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DeVliegendeHollander comments on Open Thread, May 11 - May 17, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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That article would be better titled "In Praise of Death", and is a string of the usual platitudes and circularities.
Why not? Because (the article says) rationalists are cold, emotionless Vulcans, and valuing reason is a mere prejudice.
Maybe there are people who do that, but the article is pure story-telling, without a single claim of fact. File this one under "fiction".
The previous links scored 0 out of 3 for rational content, so coming to this one, I thought, what am I likely to find? Clearly, the way to bet is that it's against cryonics. There's only about a blogpost's worth of story in the idea of corpsicles just being unrevivable, so the novel will have to have revival working, but either it works horribly badly, or the revived people find themselves in a bad situation.
Click through...and I am, I think, pleasantly surprised to find that it might, in the end, be favourable to the idea. Or maybe not, there are no reviews and it's difficult to tell from the blurb:
Spoiler request! How does it play out in the end?
Yep, futurological journalism. Pass.
Shit happens.
I'm now curious: where are the essays that make actual arguments in favor of death? The linked article doesn't make any; it just asserts that death is OK and we're being silly for fighting it, without actually providing a reason (they cite Borges's distopias at the end, but this paragraph has practically nothing in common with the rest of the article, which seems to assume immortality is impossible anyway).
Preference goes to arguments against Elven-style immortality (resistant but not completely immune to murder or disaster, suicide is an option, age-related disabilities are not a thing).
Here's my argument for why death isn't the supreme enemy: http://www.jefftk.com/p/not-very-anti-death
I have a feeling a lot of discussions of life extension suffer from being conditioned on the implicit set point of what's normal now.
Let's imagine that humans are actually replicants and their lifespan runs out in their 40s. That lifespan has a "control dial" and you can turn it to extend the human average life expectancy into the 80s. Would all your arguments apply and construct a case against meddling with that control dial?
That's a good argument if you were to construct the world from first principles. You wouldn't get the current world order, certainly. But just as arguments against, say, nation-states, or multi-national corporations, or what have you, do little do dissuade believers, the same applies to let-the-natural-order-of-things-proceed advocates. Inertia is what it's all about. The normative power of the present state, if you will. Never mind that "natural" includes antibiotics, but not gene modification.
This may seem self-evident, but what I'm pointing out is that by saying "consider this world: would you still think the same way in that world?" you'd be skipping the actual step of difficulty: overcoming said inertia, leaving the cozy home of our local minimum.
That's fine as long as you understand it and are not deluding yourself with a collection of reasons why this cozy local minimum is actually the best ever.
The considerable power wielded by inertia should be explicit.
Huh? It feels like you're responding to a common thing people say, but not to anything I've said (or believe).
I meant this as a response specifically to
More context:
I don't think our current lifespan is the perfect length, but there's a lot of room between "longer is probably better" and "effectively unlimited is ideal".
Yes, but are you saying there's going to a maximum somewhere in that space -- some metric will flip over and start going down? What might that metric be?
As I wrote in that post, there are some factors that lead to us thinking longer lives would be better, and others that shorter would be better.
Maybe this is easier to think about with a related question: what is the ideal length of tenure at a company? Do companies do best when they have entirely employees-for-life, or is it helpful to have some churn? (Ignoring that people can come in with useful relevant knowledge they got working elsewhere.) Clearly too much churn is very bad for the company, but introducing new people to your practices and teaching them help you adapt and modernize, while if everyone has been there forever it can be hard to make adjustments to changing situations.
The main issue is that people tend to fixate some on what they learn when they're younger, so if people get much older on average then it would be harder to make progress.
A rather important question here is what's "ideal" and from whose point of view? From the point of the view of the company, sure, you want some churn, but I don't know what the company would correspond to in the discussion of the aging of humanity. You're likely thinking about "society", but as opposed to companies societies do not and should not optimize for profit (or even GDP) at any cost. It's not that hard to get to the "put your old geezers on ice floes and push them off into the ocean" practices.
That's true, as a paraphrase of Max Planck's points out, "Science advances one funeral at a time".
However it also depends on what does "live forever" mean. Being stabilized at the biological age of 70 would probably lead to very different consequences from being stabilized at the biological age of 25.
My take: there's a big difference between calling something good and dealing with a fact.
I know "preppers" in Arizona who don't have any savings because they have spent all their money on this survivalist nonsense. They would do better to have put that money in the bank and applied for subsidized health insurance.
The blogger agnostic does have a point about how the prepper mentality shows an abandonment of wanting to produce for and sustain the existing society, so that instead you can position yourself to become a scavenger and a parasite on the wealth produced by others if some apocalyptic collapse happens. That ridiculous Walking Dead series, which amounts to nonstop prepper porn, feeds some very damaging fantasies that I don't think we should encourage.
Just a PSA: advancedatheist has a fixation on dehumanizing rationalists with an especial focus on rationalists 'not being able to get laid'. Here's some of his posts on this matter:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/lzb/open_thread_apr_01_apr_05_2015/c7gr
http://lesswrong.com/lw/m4h/when_does_technological_enhancement_feel_natural/cc09
http://lesswrong.com/lw/m1p/open_thread_apr_13_apr_19_2015/cams
http://lesswrong.com/lw/dqz/a_marriage_ceremony_for_aspiring_rationalists/72wr
It's best not to 'feed the trolls', so to speak.
So why lash out at him for this now when he isn't currently doing that? In any case I don't think he was trolling (deliberately trying to cause anger) so much as he was just morbidly fixated on a topic, and couldn't stop bringing it up,
I'm pointing it out for the benefit of others who may not understand where AA is coming from.
I recommend responding to whatever specific problematic things he might say rather than issuing a general warning.
I am responding to quite specific problematic things he's saying. My comment is in response to AAs and is in reply to a reply to his comment. If I were to directly reply to him saying the same thing, my intentions would probably be misunderstood.
Another thing AA seems to do quite a lot is link to pro-death blog posts and articles that he doesn't endorse. I get the impression that's what he was doing with some of the above links. IIRC he's signed up for cryonics, so it seems unlikely that he's trying to push a pro-death agenda.
So, AA, if you're reading down here, why are you signed up for cryonics while posting pro-death links and complaining at length about never getting laid? Optimism for a hereafter, despair for the present, and bitterness for the past. This is not a good conjunction.
Maybe he just sees value on challenging the status quo?
I interpret it more as "look at these awful things people are saying about us".
That's a weirdly weak collection of posts to complain about. It seems more like AA is noting his OWN lack of ability to get laid and has a degree of curiosity on the subject that would naturally result from such a situation. He also (correctly, I expect) anticipates that a noticeable number of people who are or have been in the same boat as him are on LW.
I have seen some really obnoxious posts by AA, but these don't strike me as great examples. I am not about to go digging for them.
I've noticed. While it certainly informs my attitude to everything he posts, he is mostly still at the level of worth responding to.