There's near thinking and far thinking. While LWers debate far questions, near questions remain. To take a few examples, we in the US still spend large sums on special interests through subsidies and tax breaks, and jockeying for partisan advantage makes pursuit of sound policies very difficult.
Cryonic revival, FAIs, UFAIs colonizing other star systems -- they all seem pretty far out in the future to me and a lot of other people. So a tiny band of LWers and like-minded people work on what they have a passion for, which is as it should be.
But there is one area where progress really seems feasible within a few years: radical life extension. The right combination of drugs affecting gene expression just might do it.
Eliezer, in The Moral Void and elsewhere, makes clear a passionate if not fanatical commitment to longer life, and it seems the common LW view. Yet surely economics must come into play. If we can give a 60-year-old another day of high-quality life for $10, no one would question that we should. But suppose the cost of each extra day doubles. At 20 days the cost is on the order of $10,000,000 a day. Although we might try to couch it in kinder terms, at some point we end up saying to this person, "Sorry, you die today because we can't afford what it costs to keep you alive until tomorrow." Harsh, but inevitable.
I assume exponential costs get through to thinkers even in far mode. I see economics downplayed throughout LW thinking, on the assumption that radical improvements are possible. They might happen in the longer term, but not within the course of a few years. In the next few years, mere linear increases in costs are very relevant.
The LW thinking on life extension assumes that (1) it is vigorous, healthy life we will extend, not decrepit, depressed old age, and (2) it will be affordable to all. When thinking to a far future, it's easy to assume such conditions will be met. But when a technology is right in front of us, timing issues can be extremely important.
It is a good guess that if life-extension technology comes to the market, the demand will be intense and immediate. It's a good guess that it will be expensive (the cheaper it is, the less drug companies will be motivated to develop it). And it's also a good guess that the first people to sign up in the face of risks and side effects will be the old, who have little to lose.
We face the prospect of sucking up larger and larger portions of our economy extending the lives of decrepit, demoralized old people. (We already face this trend, but the life-extension technologies that are in the offing would make it much worse).
From a distance, thinkers will see an unsustainable pattern. Yet faced with the prospect of immediate extinction, these old people and their loved ones will demand the therapies. They would be upset to think that the drugs are in the closet right down the hall but they aren't eligible to get them. They'd be less upset to know that the drugs are not approved yet, and still less upset to know that there is no clear evidence that they work in humans, and so on.
My plea is to keep life-extension therapies far from the market until all the conditions are in place to solve the problems of cost and making sure that the path is clear to extending healthy life, not decrepitude. This should include an enthusiastic, positive attitude towards life instead of weariness and depression.
There are other reasons why we should be wary of such new technologies, but these short-term, practical ones seem like a clear case that is largely independent of one's utility function.
Thank you for clarifying. Sure, if you're enjoying life and there's no cost to going on living, we'll all choose that. The question is how much we'll pay to keep that chance of living a while longer.
In response, I'd say that somehow the focus is too narrowly on any one point in time. At any given moment, it's terrifying to think you'll die and you'll do a great deal to avoid it at that moment. But as we talk of pre-committing in game theory situations, you might want to pre-commit regarding death too. You might say you don't want extraordinary measures taken. (Analogy: I would choose to submit to torture rather than have a thousand others tortured in my place -- but don't give me a panic button to reverse the choice during my actual torture!)
I sometimes sense here people saying, "Well, I'm going to live a very long time and then get my brain uploaded" and I think it's a way of dismissing death -- waving it away to some indefinite future so you don't have to get that sick feeling contemplating it in the present. But it doesn't really help. The computer's going to crash at some point too. You'll get more comfort for no less reality believing Jesus is your savior.
My father was receiving hospice the last few weeks of his life in a nursing home. There was a no-hospitalization understanding, but during a crisis, the duty nurse called an ambulance for him. The hospice nurse said that if she'd been called in a timely fashion, he probably would have died that day. Instead, I got to visit him in the hospital the next day. It was odd thinking in that moment that he was alive right then and could answer my questions, while our agreed plan had been for him to be dead by then. Note, though, that he had not a shred of joy in living and died a few days later anyway. (Yet if given a button to kill himself I doubt he'd have pushed it). Looking back a couple years later, I remember the oddness of that moment, but those few days didn't really matter very much. They mattered less than some other four days of his life spent in a notably non-optimal fashion, and who of us doesn't have oodles of such days?
For fictional support, I'd mention two books. First, in the Earthsea trilogy by Ursula LeGuin, Ged's achievement is being so comfortable with the inevitability of death that he can perform a totally exhausting and painful feat of magic to seal a hole in the world that allows a corrosive form of immortality -- sealing it off for him as well as everyone else. And the world rights itself. The second is the Hyperion/Endymion series by Dan Simmons, where the right action is giving up the 'crucifixes' that bestow immortality. The brave girl enjoys her last few days of life even knowing she's going to volunteer to be roasted alive to make the galaxy a better place. The day is worth enjoying even if it is your last.
I say there's no real way of making sense of death. We're programmed by evolution to work hard to postpone it, which was adaptive in our environment of evolution. As a nasty side effect, we know we'll eventually lose no matter what we do. But few of us kill ourselves in despair at that realization, and we still will risk death saving our children -- both also adaptive.
I'm sure nothing I'm saying is original either, and others have said it better.