It’s pretty difficult to, quite literally, argue that hundreds of billions of people should die because it might help your favored political ideology a little* or you have this correlation that a field would change citation patterns a little if the older researchers died. I would be unlikely to change my breakfast plans based on that kind of research, much less… [checks notes] “deliberately consign all humans forever to rapid decay, suffering, death, and permanent oblivion”. If you’re going to argue that and believe it’s a good use of time in such a discussion compared to other issues, you’d better bring your A-game.
I can’t think of any argument which comes within orders of magnitude of possibly justifying that, especially when the aging literature is so ambiguous about cohort effects and life-cycle trends (so being older guarantees unproductivity? Why do many fields peak so late like the 40s or 50s, then?) and the upfront loss is enormous (every time someone dies, a lifetime of experience and investment goes with them), and there is the enormous confound to any claimed ‘effect of time’ which is the aging process itself: how much of what you regard as bad about the elderly, their inflexibility and whatnot, is simply that they are literally dying one piece at a time, particularly their brains, increasingly dysfunctional in ways like being unable to sleep (good thing sleep doesn’t do anything important mentally, right?), and often are in constant pain and having lost much of what they liked about living or involvement in the affairs of the world? (We can mask this with ‘age norms’ and lowballing our cognitive tests like, “they know their name and the current US president, guess they don’t qualify for a diagnosis of senile dementia… yet”, but the reality remains, no matter what labels you use.) Sure would be embarrassing if we procrastinated on fixed aging and discovered that most or all of what is bad about the aged is the aging, and actually, living for centuries in good health is great for investment, productivity, morals etc, in the same way that the smallpox vaccine or public health are just great things and didn’t lead to societal stasis and a world trapped in amber.
* You think, based on a selective reading of history. People love to say “posterity will judge you thus-and-so”, but you’ll find that we judge our ancestors in ways people making that argument back then (how’s would find surprising, that youth movements believe and do horrifying things all the time (eg Cultural Revolution), and there’s not much reason to think that contemporary oracles prophesying moral progress in line with their personal ideologies will do much better.
Just to add to the above: even without (massive) cognitive decline in the aged, just knowing you only have a few years left likely has an effect on someone’s decisions. Most changes and improvements, in technology and institutional processes, cause initial short term problems. They only pay off long term. If you’re in the last 5 years of your career, or your life, there’s no expected payoff for learning most new things, or for seeing a major change in how the institution you work in works.
If you can reasonably expect to live for many more centuries (since with a perfect cure for aging you’d have a life expectancy of several thousand years), you might as well start adopting new things now, maybe you’ll see a net payoff in 50 years. Or maybe you’ll procrastinate first. Could go either way.
Wow, many assumptions about me here. And what a tone. I didn’t expect this in LW. And that such a response gets so many votes and no pushback. It really looks like Valentine is spot on in her or his comments.
To start, note that I never say or imply that anybody should use “~conservatism” to argue against the badness of dead, nor do I do it myself. Yet, your answer focusses on that.
Then, I’m not speaking about the political ideology. For example, although they may prefer most things to be done as they have always been done, many conservatives advocate for fast scientific advancement. That’s why I wrote “~conservatism”. Probably I should have been clearer. I’m bad at finding the right words. But I think that typing “~X” is a clear signal that I don’t mean X. If the meaning is not clear one can ask.
That a humanity without (human) dead would be much more “~conservative” seems a zero controversial statement to me. I don’t care if being older does or does not guarantee unproductivity. The point is that being older, on average, guarantees a much lower inclination to change one own’s mind and a huge tendency of doing things as previously done*.
In addition, science does not only advance one paper or one citation at a time; it advances when the scientific community adopts the better-than-previous ideas in those papers. I would be very surprised if you’d argue that a much older scientific community won’t have a much tougher time adopting the new better ideas, particularly the game-changing ones. And probably not in the short-run, but in the long-rung this would surely slow technological development.
I point out that there is a huge overlap between advocates of technological and cultural advancement and advocates of eliminating dead and, as for me it is plainly obvious that a society without dead would be much more “~conservative”, I find it strange that this is never mentioned in that debate.
I —and I think most people around here— try to be consistent with my believes and values. That’s why when some of them are in conflict, I try to acknowledge it. In part I do it for myself, probably to help me process the tension, and in part to make my ideas less confusing. I assume others would do this as well, at least some. Maybe this is the error. But I find the absolute lack of discussion about this —again, as far as I have seen, but nobody seems to contradict this observation— very strange.
And to finish: “what [I] regard as bad about the elderly”? That’s a good one. Where did I wrote about something bad about the elderly? I did zero value judgements in my comment. Please, assume less and engage more.
*[Probably there are many different causes for this and I’m not an expert, but I have some hypotheses. For example, for learning something new in many cases one has to unlearn something old, changing/breaking routines and habits requires effort, our remembered experience of time accelerates as we age… Actually, I also find it strange that this last point is barely mentioned in the debate.]
I would have wished for some reply. I’d be interested to know 1) whether you think that a much older scientific community would or would not have a much tougher time adopting the new better ideas, 2) whether or not you think that being older, on average, guarantees a much lower inclination to change one own’s mind and a huge tendency of doing things as previously done, and 3) if you maybe think that these factors would be out-compensated by other factors.
What do you think results from brain ageing? I don’t think what I mention results (mainly) from brain ageing (I’m not disputing it also affects it).
For example, when you learn something, you can learn the newest theory or an older one with more or less the same ease. Once you have learned it, updating it is hard. So people who have learned older/worse stuff, have to spend energy to update. That’s not related to brain ageing. Really engaging to a deep level with a new idea/theory when you already have one that is valid/working is something we are not inclined to do and usually we need to spend a lot of mental energy for that. Changing a routine is similarly difficult, one has to actively work on that. Our ability to do such things is limited. Almost nobody outside this community is constantly pushing to find out “the truth”. And, in addition, one must realise that a particular routine/habit/tradition/theory is outdated before trying to update it. Unless the rate of change is severely decreased (a much more “~conservative” society), this is very much a red queen race. Trying to keep the pace of change would be overwhelming.
Most people will have a hard time to learn a language at native-speaker level if they start to learn it after ~10; to fully learn the grammar it becomes harder after ~18. I don’t think that’s curable ([edit] in the context of brain ageing, increasing brain capacity would be something separate); I don’t think a society with teenager or pre-teenager brains would be successful. Our brains cannot be arbitrarily malleable and this implies some resistance to change once a valuable neuronal connection is made.
In addition, our brains are finite. So, one advantage of infinitely long lives, which could counter those effects, is finite. It could be argued that the limit is typically far away; I could not argue neither for or against it right now, I don’t have a sense of where this limit would be if we manage to keep our brains healthy. Is there any sound theory about this?
It’s pretty difficult to, quite literally, argue that hundreds of billions of people should die because it might help your favored political ideology a little* or you have this correlation that a field would change citation patterns a little if the older researchers died. I would be unlikely to change my breakfast plans based on that kind of research, much less… [checks notes] “deliberately consign all humans forever to rapid decay, suffering, death, and permanent oblivion”. If you’re going to argue that and believe it’s a good use of time in such a discussion compared to other issues, you’d better bring your A-game.
I can’t think of any argument which comes within orders of magnitude of possibly justifying that, especially when the aging literature is so ambiguous about cohort effects and life-cycle trends (so being older guarantees unproductivity? Why do many fields peak so late like the 40s or 50s, then?) and the upfront loss is enormous (every time someone dies, a lifetime of experience and investment goes with them), and there is the enormous confound to any claimed ‘effect of time’ which is the aging process itself: how much of what you regard as bad about the elderly, their inflexibility and whatnot, is simply that they are literally dying one piece at a time, particularly their brains, increasingly dysfunctional in ways like being unable to sleep (good thing sleep doesn’t do anything important mentally, right?), and often are in constant pain and having lost much of what they liked about living or involvement in the affairs of the world? (We can mask this with ‘age norms’ and lowballing our cognitive tests like, “they know their name and the current US president, guess they don’t qualify for a diagnosis of senile dementia… yet”, but the reality remains, no matter what labels you use.) Sure would be embarrassing if we procrastinated on fixed aging and discovered that most or all of what is bad about the aged is the aging, and actually, living for centuries in good health is great for investment, productivity, morals etc, in the same way that the smallpox vaccine or public health are just great things and didn’t lead to societal stasis and a world trapped in amber.
* You think, based on a selective reading of history. People love to say “posterity will judge you thus-and-so”, but you’ll find that we judge our ancestors in ways people making that argument back then (how’s would find surprising, that youth movements believe and do horrifying things all the time (eg Cultural Revolution), and there’s not much reason to think that contemporary oracles prophesying moral progress in line with their personal ideologies will do much better.
Just to add to the above: even without (massive) cognitive decline in the aged, just knowing you only have a few years left likely has an effect on someone’s decisions. Most changes and improvements, in technology and institutional processes, cause initial short term problems. They only pay off long term. If you’re in the last 5 years of your career, or your life, there’s no expected payoff for learning most new things, or for seeing a major change in how the institution you work in works.
If you can reasonably expect to live for many more centuries (since with a perfect cure for aging you’d have a life expectancy of several thousand years), you might as well start adopting new things now, maybe you’ll see a net payoff in 50 years. Or maybe you’ll procrastinate first. Could go either way.
(sorry for the late reply)
Wow, many assumptions about me here. And what a tone. I didn’t expect this in LW. And that such a response gets so many votes and no pushback. It really looks like Valentine is spot on in her or his comments.
To start, note that I never say or imply that anybody should use “~conservatism” to argue against the badness of dead, nor do I do it myself. Yet, your answer focusses on that.
Then, I’m not speaking about the political ideology. For example, although they may prefer most things to be done as they have always been done, many conservatives advocate for fast scientific advancement. That’s why I wrote “~conservatism”. Probably I should have been clearer. I’m bad at finding the right words. But I think that typing “~X” is a clear signal that I don’t mean X. If the meaning is not clear one can ask.
That a humanity without (human) dead would be much more “~conservative” seems a zero controversial statement to me. I don’t care if being older does or does not guarantee unproductivity. The point is that being older, on average, guarantees a much lower inclination to change one own’s mind and a huge tendency of doing things as previously done*.
In addition, science does not only advance one paper or one citation at a time; it advances when the scientific community adopts the better-than-previous ideas in those papers. I would be very surprised if you’d argue that a much older scientific community won’t have a much tougher time adopting the new better ideas, particularly the game-changing ones. And probably not in the short-run, but in the long-rung this would surely slow technological development.
I point out that there is a huge overlap between advocates of technological and cultural advancement and advocates of eliminating dead and, as for me it is plainly obvious that a society without dead would be much more “~conservative”, I find it strange that this is never mentioned in that debate.
I —and I think most people around here— try to be consistent with my believes and values. That’s why when some of them are in conflict, I try to acknowledge it. In part I do it for myself, probably to help me process the tension, and in part to make my ideas less confusing. I assume others would do this as well, at least some. Maybe this is the error. But I find the absolute lack of discussion about this —again, as far as I have seen, but nobody seems to contradict this observation— very strange.
And to finish: “what [I] regard as bad about the elderly”? That’s a good one. Where did I wrote about something bad about the elderly? I did zero value judgements in my comment. Please, assume less and engage more.
*[Probably there are many different causes for this and I’m not an expert, but I have some hypotheses. For example, for learning something new in many cases one has to unlearn something old, changing/breaking routines and habits requires effort, our remembered experience of time accelerates as we age… Actually, I also find it strange that this last point is barely mentioned in the debate.]
I would have wished for some reply. I’d be interested to know 1) whether you think that a much older scientific community would or would not have a much tougher time adopting the new better ideas, 2) whether or not you think that being older, on average, guarantees a much lower inclination to change one own’s mind and a huge tendency of doing things as previously done, and 3) if you maybe think that these factors would be out-compensated by other factors.
What you said is results of brain aging. I hope it will be cured.
What do you think results from brain ageing? I don’t think what I mention results (mainly) from brain ageing (I’m not disputing it also affects it).
For example, when you learn something, you can learn the newest theory or an older one with more or less the same ease. Once you have learned it, updating it is hard. So people who have learned older/worse stuff, have to spend energy to update. That’s not related to brain ageing. Really engaging to a deep level with a new idea/theory when you already have one that is valid/working is something we are not inclined to do and usually we need to spend a lot of mental energy for that. Changing a routine is similarly difficult, one has to actively work on that. Our ability to do such things is limited. Almost nobody outside this community is constantly pushing to find out “the truth”. And, in addition, one must realise that a particular routine/habit/tradition/theory is outdated before trying to update it. Unless the rate of change is severely decreased (a much more “~conservative” society), this is very much a red queen race. Trying to keep the pace of change would be overwhelming.
Most people will have a hard time to learn a language at native-speaker level if they start to learn it after ~10; to fully learn the grammar it becomes harder after ~18. I don’t think that’s curable ([edit] in the context of brain ageing, increasing brain capacity would be something separate); I don’t think a society with teenager or pre-teenager brains would be successful. Our brains cannot be arbitrarily malleable and this implies some resistance to change once a valuable neuronal connection is made.
In addition, our brains are finite. So, one advantage of infinitely long lives, which could counter those effects, is finite. It could be argued that the limit is typically far away; I could not argue neither for or against it right now, I don’t have a sense of where this limit would be if we manage to keep our brains healthy. Is there any sound theory about this?