4 ms·

Wouldn't that be lovely? I wish that the immediate reaction by most people to such a thing wasn't something preposterous like "death is natural." Yeah? So? We

Wouldn't that be lovely? I wish that the immediate reaction by most people to such a thing wasn't something preposterous like "death is natural." Yeah? So? We are not beaten in the heads with rubber mallets every day at noon. If aliens showed up and proposed that we adopt the rubber-mallet system for no benefit, we'd call them crazy.[1] Yet death, which is completely real, is treated as something not even worth attempting to cure (although we sure love trying to prevent it when it's basically too late!) [1] I'm paraphrasing Eliezer Yudkowsky here; he has cool writings on this subject if you're interested, which can be found in "Rationality from AI to Zombies," a large, cleaned-up collection of his years of blog posts at Less Wrong.

anonymous778 10y ago
IMHO He is a cultist without creditionals that makes a living from cult followers' donations, I avoid him and his memes. Also I probably know more about state of art ML than him, even though I'm an amateur practitioner. I think it's a better way to help the common cause by becoming a biology or ML scientist, or helping these scientists with code, or starting some related companies, or just spreading the opinion. We live in an age where we can download the human genome from the piratebay, clone a bioinformatics repo from github and do some analysis. If you don't know what to do or how to do it you can download any technical book from library genesis and any scientific paper from sci-hub. If more people did that at least as a hobby we'd have more scientists and faster progress. Instead we waste our time on computer games and social apps (both making them and selling them).
blackrose 10y ago
I wish that the immediate reaction by most people to such a thing wasn't something preposterous like "let's cure death before we all die." Death has already arrived, exists for all natural beings on our planet, and has existed for millions of years. We don't need to wait for it to show up with rubber mallets.
- Neslit 10y ago
  The point there is that, say humans were largely the same but instead we naturally lived a very long time, e.g. a thousand years. Then someone comes to you and says, "Hey I have this great idea with lots of societal benefits: Why not kill each person before they reach 100 years?" We would say no, that is insane and pointless, why would we sacrifice hundreds of beautiful years off of everyone's life? Indeed, consider that environmental improvements and medical technology have more than doubled the human lifespan. Would you voluntarily choose for your children to live until they're at most 35, rather than their current "natural" lifespan? Whether or not death is "natural" doesn't seem like it ought to have much bearing on whether or not we want it. If life is good, then loss of life is bad. A beautiful mind that ceases to shine, is something I'd just as soon untruncate.
  - maxwelljoslyn 10y ago
    Thank you for restating my point more clearly.

anonymous778 10y ago

IMHO He is a cultist without creditionals that makes a living from cult followers' donations, I avoid him and his memes. Also I probably know more about state of art ML than him, even though I'm an amateur practitioner. I think it's a better way to help the common cause by becoming a biology or ML scientist, or helping these scientists with code, or starting some related companies, or just spreading the opinion. We live in an age where we can download the human genome from the piratebay, clone a bioinformatics repo from github and do some analysis. If you don't know what to do or how to do it you can download any technical book from library genesis and any scientific paper from sci-hub. If more people did that at least as a hobby we'd have more scientists and faster progress. Instead we waste our time on computer games and social apps (both making them and selling them).

blackrose 10y ago

I wish that the immediate reaction by most people to such a thing wasn't something preposterous like "let's cure death before we all die." Death has already arrived, exists for all natural beings on our planet, and has existed for millions of years. We don't need to wait for it to show up with rubber mallets.

Neslit 10y ago
The point there is that, say humans were largely the same but instead we naturally lived a very long time, e.g. a thousand years. Then someone comes to you and says, "Hey I have this great idea with lots of societal benefits: Why not kill each person before they reach 100 years?" We would say no, that is insane and pointless, why would we sacrifice hundreds of beautiful years off of everyone's life? Indeed, consider that environmental improvements and medical technology have more than doubled the human lifespan. Would you voluntarily choose for your children to live until they're at most 35, rather than their current "natural" lifespan? Whether or not death is "natural" doesn't seem like it ought to have much bearing on whether or not we want it. If life is good, then loss of life is bad. A beautiful mind that ceases to shine, is something I'd just as soon untruncate.
- maxwelljoslyn 10y ago
  Thank you for restating my point more clearly.