11 ms·
The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant (2005)
- warbaker 6y agoCGP Grey's video adaptation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZYNADOHhVY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZYNADOHhVY
- dang 6y agoIf curious see also 2018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16945915 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16945915 2018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16920532 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16920532 (1 comment) 2015 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9559360 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9559360 2009 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=656713 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=656713
- 082349872349872 6y agoFor another take on dragons in particular: Farmer Giles of Ham. and for monsters & maidens in general: https://blog.plover.com/book/myth/princess-andromeda.html https://blog.plover.com/book/myth/princess-andromeda.html
- SilasX 6y agoTo save you from reading the 5000 words waiting for the point, I gave a summary on the 2015 submission. (Linking to avoid copy-paste per HN guidelines and mod feedback.) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9561960 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9561960
- dash2 6y agoNot quite accurate. The dragon is aging, not just any kind of death.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- reasonattlm 6y agoStill as relevant 15 years later, as we still live in a world in which aging can be addressed via the construction of rejuvenation therapies, but most people are simply disinterested in the prospect, the science, and doing anything other than crumbling, suffering, and dying like their parents and grandparents. The one big difference between the present and 15 years ago: the first rejuvenation therapies worthy of the name now exist in the form of senolytic treatments that selectively destroy senescent cells. Pretty much everyone over the age of 50 should be taking them once a year or so, and would have a better life as a result. It makes the pathos of the situation somewhat greater than it was.
- DennisP 6y agoAre any of those senolytic treatments available now, or are they still in FDA purgatory?
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoNot really even in purgatory, I'd say. The FDA doesn't recognize the general concept of aging as something for which you could be treated, so there's no approval process they could go through in the first place.
- DennisP 6y agoThe TAME trial is attempting to change that: https://www.afar.org/tame-trial https://www.afar.org/tame-trial Another strategy is to apply an anti-aging drug to a specific disease of aging. In any case, I guess I was really asking what these senolytic treatments are, and whether any of them are available now either as approved drugs or supplements.
- reasonattlm 6y agoDasatinib + quercetin has been shown in a clinical trial to remove senescent cells in humans in much the same way it does in mice [1]. High dose fisetin (i.e. take a whole bottle of the stuff at one go, not just a couple of pills) works about as well as dasatinib + quercetin in mice, but absent published results from the presently ongoing Mayo Clinic trial we're all dubious that will translate to humans, given how widely these sorts of compounds have been consumed, tested, and assayed [2]. Ditto piperlongumine. Beyond that, there are any number of biotech startups developing senolytic immunotherapies, small molecules, gene therapies, topical cosmetics, etc. [3] [1]: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ebiom.2019.08.069 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ebiom.2019.08.069 [2]: https://brain.forever-healthy.org/display/EN/Fisetin+Senolytic+Therapy https://brain.forever-healthy.org/display/EN/Fisetin+Senolyt... [3]: http://agingbiotech.info/companies/ http://agingbiotech.info/companies/
- rhysrhaven 6y agoA story for a story. My father had children from the age of 19 to 55. Born in the 1930s, passed in his 80s, he had a good life. As the youngest of many brothers by different mothers, our paths have diverged massively as we experience the world separated by decades. And yet the commonality of genetics lays down a pattern of personality that is striking to see. We share the same baseline, the same personality flaws, the same basic interests manifest in different ways. We are in so many ways variation on a theme that is my father. And seeing all these examples of the same pattern aging, each person slowly becomes poorly fit for the world that evolves around them. We learn as children, grow into men, and eventually become rigid in our patterns. I expect this is reflected in basic biology of the brain. The one thing that this has convinced me of, seeing these patterns far beyond what I can control, is that one day it will be my time to die, and this will be a good thing. I can pass on what I've done, the important lessons I've learned, but eventually I must make way for a new variations of genes, a new attempt at learning, a new crack at adapting to a changing world. An individual dying is not an end, but part of a cycle of change, which is the core of what life is. Everything must die in the end, because to become static and unchanging is the real death, the real dragon that we should fear.
- kybernetikos 6y agoWhat if we could fix both kinds of death?
- rhysrhaven 6y agoLets for a second imagine you're right, that a long lived human could take some drugs that returns them to a childlike state, sort of a Doctor Who-esque regeneration to readapt to a new world, a new teenage years. How many would take it? And would they really be any different? Is there a maximum to that? Sure. Next problems. Are we going to fix the broken feedback loop of capitalism, where over time the rich keep getting richer? Are we just going to recreate the Meths from Altered Carbon? Those who can use their money to live forever, accumulating more and more wealth entirely voluntarily until they are as gods over the rest of humanity? To solve one problem is to spawn so many more dragons than aging ever was.
- Kednicma 6y agoHa, hilariously naïve. I still have the "Black Dragon Fallacy" written down as something that deserves a full writeup, but in short: What's the missile made of, and how does Bostrom propose that we build it? Bostrom brings us "fine phrases and hollow rhetoric," mostly. Sure, we should do something about aging, but what, exactly, are we failing to do as a society here? He seems to think that the problem is that we're treating aging and death as inevitable, but science already has marched past that position; instead, we now know that aging is part of a tradeoff involving cancer and is closely tied to maintenance of DNA as cells reproduce in multicellular organisms. Further, the notion of agency is hopelessly confused by the design of the fable. Humans are deliberately sending other humans to the dragon while the missile is ready to go, in the story, and Bostrom insists that we are supposed to regret this. However, when we move back through the analogy to the real world, then the way that humans send other humans to the dragon is via war. Will ending aging end war? How? Anthropomorphizing psychopomps may have been a mistake, since it has led to Bostrom imagining that if we just collect all of the psychopomps into one really big mean dragon, and then kill the dragon, that we'll have defeated death. Easy peasy!
- ALittleLight 6y agoI think the main idea is to realize that aging is a disease we all have and it's lethal and we aren't doing enough to combat it. What's the budget for senescence research and why isn't it two or three orders of magnitude more? Why isn't every ninety year old automatically enrolled in an experimental program to reduce senescence? Eighty? Seventy? We should be desperate and taking desperate measures to fight aging tooth and nail. Instead, we seem to be casually studying it. If we applied the world's productive and research efforts, and obliterated redtape, how much progress would we make?
- Kednicma 6y ago...Are you suggesting sacrificing the old in order to save the old?
- ALittleLight 6y ago
- billpg 6y agoWe are the dragon.
- Taylor_OD 6y agoThe dragon is whatever you want or need it to be. I saw oil/natural gas the first time I read the story. Disease and cancer the second.
- garmaine 6y agoWell according to the author it is aging. It's a parable, not literature.
- goatlover 6y agoIt's aging, the one thing that all people succumb to if they don't die of something else first. In the story, the dragon is widely believed to be both inevitable and a necessary part of life, but there are always a few who thought otherwise. It was only when science reached a certain point did it become possible to see how the dragon might be slayed, potentially saving the increasing numbers of people taken by it every year as the human population grows. Aging is the only thing that matches the dragon.
- chosen1111 6y agoHas anyone done a really good analysis of how much money it would take to end biological aging? And then eventually buy time to develop immortalist technologies. Something like a punchlist. Do we need to solve mind uploading or AGI first? What precursor technologies need to be available and what intellectual pursuits should people be pursuing and at what scale? What political, legal and resource obstacles exist that might succeed in stopping the development of this technology? Books like Singularity is Near are great but I wish someone would create something truly like a roadmap, with risks, prerequisites, decision-trees, capital needs and obstacles.
- idclip 6y agoRead paychoanalysis - immortality is actually inherent to the system as the phenomenon of the self and the primordial ouroboric plemora. However the “experiencer” as it arises in humans as the adjucant to consciousness isnt, and the problem is in the experiencer identifying itself with the past. Immortality of experience is impossible, since by definition of the experiencer as memory, living forever requires an infinite amount of matter to preserve the memory (as the body grows older, it loses DNA structure, its cells decay in time, losing information at the molecular level. Keeping that process alive “forever” will need constant “regeneration” - and forever means infinite energy to do so, and we assume here that the universe has finite amount of matter and energy) Immortality of the plemora also assumes a cyclical nature to the universe as it decays and rises again (big bang, big crunch, but in psychoanalysis the ouroborus is depicted in myth as simply a cyclical organism/structure which is developed into various mythologies and religions) The larger “self” is infact immortal. Let that sink in.
- chosen1111 6y agoVery interesting. You are right that true immortality is not possible as eventually the universe has an end, now if it crunches and repeats is another question. If we solve biological aging we then would hopefully eventually be able to buy time before we can develop mind uploading, which brings forth more of the points you outlined. I probably should have stated the roadmap to solving aging.
- mooneater 6y agoDeath is the one great equalizer between billionaires and the poor. Remove that and we would get Eternal Robber-barons, which would be the new dragons.
- riffraff 6y agoA topic explored in plenty of SF literature, see e.g. Altered Carbon[0] for a recent take [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altered_Carbon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altered_Carbon
- webmaven 6y ago> A topic explored in plenty of SF literature, see e.g. Altered Carbon[0] for a recent take > [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altered_Carbon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altered_Carbon Not sure 2002 counts as "recent"...
- LeifCarrotson 6y agoIn tech? No. In literature? Yes. In SF literature? Maybe.
- warbaker 6y agoPerhaps we'd simply adapt, say via a global wealth tax or something similar.
- boxed 6y agoWhen the richest died from disease in numbers unheard of today we still had slavery. It's not a great equalizer if you think about it.
- tekkk 6y agoBut it is. We have progressed out of slavery over the years. Without those who were staunchly pro-slavery and who profited from it mightily dying, they would have been fighting against abolishing it to the tooth and nail over the years. After we have been molded in our childhoods, we don't change from that very radically. Certain imprints just stay with us the rest of our lives. If billionaires would be able to live forever our world would divide heavily into those who could afford to be demigods and accumulate wealth in perpetuity, and those poor buggers who would toil away in the companies the rich would own. Maybe at one point the cure could become universally available. But the aristocracy of super-wealthy would remain and the gap between the poor and the rich would become magnitudes greater than it is today.
- mooneater 6y agoDoes anyone think that the social advances of the recent centuries would have ever happened, if there was no death? If we had the same society with the same people with the same prejudices? Womens rights. Democracy. Anti-racism. Religious tolerance. Gay rights. Environmentalism. All of these would have never happened if had managed to kill "the dragon". Death is not just suffering, its a critical part of the cycle of renewal. Author is nuts imo.
- SQueeeeeL 6y agoTo imagine we have to wait for the intolerant to die to have progress is just as nuts, and forces a passive view that no one should advocate for social change in their era...
- warbaker 6y agoI think they would have, yes. Both effects are occurring at the same time - younger people are more liberal, but also older people are getting more liberal over their lifespans. And, in any case, if the price of longevity is slower social change, I'll take it!
- tosh 6y ago3rd story in Steve Jobs' commencement speech on death: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hd_ptbiPoXM&t=982 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hd_ptbiPoXM&t=982
- warbaker 6y agoI think you can courageously follow your heart even if you know you won't die for thousands of years. Perhaps a world in which a 5000-year lifespan is common will be a world in which people are more socially courageous, more daring, as they know they'll have plenty of time to recover from a mistake.
- jackcosgrove 6y agoEnding senescence would not hinder human adaptation. First of all is there any evidence that death is biologically planned, rather than simply being the result of degrading bodies for which nature never found a solution? More importantly, we have other means of information transmission between organisms such as language, such that DNA is practically obsolete as an adaptation mechanism.
- yters 6y agoNo amount of money can eliminate the second law of thermodynamics, and a finite timeline always comes to an end.
- 0_gravitas 6y agoI am always surprised/disheartend by the amount of people in threads regarding this topic who are quintessentially "pro-death".
- Kednicma 6y agoI'll put to you what I put to Bostrom in my analysis further downthread: What, exactly, do you think we should be doing which we aren't currently doing? Everything he implies that we should be working on, we are working on.
- 0_gravitas 6y agoWe are working on it with only so many resources dedicated to the effort (which, right up with/on-top-of climate-change, is one of the most impactful problems to ever be solved as far as I can fathom). This is secondary however. My __main__ concern is that these efforts are vulnerable to being rendered null due to short-sighted, dogmatic, legislation, a la similar restrictions on things like CRISPR and stem-cell research. Gauging from responses I've seen in this thread here and in the past, if it was a matter of a simple, single democratic vote on "Should we eliminate/drastically decrease the negative physical effects of aging?", I have serious doubts that the end total would be in favor of that action; an overwhelming number of people seem to hold this stockholm-syndrome-y view of death/aging. __THAT__ is the part that concerns me, and that is the/a part that I think concerns Bostrom, and what I believe the story is trying to address.