[Nursie]

I believe this comment violates HN's rules to assume the best intent on interlocutors.

> Say GP was 20. So what?

If the GP is 20 then their personal philosophy that humans should die around 40 may be informed by their feelings that 40 is a long way off and that people around 40 years old are 'other' to themselves and their peer group. Further, their philosophy has not at that point been tested while staring down the barrel, and has the luxury of being somewhat abstract.

And if it has been tested by staring down the barrel, then it becomes more interesting, and we may explore why they feel they don't have anything further to contribute to human society. I'm not pre-judging, I'm seeking to understand. Maybe this person would go willingly to carousel, but as that is entirely alien to me, I wanted to establish if that was the case. And if so I want to know more about it.

So regardless of your own extremely rude response, it is pertinent information required to understand the context of the original post and the thinking behind it.

[marcheradiuju]

Your expanded reply is a lot more generous than the single-line reply you gave, which I pattern-matched to countless prior discussions about age where the exact same verbiage was used to undercut youth. Hopefully you can forgive seeing my past experiences in a matching circumstance.

I still think that you do a disservice to the argument with the way you frame it. Not having stared down the barrel is a euphemism gesturing at naivety, when you could more kindly say that few people past the cutoff that GP gave would agree, and expand on that instead. I appreciate that you appear to mean this rebuttal in good faith, and I apologize for my own retort.

If I were to disagree with one element of the counterargument you gave, it's that people of a certain age cannot 'contribute to society'. We can see that people of almost all ages can contribute to society - least of all by political means, e.g. Thunberg, Biden. But the thrust of GP seems to me more that the original engineering of a human involves balancing shared resources directly and indirectly in different ways across lifespans, and as we stretch that long tail further out, it calls on more and different resources than the initial structures of socioculture were designed for. This isn't just about brain fog or palliative care costs, but also about how younger cohorts cope with the world around them.

Today, teenagers are told that their career peak will be in their 50s - the common response is, why work hard today when so much social momentum intends to hold you back? If our best and brightest live to 300, what will keep disenfranchised youth from decades of despair, given the economic revolutions (in the most fortunate outcome, rather than crises) these radical changes would entail? These are the questions I saw gestured at by the GP argument.

[marcheradiuju]

A follow-up thought, because this topic has haunted my mind today. A comment elsewhere in this post gestured to Malthusianism, referencing the failures of past societies to predict future advancements. That reminded me that the Repugnant Conclusion becomes all-too-real in a world of extended lifespan, and no amount of techno-optimism can solve for this problem. Bioavailability and the zero sum nature of resource management demands that we respect and solve the issues of population ethics as an integral step alongside lengthening lives. It's one thing to rebuild society with legible (!) cultures to fit the new world, but its wholly another to hand-wave uncounted suffering for the pipe-dream of living longer.

Nobody picks their birth. I can easily imagine ten people sorting toxic garbage their whole (short, brutish) lives to enable the decadence of each member of the future the centenarian ruling class. If we want to avoid such a scenario, we do so by acknowledging and integrating the studied solutions of population ethics, today.