> 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.
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> 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.
Fallacy: "but there are starving kids in Africa" is a Generic Counterargument that can be applied to anything. It says nothing useful.
Slander: how do you know people who care about aging don't care _more_ about the homeless?
Ad hominem: you take an idea (death is bad) and make it about the character of the people supporting it.
Bad ckemere. Bad.