I am new to this community. Is the anti-aging stuff popular here? To me it comes accross as a bit weird. There is a scale of depression/hedonia from being almost catatonic to being ecstatically happy. Very depressed people often want to kill themselves right now. Supposedly, ecstatically happy people would like to live forever. If you are somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, you supposedly want live another few decades, not more. If you are not hating your life but not loving it very much either, then the idea of dying in a few decades IMHO sounds logical and good. By that time you can expect to be tired about life anyway, you will have less and less of the good stuff (childhood friends, experiences to discover etc.) and more and more of the bad stuff (cumulative stress, aches etc.) and it will sound like a good deal to end it without shame i.e. naturally.
I think this largely depends on one thing really. If you have a purpose for your life, you supposed want to work on it forever. If you are like most people or like me, just going through life and trying to fish out pleasurable experiences from it, nice holidays in interesting places and big laughs with friends drunk, you probably don't want to do that forever.
Welcome to LessWrong!
Yes, we are generally very anti-aging here. It is probably one of the core parts of our culture.
If you are not hating your life but not loving it very much either, then the idea of dying in a few decades IMHO sounds logical and good.
My response would be: my desire to continue living or die would depend on my expected future utility of continuing to live. That is, if I expected that my future utility would be negative and would continue to always be negative, I might want to die, but that is not the case.
I don't consider myself ...
Past and Present
Ten years ago teenager me was hopeful. And stupid.
The world neglected aging as a disease, Aubrey had barely started spreading memes, to the point it was worth it for him to let me work remotely to help with Metuselah foundation. They had not even received that initial 1,000,000 donation from an anonymous donor. The Metuselah prize was running for less than 400,000 if I remember well. Still, I was a believer.
Now we live in the age of Larry Page's Calico, 100,000,000 dollars trying to tackle the problem, besides many other amazing initiatives, from the research paid for by Life Extension Foundation and Bill Faloon, to scholars in top universities like Steve Garan and Kenneth Hayworth fixing things from our models of aging to plastination techniques. Yet, I am much more skeptical now.
Individual risk
I am skeptical because I could not find a single individual who already used a simple technique that could certainly save you many years of healthy life. I could not even find a single individual who looked into it and decided it wasn't worth it, or was too pricy, or something of that sort.
That technique is freezing some of your cells now.
Freezing cells is not a far future hope, this is something that already exists, and has been possible for decades. The reason you would want to freeze them, in case you haven't thought of it, is that they are getting older every day, so the ones you have now are the youngest ones you'll ever be able to use.
Using these cells to create new organs is not something that may help you if medicine and technology continue progressing according to the law of accelerating returns in 10 or 30 years. We already know how to make organs out of your cells. Right now. Some organs live longer, some shorter, but it can be done - for instance to bladders - and is being done.
Hope versus Reason
Now, you'd think if there was an almost non-invasive technique already shown to work in humans that can preserve many years of your life and involves only a few trivial inconveniences - compared to changing diet or exercising for instance- the whole longevist/immortalist crowd would be lining up for it and keeping back up tissue samples all over the place.
Well I've asked them. I've asked some of the adamant researchers, and I've asked the superwealthy; I've asked the cryonicists and supplement gorgers; I've asked those who work on this 8 hour a day every day, and I've asked those who pay others to do so. I asked it mostly for selfish reasons, I saw the TEDs by Juan Enriquez and Anthony Atala and thought: hey look, clearly beneficial expected life length increase, yay! let me call someone who found this out before me - anyone, I'm probably the last one, silly me - and fix this.
I've asked them all, and I have nothing to show for it.
My takeaway lesson is: whatever it is that other people are doing to solve their own impending death, they are far from doing it rationally, and maybe most of the money and psychology involved in this whole business is about buying hope, not about staring into the void and finding out the best ways of dodging it. Maybe people are not in fact going to go all-in if the opportunity comes.
How to fix this?
Let me disclose first that I have no idea how to fix this problem. I don't mean the problem of getting all longevists to freeze their cells, I mean the problem of getting them to take information from the world of science and biomedicine and applying it to themselves. To become users of the technology they are boasters of. To behave rationally in a CFAR or even homo economicus sense.
I was hoping for a grandiose idea in this last paragraph, but it didn't come. I'll go with a quote from this emotional song sung by us during last year's Secular Solstice celebration