My impression is that it’s more than most people do! [Although full disclosure, myself I’m signed up with CI and following what I believe is the right pattern of diet and exercise. I’ll probably start some of the highest benefit/risk ratio compounds (read: rapamycin and/or NAD+ stuff) in a year or two when I’m past 30.]
But also, how do you feel about donating to the relevant orgs (e.g. SENS), working in a related or adjacent area, and advocating for this cause?
Well, about 55 million people die per year, most of them from aging, so solving it for everyone today vs say 50-60 years later with AGI would have saved 2-3 billions of potentially indefinite very very long lives. This definitely counts as “much impact for many people” on my book.
But also, what’s the probability that we will indeed get AGI in the next 50 or 70 years? I mean, I know it’s a hotly debated topic so asking for your personal best estimate.
Mortality is thought about by everyone, forever.
Technically probably yes, but the specific position of “it is something we can and should do something about right now” is unfortunately nearly as fringe as AI risk: a bunch of vocal advocates with a small following pushing for it, plus some experts in the broader field and some public figures maybe kinda tentatively flirting with it. So, to me these are two really very comparable positions, very unconventional but also very obvious if you reason from the first principles and some basic background knowledge. Maybe that’s why I may sound a bit frustrated or negative, because it feels like the people who clearly should be able to make this conclusion, for some reason don’t. And that’s why I’m basically asking this question, to understand why don’t or what am I missing or whatever is going on.
By the way, can you clarify what’s your take on the premise of the question? I’m still not sure whether you think:
Rationalists are paying comparatively little attention to mortality and it is justified
Rationalists are paying comparatively little attention to mortality and it is not justified
Rationalists are paying comparatively lot attention to mortality and I’m just not looking in the right places
Something else
Yeah, I’m talking about exercise and “eating healthy” and all the stuff that everyone knows you should do but many don’t because it’s unpleasant and hard.
Ok, in that case akrasia etc debates are very relevant. But even so, not everybody knows. Maybe the facts that you should exercise and watch what you eat themselves are relatively uncontroversial (although I still remember the dark days when EY himself was advocating on facebook that “calories in / calories out” is bullshit). But exactly what kinds of diet and exercise are optimal for longevity is a hugely controversial topic, and it’s mainly not for the lack of data, it’s for the lack of interpretation, i.e. something that we could well try to do on lesswrong. So it’d be cool to see more posts e.g. like this.
I’m well aware, but this comment section is the first time I hear there’s a non-trivial overlap! Are you saying many active rationalists are SENS supporters?
So your argument is that people should die for their own good, despite what they think about it themselves? Probably not since it’d be a almost a caricature villain, but I don’t see where else are you going with this. And the goal of “not developing an excruciatingly painful chronic disease” is not exactly at odds with the goal “combat aging”.
>By the way I would jump on the opportunity of an increased life span to say 200-300 years, 80 seems really short, but not indefinite extension
Ok that’s honestly good enough for me, I say lets get there and then argue whether we need more extension.
I’m no therapist and not even good as a regular human being at talking about carrying burdens that make one to want to kill themselves eventually, you should probably seek advice of someone who can do a better job at it.
Cryonics is around 20 bucks a month if you get it through insurance, plus 120 to sign up.
With that out of the way, I think there is substantial difference between “no LEV in 20 years” and “nothing can be done”. For one thing, known interventions—diet, exercise, very likely some chemicals—can most likely increase your life expectancy by 10-30 years depending on how right you get it, age, health and other factors. For another thing, even if working on the cause, donating to it or advocating for it won’t help yourself, it can still help many people you know and love, not to mention everyone else. Finally, the whole point of epistemic rationality (arguably) is to work correctly with probabilities. How certain you are that there will be no LEV in 20 years? If there’s a 10% chance, isn’t it’s worth giving a try and increasing it a bit? If you ~100% certain, where do you get this information?
Dangerous proposition in what sense? Someone may die? Everyone may die? I have, um, not very good news for you...
>When one realizes how far life is from the rosy picture that is often painted, one has a much easier time accepting death, even while still fearing it or still wanting to live as long as possible.
Do you truly estimate your life as not worth or barely worth living? If yes, I’m deeply sorry about that and I hope you’ll find a way to improve it. Let me assure you that there’s many people, myself included, who truly genuinely love life and enjoy it.
If it’s just a comforting lie you believe in believing to make the thought of death more tolerable, well, I can understand that, death really is terrifying, but then consider maybe not to use it as an argument.
>I’m pretty concerned, I’m trying to prevent the AI catastrophe happening that will likely kill me.
That was one of my top guesses, and I’m definitely not implying that longevity is higher or equal priority than AI alignment—it’s not. I’m just saying that after AI alignment and maybe rationality itself, not dying [even if AGI doesn’t come] seems like a pretty darn big deal to me. Is your position that AGI in our lifetime is so inevitable that other possibilities are irrelevant? Or that other possibilities are non-trivial (say above 10%) but since AGI is the greatest risk all resources should be focused on it? If the latter, do you believe it should be the strategy of the community as a whole or just those working on AGI alignment directly?
[Exercising 30 min few times a week is great, and I’m glad your housemate pushes you to do it! But, well, it’s like not going to big concerts in Feb 2020 - it’s basic sanity most regular people would also know to follow. Hell it’s literally the FDA advice and has been for decades.]
I agree, Ukraine was an exaggeration. I’ve checked the tags and grants before asking the question, and am well aware of SENS but never thought or heard of it being adjacent. Is it? Didn’t know of the three defunct institutions as well, so I should raise my estimate somewhat.
I have indeed spent a certain amount of time figuring out whether it’s the case, and the answer I came to was “yep, definitely”. Edited the question to make it more clear. I didn’t lay out the reasoning behind it, because I assumed anyone arguing in good faith would either accept the premise based on their own experience, or just point to the counterexamples (as Elizabeth and in a certain stretched sens Ben Pace did).
>low hanging fruit might be picked WRT mortality
I’m doubtful, but I can certainly see a strong argument for this! However my point is that, like with existential risks, it is a serious enough problem that it’s worth focusing on even after low hanging fruit has been picked up.
>Maybe mortality is mostly about making ourselves do the right thing and akrasia type stuff
Hmm, can you elaborate on what do you mean here? Are you talking about applying [non-drug] interventions? But the best interventions known today will give you 1-2 decades if you’re lucky.
Thanks for the answer, that wasn’t one of my top guesses! Based on your experience, do you think it’s widely held in the community?
And I totally see how it kinda makes sense from the distance because it’s what the most vocal figures of the anti-aging community often claim. The problem is that it has also been the case 20 years ago—see Methuselah Foundation “make 90 the new 50 by 2030”—and probably 20 years before that. And, to the best of my understanding, while substantial progress has been made, there hasn’t been any revolutions comparable with e.g. revolution in ML over the same period. And ironically, if you talk to the rank-n-file folks in the longevity community, many of them are stocked about AGI coming and saving us all from death, because they see it as the only hope for aging to be solved within their lifetime. It is certainly possible that we solve aging in the next 20 years, but it’s nowhere near guaranteed, and my personal estimate of this happening (without aligned AGI help) is well below 50%. Are you saying your estimates of it happening soon enough are close to 100%?
I also wouldn’t call billion-dollar investments uncommon, the only example I can think of is Altos Labs, and it’s recent and so far nobody seems to know wtf exactly are they doing. And AI safety also has billion-dollar range players, namely OpenAI.
Most importantly, throwing more money at the problem isn’t the only possible approach. Consider how early in the COVID pandemic there was a lot of effort put into figuring out what exactly is the right strategy on the individual level. Due to various problems, longevity advice suffers from similar levels of uncertainty. There’s a huge amount of data gathered, but it’s all confusing and contradictory and models are very incomplete, and there’s various sources of bias etc—and it’s a hugely important problem to get right for ~everyone. Sounds like a perfect use case for the methods of rationality to me, yet there’s very little effort in this direction, nothing to compare with COVID—which is nowhere nearly as lethal! And just like with COVID, even if someone is young and optimistic so they are confident they’ll be able to jump on the LEV train, almost everyone has friends or loved ones who are much older.
I’d be happy to be proven wrong, and existence is generally much easier to prove than non-existence. Can you point to any notable rationality-adjacent organizations focused on longevity research? Bloggers or curated sequences? When was the last rationalist event with focus on life extension (not counting cryonics, it was last Sunday)? Any major figures in the community focused on this area?
To be clear, I don’t mean “concerned about a war in Ukraine” level, I mean “concerned about AI alignment” level. Since these are the two most likely ways for the present day community members humans to die, with the exact proportion between them depending on one’s age and AI timelines estimate, I would expect a roughly comparable level of attention and that is very much not what I observe. Am I looking in the wrong places?
Meetup link seems to be broken
As someone who is very much in favor of anti-aging, I’d answer to it something like this: “I’m fine with you entertaining all these philosophical arguments, and if you like them so much you literally want to die for them, by all means. But please don’t insist that me and everyone I care or will care about should also die for your philosophical arguments.”
we’re perceiving things as “qualities”, as “feels”, even though all we are really perceiving is data
I consider it my success as a reductionist that this phrase genuinely does not make any sense to me.
But he says he doesn’t think the word “illusion” is a helpful word for expressing this, and illusionism should have been called something else, and I think he’s probably right.
Yep, can’t agree more, basically that’s why I was asking—“illusion” doesn’t sound like the right concept here.
Those are all great points. Regarding your first question, no, that’s not the reasoning I have. I think consciousness is the ability to reflect on myself firstly because it feels like the ability to reflect on myself. Kind of like the reason that I believe I can see is that when I open my eyes I start seeing things and if I interact with those things they really are mostly where I see them, nothing more sophisticated than that. There’s a bunch of longer more theoretical arguments I can bring for this point, but I never thought I should because I was kind of taking it as a given. It well may be me falling into the typical mind fallacy, if you say some people say otherwise. So if you have different intuitions about the consciousness, can you tell:
How do you subjectively, from the first person view, know that you are conscious?
Can you genuinely imagine being conscious but not self aware from the first person view?
If you get to talk to and interact with, an alien or an AI of unknown power and architecture, how would you go about finding out if they are conscious?
And because it doesn’t automatically fits into “If you have a conscious mind subjectively perceiving anything about the outside world, it has to feel like something” if you just replace “conscious” by “able to percieve itself”.
Well, no, it doesn’t fit quite as simple, but overall I think it works out. If you have an agent able to reflect on itself and model itself perceiving something, it’s going to reflect on the fact that it perceives something. I.e. it’s going to have some mental representation for both the perception and for itself perceiving it. It will be able to reason about itself perceiving things, and if it can communicate it will probably also talk about it. Different perceptions will be in relation to each other (e.g. sky is not the same color as grass, and grass color is associated with summer and warmth and so on). And, perhaps most importantly, it will have models of other such agents perceiving things and it will on the high abstract level that they have the same perceptions in them. But it will only have the access to the lower level data for such perceptions from its own sensory inputs, not others’, so it won’t be able to tell for sure what it “feels like” to them, because it won’t be getting theirs stream of low-level sensory inputs.
In short, I think—and please do correct me if you have a counterexample—that we have reasons to expect such an agent to make any claim humans make (given similar circumstances and training examples), and we can make any testable claim about such an agent that we can make about a human.
Ah, I see. My take on this question would be that we should focus on the word “you” rather than “qualia”. If you have a conscious mind subjectively perceiving anything about the outside world (or its own internal workings), it has to feel like something, almost by definition. Like, if you went to go get your covid shot and it hurt you’d say “it felt like something”. If and only if somehow you didn’t even feel the needle piercing your skin, you’ll say “I didn’t feel anything”. There were experiments proving that people can react to a stimulus they are not subjectively aware of (mostly for visual stimuli), but I’m pretty sure in all those cases they’d say they didn’t see anything—basically that’s how we know they were not subjectively aware of it. What would it even mean for a conscious mind to be aware of a stimulus but it not “feeling like something”? It must have some representation in the consciousness, that’s basically what we mean by “being aware of X” or “consciously experiencing X”.
So I’d say given a consciousness experiencing stuff, you necessarily have conscious experiences (aka qualia), that’s a tautology basically. So the question becomes why some things have consciousness, or to narrow it down to your question—why (certain) recursively self-modeling systems are conscious? And that’s kind of what I was trying to explain by the part 4 of the post, and approximately the same idea just from another perspective is much better covered in this book review and this article.
But if I tried to put it in one paragraph, I’d start with—how do I know that I’m conscious and why do I think I know it? And the answer would be a ramble along the lines of: well when I look into my mind I can see me, i.e. some guy who thinks and makes decisions and is aware of things, and have emotions and memories and so on and so forth. And at the same time as I see I also am this guy! I can have different thoughts whenever I choose to (to a degree), I can do different things whenever I choose to (to a still more limited degree), and at the same time I can reflect on the choice process. So my theory is that I can perceive myself as a human mind mostly because the self-reflecting model—which is me—has trained to perceive other human mind so well that it learned to generalize to itself (see the whole entire post for the details). Although Graziano in the article and book I linked provides a very convincing explanation as to why this self-modeling would also be very helpful for the general reasoning ability—something I was unsuccessfully trying to figure out in the part 5.
Smallpox is also a very old problem, and lots of smart people had spent lots of time thinking about it, until they’ve figured out a way to fix it. In theory, you could make an argument that no viable approaches exist today or in the foreseeable future and so harm reduction is the best strategy (from the purely selfish standpoint, working on the problem would still help the people in the future in this scenario). However, I don’t think in practice it would be a very strong argument, and in any case you are not making it.
If you’re say 60+ than yes, anti-aging is not a realistic option and all you have is cryonics, but most of the people in the community are well below 60. And even for a 60+ years old, I’d say that using the best currently available interventions to get cryopreserved a few years later and have a slightly higher chance for reanimation would be a high priority.