Contrary to lavalamp, in a society without age I expect more murder, not less.
Inequality and ambition will become more and more socially problematic as lifespans extend. Imagine not just competing against Rockefeller’s descendants, but a 172-year old John D. Rockefeller (still sharp as a tack), patriarch of a clan of 150. And 150 assumes that they just extend lifespans, not reproductive windows! Compound interest will become a serious issue, in wealth, intelligence, and time.
Generational warfare is limited, now, because most people are patient enough to wait for their parents and bosses to die or retire. When that is no longer an option, things will get bloody- and maybe it will sometimes be a polite sort of “forced retirement,” but I suspect that’ll be more difficult to pull off than murder. You don’t have the frailty that comes with age to force an accident, and it’ll be difficult to accumulate enough allies to unseat them- they’ve been around longer. Would Nelson be content being forever just a grandson (especially if more second generation Rockefellers were being created)? Would John be content giving up the empire he created to watch his children or grandchildren mismanage it, when he feels just as hale and hearty as when he built it from scratch, and has the benefit of decades of experience?
As well, demographic trends that are vaguely worrying in the long run become short-run concerns. Suppose you had some violent, high birth-rate group that could become large enough to go around murdering other groups because they don’t share their bloodline in two centuries. Normally, that would be your great grandchildren’s problem, not yours, and it’s easy to imagine their two-hundred year plan falling apart. But with the originators around to see the thing to completion, and your head on the chopping block, you might be interested in nipping this in the bud (as once they get large enough, it will be difficult to kill enough of them to change their minds).
Arguments for disposing of “defectives” are also stronger, because once you have a high-quality person, they stick around. Why not populate the world with just high-quality people?
Overall, I think a world of thousand-year vampire clans will be a better one to live in (especially if I’m a first-generation vampire!), but I think society’s fractures will be deep and bloody.
This is Whig history. I am not confidant that we are morally superior to prior generations and that future generations will be morally superior to us. Making this argument would require a non-trivial amount of intellectual labor.
I am not confidant that we are morally superior to prior generations and that future generations will be morally superior to us. Making this argument would require a non-trivial amount of intellectual labor.
A number of people have issued some variant of this response, to which I reply:
We don’t have to say that society is getting better, only that it is changing. If society is not changing then it is stagnant. If society is changing, then those best suited to whatever society currently exists are those born relatively recently.
In other words, maybe the society of 2700 isn’t actually any better than the world of 2200, but it is different. If 2700 is not different than 2200, than society is no longer “evolving”. It is static. However, since 2700 hopefully will be different, the people best suited to live in it are those born in 2650, not those born in 2200.
tl;dr- We don’t have to say that society is getting better. We just have to say that it’s changing and those born most recently are best adapted to it.
There is a significant amount of inferential distance here.
If society is changing, then those best suited to whatever society currently exists are those born relatively recently.
and
However, since 2700 hopefully will be different, the people best suited to live in it are those born in 2650, not those born in 2200.
I do not know what you mean by this. It is not obvious that, at this point in time, those individuals born relatively recently are better suited to current society than those individuals born less recently. However, I also am not sure what you mean by “better suited.” Your language sounds slightly Darwinistic. However, I do not think that you are talking about fitness.
If there were 180 year-olds alive today, chances are pretty strong that a good amount of them would think that being anti-slavery is pretty progressive.
Actually there is data on this. Why not crunch the numbers? Those born in 1941 are 70 today, but where 20 in 1961. Controlling for how getting older tends to make people more conservative, how do their opinions differ? Do you think people who don’t update on social norms, signalling and values are likley to die significantly more than others? If not I think you will find a surprising shift in individual opinions over the decades from what I recall of when I was last doing research on something related.
If I accept that “social progress” is going to slow down, but not stop, by some factor, this does not seem a grave tragedy, compared to the dis-utility of billions of deaths. Isn’t the whole reason we care about the speed “social progress” because we dislike the dis-utility incurred by those who wouldn’t be incurring it in a different (better?) system?
A sufficiently long life in the improved system should outweigh any difference in the amount of time spent in suboptimal conditions. To pick one of your charged examples and put a face to it, wouldn’t you say Alan Turing might have decided to stick around if he knew he would still be young and healthy in 2010 and society would be accepting of homosexuality?
To pick one of your charged examples and put a face to it, wouldn’t you say Alan Turing might have decided to stick around if he knew he would still be young and healthy in 2010 and society would be accepting of homosexuality?
Eh. Turing committed suicide after two years of chemical castration by hormone injections (which can significantly impact personality and cognitive functioning), I’m not sure he would have been willing to put up with 11 more years.
It’s also not clear to me that LGBT rights would have advanced as quickly in the UK without Turing as a martyr, and so he might not have been looking at only 11 more years.
I don’t think we know why he killed himself, but I’m not sure the prospect of social acceptance of homosexuality in a few decades would really have inspired him to stick around. In fact...he did have that prospect within reasonable expectations of his natural life. He had still lost his security clearance and probably considered his career to be over.
I don’t think it would be considered “stagnation” from the perspective of the old folks. They might see it as society retaining its sanity. From that point of view, this is not a cost, but a benefit.
In order to count it as a cost, you’d first have to assume that the values that future folks would hold, given no life extension, would be better than the values people would hold given life extension. What are the reasons to think this?
I don’t think it would be considered “stagnation” from the perspective of the old folks. They might see it as society retaining its sanity. From that point of view, this is not a cost, but a benefit.
Its remarkable how many LWers fail to generalize the argument that Gandhi really dosen’t want to take a pill that makes him want to kill people.
We don’t so much change our minds, and we grow new people and the old ones die.
Yes, because our neuroplasticity tends to decrease as we age. This is why it’s important to realize that anti-aging treatments must deal with the brain as well as with general bodily cell degradation. I think that many people in the field do realize this, though. (See also my previous comment on this subject.)
Cross-reference: this issue was discussed in Three Worlds Collide — the born-in-our-era Confessor says that he is too old to lead — that his generation was appalled by the decisions of the younger generation, but the by-then established social structures did not give them a say and rightly so.
Have you ever tried having a long conversation with an elderly person, only to realize that they are bigots/homophobes/racists, etc? We all love Grandpa John and Grammy Sue, but they have to die for society to move forward. If there were 180 year-olds alive today, chances are pretty strong that a good amount of them would think that being anti-slavery is pretty progressive. They would have been about 90 years old when women got the right to vote.
We don’t so much change our minds, and we grow new people and the old ones die.
Which hinges on “moral progress” currently happening or it being always desirable from our perspective.
A unexplored variant of the argument that I think works better would be one of the many examples of scientific revolutions marching on, one grave at a time. But obviously one could make a similar counter-argument that not all knowledge is good. Sometimes a better map gets you killed. But I would generally ignore that for now, since posters who question the high prior on the high instrumental value of a better map have a revealed preference of wanting a better map, considering the community they are a part of.
We don’t so much change our minds, and we grow new people and the old ones die.
Introspection works poorly here, as it often does. People are adept at changing their minds and forgetting they had ever thought differently.
A person with a good grasp of the outside view but who overly respected introspection might think: “I think I am right about things, but so does everybody. Furthermore, I haven’t significantly changed my mind from being wrong often, nor has anyone else. Society has been improving over time.
So long as I humbly and accurately recognize my not often changing my mind parallels others’ not often changing their minds, and it is unlikely I represent the pinnacle of moral progress throughout the ages (even assuming I’m better than my contemporaries) death is needed to replace people and maintain moral progress.”
The problem with that reasoning is that it is not true that people don’t change their minds—they mostly just think they don’t. They can honestly say they have always supported chief Grok, even when chief Urk was in charge.
Perhaps I worded it too strongly, though I don’t think so, but I didn’t mean to imply people never hold on to opinions established in their early life. I agree that on this issue (more than any other) generational churn is the biggest factor, but even here it is merely the largest one (I think).
“not a single state shows support for gay marriage greater than 35% amongst those 64 and older”—what were the opinions among this cohort years ago? When they were younger, did even half as many support gay marriage?
Also we do not know for sure that it is their age itself that creates more inflexibility of opinion. Many people in this age group are retired and consequently do not have as many social interactions outside of their in-groups.
Also we do not know for sure that it is their age itself that creates more inflexibility of opinion.
I’m not sure what is meant by “inflexibility of opinion,” but for many possible concepts that would apply much more to the young than the old, and perhaps to the middle aged least of all.
This is predicated on the idea that at any point in history a reliable percentage of beliefs is crazy and/or evil and will be shown to be so at a later time. Seems intuitively wrong.
IF immortality hit “today”, roughly a quarter of the US population would be scientifically literate, and would remain so—likely—the remainder of their lives, based on the age ranges that spread holds true of today. That’s rather disturbing, to me.
This seems like a real problem, but, well, I don’t know of any good way to deal with it. I don’t think that it’s a coincidence that the Brown vs. Board of Education ruling didn’t happen until after the Confederate war veterans were all dead.
As I once said some time ago: What kinds of things which are currently considered signs of social progress are also things that an average educated person from the U.S. of the 1800s would find horrifying?
What kinds of things which are currently considered signs of social progress are also things that an average educated person from the U.S. of the 1800s would find horrifying?
And of those, which of them should we still find horrifying today?
You probably should read a little more history. Things were better for most blacks in 1910 than they were in 1940. Woodrow Wilson’s election, and his subsequent expulsion of blacks from the civil service, started a period of decline for blacks that was deepened by the Depression, but had strongly started improving after WW II. Brown vs Board of Education was a result of the change not a cause, and “Civil War” veterans were irrelevant.
Thomas Sowell has written on race problems, notably in Economics and Politics of Race and large parts of his memoir, A Personal Odyssey. His discussion of Brown in the latter is particularly interesting, he was attending Howard University at the time, though a lot of comments about it and its effects are spread throughout the book.
Things were better for most blacks in 1910 than they were in 1940. Woodrow Wilson’s election, and his subsequent expulsion of blacks from the civil service, started a period of decline for blacks that was deepened by the Depression, but had strongly started improving after WW II.
I’m not particularly surprised by this, actually… things also got worse after 1877 when federal troops left the South and paramilitary organizations started suppressing the black vote.
Brown vs Board of Education was a result of the change not a cause
I just meant it as a milestone that showed how things had changed, not as a specific cause of that change. The ruling would never have been made without the successful execution of a long-term strategy to gradually change legal opinions. (The first schools to be integrated by the courts were state-run law schools...)
In this example, though, we’re the Confederate War Veterans—it seems rational, given our preferences, to crush the dreams of the future. (Or to alternate to an example with different affect: it’s rational for, say, an idealistic young lawyer to take precautions to ensure she doesn’t become an old scumbag lawyer, even if she know the old scumbag would be very happy those precautions had not been taken.)
Of course, perhaps Jim Crow was not the true implementation of Confederate CEV; they would have preferred different things if they had been more informed about the world and more the people they wanted to be, and so on. But in that case Confederates should expect that their future selves should more faithfully execute the real CEV as they become more informed, unless they don’t trust themselves (suppose I like fairness but like myself being on top slightly more, and that at after a certain point future-me is sufficiently unlike me that I’d prefer he not be on top (even though he will, since he will my preference set) - in that case it’s rational for me to precommit to stepping down after a certain time.)
So upon reflection this is a valid concern to the extent that 1) we don’t trust ourselves to implement our current CEV better than our successors and 2) we don’t trust our precommitment mechanism to work either. Of course “our” CEVs probably vary enough that there’s not a single useful answer here.
Indeed, one recurring problem is that we are who we are and not who we want to be. It’s easier to get Our Hypothetical Racist Grandparents to agree that the premises of racism are wrong but it will be harder to get them not to be upset by at the thought of their granddaughter marrying one, even if they know they shouldn’t be and actually do want to change.
Maybe someday we’ll invent brainwashing that works?
Social Stagnation Discussion Thread
Contrary to lavalamp, in a society without age I expect more murder, not less.
Inequality and ambition will become more and more socially problematic as lifespans extend. Imagine not just competing against Rockefeller’s descendants, but a 172-year old John D. Rockefeller (still sharp as a tack), patriarch of a clan of 150. And 150 assumes that they just extend lifespans, not reproductive windows! Compound interest will become a serious issue, in wealth, intelligence, and time.
Generational warfare is limited, now, because most people are patient enough to wait for their parents and bosses to die or retire. When that is no longer an option, things will get bloody- and maybe it will sometimes be a polite sort of “forced retirement,” but I suspect that’ll be more difficult to pull off than murder. You don’t have the frailty that comes with age to force an accident, and it’ll be difficult to accumulate enough allies to unseat them- they’ve been around longer. Would Nelson be content being forever just a grandson (especially if more second generation Rockefellers were being created)? Would John be content giving up the empire he created to watch his children or grandchildren mismanage it, when he feels just as hale and hearty as when he built it from scratch, and has the benefit of decades of experience?
As well, demographic trends that are vaguely worrying in the long run become short-run concerns. Suppose you had some violent, high birth-rate group that could become large enough to go around murdering other groups because they don’t share their bloodline in two centuries. Normally, that would be your great grandchildren’s problem, not yours, and it’s easy to imagine their two-hundred year plan falling apart. But with the originators around to see the thing to completion, and your head on the chopping block, you might be interested in nipping this in the bud (as once they get large enough, it will be difficult to kill enough of them to change their minds).
Arguments for disposing of “defectives” are also stronger, because once you have a high-quality person, they stick around. Why not populate the world with just high-quality people?
Overall, I think a world of thousand-year vampire clans will be a better one to live in (especially if I’m a first-generation vampire!), but I think society’s fractures will be deep and bloody.
This is Whig history. I am not confidant that we are morally superior to prior generations and that future generations will be morally superior to us. Making this argument would require a non-trivial amount of intellectual labor.
A number of people have issued some variant of this response, to which I reply:
We don’t have to say that society is getting better, only that it is changing. If society is not changing then it is stagnant. If society is changing, then those best suited to whatever society currently exists are those born relatively recently.
In other words, maybe the society of 2700 isn’t actually any better than the world of 2200, but it is different. If 2700 is not different than 2200, than society is no longer “evolving”. It is static. However, since 2700 hopefully will be different, the people best suited to live in it are those born in 2650, not those born in 2200.
tl;dr- We don’t have to say that society is getting better. We just have to say that it’s changing and those born most recently are best adapted to it.
There is a significant amount of inferential distance here.
and
I do not know what you mean by this. It is not obvious that, at this point in time, those individuals born relatively recently are better suited to current society than those individuals born less recently. However, I also am not sure what you mean by “better suited.” Your language sounds slightly Darwinistic. However, I do not think that you are talking about fitness.
Actually there is data on this. Why not crunch the numbers? Those born in 1941 are 70 today, but where 20 in 1961. Controlling for how getting older tends to make people more conservative, how do their opinions differ? Do you think people who don’t update on social norms, signalling and values are likley to die significantly more than others? If not I think you will find a surprising shift in individual opinions over the decades from what I recall of when I was last doing research on something related.
If I accept that “social progress” is going to slow down, but not stop, by some factor, this does not seem a grave tragedy, compared to the dis-utility of billions of deaths. Isn’t the whole reason we care about the speed “social progress” because we dislike the dis-utility incurred by those who wouldn’t be incurring it in a different (better?) system?
A sufficiently long life in the improved system should outweigh any difference in the amount of time spent in suboptimal conditions. To pick one of your charged examples and put a face to it, wouldn’t you say Alan Turing might have decided to stick around if he knew he would still be young and healthy in 2010 and society would be accepting of homosexuality?
Eh. Turing committed suicide after two years of chemical castration by hormone injections (which can significantly impact personality and cognitive functioning), I’m not sure he would have been willing to put up with 11 more years.
It’s also not clear to me that LGBT rights would have advanced as quickly in the UK without Turing as a martyr, and so he might not have been looking at only 11 more years.
I don’t think we know why he killed himself, but I’m not sure the prospect of social acceptance of homosexuality in a few decades would really have inspired him to stick around. In fact...he did have that prospect within reasonable expectations of his natural life. He had still lost his security clearance and probably considered his career to be over.
Turn things around: in a world where people lived forever, we would not solve the problem of social stagnation by killing people.
EDIT: Hm, I guess this is extremely similar to the provided counter-argument.
I don’t think it would be considered “stagnation” from the perspective of the old folks. They might see it as society retaining its sanity. From that point of view, this is not a cost, but a benefit.
In order to count it as a cost, you’d first have to assume that the values that future folks would hold, given no life extension, would be better than the values people would hold given life extension. What are the reasons to think this?
Its remarkable how many LWers fail to generalize the argument that Gandhi really dosen’t want to take a pill that makes him want to kill people.
Yes, because our neuroplasticity tends to decrease as we age. This is why it’s important to realize that anti-aging treatments must deal with the brain as well as with general bodily cell degradation. I think that many people in the field do realize this, though. (See also my previous comment on this subject.)
Cross-reference: this issue was discussed in Three Worlds Collide — the born-in-our-era Confessor says that he is too old to lead — that his generation was appalled by the decisions of the younger generation, but the by-then established social structures did not give them a say and rightly so.
Which hinges on “moral progress” currently happening or it being always desirable from our perspective.
A unexplored variant of the argument that I think works better would be one of the many examples of scientific revolutions marching on, one grave at a time. But obviously one could make a similar counter-argument that not all knowledge is good. Sometimes a better map gets you killed. But I would generally ignore that for now, since posters who question the high prior on the high instrumental value of a better map have a revealed preference of wanting a better map, considering the community they are a part of.
Edit: Missed this comment
Introspection works poorly here, as it often does. People are adept at changing their minds and forgetting they had ever thought differently.
A person with a good grasp of the outside view but who overly respected introspection might think: “I think I am right about things, but so does everybody. Furthermore, I haven’t significantly changed my mind from being wrong often, nor has anyone else. Society has been improving over time.
So long as I humbly and accurately recognize my not often changing my mind parallels others’ not often changing their minds, and it is unlikely I represent the pinnacle of moral progress throughout the ages (even assuming I’m better than my contemporaries) death is needed to replace people and maintain moral progress.”
The problem with that reasoning is that it is not true that people don’t change their minds—they mostly just think they don’t. They can honestly say they have always supported chief Grok, even when chief Urk was in charge.
But young people are more likely to support same-sex marriage.
Perhaps I worded it too strongly, though I don’t think so, but I didn’t mean to imply people never hold on to opinions established in their early life. I agree that on this issue (more than any other) generational churn is the biggest factor, but even here it is merely the largest one (I think).
“not a single state shows support for gay marriage greater than 35% amongst those 64 and older”—what were the opinions among this cohort years ago? When they were younger, did even half as many support gay marriage?
Also we do not know for sure that it is their age itself that creates more inflexibility of opinion. Many people in this age group are retired and consequently do not have as many social interactions outside of their in-groups.
I’m not sure what is meant by “inflexibility of opinion,” but for many possible concepts that would apply much more to the young than the old, and perhaps to the middle aged least of all.
.
IF immortality hit “today”, roughly a quarter of the US population would be scientifically literate, and would remain so—likely—the remainder of their lives, based on the age ranges that spread holds true of today. That’s rather disturbing, to me.
.
This seems like a real problem, but, well, I don’t know of any good way to deal with it. I don’t think that it’s a coincidence that the Brown vs. Board of Education ruling didn’t happen until after the Confederate war veterans were all dead.
As I once said some time ago: What kinds of things which are currently considered signs of social progress are also things that an average educated person from the U.S. of the 1800s would find horrifying?
And of those, which of them should we still find horrifying today?
You probably should read a little more history. Things were better for most blacks in 1910 than they were in 1940. Woodrow Wilson’s election, and his subsequent expulsion of blacks from the civil service, started a period of decline for blacks that was deepened by the Depression, but had strongly started improving after WW II. Brown vs Board of Education was a result of the change not a cause, and “Civil War” veterans were irrelevant.
Thomas Sowell has written on race problems, notably in Economics and Politics of Race and large parts of his memoir, A Personal Odyssey. His discussion of Brown in the latter is particularly interesting, he was attending Howard University at the time, though a lot of comments about it and its effects are spread throughout the book.
I’m not particularly surprised by this, actually… things also got worse after 1877 when federal troops left the South and paramilitary organizations started suppressing the black vote.
I just meant it as a milestone that showed how things had changed, not as a specific cause of that change. The ruling would never have been made without the successful execution of a long-term strategy to gradually change legal opinions. (The first schools to be integrated by the courts were state-run law schools...)
In this example, though, we’re the Confederate War Veterans—it seems rational, given our preferences, to crush the dreams of the future. (Or to alternate to an example with different affect: it’s rational for, say, an idealistic young lawyer to take precautions to ensure she doesn’t become an old scumbag lawyer, even if she know the old scumbag would be very happy those precautions had not been taken.)
Of course, perhaps Jim Crow was not the true implementation of Confederate CEV; they would have preferred different things if they had been more informed about the world and more the people they wanted to be, and so on. But in that case Confederates should expect that their future selves should more faithfully execute the real CEV as they become more informed, unless they don’t trust themselves (suppose I like fairness but like myself being on top slightly more, and that at after a certain point future-me is sufficiently unlike me that I’d prefer he not be on top (even though he will, since he will my preference set) - in that case it’s rational for me to precommit to stepping down after a certain time.)
So upon reflection this is a valid concern to the extent that 1) we don’t trust ourselves to implement our current CEV better than our successors and 2) we don’t trust our precommitment mechanism to work either. Of course “our” CEVs probably vary enough that there’s not a single useful answer here.
Indeed, one recurring problem is that we are who we are and not who we want to be. It’s easier to get Our Hypothetical Racist Grandparents to agree that the premises of racism are wrong but it will be harder to get them not to be upset by at the thought of their granddaughter marrying one, even if they know they shouldn’t be and actually do want to change.
Maybe someday we’ll invent brainwashing that works?