I can appreciate that there is an importance in a certain percentage of the population focusing on the problems of tomorrow. There are kind, sincere and intelligent people involved in those communities. At least in my first hand experience / memory.
I am very skeptical that you have seen Nick Bostrom do this. Certainly you have never seen me do this. So I think your argument rests purely on bigotry against a stereotype you are projecting onto people whose beliefs differ from your own.
Even if you were right about Nick's personal vices, it would be irrelevant to his reasoning. The vilest grifter can tell you the Sun is a ball of plasma rather than truly the chariot of Apollo, and the Sun will not transmute; truth does not become falsehood merely because it is spoken by the unvirtuous.
Such arguments are deplorable and have no place in decent society, or even on HN.
Aging affects more than just the homeless. It affects everyone universally, poor or rich, homeless or royalty. It also manifested itself in any number of ways from decreased mobility to cancer. Nobody is immune to it. It is literally the biggest health challenge in the world and the biggest killer of mankind.
The homeless opioid addict while in some way much more acute, but can be solved the next day should we decide to. It is a political problem, not a technical problem like aging is.
But given that a universal cure for aging necessarily requires universal distribution of that cure, isn't it worth asking if you're putting the cart in front of the horse here?
You say the homeless problem "can be solved the next day should we decide to"; but we haven't decided to. So either this isn't a simple political problem and there are practical concerns we haven't figured out yet, or there's a worrying gap between what is possible to do and what we're willing to do. And if there is no mechanism to close that gap, then you just can't solve aging universally. At best you can only solve it for a very small select few, at which point you might be doing more utilitarian good by just helping the homeless right now.
The current lack of universal housing, universal health care, suggests very strongly to me that curing aging is not in fact an effort that "affects everyone universally"; because I don't believe that universal distribution of a cure is simple or a straightforward question of political will, and I wonder if it actually does have massive social/political/practical complications behind it that are going to be very difficult to solve, and I wonder if (under a strict utilitarian perspective) solving that problem of universal access to basic resources is not the more important priority.
If we're all just working on our own stuff in parallel, fine. I actually think the utilitarian way of looking at this is kind of nonsense, and I would encourage people not to use this lens. We should not be ranking social problems in this way, it's fine for some people to focus on technical problems and its fine for some people to work on social problems. But if we are going to use this lens and we are going to rank problems, it seems like fully solving the aging problem is almost strictly dependent on solving the political problems first.
But given that a universal cure for aging necessarily requires universal distribution of that cure, isn't it worth asking if you're putting the cart in front of the horse here?
Once you have the effective cure, it will likely be economically a no-brainer to implement, because a whole lot of illness of old age will just go away. It's essentially a self-funding cure that drastically reduce the cost of healthcare.
However, a cure for aging will not be solved tomorrow, maybe not even a decade. It is a long term investment.
The solution to the homeless isn't economically complicated. It doesn't require us to keep at a problem for ten years. It is strictly a matter of political will.
It isn't even a matter of practical concerns, because we live right now is unsustainable economically and financially.
> Once you have the effective cure, it will likely be economically a no-brainer to implement, because a whole lot of illness of old age will just go away. It's essentially a self-funding cure that drastically reduce the cost of healthcare.
Okay, but don't you see the disconnect here? Because we don't even have good preventative care right now in the US, and that is also economically a no-brainer. Being economically advantageous overall turns out to be not enough of an incentive to introduce political change.
So you have this theory that once death is solved, naturally it will be in everyone's best interest to distribute the cure, but that doesn't match up with what we see in the world today. Again, going back to homelessness, if this isn't economically complicated, and we still haven't solved it, that to me suggests that it's not going to be simple in the future to distribute a cure for aging, even if you're right about the incentives. Figuring out how to bridge that gap between economic incentive and political will might be a giant, equally difficult problem to solve.
Doesn't it worry you that fixing these kinds of problems today would clearly reduce overall health care costs on the system and yet the problems still exist? How are you so confident that aging will be different?
> Once you have the effective cure, it will likely be economically a no-brainer to implement, because a whole lot of illness of old age will just go away. It's essentially a self-funding cure that drastically reduce the cost of healthcare.
Sure, it might be economically a no-brainer, but I don't see this happening. Why would the people in positions of power to implement this give it to the masses when they can have it and keep their power forever while the plebs have to continue to age and die?
That same argument can be made about anyone that supports anything. There is always going to be something that others deem more important that they feel resources should be devoted too. Just look at the current argument stating space exploration is wasting money that should be spent on earth. Different people can focus on different problems.
> you take an idea (death is bad) and make it about the character of the people supporting it
Well... the Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant is not actually just about the idea that death is bad. It's both about the idea that death is bad, and it presents a specific set of ideas about how we should respond to death being bad. There is an element of fallacy here, and I think people should be careful about how they critique this, but there is also an element of real substantive criticism. Some passages from The Dragon-Tyrant:
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> The next morning, a billion people woke up and realized that their turn to be sent to the dragon would come before the projectile would be completed. A tipping point was reached. Whereas before, active support for the anti-dragonist cause had been limited to a small group of visionaries, it now became the number one priority and concern on everybody’s mind.
It's important to start with the fact that many of the critiques against the anti-aging movement are not actually critiques against the concept of anti-aging, they are critiques of a very real argument that the anti-aging crowd makes that researching and pouring public resources into this project should be the number one greatest priority that we have right now.
Given that context, given that Bostrom is arguing that we should be focusing on aging first and foremost above everything else, it is reasonable to ask questions about whether or not anti-aging research is something that is likely to matter before the very-long-term for anyone other than a select few rich people (we don't have functioning health care right now, most people are not going to have access to anti-aging technology), and it is reasonable to ask whether it is ethical to abandon solvable problems today (and the people affected by them) in favor of problems that may take at best a huge amount of time to solve.
Nobody criticizes cancer research over this kind of stuff because cancer research doesn't say that it should be the dominating social concern of the entire world.
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Bostrom also writes:
> The king and his people will face some major challenges when they recover from their celebration. Their society has been so conditioned and deformed by the presence of the dragon that a frightening void now exists. They will have to work creatively, on both an individual and a societal level, to develop conditions that will keep lives flourishingly dynamic and meaningful beyond the accustomed three-score-years-and-ten. [...] We can leave, for now, the long-lived fable people to grapple with these new challenges, while we try to make some progress in our own adventure
Another criticism of the anti-aging movement is that they tend to hand-wave the significance of social change as a precondition to removing death, not something that can happen after the fact. I mentioned healthcare above; Bostrom is very cognizant of the lives that will be lost if aging is solved 5 years later than it could have been. He does not seem to be cognizant of the lives that would be lost if anti-aging technology is inaccessible for 5 additional years. His moral treats this like you flip a switch and suddenly millions of lives are saved as soon as the technology is invented.
And that's just a really simplistic way to look at the world; if you're trying to cure aging, it doesn't make sense to think of radical social change as a future problem. Overpopulation is not the biggest problem we face after curing aging, and I think it's a fair criticism that anti-aging advocates are sometimes dismissive of extremely relevant, current problems that are not only worth solving for their own sake but are worth solving because you can't kill the dragon until after you solve problems like health care, resource scarcity, and entrenched wealth/resource hording.
Again, not everyone needs to work on every problem. It's fine for Bostrom to go out and evangelize anti-aging research, and to advocate for more funding, and it's fine for scientists to work on it. These are generally less controversial ideas on average than people think. But the critique becomes different when Bostrom is arguing that this needs to be everyone's priority. At that point I do start questioning some of the motives, or at least I start questioning his perspective.
It is impossible for me to imagine a world with universal immortality that looks anything like the world we have today. And if all anyone does is advocate for universal immortality, without first advocating for universal rights, universal access to care/resources/housing, universal human dignity, political changes, market changes, changes to how we think about how finite resources like property are distributed to an immortal population... those are not afterthoughts, if you wait until after you solve aging to tackle those problems, then you will create a horrifying dystopia for the majority of the population.
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TLDR, Bostrom argues in the story for a complete redistribution of effort entirely towards anti-aging, which is worth criticizing on its own as out of touch with the reality of how society functions and how we make progress towards goals, and out of touch with the social/political problems that are going to get in the way of actually curing death, and also is advocating that we should accept higher current casualties/suffering and is advocating that we should ignore other problems (and even potentially introduce more of them) until after death is solved.
There are dangers of falling into ad-hominems and fallacies about that argument, but it is still worth criticizing.
As a disclaimer, I really dislike this train of thought to the point of feeling "icky" about discussing it. But that's my personal problem, and you are making good arguments in good faith, which I really like, so...
Rather than trying to address each point I'm going to try to address directly what I think is a misunderstanding. I don't know how other people think about anti-aging. I really don't think it's fair to talk about anti-aging as a community or a group or even an ideology, when at its core it's just the idea that we should try to actively solve aging as a problem in itself, rather than wait for the slow march of technology and medicine to do its thing.
There are two differences I can tell between me and your image of anti-aging.
First and most important, I don't think technology is going to work like you think it will. Most likely there are several causes of aging, and while some may be expensive to fix, I'm pretty sure some won't. I'm reasonably sure at least one, maybe several treatments will be at the level of a 5 dollar pill that will increase lifespan by about a decade. Either something like a cheap pill that does metabolic tweaking, or CRISPR-based one time treatment. I also think you're underestimating the power of tech - MRI machines are some of the most state of the art pieces of technology one can imagine, and yet they're still affordable to the point where everybody has at least a couple done during his lifetime. TBH, I have issues imagining how a truly expensive treatment might look like - maybe growing organs over printed scaffolding?
So I both don't see anti-aging as a pricing thing, and I don't see it doing big disruptions any time soon. It'd just mean more life for everybody, and more _productive_ years, which might bring some pretty amazing gains at society level. After all, we don't really know how good a professional can become with an extra decade to learn stuff. And as far as the expensive treatments go, the ones for the billionaires, they'll basically be sponsoring tech development for the rest of us. Any industry needs somebody to pay for the expensive and shitty prototypes in order to reach quality mass production. You literally can't skip this step - trying to just pour government money until you get a product... shudder we definitely won't live to see this happen.
And second, I don't think we should drop everything and start working on anti-aging. And I really think this is a very dishonest argument, btw. We're at the level where anti-aging applied research isn't even legal, and not really in the Overton window either. It's a bit early to say "but we should leave some resources for something else".
> I don't think we should drop everything and start working on anti-aging. And I really think this is a very dishonest argument, btw
I definitely don't mean to paint every anti-aging proponent with this brush, and I agree that there's danger here in responding to people who say "I just think death is bad" with "why does this guy over here claim more than that?" You're not responsible for Bostrom's writing, you don't have a responsibility to answer for every person in the anti-aging movement, and I definitely don't mean to create the impression of a monoculture, I apologize for doing that.
But Bostrom is literally making the argument that we should drop everything, the text even advocates accepting significant compromises and costs in other areas in order to end aging. So to the extent that the Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant is a formative text in the anti-aging movement, then there should be some grappling with or at least acknowledgement of the fact that a formative text in the movement has these problems. I don't think I'm being dishonest at all about that; if Dragon-Tyrant is actually representative of anti-aging views then those views have got some pretty toxic baggage attached to them.
Of course if someone is just advocating "we should research slowing/stopping aging", then go wild, I don't have a problem with that or you. My objection is specifically to the phrasing of The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant. I don't believe the text is a neutral argument that death is bad, I think it has a lot of political assumptions/values built into it, and (worse) that it phrases those political values as a moral imperative for anyone who believes that death is bad. But you are not the text.
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> Test-missiles were fired but fell dead to the ground or flew off in the wrong direction. In one tragic accident, a wayward missile landed on a hospital and killed several hundred patients and staff. But there was now a real seriousness of purpose, and the tests continued even as the corpses were being dug out from the debris.
[...]
> The king had undergone a personal transformation from his earlier frivolous and thoughtless self. He now spent as much time as he could in the laboratories and the manufacturing plants, encouraging the workers and praising their toil. Sometimes he would bring a sleeping bag and spend the night on a noisy machine floor. He even studied and tried to understand the technical aspects of their work. Yet he confined himself to giving moral support and refrained from meddling in technical and managerial matters. (emphasis mine)
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The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant is filled with quotes like this that are advocating for pretty specific political/moral worldviews far beyond "death is bad".
I definitely don't want to paint people with a broad brush and (while I suspect you are over-optimistic about both technology and treatment cost), I don't have a problem with people researching anti-aging technology. At the same time, I don't think I'm being intellectually dishonest, deceptive, or bad faith in my reading of Bostrom's work, I think I'm applying a very straightforward interpretation of the text.
Fair enough. I'm mostly considering those paragraphs as artistic expression - it's a work of fiction after all. This might be most of our disagreement.
If you're frustrated by homelessness and you hold scientists who are working on a totally unrelated problem accountable for that homelessness, you're either participating in an absurd amount of Whataboutism, or you're not actually serious about what it takes to solve homelessness.
Plenty of countries have solved homelessness, and it requires a very well funded social and economic safety net, fueled by high taxation. Be angry with people who oppose those safety nets, not some random scientists who have nothing to do with this problem.
I should clarify that I have no problem with research on aging. I do research on brain machine interfaces which is equally pie in the sky. I am frustrated by the interest/funding shown in this research.
Also, I think that it's irresponsible to say that homelessness is a public policy problem and aging isn't. [Edit-more clarification]: My frustration is people who consider the problem of giving the median individual 10 more healthy-years of life unworthy of their attention/resources (attention is really the most valuable resource at some level) but are quite happy to get excited by those who promise infinite life. What if rather than a silver bullet, life extension requires society-level changes a small step at a time??
