>”The problem is when people get old, they don’t change their minds, they just die. So, if you want to have progress in society, you got to make sure that, you know, people need to die, because they get old, they don’t change their mind.”
That’s valid today but I am willing to bet a big reason why old people change their mind less is biological—less neuroplasticity, accumulated damage, mental fatigue etc. If we are fixing aging, and we fix those as well it should be less of an issue.
Additionally, if we are in some post-death utopia, I have to assume we have useful, benevolent AI solving our problems, and that ideally it doesn’t matter all that much who held a lot of wealth or power before.
Computational argument, inspired by Algorithms to Live By: The more time you have, the more you should lean towards exploration in the explore-exploit tradeoff. As your remaining lifespan decreases, you should conversely lean towards the exploit side. Including consuming less new information, and changing your mind less often—since there’s less value in doing that when you have less time to act on that new info.
Conversely, if we could magically extend the healthy lifespans of people, by this same argument that should result in more exploration, and in people being more willing to change their mind.
It is not a biological argument. Well, maybe it was, but you can also compare what aging does to corporations. Companies also age, even though their substrate doesn’t. They get slower and more conservative. They have optimized harder in the past and have more to lose due to change. I bet these effects also happen to people and not for biological reasons (though these may make it worse).
In case of institutions, there’s a bias towards conservatism because any institution that’s too willing to change is one that might well cease to exist for any number of reasons. So if you encounter a long-lived institution, it’s probably one that has numerous policies in place to perpetuate itself.
This doesn’t really seem analogous to how human aging affects willingness and ability to change.
It’s a potentially useful data point but probably only slightly comparable.
Big, older, well-established companies face stronger and different pressures than small ones and do have more to lose. For humans that’s much less the case after a point.
>”The problem is when people get old, they don’t change their minds, they just die. So, if you want to have progress in society, you got to make sure that, you know, people need to die, because they get old, they don’t change their mind.”
That’s valid today but I am willing to bet a big reason why old people change their mind less is biological—less neuroplasticity, accumulated damage, mental fatigue etc. If we are fixing aging, and we fix those as well it should be less of an issue.
Additionally, if we are in some post-death utopia, I have to assume we have useful, benevolent AI solving our problems, and that ideally it doesn’t matter all that much who held a lot of wealth or power before.
Computational argument, inspired by Algorithms to Live By: The more time you have, the more you should lean towards exploration in the explore-exploit tradeoff. As your remaining lifespan decreases, you should conversely lean towards the exploit side. Including consuming less new information, and changing your mind less often—since there’s less value in doing that when you have less time to act on that new info.
Conversely, if we could magically extend the healthy lifespans of people, by this same argument that should result in more exploration, and in people being more willing to change their mind.
It is not a biological argument. Well, maybe it was, but you can also compare what aging does to corporations. Companies also age, even though their substrate doesn’t. They get slower and more conservative. They have optimized harder in the past and have more to lose due to change. I bet these effects also happen to people and not for biological reasons (though these may make it worse).
In case of institutions, there’s a bias towards conservatism because any institution that’s too willing to change is one that might well cease to exist for any number of reasons. So if you encounter a long-lived institution, it’s probably one that has numerous policies in place to perpetuate itself.
This doesn’t really seem analogous to how human aging affects willingness and ability to change.
It’s a potentially useful data point but probably only slightly comparable. Big, older, well-established companies face stronger and different pressures than small ones and do have more to lose. For humans that’s much less the case after a point.