(Meta: is this still too combative, or am I OK? Unfortunately, I fear there is only so much I know how to hold back on my natural writing style without at least one of either compromising the information content of what I’m trying to say, or destroying my motivation to write anything at all.)
Perhaps the crux is this: the example (of attitudes towards death) that you seem to be presenting as a contrast between a causal-reality worldview vs. a social-reality worldview, I’m instead interpeting as a contrast between between transhumanist social reality vs. “normie” social reality.
(This is probably also why I thought it would be helpful to mention pro-Vibrams social pressure: not to exhaustively enumerate all possible social pressures, but to credibly signal that you’re trying to make an intellectually substantive point, rather than just cheering for the smart/nonconformist/anti-death ingroup at the expense of the dumb/conformist/death-accommodationist outgroup.)
a belief that aging and death are solvable
But whether aging and death are solvable is an empirical question, right? What if they’re not solvable? Then the belief that aging and death are solvable would be incorrect.
I can pretty easily imagine there being an upper bound on humanly-achievable medical technology. Suppose defeating aging would require advanced molecular nanotechnology, but all human civilizations inevitably destroy themselves shortly after reaching that point. (Say, because that same level of nanotech gives you super-fast computers that make it easy to brute-force unaligned AGI, and AI alignment is just too hard.)
and it’s terrible that we’re not going as fast as we could be.
I mean that it is something people have strong feelings about, something that they push for in whatever way. They seen grandma getting sicker and sicker, suffering more and more, and they feel outrage
I think people do this. In the OP, you linked to the immortal Scott Alexander’s “Who By Very Slow Decay”, which contains this passage—
In the cafeteria at lunch, [doctors] will—despite medical confidentiality laws that totally prohibit this—compare stories of the most ridiculous families. “I have a blind 90 year old patient with stage 4 lung cancer with brain mets and no kidney function, and the family is demanding I enroll her in a clinical trial from Sri Lanka.” “Oh, that’s nothing. I have a patient who can’t walk or speak who’s breathing from a ventilator and has anoxic brain injury, and the family is insisting I try to get him a liver transplant.”
What is harrassing doctors to demand a liver transplant, if it’s not feeling outrage and taking action?
why have we not solved this yet?
In social reality, this is a rhetorical question used to coordinate punishment of those who can be blamed for not solving it yet.
In causal reality, it’s a question with a very straightforward literal answer: the human organism is, in fact, subject to the biological process of senescence, and human civilization has not, in fact, developed the incredibly advanced technology that would be needed to circumvent this.
The cases Scott talks about are individuals clamoring for symbolic action in social reality in the aid of individuals that they want to signal they care about. It’s quite Hansonian, because the whole point is that these people are already dead and none of these interventions do anything but take away resources from other patients. They don’t ask ‘what would cause people I love to die less often’ at all, which my model says is because that question doesn’t even parse to them.
Perhaps the crux is this: the example (of attitudes towards death) that you seem to be presenting as a contrast between a causal-reality worldview vs. a social-reality worldview, I’m instead interpeting as a contrast between between transhumanist social reality vs. “normie” social reality.
Fwiw, I found this paragraph quite helpful. I initially bounced off your original comment because I couldn’t tell what the point was, and would have had an easier time following it if it had opened with something more like this paragraph.
(Meta: Yup, that’s much better. I appreciate the effort. To share some perspective from my end, I think this has been my most controversial post to date. I think I understand now why many people say posting can be very stressful. I know of one author who removed all their content from LW after finding the comments on their posts too stressful. So there’s a probably a trade off [I also empathize with the desire to express emphatic opinions as you feel them], where writing more directly can end up dissuading many people from posting or commenting at all.)
Perhaps the crux is this: the example (of attitudes towards death) that you seem to be presenting as a contrast between a causal-reality worldview vs. a social-reality worldview, I’m instead interpeting as a contrast between between transhumanist social reality vs. “normie” social reality.
I think that’s a reasonable point. My counter is that I’d argue that “transhumanist social reality” is more connected to the causal world than mainstream social reality. Transhumanists, even if they are biased and over-optimistic, etc., at least invoke arguments and evidence from the general physical world: telomeres, nanotechnology, the fact that turtles lives a really long time, experiments on worms, etc. Maybe they repeat each other’s socially sanctioned arguments, but those arguments invoke causal reality.
In contrast, the mainstream social reality appears to be very anchored on the status quo and history to date. You might be able to easily imagine that there’s an upper bound on humanly-achievable medical technology, but I’d wager that’s not the thought process most people go through when (assuming they ever even consider the possibility) they judge whether they think life-extension is possible or not. To quote the Chivers passage again:
“The first thing that pops up, obviously, is I vaguely assume my children will die the way we all do. My grandfather died recently; my parents are in their sixties; I’m almost 37 now. You see the paths of a human’s life each time; all lives follow roughly the same path. They have different toys—iPhones instead of colour TVs instead of whatever—but the fundamental shape of a human’s life is roughly the same.
Note that he’s not making an argument from physics or biology or technology at all. This argument is from comparison to other people. “My children will die the way we all do,” “all lives follow roughly the same path.” One might claim that isn’t unreasonable evidence. The past is a good prior, it’s a good outside view. But the past also shows tremendous advances in technology and medical science—including dramatic increases in lifespan. My claim is that these things aren’t considered in the ontology most people think within, one where how other people do things is dominant.
If I ask my parents, if I stop and ask people on the street, I don’t expect them to say they thought about radical life extension and dismissed it because of arguments about what is technologically realistic. I don’t expect them to say they’re not doing anything towards it (despite it seeming possible) because they see no realistic path for them to help. I expect them to not have thought about it, I expect them to have anchored on what human life has been like to date, or I expect them to have thought about it just long enough to note that it isn’t a commonly-held belief and conclude therefore it’s just a thing another group believes.
Even if the contrast is “transhumanist social reality”, I ask how did that social reality come to be and how did people join it? I’m pretty sure most transhumanists weren’t born to transhumanist families, educated in transhumanist schools, or surrounded at transhumanist friends. Something at some point prompted them to join this new social group—and I’d wager that in many cases it’s because on their own they reasoned how humans are now isn’t how they have to be—rightly or wrongly—they invoke a belief about what broader reality allows beyond what is commonly held opinion or practice to date. Maybe that’s a social reality too, but it’s a really different one.
The reason why the disease and death example is confusing to me is partly because I expect people to be highly emotion and unstrategic—willing to invest a great deal for only a small chance. People agonize over “maybe I could have done something” often enough. They demand doctors do things “so long as there’s a chance.” One can doubt that radical life extension is possible, but I don’t think one can be reasonably certain that it isn’t. I expect that if people thought there was any non-trivial chance that we didn’t need to millions of people to decay and die each year, they would be upset about it (especially given first-hand experience), and do something. As it is, I think most people take death and decay for granted. That’s just how it is. That’s what people do. That’s my confusion. How can you so blithely ignore the progress of the last few hundred years? Or the technological feats we continue to pull off. You think it’s reasonable for there to be giant flying metal cans? For us to split the atom and go to moon? To edit genes and have artificial hearts? To have double historical lifespans already? Yet to never wonder whether life could be better still? To never be upset that maybe the universe doesn’t require it to be this way, instead we (humanity) just haven’t got our shit together, and that’s a terrible tragedy.
This perspective is natural to me. Obvious. The question I am trying to explain is why am I different? I think I am the weird one (i.e., the unusual one). But what am I doing differently? How is my reality (social or otherwise) different? And one of the reasonable answers is that I invoke a different type of reasoning to infer what is possible. My evidence is that I don’t encounter people responding with like-kind arguments (or even having considered the question) to questions of elimination decay and death.
“Terrible” is a moral judgment. The anticipated experience is that when I point my “moral evaluator unit” at a morally terrible thing, it outputs “terrible.”
Even if the contrast is “transhumanist social reality”, I ask how did that social reality come to be and how did people join it? I’m pretty sure most transhumanists weren’t born to transhumanist families, educated in transhumanist schools, or surrounded at transhumanist friends. Something at some point prompted them to join this new social group
This isn’t necessarily a point in transhumanism’s favor! At least vertically-transmitted memeplexes (spread from parents to children, like established religions) face selective pressures tying the fitness of the meme to the fitness of the host. (Where evolutionary fitness isn’t necessarily good from a humane perspective, but there are at least bounds on how bad it can be.) Horizontally-transmitted memeplexes (like cults or mass political movements) don’t face this constraint and can optimize for raw marketing appeal independent of long-term consequences.
“Terrible” is a moral judgment. The anticipated experience is that when I point my “moral evaluator unit” at a morally terrible thing, it outputs “terrible.”
I think moral judgements are usually understood to have a social function—if I see someone stealing forty cakes and say that that’s terrible, there’s an implied call-to-action to punish the thief in accordance with the laws of our tribe. It seems weird to expect this as an alternative to social reality.
(Meta: is this still too combative, or am I OK? Unfortunately, I fear there is only so much I know how to hold back on my natural writing style without at least one of either compromising the information content of what I’m trying to say, or destroying my motivation to write anything at all.)
Perhaps the crux is this: the example (of attitudes towards death) that you seem to be presenting as a contrast between a causal-reality worldview vs. a social-reality worldview, I’m instead interpeting as a contrast between between transhumanist social reality vs. “normie” social reality.
(This is probably also why I thought it would be helpful to mention pro-Vibrams social pressure: not to exhaustively enumerate all possible social pressures, but to credibly signal that you’re trying to make an intellectually substantive point, rather than just cheering for the smart/nonconformist/anti-death ingroup at the expense of the dumb/conformist/death-accommodationist outgroup.)
But whether aging and death are solvable is an empirical question, right? What if they’re not solvable? Then the belief that aging and death are solvable would be incorrect.
I can pretty easily imagine there being an upper bound on humanly-achievable medical technology. Suppose defeating aging would require advanced molecular nanotechnology, but all human civilizations inevitably destroy themselves shortly after reaching that point. (Say, because that same level of nanotech gives you super-fast computers that make it easy to brute-force unaligned AGI, and AI alignment is just too hard.)
The concept of “terrible” doesn’t exist in causal reality. (How does something being “terrible” pay rent in anticipated experiences?)
I think people do this. In the OP, you linked to the immortal Scott Alexander’s “Who By Very Slow Decay”, which contains this passage—
What is harrassing doctors to demand a liver transplant, if it’s not feeling outrage and taking action?
In social reality, this is a rhetorical question used to coordinate punishment of those who can be blamed for not solving it yet.
In causal reality, it’s a question with a very straightforward literal answer: the human organism is, in fact, subject to the biological process of senescence, and human civilization has not, in fact, developed the incredibly advanced technology that would be needed to circumvent this.
The cases Scott talks about are individuals clamoring for symbolic action in social reality in the aid of individuals that they want to signal they care about. It’s quite Hansonian, because the whole point is that these people are already dead and none of these interventions do anything but take away resources from other patients. They don’t ask ‘what would cause people I love to die less often’ at all, which my model says is because that question doesn’t even parse to them.
Fwiw, I found this paragraph quite helpful. I initially bounced off your original comment because I couldn’t tell what the point was, and would have had an easier time following it if it had opened with something more like this paragraph.
(Meta: Yup, that’s much better. I appreciate the effort. To share some perspective from my end, I think this has been my most controversial post to date. I think I understand now why many people say posting can be very stressful. I know of one author who removed all their content from LW after finding the comments on their posts too stressful. So there’s a probably a trade off [I also empathize with the desire to express emphatic opinions as you feel them], where writing more directly can end up dissuading many people from posting or commenting at all.)
I think that’s a reasonable point. My counter is that I’d argue that “transhumanist social reality” is more connected to the causal world than mainstream social reality. Transhumanists, even if they are biased and over-optimistic, etc., at least invoke arguments and evidence from the general physical world: telomeres, nanotechnology, the fact that turtles lives a really long time, experiments on worms, etc. Maybe they repeat each other’s socially sanctioned arguments, but those arguments invoke causal reality.
In contrast, the mainstream social reality appears to be very anchored on the status quo and history to date. You might be able to easily imagine that there’s an upper bound on humanly-achievable medical technology, but I’d wager that’s not the thought process most people go through when (assuming they ever even consider the possibility) they judge whether they think life-extension is possible or not. To quote the Chivers passage again:
Note that he’s not making an argument from physics or biology or technology at all. This argument is from comparison to other people. “My children will die the way we all do,” “all lives follow roughly the same path.” One might claim that isn’t unreasonable evidence. The past is a good prior, it’s a good outside view. But the past also shows tremendous advances in technology and medical science—including dramatic increases in lifespan. My claim is that these things aren’t considered in the ontology most people think within, one where how other people do things is dominant.
If I ask my parents, if I stop and ask people on the street, I don’t expect them to say they thought about radical life extension and dismissed it because of arguments about what is technologically realistic. I don’t expect them to say they’re not doing anything towards it (despite it seeming possible) because they see no realistic path for them to help. I expect them to not have thought about it, I expect them to have anchored on what human life has been like to date, or I expect them to have thought about it just long enough to note that it isn’t a commonly-held belief and conclude therefore it’s just a thing another group believes.
Even if the contrast is “transhumanist social reality”, I ask how did that social reality come to be and how did people join it? I’m pretty sure most transhumanists weren’t born to transhumanist families, educated in transhumanist schools, or surrounded at transhumanist friends. Something at some point prompted them to join this new social group—and I’d wager that in many cases it’s because on their own they reasoned how humans are now isn’t how they have to be—rightly or wrongly—they invoke a belief about what broader reality allows beyond what is commonly held opinion or practice to date. Maybe that’s a social reality too, but it’s a really different one.
The reason why the disease and death example is confusing to me is partly because I expect people to be highly emotion and unstrategic—willing to invest a great deal for only a small chance. People agonize over “maybe I could have done something” often enough. They demand doctors do things “so long as there’s a chance.” One can doubt that radical life extension is possible, but I don’t think one can be reasonably certain that it isn’t. I expect that if people thought there was any non-trivial chance that we didn’t need to millions of people to decay and die each year, they would be upset about it (especially given first-hand experience), and do something. As it is, I think most people take death and decay for granted. That’s just how it is. That’s what people do. That’s my confusion. How can you so blithely ignore the progress of the last few hundred years? Or the technological feats we continue to pull off. You think it’s reasonable for there to be giant flying metal cans? For us to split the atom and go to moon? To edit genes and have artificial hearts? To have double historical lifespans already? Yet to never wonder whether life could be better still? To never be upset that maybe the universe doesn’t require it to be this way, instead we (humanity) just haven’t got our shit together, and that’s a terrible tragedy.
This perspective is natural to me. Obvious. The question I am trying to explain is why am I different? I think I am the weird one (i.e., the unusual one). But what am I doing differently? How is my reality (social or otherwise) different? And one of the reasonable answers is that I invoke a different type of reasoning to infer what is possible. My evidence is that I don’t encounter people responding with like-kind arguments (or even having considered the question) to questions of elimination decay and death.
“Terrible” is a moral judgment. The anticipated experience is that when I point my “moral evaluator unit” at a morally terrible thing, it outputs “terrible.”
This isn’t necessarily a point in transhumanism’s favor! At least vertically-transmitted memeplexes (spread from parents to children, like established religions) face selective pressures tying the fitness of the meme to the fitness of the host. (Where evolutionary fitness isn’t necessarily good from a humane perspective, but there are at least bounds on how bad it can be.) Horizontally-transmitted memeplexes (like cults or mass political movements) don’t face this constraint and can optimize for raw marketing appeal independent of long-term consequences.
Isn’t this kind of circular? Compare: “A Vice President is anyone who’s job title is vice-president. That’s a falsifiable prediction because it constrains your anticipations of what you’ll see on their business card.” It’s true, but one is left with the sense that some important part of the explanation is being left out. What is the moral evaluator unit for?
I think moral judgements are usually understood to have a social function—if I see someone stealing forty cakes and say that that’s terrible, there’s an implied call-to-action to punish the thief in accordance with the laws of our tribe. It seems weird to expect this as an alternative to social reality.