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DanielLC comments on Open thread, July 21-27, 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Why do transhumanists keep setting arbitrary (and frankly nonsensical) "immortality" dates in this century, like 2045?
One, these dates fall within the life expectancies of people alive in 2014. Plenty of people alive now could survive another 30 years and a few months any way, just through natural maturation and aging; they won't mysteriously "become immortal" by making it to January 1, 2045.
Two, you can't tell if a longevity breakthrough has occurred any faster than the rate at which humans happen to live. You would need institutions with the resources to collect data on the experimental groups and conduct longitudinal studies over many decades to see if they live a lot longer than the untreated control group of natural human populations. I don't know of anyone who has proposed doing that.
In fact, that shows the fallacy of Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw's writings over 30 years ago. They wrote their first book, Life Extension, in their late 30's, where they make unsubstantiated claims that they had figured out how to decelerate their aging by ingesting certain artificial chemicals. (As I recall, this book in the early 1980's became hugely popular with the predecessors to today's transhumanists.) Yet Americans in their late 30's who have helpful genetics, enjoy good health and take care of themselves, naturally look pretty good any way, as Durk & Sandy did at the time. These two simply did not have enough of a baseline circa 1980 to show that they had come up with effective hacks into their aging process. And if you can find recent photographs of them in their early 70's, you can see that they still haven't figured out what to do about their aging.
And three, why all the focus on this century for people who aspire to live a lot longer than normal? Why not think about things you would like to see or do in, say, the 24th Century, as Thomas Donaldson wrote about years ago?
References:
http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/24thcenturymedicine.html
http://www.scribd.com/doc/59655111/History-to-3400-AD
BTW, extra credit for finding the math error in the second article.
I'd say it's that people like numbers. As a result, a lot of people pull out arbitrary numbers of much higher precision than is reasonable.
I don't think there's much point in focusing on that stuff other than entertainment. I guess people think it's more fun to think about how things will improve in a century or so than to try to work out what completely alien world will exist in the distant future.
If you do think it will be useful, then you know more about the near future, so you can think about it more productively, you have more time to think about the distant future and you can procrastinate, and thinking about the near future will pay off sooner, so it will better compete with investing.