I’m going to bring up the classic Aubrey de Grey response, which actually works for all of these issues, but I think this one in particular. Yes, there will be problems if we live a much longer time. Yes, they will be very big problems. No, we don’t even know what those problems will even be. But those problems will pale in comparison to the needless deaths of hundreds of thousands of people every day.
Yup, there’s ginormous status quo bias going on here. If we lived in a world stretched to the limit for resources, where policy is impossible because everyone is a bigoted moral fossil and the few sane leaders left have no clue what they’re doing because it’s all so new, and you proposed “Hey, I know! Let’s kill everyone over 80!”… everyone would just stare and ask “Have you been reading Pebble in the sky again?”.
It just gets to be very hard to envision a situation in which people would be motivated to keep forcing life onwards if it stopped being worth it, as a rule.
Yes, euthanasia exists, and is presently frequently denied. If the desire for it became so widespread that it was a major social need in the general population, that denial of it would also change, so long as we have anything to do with making our own rules.
If the consequences of life extension really are unknown, then they might be really good just as easily as they could be bad. Giving those up has a high opportunity cost. Without more information about the nature of these “unknown” consequences, they are not relevant (for non-risk-averse utility maximizers).
Unknown Consequences Discussion Thread
I’m going to bring up the classic Aubrey de Grey response, which actually works for all of these issues, but I think this one in particular. Yes, there will be problems if we live a much longer time. Yes, they will be very big problems. No, we don’t even know what those problems will even be. But those problems will pale in comparison to the needless deaths of hundreds of thousands of people every day.
Yup, there’s ginormous status quo bias going on here. If we lived in a world stretched to the limit for resources, where policy is impossible because everyone is a bigoted moral fossil and the few sane leaders left have no clue what they’re doing because it’s all so new, and you proposed “Hey, I know! Let’s kill everyone over 80!”… everyone would just stare and ask “Have you been reading Pebble in the sky again?”.
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How is this hand-waving?
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It just gets to be very hard to envision a situation in which people would be motivated to keep forcing life onwards if it stopped being worth it, as a rule.
Yes, euthanasia exists, and is presently frequently denied. If the desire for it became so widespread that it was a major social need in the general population, that denial of it would also change, so long as we have anything to do with making our own rules.
And if most people were even modestly rational...
It seems to me that if you would be better off dead, that’s the kind of situation you notice.
If the consequences of life extension really are unknown, then they might be really good just as easily as they could be bad. Giving those up has a high opportunity cost. Without more information about the nature of these “unknown” consequences, they are not relevant (for non-risk-averse utility maximizers).
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