All of the dreadful arguments for why death is good came out. For uninteresting reasons I missed a few minutes here and there, but in what I heard, not one of the speakers on any side of the question said anything like, “This is a no-brainer! Death is evil. Disease is evil. The less of both we have, the better. There is nothing good about death, at all, and all the arguments to the contrary are moral imbecility.”
There are arguments in favor of death though, and most people have rationalized to their own satisfaction the conclusion that death is for the best. Calling the issue a no-brainer, and saying that it’s obvious that we should have as little death and disease as possible, is unlikely to impress an audience that doesn’t already hold that position. It’s likely to convince them that your position is less sophisticated than their own, rather than more, and that you haven’t considered their objections, rather than being able to dispense with them.
As I understand, the question was about life extension, which does not equal immortality. I have heard a few plausible arguments against immortality, but here it seems that those people are arguing that if we had to choose between living for 80 years and 150 years, we should take 80, for sophisticated reasons. An that is stupidity.
And I don’t think that the general audience is firmly entrenched in sophisticated positions. Most people would gladly accept that the moral question about death is simple. We see few people arguing that cancer is good, even if many those sophisticated arguments for death could be used to support cancer as well. I haven’t also ever seen somebody to argue, on whatever level of sophistication, that e.g. Japan is inferior to Zimbabwe because people in Japan live longer. Once a longer life becomes a real option, everybody will choose it if he can. When people rationalise (early) death as good, it is only because they see the alternatives as only hypothetical.
But what would be the advantages to calling it stupidity in a public debate? I’m skeptical that most people are not fairly entrenched in sophisticated positions on life extension, having argued the matter on several occasions in real life with people outside my own ideological circles. If you want to convince someone to change their mind to adopt a minority opinion, it’s generally most effective to show that you’ve given the matter more consideration than they have, and to avoid any implication that you’re unaware of or have dismissed out of hand any arguments in favor of their position.
While I’ve never heard anyone argue in those words that Japan is inferior to Zimbabwe because people live longer, there’s no shortage of people who will argue that societies like Japan pose more danger to our planet than ones like Zimbabwe, because of the ecological impacts of a first world lifestyle. Longer lives would implicitly be an exacerbating factor. I’m aware of this line of argument, and prepared to argue against it, but if I proclaimed those opposing my position to be stupid without first addressing it or any others they might bring up, then it would tend to give the audience the impression that I had not given the matter adequate consideration, was entrenched in my position, and prepared to rationalize away any arguments against it.
I tend to think that different techniques are needed in the public debate depending on circumstances. Sometimes it is better choice to argue carefully and to show considerable interest in your opponent’s arguments, but sometimes the better way is to confidently declare your position as the only sensible one. People like Dawkins are not popular by chance, their style of arguing has some appeal.
Unfortunately I am not so good at telling which strategy works better for a given audience and situation.
Once a longer life becomes a real option, everybody will choose it if he can.
That is not what currently happens. There are big differences in the way people age, and when they die. Many of them can be linked to lifestyle decisions, some are well researched, and a few even widely known due to public propaganda. And still people smoke. If a quick/fix, a pill, o something that looks like treatment becomes available that might change. But at the moment much of what actually can be done to improve life quality, length, or probability of surviving is just not done.
Depending on the details, many people may even reject “quick fixes that look like treatment” to death and disease.
See for instance the conservative response to the HPV vaccine Gardasil, which prevents the most common strains of the virus that causes genital warts—and thereby drastically reduces the risk of cervical cancer. By providing a “quick fix” to protect sexually active women from a deadly disease, Gardasil reduces the “punishments” available for an action (or “lifestyle”) disapproved by conservatives; therefore, they reject it.
There used to be a time when racism was quite respectable. There were many sophisticated arguments in its favor. But it was still a mind-bendingly stupid idea. Smart people eventually realized how embarrassing it was and stopped arguing in its favor—but I doubt it was due to calm, deliberate argument alone that this occurred.
Emotional approaches, including appeals to shame, probably carried a large part of the impact of the civil rights movement. But there’s a difference between “I am a man, a human being with thoughts and aspirations, and I believe I have a right to be treated with dignity,” and “what you’re doing is evil, and any attempt to justify yourself is sheer moral imbecility.”
Emphasizing the sheer moral weight of the arguments they’re dismissing by arguing for death might encourage them to consider that they may be doing something wrong, but calling their arguments stupid, or far worse, evil, is likely to signal to them that they’ve been targeted as an enemy, and cause them to dig in their heels.
Oh yes, that rant was written for LW consumption. I’m as yet undecided just what to say to cross the greater distance to a different audience. But I don’t yet exclude that rant itself, with more arguments, but undiluted.
There are indeed arguments in favour of death—the programme was full of them. But do you think there are good arguments in favour of death? Death of people in general, that is. It is good for us that every smallpox virus dies, there are people in dreadful situations for which there is nothing else to be done, and there are dreadful people whose death would make everyone whose lives they touch better off. But everyone wearing out by 100?
Part of the difficulty here is that opposing death doesn’t necessarily equate to supporting life-extension research, as it does depend somewhat on the knock-on effects and the implementation of the latter.
For example, it strikes me as plausible that a life-extension treatment expensive or scarce enough that it could be applied to only N% of the population would leave the world in a worse condition than it is now, and I’m not at all confident of my estimates of N.
That said, my usual reply to the pro-death argument is some form of “If a rogue scientist accidentally released a nanovirus that kept everyone alive and healthy for a thousand years, would you support a policy of artificial death to maintain the status quo? If not, why not?”
My experience is that very few people treat an inevitable death the same way as a deliberate one, no matter how much they assert that the death is a good thing for reasons other than its inevitability. So they often end up thinking about the second case very differently, and sometimes that evokes a mental set that carries over.
That said, my usual reply to the pro-death argument is some form of “If a rogue scientist accidentally released a nanovirus that kept everyone alive and healthy for a thousand years, would you support a policy of artificial death to maintain the status quo? If not, why not?”
I use the baseball-bat-to-the-head analogy, that if people were hit on the head with a baseball bat twice daily, after years they would come accept it, after decades they would come to believe it is good, and after generations they would develop clever and complicated arguments as to why it is good and why it should continue. But would any of those arguments convince you, now, to take up a regimen of baseball bat strikes to the head?
I think I stole that almost word-for-word from somewhere else on this site, though.
The original was Eliezer himself, in How to Seem (and Be) Deep. I’m more fond of TheOtherDave’s analogy, though, since I think the baseball bat analogy suffers from one weakness: you’re drawing a metaphorical parallel in which death (which you disagree is bad) is replaced by something that’s definitely bad. Sometimes you can’t get any farther than this, since this sets off some people’s BS detectors (and to be honest I think the heuristic they’re using to call foul on this is a decent one).
Even if you can get them to consider the true payload of the argument (that clearly bad but inevitable things will probably be rationalized, and therefore that we should expect death to have some positive-sounding rationalizations even if it were A Very Bad Thing), you still haven’t really got a complete argument. That baseless rationalizations might be expected to crop up justifying inevitabilities does not prove that your conversation partner’s justifications are baseless, it only provides an alternate explanation for the evidence.
It isn’t actually hard to flesh this line of thought into a more compelling argument, but I think the accidental long-life thought experiment hits much harder.
Edit: Upon rereading, I had forgotten that Eliezer’s version ends with a line that includes the thrust of the TheOtherDave’s argument: “I think that if you took someone who was immortal, and asked them if they wanted to die for benefit X, they would say no.”
(nods) Agreed; I don’t think I was saying anything Eliezer wasn’t, just building a slightly different intuition pump.
That said, the precise construction of the intuition pump can matter a lot for rhetorical purposes.
Mainstream culture entangles two separate ideas when it comes to death: first, that an agent’s choices are more subject to skepticism than the consistently applied ground rules of existence (A1) and second, that death is better than life (A2).
A1 is a lot easier to support than A2, so in any scenario where life-extension is an agent’s choice the arguments against life-extension will tend to rest heavily on A1.
Setting up a scenario where A1 and A2 point in different directions—where life-extension just happens, and death is a deliberate choice—kicks that particular leg out from under the argument, and forces people to actually defend A2. (Which, to be fair, some people will proceed to do… but others will balk. And there are A3..An’s that I’m ignoring here.)
The “I think that if you took someone who was immortal, and asked them if they wanted to die for benefit X, they would say no.” argument does something similar: it also makes life the default, and death a choice.
In some ways it’s an even better pump: my version still has an agent responsible for life-extension, even if it’s accidental. OTOH, in some ways it’s worse: telling a story about how the immortal person got that way makes the narrative easier to swallow.
(Incidentally, this suggests that a revision involving a large-scale mutation rather than a rogue scientist might work even better, though the connotations of “mutation” impose their own difficulties.)
It might just be easiest to postulate an immortal person and obfuscate the process entirely.
Also, I am trying to come up with a quick test to distinguish passive deathists from active deathists—ie, who would refuse an offered immortality potion, and who would vote against funding to develop an immortality potion? Who would say “I don’t want to live forever” and who would say “People shouldn’t live forever”? Arguments need to be tailored in different ways for these different types. Something like “How about you take the potion, and then if you actually do wake up one day and want to die, you can commit painless suicide?” for the passives and your “Would you vote for a policy of artificial death?” for the actives.
There are arguments in favor of death though, and most people have rationalized to their own satisfaction the conclusion that death is for the best. Calling the issue a no-brainer, and saying that it’s obvious that we should have as little death and disease as possible, is unlikely to impress an audience that doesn’t already hold that position. It’s likely to convince them that your position is less sophisticated than their own, rather than more, and that you haven’t considered their objections, rather than being able to dispense with them.
As I understand, the question was about life extension, which does not equal immortality. I have heard a few plausible arguments against immortality, but here it seems that those people are arguing that if we had to choose between living for 80 years and 150 years, we should take 80, for sophisticated reasons. An that is stupidity.
And I don’t think that the general audience is firmly entrenched in sophisticated positions. Most people would gladly accept that the moral question about death is simple. We see few people arguing that cancer is good, even if many those sophisticated arguments for death could be used to support cancer as well. I haven’t also ever seen somebody to argue, on whatever level of sophistication, that e.g. Japan is inferior to Zimbabwe because people in Japan live longer. Once a longer life becomes a real option, everybody will choose it if he can. When people rationalise (early) death as good, it is only because they see the alternatives as only hypothetical.
But what would be the advantages to calling it stupidity in a public debate? I’m skeptical that most people are not fairly entrenched in sophisticated positions on life extension, having argued the matter on several occasions in real life with people outside my own ideological circles. If you want to convince someone to change their mind to adopt a minority opinion, it’s generally most effective to show that you’ve given the matter more consideration than they have, and to avoid any implication that you’re unaware of or have dismissed out of hand any arguments in favor of their position.
While I’ve never heard anyone argue in those words that Japan is inferior to Zimbabwe because people live longer, there’s no shortage of people who will argue that societies like Japan pose more danger to our planet than ones like Zimbabwe, because of the ecological impacts of a first world lifestyle. Longer lives would implicitly be an exacerbating factor. I’m aware of this line of argument, and prepared to argue against it, but if I proclaimed those opposing my position to be stupid without first addressing it or any others they might bring up, then it would tend to give the audience the impression that I had not given the matter adequate consideration, was entrenched in my position, and prepared to rationalize away any arguments against it.
I tend to think that different techniques are needed in the public debate depending on circumstances. Sometimes it is better choice to argue carefully and to show considerable interest in your opponent’s arguments, but sometimes the better way is to confidently declare your position as the only sensible one. People like Dawkins are not popular by chance, their style of arguing has some appeal.
Unfortunately I am not so good at telling which strategy works better for a given audience and situation.
That is not what currently happens. There are big differences in the way people age, and when they die. Many of them can be linked to lifestyle decisions, some are well researched, and a few even widely known due to public propaganda. And still people smoke. If a quick/fix, a pill, o something that looks like treatment becomes available that might change. But at the moment much of what actually can be done to improve life quality, length, or probability of surviving is just not done.
Depending on the details, many people may even reject “quick fixes that look like treatment” to death and disease.
See for instance the conservative response to the HPV vaccine Gardasil, which prevents the most common strains of the virus that causes genital warts—and thereby drastically reduces the risk of cervical cancer. By providing a “quick fix” to protect sexually active women from a deadly disease, Gardasil reduces the “punishments” available for an action (or “lifestyle”) disapproved by conservatives; therefore, they reject it.
There used to be a time when racism was quite respectable. There were many sophisticated arguments in its favor. But it was still a mind-bendingly stupid idea. Smart people eventually realized how embarrassing it was and stopped arguing in its favor—but I doubt it was due to calm, deliberate argument alone that this occurred.
Emotional approaches, including appeals to shame, probably carried a large part of the impact of the civil rights movement. But there’s a difference between “I am a man, a human being with thoughts and aspirations, and I believe I have a right to be treated with dignity,” and “what you’re doing is evil, and any attempt to justify yourself is sheer moral imbecility.”
Emphasizing the sheer moral weight of the arguments they’re dismissing by arguing for death might encourage them to consider that they may be doing something wrong, but calling their arguments stupid, or far worse, evil, is likely to signal to them that they’ve been targeted as an enemy, and cause them to dig in their heels.
Methods of Communication—a discussion of different styles of activist communication, including the weak and strong points of each of them.
Thanks! That post is totally made of awesome!
Oh yes, that rant was written for LW consumption. I’m as yet undecided just what to say to cross the greater distance to a different audience. But I don’t yet exclude that rant itself, with more arguments, but undiluted.
There are indeed arguments in favour of death—the programme was full of them. But do you think there are good arguments in favour of death? Death of people in general, that is. It is good for us that every smallpox virus dies, there are people in dreadful situations for which there is nothing else to be done, and there are dreadful people whose death would make everyone whose lives they touch better off. But everyone wearing out by 100?
Part of the difficulty here is that opposing death doesn’t necessarily equate to supporting life-extension research, as it does depend somewhat on the knock-on effects and the implementation of the latter.
For example, it strikes me as plausible that a life-extension treatment expensive or scarce enough that it could be applied to only N% of the population would leave the world in a worse condition than it is now, and I’m not at all confident of my estimates of N.
That said, my usual reply to the pro-death argument is some form of “If a rogue scientist accidentally released a nanovirus that kept everyone alive and healthy for a thousand years, would you support a policy of artificial death to maintain the status quo? If not, why not?”
My experience is that very few people treat an inevitable death the same way as a deliberate one, no matter how much they assert that the death is a good thing for reasons other than its inevitability. So they often end up thinking about the second case very differently, and sometimes that evokes a mental set that carries over.
And sometimes not.
I use the baseball-bat-to-the-head analogy, that if people were hit on the head with a baseball bat twice daily, after years they would come accept it, after decades they would come to believe it is good, and after generations they would develop clever and complicated arguments as to why it is good and why it should continue. But would any of those arguments convince you, now, to take up a regimen of baseball bat strikes to the head?
I think I stole that almost word-for-word from somewhere else on this site, though.
The original was Eliezer himself, in How to Seem (and Be) Deep. I’m more fond of TheOtherDave’s analogy, though, since I think the baseball bat analogy suffers from one weakness: you’re drawing a metaphorical parallel in which death (which you disagree is bad) is replaced by something that’s definitely bad. Sometimes you can’t get any farther than this, since this sets off some people’s BS detectors (and to be honest I think the heuristic they’re using to call foul on this is a decent one).
Even if you can get them to consider the true payload of the argument (that clearly bad but inevitable things will probably be rationalized, and therefore that we should expect death to have some positive-sounding rationalizations even if it were A Very Bad Thing), you still haven’t really got a complete argument. That baseless rationalizations might be expected to crop up justifying inevitabilities does not prove that your conversation partner’s justifications are baseless, it only provides an alternate explanation for the evidence.
It isn’t actually hard to flesh this line of thought into a more compelling argument, but I think the accidental long-life thought experiment hits much harder.
Edit: Upon rereading, I had forgotten that Eliezer’s version ends with a line that includes the thrust of the TheOtherDave’s argument: “I think that if you took someone who was immortal, and asked them if they wanted to die for benefit X, they would say no.”
(nods) Agreed; I don’t think I was saying anything Eliezer wasn’t, just building a slightly different intuition pump.
That said, the precise construction of the intuition pump can matter a lot for rhetorical purposes.
Mainstream culture entangles two separate ideas when it comes to death: first, that an agent’s choices are more subject to skepticism than the consistently applied ground rules of existence (A1) and second, that death is better than life (A2).
A1 is a lot easier to support than A2, so in any scenario where life-extension is an agent’s choice the arguments against life-extension will tend to rest heavily on A1.
Setting up a scenario where A1 and A2 point in different directions—where life-extension just happens, and death is a deliberate choice—kicks that particular leg out from under the argument, and forces people to actually defend A2. (Which, to be fair, some people will proceed to do… but others will balk. And there are A3..An’s that I’m ignoring here.)
The “I think that if you took someone who was immortal, and asked them if they wanted to die for benefit X, they would say no.” argument does something similar: it also makes life the default, and death a choice.
In some ways it’s an even better pump: my version still has an agent responsible for life-extension, even if it’s accidental. OTOH, in some ways it’s worse: telling a story about how the immortal person got that way makes the narrative easier to swallow.
(Incidentally, this suggests that a revision involving a large-scale mutation rather than a rogue scientist might work even better, though the connotations of “mutation” impose their own difficulties.)
It might just be easiest to postulate an immortal person and obfuscate the process entirely.
Also, I am trying to come up with a quick test to distinguish passive deathists from active deathists—ie, who would refuse an offered immortality potion, and who would vote against funding to develop an immortality potion? Who would say “I don’t want to live forever” and who would say “People shouldn’t live forever”? Arguments need to be tailored in different ways for these different types. Something like “How about you take the potion, and then if you actually do wake up one day and want to die, you can commit painless suicide?” for the passives and your “Would you vote for a policy of artificial death?” for the actives.