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DanielVarga comments on [LINK] Larry = Harry sans magic? Google vs. Death - Less Wrong Discussion

23 Post author: shminux 18 September 2013 04:49PM

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Comment author: DanielVarga 18 September 2013 08:39:18PM 3 points [-]

“Are people really focused on the right things? One of the things I thought was amazing is that if you solve cancer, you’d add about three years to people’s average life expectancy,” Page said. “We think of solving cancer as this huge thing that’ll totally change the world. But when you really take a step back and look at it, yeah, there are many, many tragic cases of cancer, and it’s very, very sad, but in the aggregate, it’s not as big an advance as you might think.” (Larry Page as quoted in the Time article)

This is something like the ecological fallacy. In the aggregate, we lose 3 years of potential life because of cancer. No big deal. Looking at the individual level, most of us had close friends who had lost 30 years of potential life.

Comment author: Yosarian2 18 September 2013 10:30:40PM *  8 points [-]

Anyway, the only reason that we lose "only 3 years" to cancer is that something else is going to kill us not long after if cancer doesn't. However, if we were able to prevent all other forms of death, cancer would still kill all of us eventually.

I tend to think of curing cancer as not just "adding 3 years of life", but as a small but vital part of developing extreme medical (that is, organic) longevity.

Comment author: Vaniver 18 September 2013 11:13:32PM 14 points [-]

Looking at the individual level, most of us had close friends who had lost 30 years of potential life.

Suppose you could either extend the life of one close friend by 30 years, or the lives of all of your friends by 10 years. (Hopefully you have more than three friends.) Page is pointing out that the second could possibly be on the table, but it wouldn't be obvious because we're so used to treating rare serious diseases instead of making everyone a bit healthier or live a bit longer on the margins.

Comment author: DanielVarga 19 September 2013 02:08:21AM 2 points [-]

I fully agree with this point, and I fully agree with Page's goals. But I think there are things here that a simple total-years-of-potential-life-lost framework can not capture. As you might have guessed even from my first comment, this issue is very personal to me. Not long ago a good friend died after terrible suffering, leaving three young children behind. That's very sad, and I really don't know for what values of N could this be balanced in a utilitarian sense by lengthening the healthy old age of N of my friends with 10 years. Obviously, such trade-offs are taboo, but even if I try to force myself into some detached outside view, I still believe that number N must be large.

Comment author: Vaniver 19 September 2013 04:23:41AM 3 points [-]

Agreed that not all years are equal, and the impacts of early deaths can be large.

For measuring N, I wonder how much of this is availability bias. I know a number of old people who have outlived half of their friends, as well as seeing a few friends lost early in life. My weak suspicion is that they would favor a lower N, just by more familiarity with death due to old age and a better idea of what old age deaths do to the culture / friend groups / family.

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