[paideic]

Somewhat off-topic, but I always thought the most prominent real-life reenactment of The Fox and the Grapes was all of the media and thinkpieces that people have written about how living for an extended period of time would be just _awful_. You wouldn't find many people who think that 40 years would be an acceptable lifespan, and most people would probably like to live to 100 if they got there in good health, but as soon as the idea of living potential centuries is floated, it's all "it would drive you crazy with boredom!" It seems like a good-sized contingent of people believe that extending the human lifespan wouldn't be impossible or immoral so much as it would be _undesirable_. Boy, it sure is convenient that our "natural" longevity (whatever that means) is right at the limits of what humans can reasonably enjoy, huh?

I could understand the impulse people would have to not extend their lives if that's truly what they wanted, but the almost _cultural_ belief that seeking immortality is Bad and Wrong, something only pursued by cartoon villains and insane emperors seems like a collective agreement among people to throw their hands up and go "well, fine! I don't even _want_ to live longer, who'd like that?"

All of this, of course, doesn't touch on the moral, economic, environmental, etc. problems that crop up with greatly extended longevity, for which there are a number of altogether more palatable arguments that would need to be engaged with more fully. Still, it's an odd piece of ideology that makes people feel like they don't need to deploy any of these in the conversation - why would they, when they _totally_ don't even want to live much longer than 100 anyways?

[dkersten]

These are the same people who complain that they would be bored if out of work for too long. I personally have so many personal or passion projects that I would like to undertake, but don’t have the time for, that I’d happily fill a few lifetimes with interesting things to do.

Of course, there’s a difference between a few lifetimes and thousands of years or immortality.

[okcando]

I expect most people's experiences when they're unemployed are colored by being... unemployed. You're not retired or on vacation, you're jobless. You're not supposed to be having a good time following your passions, you're supposed to be looking for more work or skill-building so you can get work. And money is going to run out eventually and who is going to want to hire you when you haven't had a job in six months or a year?

A lot of cultural baggage and shame in it, most people just end up stressed out and depressed.

[dkersten]

I’m not talking about the people who are unemployed against their will, but the people who are not unemployed and say “no, they couldn’t take a load of time of work[1] because they would be bored”. I took some time off a while back, to destress and work on my own ideas for a while and the amount of people who said they couldn’t do it, they’d be bored was mind blowing.

> who is going to want to hire you when you haven't had a job in six months or a year?

I’m lucky enough that in our industry, this hasn’t affected me. Tech companies seem pretty open to the idea that people take sabbaticals and such. Don’t get me wrong, I’m under no illusion that this isn’t a problem for other people and other industries, it absolutely is, unfortunately.

[1] Assuming they could financially afford it

[okcando]

Yes, I think even when people choose to stop working, they often still fall into the trappings of joblessness and stress about the uncertainty of what they're going to do when it's time to go back to work. And so they don't enjoy it.

Not everyone, of course.

[raxxorrax]

Seriously, I think this is actually a severe case of self-deception to cope with the realities of having to work in a modern environment. Or, for the other example, dying.

That said, people who get bored are difficult to be with in my opinion. Cannot remember that last time being bored. You always have the option to spam your unqualified opinion on HN or something, there is so much potential stuff to do that a lifetime probably wouldn't be enough.

[stcredzero]

That said, people who get bored are difficult to be with in my opinion.

Suburban kids in the 70's. Checks out!

[lisper]

As someone who has been incredibly fortunate to be able to do pretty much whatever I want for the last 15 years I can tell you from personal experience: you can get sick and tired of pretty much anything and everything, and it happens a lot faster than you would expect (or at least a lot faster than I expected).

One of the really serious problems is that your brain generalizes, so once you get sick and tired of one thing, it's easier to get sick and tired of the next thing because your brain says, "Oh, this is kinda similar to this other thing that I already got sick and tired of."

Managing all this can be a real challenge. Not that I'm complaining, mind you, it's an incredibly nice problem to have, and I wouldn't trade it for the world (literally!) But even nice problems to have can still be real problems.

[oblio]

I took a long sabbatical (6+ months). All my friends were working. My own projects didn't seem that fulfilling.

I was bored after about 4 months.

[dkersten]

I guess I can’t relate, I’ve been lucky enough to have had a number of periods in my life where I’ve had time to do my own thing and... I never tire of having long periods of time to do with as I wish. I mean, sure, I have to actively seek the next fulfilling thing, I can’t just sit back and assume the projects in my mind will fulfilling longtime and I do agree that its easy to slip into boredom, but there are so many things I’d like to do or experience that there’s always something I can do that I find interesting or exciting enough to fill my time. I certainly wouldn’t be idle, which absolutely would bore me.

I suppose everybody is different though and what works for me, might not work for you.

[MadWombat]

I am the same way, have a bunch of things I would love to do, but don't have the time. Once thing I noticed is that at least in the past 2-3 decades there are more and more fields opening up to DIY projects that used to have a really high bar for entry in the past. DIY biology, robotics and other electronics and many others. So I think by the time we could fill one lifetime with projects, things would pile up enough to take another few lifetimes :)

[magduf]

Don't worry, it's quite likely you won't have thousands of years of immortality even if biological immortality is achieved. Eventually, something is going to kill you: a plane crash, a speeding bus, an earthquake, a murderer, etc. Just look at how many people are killed in cars every year in the US alone.

[melling]

You are actually on topic!

Well, the bikeshedding part of the topic.

For some reason, any time we discuss extending human life, it quickly degenerates into an ethical question.

First, I wouldn’t worry about it because we spend more effort discussing ethics than actually trying to solve the problem. Basically, because the problem is so hard we bikeshed on ethics.

Second, it’s a very hard problem. It’s unlikely with the actual amount of effort, that we’ll be able to do much to extend life in the foreseeable future. We need to cure all the cancers, Alzheimer’s, heart disease, etc.

[D-Coder]

Most of these are mostly age-related. Reducing your body's age may reduce these problems a lot. So a completely different issue than you are addressing.

[magduf]

>We need to cure all the cancers, Alzheimer’s, heart disease, etc.

No, we really don't. Heart disease is mostly caused by lifestyle. And cancer and the aging process are two sides of the same coin: solve aging and you'll figure out cancer too. Alzheimer's is now appearing to be caused by a virus, so we'll probably have a vaccine for that before long.

[melling]

What about the people who seem to inherit Alzheimer’s?

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-03848-4

Plenty of young people get cancer. We also have childhood cancers.

Maybe you should include some references? We haven’t had one effective treatment for alzheimer’s in the past 20 years

[Retra]

I feel like we might be habituated to justifying our own failures in terms of the restrictions life makes for us. I'm not a billionaire because I couldn't be. I'm not a world-class piano player because I couldn't be. And I can't be because life is too short for all that.

So when you tell somebody that life isn't short, suddenly they are confronted with the fact that maybe they could be those things, and now they have to justify why they haven't been working at it all along. "Well, I wouldn't want it anyway."

[vict00ms]

I think the rapid mental and physical decline in your twilight years dissuades most people from wanting to live much longer than that, not some inane moral compulsion to live within our "rightful" lifespan.

[JoshTriplett]

Everyone advocating and working towards increasing lifespan wants to eliminate that mental and physical decline. The goal is to give you more years feeling 30-40, not just more years feeling 90-110.

[magduf]

Exactly; no one wants to live as a decrepit elderly person for centuries. The whole idea is to stop aging altogether so you're always 25-30.

[Retra]

That decline is what kills you. If you live longer, it is necessary that this decline be inhibited. Saying you don't want to live longer is basically the same as saying you want to be less healthy.

[skybrian]

That's too simple. Slowing the decline for people who are in at least moderately good health who can enjoy life is of course a good thing. But in poor health, with no prospects of improvement... well, when's the last time you've visited a nursing home?

The experience of helping taking care someone in hospice care makes it very clear that at some point they can't do much of anything, or enjoy much of anything, and prolonging the suffering is not on the agenda of anyone with a heart.

More: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/07/17/who-by-very-slow-decay...

[Retra]

Ok then. Let's just take this broad conversation about "most people" and distort it with wildly pessimistic and self-contradictory assumptions.

I can only repeat myself here. If you want to live longer, you want better health. If you don't want better health because "there's no prospect for improvement", then I don't know what to tell you. That's a contradiction.

In any case, slowing the decline due to aging doesn't mean you spend more time in a nursing home. I means you delay entering a nursing home in the first place.

[skybrian]

I agree that it's very useful to prolong the amount of time spent in earlier, healthier stages of life. The treatments described in the New Yorker article sound quite promising.

However, you aren't taking the elderly seriously. It's not "wildly pessimistic" to spend time thinking about what happens after people get beyond that point. This is something that happens to everyone who doesn't die first. It's a normal part of life.

[Retra]

Look, you're the one saying that elderly people are so miserable that we should not prolong their lives.

>It's not "wildly pessimistic" to spend time thinking about what happens after people get beyond that point.

Your thoughts are pessimistic, not the fact that you are thinking. The main purpose of a nursing home is to extend the length of people's lives. If you think this is inhumane, then perhaps you would prefer a crematorium to a nursing home?

There is nothing about extending the life of people who are in a place specifically to have their lives extended that is 'not taking the elderly seriously.'

[magduf]

>Slowing the decline for people who are in at least moderately good health who can enjoy life is of course a good thing. But in poor health, with no prospects of improvement

This is a really silly and non-sensical line of reasoning. We're talking here about achieving biological immortality: stopping the aging process. This would necessarily require understanding human biology and cellular processes at an extremely detailed level, in order to modify them artificially to stop aging altogether. (Most likely, this will require periodic treatments, much like we currently go to the dentist every 6 months for a cleaning.) If we have the technology to do this, people aren't going to be in poor health with "no prospects for improvement": the anti-aging technology or treatments are going to change that.

[skybrian]

You're engaging in one-bit reasoning where longevity treatments are either a magic fountain of youth, stopping aging and disease completely, or they don't work at all. But how can we know how well they will work?

I think it's more likely that the first ones could add years or decades of life without being nearly that good, and perhaps still having significant side effects or just not affecting some aspects of aging. If so, difficult decisions about what to do when closer to death won't go away.

[magduf]

Those difficult decisions are there right now; life extensions just push them further away. I don't see the problem here. And yes, longevity treatments will necessarily involve reducing disease and aging, or else they won't increase your lifespan. Aging is simply a disease, where much like AIDS causes your immune system to fail which causes other diseases to kill you, with aging some other aging-related disease finally kills you, such as Alzheimer's, cancer, heart disease, etc. Longevity treatments will necessarily result in less disease, even if they can't figure out how to stop all diseases right away. I don't see how they'll result in hordes of centenarians on life support.

[GuiA]

Boy, it sure is convenient that our "natural" longevity (whatever that means) is right at the limits of what humans can reasonably enjoy, huh?

I suspect you have not spent much time around eg people with dementia, who are well within their “natural longevity” but for some have not “reasonably enjoyed” anything in many years, sometimes decades.

Visit a nursing home, and you may find yourself pondering that perhaps medicine has by and large given us many more years than we know what to do with already.

For many entering old age, the concern is not about how many years they have left, but if they’ll be able to take care of their basic needs during them.

[magduf]

>Visit a nursing home, and you may find yourself pondering that perhaps medicine has by and large given us many more years than we know what to do with already.

Instead of that, try visiting some universities where there's still some elderly people working as academics. Or try going to a classic rock concert where guys in their 70s are still playing on stage, sounding just about as good as they did decades before. Obviously, some people don't just give up when they get older, and keep doing the things they enjoy.

[GuiA]

> Obviously, some people don't just give up when they get older

... you understand that declining mental health is not the result of "giving up", right? And that the celebrity academics/rockstars still active at 85 often are 1) reasonably wealthy and 2) lucky.

I've TA'd for 70+ years old professors with declining health who were still teaching because they didn't have a choice and had bills to pay, and it was just sad. Complete waste of time for the students (and tragic for the professors to find themselves in that situation).

Your messages give the sense that you have a very naive/idealistic view of aging.

[scotty79]

> it's all "it would drive you crazy with boredom!"

People really underestimate of how much o their life they forget as the decades pass.

[D-Coder]

I am willing to struggle with the problem of boredom for as many centuries as it takes to solve it!

[rsync]

"I could understand the impulse people would have to not extend their lives if that's truly what they wanted, but the almost _cultural_ belief that seeking immortality is Bad and Wrong, something only pursued by cartoon villains and insane emperors ..."

I've spent some time thinking about this. Bear with me ...

First, let me agree with you that I am flabbergasted by the notion that one would have nothing but ill-use for another 40 or 80 or 200 years of life - I would certainly find good and productive use for it, provided I was in good physical and mental health.

However, I ask you to consider the most liberal and progressive figures of the 18th century. Pick any that you like (hint: they're all men). Now bring them forward to the present and they are impossibly reactionary and conservative. Their wives didn't wear pants, they would refuse to speak to a divorced woman in public (if such a woman was even present) and they probably believed that homosexuals had no place in society.

That's us 200 years from now. No matter how "woke" you are or how liberal or progressive you believe your attitudes to be: either civilization collapses, or you're hopelessly - even dangerously - conservative and reactionary 200 years from now.

To put it succinctly: progressive people, and their opinions, turn into reactionary conservatives with nothing but the passage of time.

So now consider if all of those "woke" 18th century (white males) were walking around with us today. How does that affect politics and civilization ? We don't need to do a thought experiment - it's right here in front of us: the "villians" in the housing/NIMBY/prop13 debate are basically anyone over the age of 50 who owns property. Those people aren't even a full generation away from us and we're trying to decide whether they're just sort-of evil or all-the-way evil.

So yes, there is a cultural resistance to people living (a lot) longer and if you can extrapolate political mores forward 50-100-150-200 years I think you can see how quickly that would get murderous - and I do mean that.

...

Looking deeper, I think the prohibition is more than a political one, as I've described above, but one of individual vs. group optimization. You are thinking of your personal self as the organism - and that makes sense because we aren't bees or ants. However, there are other units that can be thought of as an organism and there is, by definition, a conflict between optimizing for the individual vs. optimizing for the tribe/race/species.

Remember: we have a word for what happens when a single cell reserves resources and prolongs its own life at the expense of the larger organism: cancer.

[UnFleshedOne]

People can change world-views multiple times in their lifetime, maybe this plasticity is just another thing we'll need to preserve as part of improvements designed for staying younger longer.

Arguably, for example in science, advancing it "one funeral at a time" is too slow even at current life expectancy. So one way of speeding it up is killing any prominent scientists over 30. Lots of benefits, right? We would have moon bases in early hundreds BC if humanity adopted that approach!

Advancing societal progress one generation worth of funerals at a time doesn't sound like a good strategy either. I propose reeducations camps instead. Similarly to how slavery during the time of its invention was a great humanitarian advance (alternative was literally death), imperative to keep up with times would be a good alternative to death as well.

Seriously though, changing society to value rationality, (in lesswrong kind of sense, with obligatory Crisis Of Faith exercises, etc) might be not much harder than extending life expectancy to 1k years.

Re: cancer -- society is not an organism, there is no inherent worth of society separate from what benefits it conveys to individual members. In other words, maybe that's my individual organismic bias showing, but individual cells live for the benefit of the host organism, while society exists for the benefit of individual members. Cancer cells are freedom loving cells!

[stcredzero]

That's us 200 years from now. No matter how "woke" you are or how liberal or progressive you believe your attitudes to be: either civilization collapses, or you're hopelessly - even dangerously - conservative and reactionary 200 years from now.

I knew a young woman in college who was extremely homophobic. I witnessed her bonding with a gay activist over soap operas and changing her mind. People change and adapt. Also, if you look back at history, you'll find people more "woke" than you.

if you can extrapolate political mores forward 50-100-150-200 years

Human history doesn't really work like that. We may be going beyond human history with AI, and it would work quite like that either.

Remember: we have a word for what happens when a single cell reserves resources and prolongs its own life at the expense of the larger organism: cancer.

A single alien AI that controls the resources of an entire solar system would likely see our civilization in these terms.

[Faark]

This is an interesting aspect. But our inability to or having a hard time of changing our fundamental believes seems like a bug to me. I'd hope its one of those health issues we'll learn to mitigate. Btw, do you guys also despise the concept of a global learning rate in AI/ML? There has to be a better way than just assuming "the current state is good enough, now lets only fix details". Humans certainly don't work that way.

But back to topic... even without, I have a hard time accepting that you can simply extrapolate the current "old people behavior" happening for a few hundred years longer. A lot of issues would suddenly affect them. They'd have already lived though multiple revolutions (e.g. new tech, maybe like not paying with hard cash anymore) and internalize this as a part of life. Actually, we're close to having to learn this right now, with how fast progress has accelerated.

But yeah, making it work with stuff like actively seeking peers across a diverse spectrum would probably require drastic effort with a significant burden placed on the individual.

[vokep]

But only some of the ideology from then is reactionary and conservative by today's standards.

Why the assumption that Past = Right/Conservative and Future = Left/Progressive? I grew up with about this view of politics, but I don't think it's accurate. It seems like a nice simplification, but it's a gross oversimplification that paints anything right of center as being obviously backwards.

[rsync]

"Why the assumption that Past = Right/Conservative and Future = Left/Progressive?"

No, that's not really what I am saying ... and you are correct, that would be a very blunt oversimplification (or just plain wrong).

What I am saying is that in an unbroken thread of society (that is, absent disaster or revolution or other "resets") views and mores become viewed as more and more conservative by each successive generation that succeeds them.

As I wrote, "progressive people, and their opinions, turn into reactionary conservatives with nothing but the passage of time." I don't mean that those people become conservatives, I mean that successive generations view them as more and more conservative.

I don't think that implies that conservative views are backwards - unless you start with an assumption that "new is always better". I don't assume that.

[saltcured]

I understood your original point. Implicitly, you are assuming that people develop their values and beliefs and lose plasticity over time, so they will not adapt to the societal changes happening around them.

I think the underlying thought experiment "would I want to be immortal" is plagued by these and other unspoken assumptions. We simply don't know what it would mean to have a lifespan decoupled from our evolutionary experience. Clearly, we have psychological and emotional development coupled to our physical development and our functional roles within human society.

What does it mean to freeze our physical health at our "prime" of 20s-30s? Would it also freeze our cognition and emotion? Or would an accumulation of experience still shift our minds into very different modes incongruent with what we assume of young adults? Think of idioms like "young at heart", "wise for her age", or "has an old soul". Will people freeze with one personality, or all trend towards some world-weary and sage disposition as they witness more and more of life and loss?

And what of pathologies and maladaption? When would people reproduce, if they are immortal? Where does evolutionary pressure provide feedback, if traits can erupt with arbitrarily inter-generational delay?

Can an economic and social system develop to handle immortal participants? The worst aspects of primacy could emerge, if actual individuals can take the place of dynasties and corporations as permanent centers of wealth and power. Conversely, would any potentially immortal individual want to take on great personal risk for the betterment of a larger group? How does this change with time? Would centuries of experience lead one to sacrifice for the young, or would the absence of decrepitude encourage selfish delusions of grandeur, thinking that an accumulation of vast experience should be preserved by spilling blood of relatively empty youth...?

[rsync]

"I understood your original point. Implicitly, you are assuming that people develop their values and beliefs and lose plasticity over time, so they will not adapt to the societal changes happening around them."

With respect, we're talking past one another.

I am not talking about the persons whose lives are extended.

I am talking about their new contemporaries - their "younger peers" who, in the past, would have never found themselves cohabitating with people who had lived 1xx or 2xx years ago.

It is those future young people who I think will have a very hard time accepting any views of any kind coming from any "great old ones" - no matter how plastic or malleable or open-minded those old people might be.

Their sin is simply being old and youth defines itself by breaking with the old. Right now there's a throttle on that struggle because people die. Without that throttle, the young will, I fear, kill the "vampires".

[saltcured]

To me, you still seem to be implicitly assuming that the old person would be reflecting "old" perspectives. I don't necessarily disagree with this assumption, but I think you may be overlooking how much your argument depends on this. And, I am not sure that the dreamers of life extension share this assumption.

Playing devil's advocate: If one had the permanent physical and cognitive characteristics of someone in their 20s-30s, might they not continue to pass as a young person? Unless you look up their identity in some registry, you wouldn't necessarily be able to identify a cohort. Here is urban Southern California, I see plenty of "old" people in their 50s-60s who are trying to pass as young people all the time. What if they don't have to mask fading hair and eyes, sagging or blotchy skin, aching joints, gravely voices, or personality changes?

You describe a person from 200 years ago existing today, as if they step out of a time machine. But, if they have had 200 years to absorb pop culture, mannerisms, dialect, etc. then how would you know? They won't be repelled by garlic nor invisible in mirrors. They won't even be afraid of sunlight (no skin aging!) and their blood-sucking may not be distinguishable from any young go-getter's.

[MadWombat]

So essentially, you are suggesting that people should die earlier, because you don't like old people :)

[rsync]

"So essentially, you are suggesting that people should die earlier, because you don't like old people :)"

No, not at all.

I am saying that one should be wary of living much longer than a typical lifespan because when people see vampires, they hunt them down and kill them.

[magduf]

>However, I ask you to consider the most liberal and progressive figures of the 18th century

People change over time. My mother is over 80 now, and happily buys all kinds of stuff on Amazon with her laptop or smartphone, even though she said decades ago she didn't see the need for a computer. Her politics are also quite liberal, a lot more so than a lot of 20-somethings I talk to these days who seem to be a bunch of MAGA fans.

Also, how do you know that progressive people from the 18th century would have a problem talking to a divorced woman or women wearing pants? Just because that was the standard of the day doesn't mean that everyone from those times agreed with that.

>progressive people, and their opinions, turn into reactionary conservatives with nothing but the passage of time.

This simply isn't true at all. Many of today's conservatives are quite young, and lots of liberals are quite old. One of the most liberal SCOTUS justices is on her deathbed now, while the youngest one is a Trump appointee.

[rsync]

"progressive people, and their opinions, turn into reactionary conservatives with nothing but the passage of time."

I'm sorry - that line makes it sound like I am saying those people who were progressive become, themselves, reactionary conservatives.

What I am trying to say is that viewed by successive, future generations those people become reactionary conservatives. That is, simply the passage of time changes the view, from outside, of those people.

"Many of today's conservatives are quite young, and lots of liberals are quite old."

Agreed. What I am saying is that, absent a revolution or other reset of our current society, both of those groups will be considered, 200 years from now, quite conservative.

An example looking backward:

Find me the most liberal and the most conservative participants at the signing of the US Declaration of Independence - now let's sign them up to speak at Berkeley tomorrow and see how that goes. See what I'm saying ?

[magduf]

You're falling victim to the classic fallacy that societies get more liberal with time. That simply isn't true at all, and you can see it many times in history. Here's a couple of examples: 1) Roman society vs. Medieval feudal society vs western society in the 15-1800s. The Romans had slaves, but the slaves could own money, buy their own freedom, etc., so they were really more like "indentured servants", so this already makes them more liberal and respecting of human rights than America in the early 1800s. Romans had freedom of religion: no one was burned at the stake for believing the wrong kind of religion there. You can't say the same for Medieval times. 2) Ancient Greece vs. everything until about 40 years ago: in ancient Greece and nearby areas, homosexuality was not only tolerated, but encouraged among military members to improve unit cohesion. We're only now tolerating homosexuality again, and even then, not that well. 3) America in the 1920s vs. America in the 1940s-60s. Remember "flappers", speakeasies, etc.? Society was more liberal in the 20s than later.

I can easily find examples of people in my own social circles (mainly through family contacts) where there's young people who are die-hard conservatives, MAGA fans, Christian zealots, etc., and older and elderly people who are staunch defenders of Roe v. Wade.

The things you identify as "liberal" vs. "conservative" simply do not correlate very well with age or generation at all.