9 ms·

The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant (2005)

81 points by AdeptusAquinas 8y ago

stephengillie 8y ago
[deleted]
- ipsum2 8y ago
  I've read this story a few years ago. I don't think there's a conspiracy/secret advertisement: someone watched the same video as you and decided to link the text version.
  - kbenson 8y ago
    To the dead comment, since it was killed right before I could finish and I can't reply there anymore (since I think a question deserves an answer): I suspect the video you say was this one.[1] If so, you might have noticed in the description Nick Bostrom is the original author, or might have noticed the credits at the end. CGP Grey, the narrator of the video, is a fairly famous youtube personality, and have been on a sort of crusade against death and ageing lately with a few videos. I think it's more likely that it was posted here because of CGP Grey's video bring some new (or more recent) popularity to it. 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZYNADOHhVY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZYNADOHhVY
tschwimmer 8y ago
Animated narration here: https://youtu.be/cZYNADOHhVY https://youtu.be/cZYNADOHhVY
edflsafoiewq 8y ago
The conceit was rather obvious. I always find it strange when persuasive writing takes the form of fiction.
- CobrastanJorji 8y ago
  Parables have a rich tradition dating back pretty much as far as written things date back. The moral lesson they're trying to get across isn't so much a twist as the whole of the thing.
  - edflsafoiewq 8y ago
    But there is no moral lesson here. This isn't Damon and Pythias, it's not tutelary. It's argumentative. It does not make for a good narrative alone (at least then you would know which side was able to attract the skill of an artist!), its only content is the argument. Only the argument is couched in a fictional world that allows it to avoid addressing any counter-argument altogether. The fact that it is followed by an explicit argument only makes it stranger.
- kbenson 8y ago
  Some people are resistant to logical argument on some topics, because of natural human tendencies. A fictional narrative tries to do an end-run around our cognitive biases by presenting a logically consistent, but still very fictional, story and then inviting comparison to real-world parallels. Since the person performing the comparison and championing each side is yourself, it's much harder to dismiss one of the views as being purposefully misrepresented, or portions being played down or up to fit the argument. The way to deal with the logical inconsistency is to reassess and admit the faults of each side (if any exist). This is fairly common in Science Fiction, and why if the author has done a good job it can often change how you think the future will be in a much more definitive way that some simple statement might.
  - mannykannot 8y ago
    It is just as possible (and actually much more likely, in my experience) for fictional narratives to be used as intuition pumps, to appeal to cognitive biases and distract from the difficulties of the real-world situation and the inconsistencies, incompleteness or arbitrariness of the author's position.
ohazi 8y ago
I absolutely despise this fable, and I'm annoyed at Bostrom for all the time I've wasted trying to defend my position whenever it comes up. The story is too simplistic for the point Bostrom is trying to make, even as a fable. It treats the concept of death as a singular thing that ends up being defeated by a literal magic bullet. I don't think a Manhattan Project style effort will ever be capable of eradicating death like this, and I don't think this is an unreasonable position to hold. We've already made incredible progress in improving overall health, reducing mortality, and treating and eradicating really horrible diseases. We already get to live 2-3 times as long as our ancestors. I'm definitely not a Luddite trying to claim that this is enough progress, or that this is how it's meant to be, but you'd have to be willfully ignorant to miss the obvious fact that we're now at a point where the return on effort for cutting edge health research is rapidly diminishing. Perhaps we'll have a bio-renaissance, perhaps not, but even a renaissance isn't likely going to take you to infinity. Bostrom obviously expects pushback, as he spends a considerable fraction of the fable "defending" his effort from "critics." But he doesn't understand his critics or their criticism. In the story they take the form of caricatures of luddites, penny-pinchers, and ignorant religious fools. I absolutely support continuing research in health and longevity, but we should be realistic about the effort required, the real possibility that seemingly promising efforts will fail, and what we hope to achieve. Eradicating cancer is a fantastic goal, but it's really fucking hard, might not work in the general case, and isn't likely to increase best-case longevity by a huge amount. After cancer no longer kills you, something else will. Also, it would be nice to not be accused of being some sort of monsterous death-worshiper whenever I express this view.
- toomuchtodo 8y ago
  It only took 66 years from the Wright Brothers flying at Kitty Hawk to Apollo 11 landing on the Moon. Healthy skepticism is warranted, but outright pessimism is not. We have many great challenges ahead of us as a species. It’s important to keep in mind our priorities and how we’re allocating our resources, even as it relates to curing aging/death. Sidenote: I enjoyed that the CGP Grey animation of this fable cribbed off of Kennedy’s speech kicking off the space race to the Moon.
  - 8y ago
tim333 8y ago
Tl;dr, the 4878 word parable is the dragon that kills thousands each day represents death and people say nothing can be done about it gets killed in the end by a missile. Bostrom then argues "we have compelling moral reasons to get rid of human senescence." Which is kinda ok I guess though I'm not sure the analogy is very good. Everyone seems in favour of better health and I'm in a minority who like the idea of semi immortality through uploading but I'm not sure the dragon story is very helpful here.
Zarkonnen 8y ago
Ooh, let me post my comment from the last time this was posted here back in 2015: One day, an anti-dragonist on a speaking tour visited a town. When he arrived, most of the town's inns were already full, and he had to make do with a small room in a small in in a run-down part of the town. The next morning, he stood outside the inn on his soap box and told people about how the dragon could be defeated. A small crowd gathered around him. When he had finished speaking, a woman asked: "My children are hungry. My husband went off to war against the tigers and never came back. How does killing the dragon help them?" "Well, they too will one day be fed to the dragon!" "But they are hungry now. My baby is very weak. She cries all the time. Even if she doesn't die, she's going to grow up stunted." "I'm sure you can find a way. Anyway, I'm here to talk about the dragon, it's..." Another interrupted him: "My son was killed by the king's men three weeks ago. They laughed as they cut him down. No one will hear my case." "Well, I'm sure they had a good reason. Your son was probably a criminal." Another said: "My family beats me because I don't want to marry the man they chose for me. Right now, I wouldn't mind being eaten." "Listen. I'm not interested in the problems of you little people. They're not my problems, and anyway, you're probably lying, or exaggerating, or just not trying hard enough. But I'm scared of the dragon, because the dragon's going to eat everyone, including me. So we should concentrate on that, don't you agree?" And the people rolled their eyes and walked away.
- JoshTriplett 8y ago
  For every one person working on addressing aging and death, thousands are looking at other problems. Nobody is advocating that every other problem should be ignored, simply that we could stand to adjust the balance. (Apart from that, I'd say that the caricature you're depicting is not particularly good at responding to people in a productive or endearing way, which is unrelated to the problem itself.)
  - nibnalin 8y ago
    I think the point of the conversation is also to point out that if there is no fear of death, and population keeps growing, it is possible that quality of life of average humanity goes down. Of course, multiple factors can contribute to that, including induced "laziness" in large sections of society due to infiniteness of life.
pavlov 8y ago
A world without natural death would have a very different attitude towards children. There simply wouldn't be room for very many new people on a planet populated by immortal 300-year-olds. Most people wouldn't be able to start a family. The few who get the opportunity would probably be carefully vetted by governments. The dragon fable is emotional, but it doesn't address any of the questions of what a "post-dragon" world of inevitable gerontocracy would look like. If bodies don't fail, that doesn't automatically mean brains wouldn't decay. Will the old people in power remain open to new ideas and challenges? Do we really want immortal Bezos and Zuckerberg expanding their empires in perpetuity?
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  > Most people wouldn't be able to start a family. The few who get the opportunity would probably be carefully vetted by governments. Maybe. Or maybe there would be a push to engineer deserts to be habitable. To create undersea habitats. To colonize Mars and expand further. This might not happen, but it is a solution. Also, with more and more interesting things to do and without the societal pressure to have children (as we have today), less people would even want to start a family. I believe the problem is manageable, and I don't buy the "we have to die, so that new people can live (and die)" line of reasoning. > If bodies don't fail, that doesn't automatically mean brains wouldn't decay. It would probably happen. But that would be a nice problem to have. > Do we really want immortal Bezos and Zuckerberg expanding their empires in perpetuity? We seem to be managing this problem with wealthy families, so we could probably manage it with individuals as well.
  - pavlov 8y ago
    > Or maybe there would be a push to engineer deserts to be habitable. To create undersea habitats. To colonize Mars and expand further. Would immortals risk themselves in such endeavors? If death came only through bodily harm, it makes sense that people would go to great lengths to protect their bodies. Maybe we can assume that robots would be doing all the dangerous work. But why go to the effort of creating new more dangerous habitats for mankind, when societies could just remove the population growth pressure? I don’t see any reason why a world of immortals wouldn’t eventually evolve into something like planet Solaria in Asimov’s Robot series: static, extremely risk-averse, minimal population to ensure maximum resources for each individual.
dredmorbius 8y ago
Slay this dragon (I doubt you can) and you will soon find he is greatly missed.
YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
Human life span has risen steadily in the last hundred years or so. The world average life expectancy at birth in 1900 was 31. In 1950, it was 48. In 2014, it was 71.5. That's an increase of 40 years achieved in 114 years of medical advances. In other words, far from the dragon of ageing getting bigger and bigger and ever more hungry, humanity has been winning fight after fight after bloody fight against this evil beast. I cannot believe the chutzpah in Bostrom's allegory, that sweeps this remarkable achievement aside as insignificant and misguided, with his description of "the king" sending "his army" to fight minor, incompetent battles against the lesser evils of "tigers and snakes" - presumably that's governments funding medical research into such minor threats as HIV and malaria, that claim mere millions of people every year. What's worse, he actually advocates that we set aside this actually, currently, life-extending research and instead focus on finding ways to defeat ageing: "Instead of a massive publicly-funded research program to halt aging, we spend almost our entire health budget on health-care and on researching individual diseases." We already have the medical technology to save the lives of millions of people in the developing world, who die of such "individual diseases" that are treatable or preventable right now. And yet we don't provide those treatments to the people who need them, because they can't afford them. We value the profits of private enterprise more than long and healthy lives for everyone on the planet. Long and healthy lives are for those who can afford Western medicine- for the rest, well, tough. They live sick and die young. This is the kind of ethical deficit we should be discussing: two thirds of the world live significantly shorter, significantly less healthy lives than the other third. We can fix this right now - and still keep looking for Nick Bostrom's magical health-extending pills. And then make it available to really-really everyone once we find it.
- nshepperd 8y ago
  This argument is whataboutism at its worst. He's not suggesting that we ignore healthcare and individual diseases. He's suggesting that we stop ignoring aging (and death in general) and take it seriously. The problem of medical patents and treatment distribution in the developing world is indeed a big one, but it's a political/economic one completely unrelated to the choice to ignore the biggest disease humans suffer from.
internetman55 8y ago
Does this relate to the dragon energy of Kanye West and Donald Trump?
ragefuel 8y ago
This is a stupid analogy. He makes the assumption that the actual slaying of the “dragon” just takes one major push, that afterwards, there is nothing else that needs to be done to deal with the dragon. Except, like with everything, you can't just have one push and then it's job done, go on with your lives. As another example, technically speaking we KNOW how to kill the dragon of infant and child mortality due to diarrhea… yet as of 2015, half a million children still die, a year, due to infectious diarrhea. 2.39 billion instances of the disease in 2015, with 900+ million of them being children. 500 million die. Slightly less and half of those are in India and Nigeria. Here's a prediction: when the “dragon” gets slayed, i.e. you figure out a way out for senescence and death, you'll “slay” the dragon for you and your mates in your circle-jerk, and fuck everyone else, because they're not “worthy”, or “not a pressing concern”. After that it's just a matter of either your backs get shoved to the wall when the revolution comes, or you lot will perfect the Universal Disassembler and the chaff will get thrown into the furnace to be remade into something more worthy than what they were before.

stephengillie 8y ago

[deleted]

ipsum2 8y ago
I've read this story a few years ago. I don't think there's a conspiracy/secret advertisement: someone watched the same video as you and decided to link the text version.
- kbenson 8y ago
  To the dead comment, since it was killed right before I could finish and I can't reply there anymore (since I think a question deserves an answer): I suspect the video you say was this one.[1] If so, you might have noticed in the description Nick Bostrom is the original author, or might have noticed the credits at the end. CGP Grey, the narrator of the video, is a fairly famous youtube personality, and have been on a sort of crusade against death and ageing lately with a few videos. I think it's more likely that it was posted here because of CGP Grey's video bring some new (or more recent) popularity to it. 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZYNADOHhVY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZYNADOHhVY

tschwimmer 8y ago

Animated narration here: https://youtu.be/cZYNADOHhVY https://youtu.be/cZYNADOHhVY

edflsafoiewq 8y ago

The conceit was rather obvious. I always find it strange when persuasive writing takes the form of fiction.

CobrastanJorji 8y ago
Parables have a rich tradition dating back pretty much as far as written things date back. The moral lesson they're trying to get across isn't so much a twist as the whole of the thing.
- edflsafoiewq 8y ago
  But there is no moral lesson here. This isn't Damon and Pythias, it's not tutelary. It's argumentative. It does not make for a good narrative alone (at least then you would know which side was able to attract the skill of an artist!), its only content is the argument. Only the argument is couched in a fictional world that allows it to avoid addressing any counter-argument altogether. The fact that it is followed by an explicit argument only makes it stranger.
kbenson 8y ago
Some people are resistant to logical argument on some topics, because of natural human tendencies. A fictional narrative tries to do an end-run around our cognitive biases by presenting a logically consistent, but still very fictional, story and then inviting comparison to real-world parallels. Since the person performing the comparison and championing each side is yourself, it's much harder to dismiss one of the views as being purposefully misrepresented, or portions being played down or up to fit the argument. The way to deal with the logical inconsistency is to reassess and admit the faults of each side (if any exist). This is fairly common in Science Fiction, and why if the author has done a good job it can often change how you think the future will be in a much more definitive way that some simple statement might.
- mannykannot 8y ago
  It is just as possible (and actually much more likely, in my experience) for fictional narratives to be used as intuition pumps, to appeal to cognitive biases and distract from the difficulties of the real-world situation and the inconsistencies, incompleteness or arbitrariness of the author's position.

ohazi 8y ago

I absolutely despise this fable, and I'm annoyed at Bostrom for all the time I've wasted trying to defend my position whenever it comes up. The story is too simplistic for the point Bostrom is trying to make, even as a fable. It treats the concept of death as a singular thing that ends up being defeated by a literal magic bullet. I don't think a Manhattan Project style effort will ever be capable of eradicating death like this, and I don't think this is an unreasonable position to hold. We've already made incredible progress in improving overall health, reducing mortality, and treating and eradicating really horrible diseases. We already get to live 2-3 times as long as our ancestors. I'm definitely not a Luddite trying to claim that this is enough progress, or that this is how it's meant to be, but you'd have to be willfully ignorant to miss the obvious fact that we're now at a point where the return on effort for cutting edge health research is rapidly diminishing. Perhaps we'll have a bio-renaissance, perhaps not, but even a renaissance isn't likely going to take you to infinity. Bostrom obviously expects pushback, as he spends a considerable fraction of the fable "defending" his effort from "critics." But he doesn't understand his critics or their criticism. In the story they take the form of caricatures of luddites, penny-pinchers, and ignorant religious fools. I absolutely support continuing research in health and longevity, but we should be realistic about the effort required, the real possibility that seemingly promising efforts will fail, and what we hope to achieve. Eradicating cancer is a fantastic goal, but it's really fucking hard, might not work in the general case, and isn't likely to increase best-case longevity by a huge amount. After cancer no longer kills you, something else will. Also, it would be nice to not be accused of being some sort of monsterous death-worshiper whenever I express this view.

toomuchtodo 8y ago
It only took 66 years from the Wright Brothers flying at Kitty Hawk to Apollo 11 landing on the Moon. Healthy skepticism is warranted, but outright pessimism is not. We have many great challenges ahead of us as a species. It’s important to keep in mind our priorities and how we’re allocating our resources, even as it relates to curing aging/death. Sidenote: I enjoyed that the CGP Grey animation of this fable cribbed off of Kennedy’s speech kicking off the space race to the Moon.
- 8y ago

tim333 8y ago

Tl;dr, the 4878 word parable is the dragon that kills thousands each day represents death and people say nothing can be done about it gets killed in the end by a missile. Bostrom then argues "we have compelling moral reasons to get rid of human senescence." Which is kinda ok I guess though I'm not sure the analogy is very good. Everyone seems in favour of better health and I'm in a minority who like the idea of semi immortality through uploading but I'm not sure the dragon story is very helpful here.

Zarkonnen 8y ago

Ooh, let me post my comment from the last time this was posted here back in 2015: One day, an anti-dragonist on a speaking tour visited a town. When he arrived, most of the town's inns were already full, and he had to make do with a small room in a small in in a run-down part of the town. The next morning, he stood outside the inn on his soap box and told people about how the dragon could be defeated. A small crowd gathered around him. When he had finished speaking, a woman asked: "My children are hungry. My husband went off to war against the tigers and never came back. How does killing the dragon help them?" "Well, they too will one day be fed to the dragon!" "But they are hungry now. My baby is very weak. She cries all the time. Even if she doesn't die, she's going to grow up stunted." "I'm sure you can find a way. Anyway, I'm here to talk about the dragon, it's..." Another interrupted him: "My son was killed by the king's men three weeks ago. They laughed as they cut him down. No one will hear my case." "Well, I'm sure they had a good reason. Your son was probably a criminal." Another said: "My family beats me because I don't want to marry the man they chose for me. Right now, I wouldn't mind being eaten." "Listen. I'm not interested in the problems of you little people. They're not my problems, and anyway, you're probably lying, or exaggerating, or just not trying hard enough. But I'm scared of the dragon, because the dragon's going to eat everyone, including me. So we should concentrate on that, don't you agree?" And the people rolled their eyes and walked away.

JoshTriplett 8y ago
For every one person working on addressing aging and death, thousands are looking at other problems. Nobody is advocating that every other problem should be ignored, simply that we could stand to adjust the balance. (Apart from that, I'd say that the caricature you're depicting is not particularly good at responding to people in a productive or endearing way, which is unrelated to the problem itself.)
- nibnalin 8y ago
  I think the point of the conversation is also to point out that if there is no fear of death, and population keeps growing, it is possible that quality of life of average humanity goes down. Of course, multiple factors can contribute to that, including induced "laziness" in large sections of society due to infiniteness of life.

pavlov 8y ago

A world without natural death would have a very different attitude towards children. There simply wouldn't be room for very many new people on a planet populated by immortal 300-year-olds. Most people wouldn't be able to start a family. The few who get the opportunity would probably be carefully vetted by governments. The dragon fable is emotional, but it doesn't address any of the questions of what a "post-dragon" world of inevitable gerontocracy would look like. If bodies don't fail, that doesn't automatically mean brains wouldn't decay. Will the old people in power remain open to new ideas and challenges? Do we really want immortal Bezos and Zuckerberg expanding their empires in perpetuity?

TeMPOraL 8y ago
> Most people wouldn't be able to start a family. The few who get the opportunity would probably be carefully vetted by governments. Maybe. Or maybe there would be a push to engineer deserts to be habitable. To create undersea habitats. To colonize Mars and expand further. This might not happen, but it is a solution. Also, with more and more interesting things to do and without the societal pressure to have children (as we have today), less people would even want to start a family. I believe the problem is manageable, and I don't buy the "we have to die, so that new people can live (and die)" line of reasoning. > If bodies don't fail, that doesn't automatically mean brains wouldn't decay. It would probably happen. But that would be a nice problem to have. > Do we really want immortal Bezos and Zuckerberg expanding their empires in perpetuity? We seem to be managing this problem with wealthy families, so we could probably manage it with individuals as well.
- pavlov 8y ago
  > Or maybe there would be a push to engineer deserts to be habitable. To create undersea habitats. To colonize Mars and expand further. Would immortals risk themselves in such endeavors? If death came only through bodily harm, it makes sense that people would go to great lengths to protect their bodies. Maybe we can assume that robots would be doing all the dangerous work. But why go to the effort of creating new more dangerous habitats for mankind, when societies could just remove the population growth pressure? I don’t see any reason why a world of immortals wouldn’t eventually evolve into something like planet Solaria in Asimov’s Robot series: static, extremely risk-averse, minimal population to ensure maximum resources for each individual.

dredmorbius 8y ago

Slay this dragon (I doubt you can) and you will soon find he is greatly missed.

YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago

Human life span has risen steadily in the last hundred years or so. The world average life expectancy at birth in 1900 was 31. In 1950, it was 48. In 2014, it was 71.5. That's an increase of 40 years achieved in 114 years of medical advances. In other words, far from the dragon of ageing getting bigger and bigger and ever more hungry, humanity has been winning fight after fight after bloody fight against this evil beast. I cannot believe the chutzpah in Bostrom's allegory, that sweeps this remarkable achievement aside as insignificant and misguided, with his description of "the king" sending "his army" to fight minor, incompetent battles against the lesser evils of "tigers and snakes" - presumably that's governments funding medical research into such minor threats as HIV and malaria, that claim mere millions of people every year. What's worse, he actually advocates that we set aside this actually, currently, life-extending research and instead focus on finding ways to defeat ageing: "Instead of a massive publicly-funded research program to halt aging, we spend almost our entire health budget on health-care and on researching individual diseases." We already have the medical technology to save the lives of millions of people in the developing world, who die of such "individual diseases" that are treatable or preventable right now. And yet we don't provide those treatments to the people who need them, because they can't afford them. We value the profits of private enterprise more than long and healthy lives for everyone on the planet. Long and healthy lives are for those who can afford Western medicine- for the rest, well, tough. They live sick and die young. This is the kind of ethical deficit we should be discussing: two thirds of the world live significantly shorter, significantly less healthy lives than the other third. We can fix this right now - and still keep looking for Nick Bostrom's magical health-extending pills. And then make it available to really-really everyone once we find it.

nshepperd 8y ago
This argument is whataboutism at its worst. He's not suggesting that we ignore healthcare and individual diseases. He's suggesting that we stop ignoring aging (and death in general) and take it seriously. The problem of medical patents and treatment distribution in the developing world is indeed a big one, but it's a political/economic one completely unrelated to the choice to ignore the biggest disease humans suffer from.

internetman55 8y ago

Does this relate to the dragon energy of Kanye West and Donald Trump?

ragefuel 8y ago

This is a stupid analogy. He makes the assumption that the actual slaying of the “dragon” just takes one major push, that afterwards, there is nothing else that needs to be done to deal with the dragon. Except, like with everything, you can't just have one push and then it's job done, go on with your lives. As another example, technically speaking we KNOW how to kill the dragon of infant and child mortality due to diarrhea… yet as of 2015, half a million children still die, a year, due to infectious diarrhea. 2.39 billion instances of the disease in 2015, with 900+ million of them being children. 500 million die. Slightly less and half of those are in India and Nigeria. Here's a prediction: when the “dragon” gets slayed, i.e. you figure out a way out for senescence and death, you'll “slay” the dragon for you and your mates in your circle-jerk, and fuck everyone else, because they're not “worthy”, or “not a pressing concern”. After that it's just a matter of either your backs get shoved to the wall when the revolution comes, or you lot will perfect the Universal Disassembler and the chaff will get thrown into the furnace to be remade into something more worthy than what they were before.