I read the original article. I feel like the author of this retort got nerd sniped. “Cracks knuckles”? I can find better things to grind an axe about.
The original article is an opinionated rant. It’s not a scientific or a philosophical treatise, so bringing up things like how diabetes is being cured is far, far outside of the subject matter. So for me this retort is invalid from the get go.
The crux of the original article can be summed up as: “I don’t want to be lorded over by morons who pay their way to live to 200 years.” Hard to argue with that.
In particular I’m amused by this line from the original article:
> I am not looking forward to living in such a world, and indeed I think that such a world might constitute an immense disaster for humankind.
I’d argue the world/humankind is already an immense disaster and things can’t get much worse in any real way. It’s run by sadists and we don’t even know why we are here.
marcodiego · 17h ago
> I’d argue the world/humankind is already an immense disaster
Not exactly disagreeing because I really don't know any better. But whenever I hear comments like these, I wonder if isolated peoples or medieval/industrial revolution population have/had a better life then we do. We have conveniences that far surpasses anything a king could have just a few decades ago. Our life expectancy and IDH is (almost) monotonically increasing.
I really expect that efficiency growth will make the world converge to a life style where most people don't have to work to survive, but just to acquire luxury goods. I actually think that maybe we could already be at that point if it wasn't for the "sadists that run the world", but I don't think they can prevent it from happening because that will make them make more money too.
So, I really don't know if people criticizing our current state as "an immense disaster" are overly pessimistic or if the people (like myself) thinking that the world is in a never before achieved good state are realistic or uninformed.
I fear deterioration beyond repair, like irrecoverable climate change, because an event like that would really separate the very rich from rest of the population in a way that only one of these two partitions could survive. But I don't think we'll reach that point my lifetime.
Aurornis · 16h ago
> But whenever I hear comments like these, I wonder if isolated peoples or medieval/industrial revolution population have/had a better life then we do.
Medieval life was hard. Hard to an extreme that we can’t really relate to, which has opened the door to a lot of fantasizing about the past being better than the present. We like to imagine the past as a version of the present minus the complexities of modern life that we dislike, but past life was full of difficulties that are entirely foreign to us.
It’s hard to even imagine a life where you were one bad farming season away from a year of starvation, one accidental fall away from a lifetime of total disability, or one little scratch away from an infection that ends your life after a period of untreatable agony.
I also think the average modern person doesn’t really understand the level of work and toil that went into basic survival in those times. Today we see people cite trades jobs as back-breaking labor, but a modern trades job is like a vacation relative to something like subsistence farming
keiferski · 17h ago
My go-to oversimplified answer to this is: people in the past had a poorer material life, but a richer spiritual/purpose-driven one.
I think it’s probably accurate to say that just because we have immense wealth, medicine, etc. that doesn’t necessarily imply we are psychologically healthier or happier. We live in an age of material abundance with a shortage of meaning.
marcodiego · 16h ago
> we have immense wealth, medicine, etc. that doesn’t necessarily imply we are psychologically healthier or happier.
That may make sense if you compare us to a few generations ago because maybe we're almost in a "diminishing returns" phase and our lives aren't significantly better than our closest ancestors. Nevertheless, I'm not sure if we were happier during periods of famine, plague and inquisition. It is still possible to have a "go-to oversimplified answer to this" even for this "go-to oversimplified answer to this".
keiferski · 16h ago
I’m sure you can pick any individual group of people today and compare them to an individual group from the past, and say that one was happier / less happier than the other.
I am speaking more in general terms, and to make the specific point that just because material conditions are better, that doesn’t imply that psychological / spiritual ones are too.
CooCooCaCha · 17h ago
I agree with everything you say except the “can’t get much worse” part. I think it can get substantially worse, and death is the primary mechanism that prevents power from centralizing on individuals forever.
Every death is a mini-reset in some way.
cvoss · 17h ago
> Dr. Fukuyama, when you plant the word "against" adjacent to the phrase "life extension," you've earned an "F" in Longevity Strawman Arguments, Volume 1.
> ...
> Fukuyama's syllogism boils down to:
> Change is necessary
> Death creates change
> Therefore, death is necessary
> By that logic, we'd still accept smallpox as the price of social dynamism.
If your first sentence accuses your opponent of using a strawman (I think that's what that sentence means... the double negative metaphor of failing a strawman class is confusing me), you had better make sure your conclusion isn't a strawman.
slibhb · 17h ago
I'm in favor of research into life extension. But I don't think this response really deals with the fundamental objection of:
"Change is necessary
Death creates change
Therefore, death is necessary"
Perhaps humans are not very capable of change once we reach adulthood and so significantly (or indefinitely) extending human lifespan would result in civilizational stasis. I don't see a simple way to overcome this argument.
orangecat · 17h ago
The argument is invalid because it ignores the possibility of something other than death creating change. As the article notes, there are plenty of examples of widespread societal change that didn't require previous generations to die off.
prmph · 17h ago
I agree. One other problem with the death-necessary-for-change mantra is that it assumes very change is good.
There have been plenty of changes in recent memory that have been disastrous.
GMoromisato · 17h ago
There is a logical flaw in that syllogism: Just because death creates change doesn't mean that death is the only thing that creates change. And if you can substitute some other process to create change, then death is not necessary.
It's like this syllogism:
1. We must do something about unemployment.
2. Slavery is something.
3. Therefore, we must do slavery.
Once the syllogism falls apart, it's obvious that there are many (and even better) ways to create change. The entire history of humanity is filled with them.
slibhb · 17h ago
But maybe death is necessary for change. It's cerainly necessary for evolution.
It's not so much that I buy this argument...it's that I don't see a simple way to rebut it. To me, it's an empirical question that we can't answer a priori, i.e. "what would human civilization look like if everyone lived forever?"
GMoromisato · 16h ago
Another argument is that death is a continuum. You can die after 80 years or after 120 or after 1,200 or after 1.2 million.
Sure, maybe if we lived 1 million years there would be problems. But it's a strawman to say that living for 1 million years is bad, so we should kill people at 100.
Honestly, (in my uninformed opinion) of all the potentially disruptive technologies, life extension is the least problematic. Disruption is worst when it happens quickly (witness AI). But life extension is not likely to happen quickly exactly because it is a complex problem with myriad causes.
the__alchemist · 17h ago
I agree with this article's arguments, and find in general, arguments philosophically opposed to extending human lifespan to be trivial to knock down (Ones listed in the article and otherwise). The elephant in the room appears to be more can we do it? And if so, will this involve genome modification (Through molecular bio techniques, or directed evolution as suggested by Dawkins). Optimists hope for treatments for the still-living... I'm not sure if this will ever be possible for significant extensions; we'll see.
keiferski · 17h ago
Here’s a counter argument: I don’t want to live in the kind of world implied by a focus on life extension. I’m okay with it “happening in the background” in the way that modern medicine has improved lifespans over the last century. But I wouldn’t want it to be a direct imperative part of everyday life.
I don’t inherently have a problem with the idea of people living longer, and I don’t really have an issue with research going into it - but I do have a problem with the cultural environment that would exist under such a philosophy. All adventurous spirit would evaporate, all dangerous activities banned or strongly discouraged.
If the only way you can die is by getting physically injured, you can expect social pressure against doing anything that is even the slightest bit physically dangerous. The world would be a scared, fearful place, and I think this is a net negative for the human spirit.
I don’t worry about that too much though, as I do think you’d get a major counter cultural backlash to such a cultural situation. You can already feel echoes of it today: white collar workers looking for a job that is “more real” or with their hands; kids wanting to be Navy Seals or join the military purely because they can’t stomach the office lifestyle. A certain percentage of people will always prefer adventure to safety and cold rationality, and you can see this emerge as a trend frequently throughout history (e.g., Romanticism coming after Enlightenment rationalism.)
That also touches on a second point, which is that the entire life extension project is basically a domain of the rich in hyper individualist Western countries, functioning as an ersatz replacement for a heaven they no longer believe in. It’s fundamentally a rejection of the reality of death in human existence, and that is partially why it may simply be outcompeted by more group-oriented cultures that aren’t as centered on maximizing individual experience as long as possible.
I’m just guessing here, and perhaps there is no data to support this, but: I get the impression that people with robust family and community lives are less concerned with maximizing their individual lifespans as much as possible. This is probably because they derive more meaning from their place in that community than in their individualist existence. And you could probably also bring in religion and the belief in an afterlife here (see birth rates correlated with religiosity, for example.)
ImHereToVote · 17h ago
Bit of a leap there.
reverendsteveii · 17h ago
I think the "can we do it" can only really exist if you purposefully ignore the fact that we've been doing it for thousands of years and it has been undeniably working.
topaz0 · 17h ago
I get the sense that the problem with "longevity" research per se is that it is largely driven by the desire of extremely wealthy and selfish people to live forever no matter the cost, rather than to extend every person's healthy lifespan incrementally. The biggest hurdle for the latter is not new research. It's lack of access to affordable healthcare, which would be easy to provide if society weren't so obsequious to the welfare of the most wealthy. I think medical research is generally a good thing (and full disclosure I am tangentially involved in it), but extending the lifespan of the ultrarich is generally going to be bad for society.
Aurornis · 17h ago
I disagree. This is a rare case where “trickle down” actually would work: If the ultra rich want to pay their way to discovering longevity improvements, it won’t be long before companies everywhere are competing to bring those same discoveries to the masses at ever-lower prices.
If ultra rich want to fund longevity research with their money then bring it on. Their personal spending on research doesn’t subtract from other issues like healthcare policy.
There was a time when things like refrigeration, televisions, and mobile phones were only for the extremely wealthy, too. Imagine if we had halted research on those because we didn’t think it was fair for only rich people to have those things.
topaz0 · 17h ago
Have you looked at the current healthcare market, where even the cheapest and most proven drugs are exorbitantly expensive? This is a laughable pipe dream in this society (read, the society that protects the profits of the ultrarich over the health of average citizens).
Aurornis · 16h ago
> where even the cheapest and most proven drugs are exorbitantly expensive?
New, on-patent drugs are expensive.
Most proven, older drugs are actually pretty cheap.
The most commonly prescribed drugs in America like atorvastatin, lisinopril, and levothyroxine are all less than $10 without insurance at your local Walmart or Walgreens.
A lot of people are shocked to learn that most SSRIs and common (unscheduled) psych meds can be had for as little as $4/month cash pay at Walmart. Even insulin (excluding newest patented analogs) is $25/vial cash pay at Walmart. They’re starting to introduce cheap analogs, too, as patents run out.
And that’s my point: All of these medications were once extremely expensive, and now they’re cheap. Being expensive at launch doesn’t mean expensive forever.
orangecat · 17h ago
Ok, let's assume we are and always will be in a capitalist hellscape where the only thing that matters is what rich people want. Even in that case, if effective longevity treatments are discovered, they'll still be made widely available because it would be hugely profitable. Obviously the sellers of the treatments would make a fortune, also insurance companies would benefit from reduced medical expenses and corporations would benefit from employees getting chronic diseases less often.
orangecat · 17h ago
it is largely driven by the desire of extremely wealthy and selfish people to live forever no matter the cost, rather than to extend every person's healthy lifespan incrementally
This is a caricature invented by people who reflexively assume that the "ultra rich" are cartoon villains. When Michael J Fox starts a foundation for Parkinson's research, do you think his goal is to get a cure for himself and ignore everyone else suffering from it?
It's lack of access to affordable healthcare, which would be easy to provide if society weren't so obsequious to the welfare of the most wealthy
Health care is very expensive, especially for old people. This is true across countries with very different funding mechanisms. Being able to slow or prevent aging would make it much more affordable.
topaz0 · 16h ago
Not assume, rather observe. I think mostly they are just nihilists that don't care what happens to anybody but themselves. Michael J Fox is not in this category, and neither is Parkinson's research "longevity" research. Like I said, I am in favor of medical research, and having a cure for Parkinson's would be a net good for society. The point is that people will still decline and die from Parkinson's because they can't access the cure, just as they still die from many diseases that are preventable today from lack of healthcare access. That's not Michael J Fox's fault, but the point is that treating research as the secret to longevity is misunderstanding the problem.
echelon · 17h ago
Look at how much of the developing world has been pulled out of poverty in the last 30 years. Look at the infant mortality rates.
We're looking at the wrong data points.
> It's lack of access to affordable healthcare,
When the leading cause of mortality is heart disease, the solution is not more affordable healthcare. It's healthy eating and living.
When the next leading cause is cancer, the solution is more research not more affordable healthcare.
When the next leading cause is "accidents", and those are then broken down into "poisoning", "falls", and "automotive", the solutions are again not health insurance. Autonomous vehicles will do more to solve automotive mortality than changes to the health insurance industry.
I think you'd be surprised by how many of those deaths would have been preventable by earlier healthcare access. Just medicaid expansion reduced all-cause mortality rates by about 3% on average, compared to non-expansion states. That's all-cause mortality of the whole population, not just among the people on medicaid.
Of course you're right that it would be much more effective to eliminate poverty than to just provide healthcare. For example that would do a lot for the "healthy eating and living" that you mention. But providing healthcare would certainly help.
reverendsteveii · 17h ago
the same Fukuyama that told us the fall of the berlin wall was "the end of history" (his words)?
stared · 17h ago
Well, when it comes to change, a sad truth is that it's generations who shift attitudes - not individuals. On average, people hold onto their established worldviews, and society evolves primarily because older generations gradually pass away.
People love to have opinions about how technologies should develop, but time and again, market realities are what guide their development. People easily get emotional about life extension, and it grabs a lot of attention because of that, but all those feelings don't measure up to the impossible to extrapolate tertiary effects of any technology which transforms lives, life extension definitely being one.
I'd argue that it's pretty clear that lipitor is partially to blame for our present gerontocracy muddle, but the issue there is that lipitor transfers mortality from the heart to many other conditions, some of which impair thinking. Life extension isn't a monolith, nor are the mechanisms of cellular age in animals. It's a blanket for 1000s of possible technologies. Productive conversations about it would be nuanced, and related to details about a particular technology, which these conversations never seem to rise to the level of. Definitely not this piece or fukuyama's either.
I come to HN for nuance.
dmm · 17h ago
I hope death is cured soon so the boomers can rule the world forever.
The original article is an opinionated rant. It’s not a scientific or a philosophical treatise, so bringing up things like how diabetes is being cured is far, far outside of the subject matter. So for me this retort is invalid from the get go.
The crux of the original article can be summed up as: “I don’t want to be lorded over by morons who pay their way to live to 200 years.” Hard to argue with that.
In particular I’m amused by this line from the original article:
> I am not looking forward to living in such a world, and indeed I think that such a world might constitute an immense disaster for humankind.
I’d argue the world/humankind is already an immense disaster and things can’t get much worse in any real way. It’s run by sadists and we don’t even know why we are here.
Not exactly disagreeing because I really don't know any better. But whenever I hear comments like these, I wonder if isolated peoples or medieval/industrial revolution population have/had a better life then we do. We have conveniences that far surpasses anything a king could have just a few decades ago. Our life expectancy and IDH is (almost) monotonically increasing.
I really expect that efficiency growth will make the world converge to a life style where most people don't have to work to survive, but just to acquire luxury goods. I actually think that maybe we could already be at that point if it wasn't for the "sadists that run the world", but I don't think they can prevent it from happening because that will make them make more money too.
So, I really don't know if people criticizing our current state as "an immense disaster" are overly pessimistic or if the people (like myself) thinking that the world is in a never before achieved good state are realistic or uninformed.
I fear deterioration beyond repair, like irrecoverable climate change, because an event like that would really separate the very rich from rest of the population in a way that only one of these two partitions could survive. But I don't think we'll reach that point my lifetime.
Medieval life was hard. Hard to an extreme that we can’t really relate to, which has opened the door to a lot of fantasizing about the past being better than the present. We like to imagine the past as a version of the present minus the complexities of modern life that we dislike, but past life was full of difficulties that are entirely foreign to us.
It’s hard to even imagine a life where you were one bad farming season away from a year of starvation, one accidental fall away from a lifetime of total disability, or one little scratch away from an infection that ends your life after a period of untreatable agony.
I also think the average modern person doesn’t really understand the level of work and toil that went into basic survival in those times. Today we see people cite trades jobs as back-breaking labor, but a modern trades job is like a vacation relative to something like subsistence farming
I think it’s probably accurate to say that just because we have immense wealth, medicine, etc. that doesn’t necessarily imply we are psychologically healthier or happier. We live in an age of material abundance with a shortage of meaning.
That may make sense if you compare us to a few generations ago because maybe we're almost in a "diminishing returns" phase and our lives aren't significantly better than our closest ancestors. Nevertheless, I'm not sure if we were happier during periods of famine, plague and inquisition. It is still possible to have a "go-to oversimplified answer to this" even for this "go-to oversimplified answer to this".
I am speaking more in general terms, and to make the specific point that just because material conditions are better, that doesn’t imply that psychological / spiritual ones are too.
Every death is a mini-reset in some way.
> ...
> Fukuyama's syllogism boils down to:
> Change is necessary
> Death creates change
> Therefore, death is necessary
> By that logic, we'd still accept smallpox as the price of social dynamism.
If your first sentence accuses your opponent of using a strawman (I think that's what that sentence means... the double negative metaphor of failing a strawman class is confusing me), you had better make sure your conclusion isn't a strawman.
"Change is necessary
Death creates change
Therefore, death is necessary"
Perhaps humans are not very capable of change once we reach adulthood and so significantly (or indefinitely) extending human lifespan would result in civilizational stasis. I don't see a simple way to overcome this argument.
There have been plenty of changes in recent memory that have been disastrous.
It's like this syllogism:
1. We must do something about unemployment.
2. Slavery is something.
3. Therefore, we must do slavery.
Once the syllogism falls apart, it's obvious that there are many (and even better) ways to create change. The entire history of humanity is filled with them.
It's not so much that I buy this argument...it's that I don't see a simple way to rebut it. To me, it's an empirical question that we can't answer a priori, i.e. "what would human civilization look like if everyone lived forever?"
Sure, maybe if we lived 1 million years there would be problems. But it's a strawman to say that living for 1 million years is bad, so we should kill people at 100.
Honestly, (in my uninformed opinion) of all the potentially disruptive technologies, life extension is the least problematic. Disruption is worst when it happens quickly (witness AI). But life extension is not likely to happen quickly exactly because it is a complex problem with myriad causes.
I don’t inherently have a problem with the idea of people living longer, and I don’t really have an issue with research going into it - but I do have a problem with the cultural environment that would exist under such a philosophy. All adventurous spirit would evaporate, all dangerous activities banned or strongly discouraged.
If the only way you can die is by getting physically injured, you can expect social pressure against doing anything that is even the slightest bit physically dangerous. The world would be a scared, fearful place, and I think this is a net negative for the human spirit.
I don’t worry about that too much though, as I do think you’d get a major counter cultural backlash to such a cultural situation. You can already feel echoes of it today: white collar workers looking for a job that is “more real” or with their hands; kids wanting to be Navy Seals or join the military purely because they can’t stomach the office lifestyle. A certain percentage of people will always prefer adventure to safety and cold rationality, and you can see this emerge as a trend frequently throughout history (e.g., Romanticism coming after Enlightenment rationalism.)
That also touches on a second point, which is that the entire life extension project is basically a domain of the rich in hyper individualist Western countries, functioning as an ersatz replacement for a heaven they no longer believe in. It’s fundamentally a rejection of the reality of death in human existence, and that is partially why it may simply be outcompeted by more group-oriented cultures that aren’t as centered on maximizing individual experience as long as possible.
I’m just guessing here, and perhaps there is no data to support this, but: I get the impression that people with robust family and community lives are less concerned with maximizing their individual lifespans as much as possible. This is probably because they derive more meaning from their place in that community than in their individualist existence. And you could probably also bring in religion and the belief in an afterlife here (see birth rates correlated with religiosity, for example.)
If ultra rich want to fund longevity research with their money then bring it on. Their personal spending on research doesn’t subtract from other issues like healthcare policy.
There was a time when things like refrigeration, televisions, and mobile phones were only for the extremely wealthy, too. Imagine if we had halted research on those because we didn’t think it was fair for only rich people to have those things.
New, on-patent drugs are expensive.
Most proven, older drugs are actually pretty cheap.
The most commonly prescribed drugs in America like atorvastatin, lisinopril, and levothyroxine are all less than $10 without insurance at your local Walmart or Walgreens.
A lot of people are shocked to learn that most SSRIs and common (unscheduled) psych meds can be had for as little as $4/month cash pay at Walmart. Even insulin (excluding newest patented analogs) is $25/vial cash pay at Walmart. They’re starting to introduce cheap analogs, too, as patents run out.
And that’s my point: All of these medications were once extremely expensive, and now they’re cheap. Being expensive at launch doesn’t mean expensive forever.
This is a caricature invented by people who reflexively assume that the "ultra rich" are cartoon villains. When Michael J Fox starts a foundation for Parkinson's research, do you think his goal is to get a cure for himself and ignore everyone else suffering from it?
It's lack of access to affordable healthcare, which would be easy to provide if society weren't so obsequious to the welfare of the most wealthy
Health care is very expensive, especially for old people. This is true across countries with very different funding mechanisms. Being able to slow or prevent aging would make it much more affordable.
We're looking at the wrong data points.
> It's lack of access to affordable healthcare,
When the leading cause of mortality is heart disease, the solution is not more affordable healthcare. It's healthy eating and living.
When the next leading cause is cancer, the solution is more research not more affordable healthcare.
When the next leading cause is "accidents", and those are then broken down into "poisoning", "falls", and "automotive", the solutions are again not health insurance. Autonomous vehicles will do more to solve automotive mortality than changes to the health insurance industry.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm
https://www.statista.com/statistics/526300/deaths-number-uni...
Of course you're right that it would be much more effective to eliminate poverty than to just provide healthcare. For example that would do a lot for the "healthy eating and living" that you mention. But providing healthcare would certainly help.
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2019/10/31/societie...
Here's also a cynical take on unicorns: they're immortal, so most of them hold rather outdated views.
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/sad-truths-mythical-creatu...
I'd argue that it's pretty clear that lipitor is partially to blame for our present gerontocracy muddle, but the issue there is that lipitor transfers mortality from the heart to many other conditions, some of which impair thinking. Life extension isn't a monolith, nor are the mechanisms of cellular age in animals. It's a blanket for 1000s of possible technologies. Productive conversations about it would be nuanced, and related to details about a particular technology, which these conversations never seem to rise to the level of. Definitely not this piece or fukuyama's either.
I come to HN for nuance.