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> At another point in the discussion, a man spoke of some benefit X of death, I don't recall exactly what. And I said: "You know, given human nature, if peopl

> At another point in the discussion, a man spoke of some benefit X of death, I don't recall exactly what. And I said: "You know, given human nature, if people got hit on the head by a baseball bat every week, pretty soon they would invent reasons why getting hit on the head with a baseball bat was a good thing. But if you took someone who wasn't being hit on the head with a baseball bat, and you asked them if they wanted it, they would say no. I think that if you took someone who was immortal, and asked them if they wanted to die for benefit X, they would say no." https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aSQy7yHj6nPD44RNo/how-to-seem-and-be-deep https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aSQy7yHj6nPD44RNo/how-to-see...

Koshkin 6y ago
Talk about being obvious. I am sure Stalin wanted to live to 100 years. I am also sure people are better off without him.
- p1esk 6y ago
  Everyone being immortal also means you can't kill your enemies. I imagine that would be quite a problem for people like Stalin.
  - 0xdeadb00f 6y ago
    You can't kill them but you sure as hell can kidnap and torture them for eternity.
    - webmaven 6y ago
      > You can't kill them but you sure as hell can kidnap and torture them for eternity. For many would-be Stalins, the main point isn't the torture, but the kidnapping and incommunicado imprisonment (eg. in gulags). The utility of torture comes in when you want to ensure the prisoner's compliance when reintroduced to society. So: please note that immortality by itself doesn't preclude either sequestration nor adversarial behavior modification. Technical solutions to both of those (integrity checks to detect coercion, restoring from distributed backups, etc.), start to run into the same sort of arms-races we have with internet filtering, botnets, and malware. Except that so far as a totalitarian regime is concerned, the uploaded dissident is the malware, as is any sufficiently advanced freedom-preserving tech.

Koshkin 6y ago

Talk about being obvious. I am sure Stalin wanted to live to 100 years. I am also sure people are better off without him.

p1esk 6y ago
Everyone being immortal also means you can't kill your enemies. I imagine that would be quite a problem for people like Stalin.
- 0xdeadb00f 6y ago
  You can't kill them but you sure as hell can kidnap and torture them for eternity.
  - webmaven 6y ago
    > You can't kill them but you sure as hell can kidnap and torture them for eternity. For many would-be Stalins, the main point isn't the torture, but the kidnapping and incommunicado imprisonment (eg. in gulags). The utility of torture comes in when you want to ensure the prisoner's compliance when reintroduced to society. So: please note that immortality by itself doesn't preclude either sequestration nor adversarial behavior modification. Technical solutions to both of those (integrity checks to detect coercion, restoring from distributed backups, etc.), start to run into the same sort of arms-races we have with internet filtering, botnets, and malware. Except that so far as a totalitarian regime is concerned, the uploaded dissident is the malware, as is any sufficiently advanced freedom-preserving tech.