9 ms·

The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant (2005)

61 points by bobbiechen 5y ago

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
dharmaturtle 5y ago
13 minute long CGP Grey video of this story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZYNADOHhVY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZYNADOHhVY
- AlwaysRock 5y ago
  This is the best way to take this story in.
the__alchemist 5y ago
It seems like the metaphor is a bit meta? Tautological? Death is represented by death. This is a minor point, but distracting. Still... I hope for a well-supported contingent of warriors to slay the dragon. If not now, eventually.
- bschne 5y ago
  My recollection of the story is a bit spotty and I can't re-read in full right now, but: I think the point this is trying to make is that we accept death of old age as a natural fact and think it is odd to want to "solve" it, but wouldn't accept it at all if it were caused by some personified actor? Of course we don't "just accept" it, we have long considered a large fraction of deaths "too early" and worked on postponing them with various treatments.
  - kiba 5y ago
    It's enshrined into our oldest myth and stories as a form of wisdom and then repeated again in modernity as an obvious 'lesson'.
- somesortofthing 5y ago
  I think the idea is to draw a parallel between something we're repulsed by, find abhorrent, and feel we ought to eliminate (like a violent death from being ripped apart by a dragon) and something that we consider a natural and inevitable part of life but that doesn't really differ much from the first thing(death from aging). It's a pretty common metaphor in transhumanist circles. I remember this piece comparing the elimination of "natural" unhappiness to the advent of painkillers making a strong impression on me: https://www.hedweb.com/hedab.htm https://www.hedweb.com/hedab.htm
- Ygg2 5y ago
  Death is inescapable. Just because you don't die of old age doesn't mean you wouldn't die. As long as time exists, you will end. That's why dragon is aging, not death.
PaulHoule 5y ago
This is just silly. It reminds me the time I went a meeting of the MIT nanotechnology study group at the MIT AI lab and the president of Alcor (the "frozen heads in a bottle" company) showed up... If I remember right he'd been charged with murder because he'd been accused of freezing somebody who wasn't quite dead yet and had just been acquitted. In addition to the usual crowd we had a large contingent of middle aged and older rich women who seemed offended that the people at the study group asked tough questions of the speaker. My feeling was that these people didn't feel like they'd gotten enough out of life and wanted to pretend that biological immortality was possible. Lately I came across this TV episode https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4L59EubHFGk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4L59EubHFGk about someone with this attitude. Death is certainly not some tyrant that came recently, but it's something that's been part of life for at least a billion years.
- posnet 5y ago
  > it's something that's been part of life for at least a billion years I know right. The dragon is just a way of life, and will be for all time. Anyone who tries to fight the dragon or even suggest it could be slain is a foolish nuisance.
  - PaulHoule 5y ago
    Fighting it is one thing. Slaying it is another. This article is meant to gather together a group of groupthinkers who delude themselves.
    - Viliam1234 5y ago
      > groupthinkers Unlike all those "death gives meaning to life" people, who all came to the same conclusion independently.
- the__alchemist 5y ago
  How does this follow from the article?
weakfish 5y ago
Here I was thinking this would be about climate change...
bschne 5y ago
There's something interesting about the way we as a species think about death. Say you're working on "immortality" or on "solving aging", and most people outside a small subset of the tech/SV crowd will think you're a megalomaniac or just plain crazy -- death is obviously a fact, and to attempt to overcome it pure hubris. Yet we spend an incredible amount of resources on prolonging life in various ways through lifestyle interventions, treatments, cures -- and handsomely reward and revere those who succeed in pushing our life expectancy ever so slightly upwards.
- posnet 5y ago
  I think one of the major issues is that people associate longer life expectancy with old age. For most people, the idea of being kept alive by machines, bed ridden for decades into their 80/90s as far worse than death. They never consider that improvements could promise them a strong body and agile mind in addition to the extra years. Who ever does the life extension technology marketing really needs to push the "keep people younger, longer" message.
  - SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
    It's worth noting, though, that people think of it this way because that's historically what life extension has looked like. I'm still ultimately in favor, but I see a nontrivial chance of a disaster scenario where "keep people barely alive till they're 150" is the low hanging fruit.
    - whatshisface 5y ago
      As far as disasters go, one you can opt-out of is not the most terrifying.
      - SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
        Often you can't opt out. My great-grandma was basically non-functional for her last decade: she couldn't move without assistance, couldn't taste anything, and seemed to be in constant pain. But her dementia came first, so by the time we started worrying about it, she couldn't think clearly enough to make any decisions about anything. We never put her on life support as such because we were pretty sure she wouldn't have wanted it, but there was no specific life-sustaining intervention to consider withdrawing, just a bundle of meds which each meaningfully improved her quality of life. So she kinda bumbled along in a cloud of permanent confusion and misery until the end.
ckemere 5y ago
I think that what frustrates me about the "cure aging" crowd is that they quite easily step over the homeless opioid addict on their front porch in SF on their way to the latest lecture. "Aging can be defeated! Oh, but this individual in front of me represents an insurmountable problem." It's quite easy to justify anything you do if you've already decided that an infinite number of (hypothetical) future people will benefit...
- w-j-w 5y ago
  No one in San Francisco has attempted to solve the homelessness problem ever. No resources, no ideas, nothing. People hardly discuss the problem.
- kiba 5y ago
  Aging affects more than just the homeless. It affects everyone universally, poor or rich, homeless or royalty. It also manifested itself in any number of ways from decreased mobility to cancer. Nobody is immune to it. It is literally the biggest health challenge in the world and the biggest killer of mankind. The homeless opioid addict while in some way much more acute, but can be solved the next day should we decide to. It is a political problem, not a technical problem like aging is.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - danShumway 5y ago
    But given that a universal cure for aging necessarily requires universal distribution of that cure, isn't it worth asking if you're putting the cart in front of the horse here? You say the homeless problem "can be solved the next day should we decide to"; but we haven't decided to. So either this isn't a simple political problem and there are practical concerns we haven't figured out yet, or there's a worrying gap between what is possible to do and what we're willing to do. And if there is no mechanism to close that gap, then you just can't solve aging universally. At best you can only solve it for a very small select few, at which point you might be doing more utilitarian good by just helping the homeless right now. The current lack of universal housing, universal health care, suggests very strongly to me that curing aging is not in fact an effort that "affects everyone universally"; because I don't believe that universal distribution of a cure is simple or a straightforward question of political will, and I wonder if it actually does have massive social/political/practical complications behind it that are going to be very difficult to solve, and I wonder if (under a strict utilitarian perspective) solving that problem of universal access to basic resources is not the more important priority. If we're all just working on our own stuff in parallel, fine. I actually think the utilitarian way of looking at this is kind of nonsense, and I would encourage people not to use this lens. We should not be ranking social problems in this way, it's fine for some people to focus on technical problems and its fine for some people to work on social problems. But if we are going to use this lens and we are going to rank problems, it seems like fully solving the aging problem is almost strictly dependent on solving the political problems first.
GranularRecipe 5y ago
I think the dragon-tyrant here should be interpreted as a metaphor specifically for death through aging, and not death generally. Because death is not any single condition (representable through a token), but the vast set of states that vastly outnumber the set of "living states". Solving the problem of aging wouldn't solve the problem death, curing all sickness wouldn't solve the problem of death, preventing all accidents wouldn't solve the problem of death. Indeed, if we get philosophical (and transhumanist), we need to find a reasonable definition of death (and life), possibly detached from the necessity of continuous physical existence. [edited for readabiliy]
- depaya 5y ago
  Related to this - If you want to read a story about a truly post-death world check out the YA novel Scythe. CGP Grey recommended it awhile ago (I assume he read it while developing his video on this topic) and it's an interesting (and very easy) read.
- fknorangesite 5y ago
  > I think the dragon-tyrant here should be interpreted as a metaphor specifically for death through aging That is explicitly clear in the essay, yes.
ladyattis 5y ago
Looking back at this story now, I think I disagree with its argument. Yes, old age today is a costly drain on modern western societies but mostly because people are living much longer. If our society was accepting of euthanasia for people who don't want to suffer in old age as it was of trying to keep the old living as long as possible then maybe the cost wouldn't be so draining. The idea that we MUST live for as long as possible without any sense of what the person who's living through the suffering of the diseases that become more severe with old age shows how little we value those people. If we really did value the elderly we'd ask if they want to continue to live or allow them to choose to end their lives with their own subjective sense of dignity instead. This isn't to say I'm opposed to any kind of medical research to improve life in our final years. Anything that retains physical autonomy and removes pain from old age is great but the obsession with death itself is problematic to me. In my opinion, life ain't worth living if it leaves me in an adult diaper being constantly pumped full of drugs to just keep myself sane with the pain and indignities.
- nilstycho 5y ago
  You say the idea presented is “that we MUST live for as long as possible…” But the author claims that isn't his idea: > The argument is not in favor or life-span extension per se. Adding extra years of sickness and debility at the end of life would be pointless. The argument is in favor of extending, as far as possible, the human health-span. By slowing or halting the aging process, the healthy human life span would be extended. Individuals would be able to remain healthy, vigorous, and productive at ages at which they would otherwise be dead.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
dang 5y ago
Some past threads: The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant (2005) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24770566 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24770566 - Oct 2020 (91 comments) The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant (2005) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16945915 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16945915 - April 2018 (71 comments) The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant (CGP Grey) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16920532 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16920532 - April 2018 (1 comment) The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant (2005) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9559360 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9559360 - May 2015 (38 comments) The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant (2005) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=656713 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=656713 - June 2009 (25 comments)
jabthedang 5y ago
(if you are reading this, you were quick -- bound to be downvoted) mr. bostrom fails to mention the phoenix in the room.. meaning the incessant conception & birthing habit of humans. so, is the brilliant idea here that more (and more... AND MORE!!) ..is "better", or what? smh quite aside from the strawman bit of immortality somehow being comparable to flight.. rofl ok geniuses, press the downvote button, quick! and go back to your delusions of grandeur.
buildsjets 5y ago
The prospect of a society with significantly extended lifetimes is absolutely horrifying. My opinion does not frequently align with Elon Musk, but I fully agree with him on this one. Death is necessary for human progress. People, at the large scale, are not sufficiently capable of changing their deeply held convictions when the societal circumstances around them change. We need a mechanism for obsolete ideas and minds to grow senescent and die off, or we will be forever stagnant and bound to the ideals of 250 year old people. https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-believes-it-is-important-for-us-to-die-2021-12 https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-believes-it-is-imp...
- DennisP 5y ago
  One reason old people are inflexible is that their brains get worse at making new neural connections. If anti-aging affects the brain too, then that will improve.

61 points by bobbiechen 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

13 minute long CGP Grey video of this story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZYNADOHhVY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZYNADOHhVY

AlwaysRock 5y ago
This is the best way to take this story in.

the__alchemist 5y ago

It seems like the metaphor is a bit meta? Tautological? Death is represented by death. This is a minor point, but distracting. Still... I hope for a well-supported contingent of warriors to slay the dragon. If not now, eventually.

bschne 5y ago
My recollection of the story is a bit spotty and I can't re-read in full right now, but: I think the point this is trying to make is that we accept death of old age as a natural fact and think it is odd to want to "solve" it, but wouldn't accept it at all if it were caused by some personified actor? Of course we don't "just accept" it, we have long considered a large fraction of deaths "too early" and worked on postponing them with various treatments.
- kiba 5y ago
  It's enshrined into our oldest myth and stories as a form of wisdom and then repeated again in modernity as an obvious 'lesson'.
somesortofthing 5y ago
I think the idea is to draw a parallel between something we're repulsed by, find abhorrent, and feel we ought to eliminate (like a violent death from being ripped apart by a dragon) and something that we consider a natural and inevitable part of life but that doesn't really differ much from the first thing(death from aging). It's a pretty common metaphor in transhumanist circles. I remember this piece comparing the elimination of "natural" unhappiness to the advent of painkillers making a strong impression on me: https://www.hedweb.com/hedab.htm https://www.hedweb.com/hedab.htm
Ygg2 5y ago
Death is inescapable. Just because you don't die of old age doesn't mean you wouldn't die. As long as time exists, you will end. That's why dragon is aging, not death.

PaulHoule 5y ago

This is just silly. It reminds me the time I went a meeting of the MIT nanotechnology study group at the MIT AI lab and the president of Alcor (the "frozen heads in a bottle" company) showed up... If I remember right he'd been charged with murder because he'd been accused of freezing somebody who wasn't quite dead yet and had just been acquitted. In addition to the usual crowd we had a large contingent of middle aged and older rich women who seemed offended that the people at the study group asked tough questions of the speaker. My feeling was that these people didn't feel like they'd gotten enough out of life and wanted to pretend that biological immortality was possible. Lately I came across this TV episode https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4L59EubHFGk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4L59EubHFGk about someone with this attitude. Death is certainly not some tyrant that came recently, but it's something that's been part of life for at least a billion years.

posnet 5y ago
> it's something that's been part of life for at least a billion years I know right. The dragon is just a way of life, and will be for all time. Anyone who tries to fight the dragon or even suggest it could be slain is a foolish nuisance.
- PaulHoule 5y ago
  Fighting it is one thing. Slaying it is another. This article is meant to gather together a group of groupthinkers who delude themselves.
  - Viliam1234 5y ago
    > groupthinkers Unlike all those "death gives meaning to life" people, who all came to the same conclusion independently.
the__alchemist 5y ago
How does this follow from the article?

weakfish 5y ago

Here I was thinking this would be about climate change...

bschne 5y ago

There's something interesting about the way we as a species think about death. Say you're working on "immortality" or on "solving aging", and most people outside a small subset of the tech/SV crowd will think you're a megalomaniac or just plain crazy -- death is obviously a fact, and to attempt to overcome it pure hubris. Yet we spend an incredible amount of resources on prolonging life in various ways through lifestyle interventions, treatments, cures -- and handsomely reward and revere those who succeed in pushing our life expectancy ever so slightly upwards.

posnet 5y ago
I think one of the major issues is that people associate longer life expectancy with old age. For most people, the idea of being kept alive by machines, bed ridden for decades into their 80/90s as far worse than death. They never consider that improvements could promise them a strong body and agile mind in addition to the extra years. Who ever does the life extension technology marketing really needs to push the "keep people younger, longer" message.
- SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
  It's worth noting, though, that people think of it this way because that's historically what life extension has looked like. I'm still ultimately in favor, but I see a nontrivial chance of a disaster scenario where "keep people barely alive till they're 150" is the low hanging fruit.
  - whatshisface 5y ago
    As far as disasters go, one you can opt-out of is not the most terrifying.
    - SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
      Often you can't opt out. My great-grandma was basically non-functional for her last decade: she couldn't move without assistance, couldn't taste anything, and seemed to be in constant pain. But her dementia came first, so by the time we started worrying about it, she couldn't think clearly enough to make any decisions about anything. We never put her on life support as such because we were pretty sure she wouldn't have wanted it, but there was no specific life-sustaining intervention to consider withdrawing, just a bundle of meds which each meaningfully improved her quality of life. So she kinda bumbled along in a cloud of permanent confusion and misery until the end.

ckemere 5y ago

I think that what frustrates me about the "cure aging" crowd is that they quite easily step over the homeless opioid addict on their front porch in SF on their way to the latest lecture. "Aging can be defeated! Oh, but this individual in front of me represents an insurmountable problem." It's quite easy to justify anything you do if you've already decided that an infinite number of (hypothetical) future people will benefit...

w-j-w 5y ago
No one in San Francisco has attempted to solve the homelessness problem ever. No resources, no ideas, nothing. People hardly discuss the problem.
kiba 5y ago
Aging affects more than just the homeless. It affects everyone universally, poor or rich, homeless or royalty. It also manifested itself in any number of ways from decreased mobility to cancer. Nobody is immune to it. It is literally the biggest health challenge in the world and the biggest killer of mankind. The homeless opioid addict while in some way much more acute, but can be solved the next day should we decide to. It is a political problem, not a technical problem like aging is.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- danShumway 5y ago
  But given that a universal cure for aging necessarily requires universal distribution of that cure, isn't it worth asking if you're putting the cart in front of the horse here? You say the homeless problem "can be solved the next day should we decide to"; but we haven't decided to. So either this isn't a simple political problem and there are practical concerns we haven't figured out yet, or there's a worrying gap between what is possible to do and what we're willing to do. And if there is no mechanism to close that gap, then you just can't solve aging universally. At best you can only solve it for a very small select few, at which point you might be doing more utilitarian good by just helping the homeless right now. The current lack of universal housing, universal health care, suggests very strongly to me that curing aging is not in fact an effort that "affects everyone universally"; because I don't believe that universal distribution of a cure is simple or a straightforward question of political will, and I wonder if it actually does have massive social/political/practical complications behind it that are going to be very difficult to solve, and I wonder if (under a strict utilitarian perspective) solving that problem of universal access to basic resources is not the more important priority. If we're all just working on our own stuff in parallel, fine. I actually think the utilitarian way of looking at this is kind of nonsense, and I would encourage people not to use this lens. We should not be ranking social problems in this way, it's fine for some people to focus on technical problems and its fine for some people to work on social problems. But if we are going to use this lens and we are going to rank problems, it seems like fully solving the aging problem is almost strictly dependent on solving the political problems first.

GranularRecipe 5y ago

I think the dragon-tyrant here should be interpreted as a metaphor specifically for death through aging, and not death generally. Because death is not any single condition (representable through a token), but the vast set of states that vastly outnumber the set of "living states". Solving the problem of aging wouldn't solve the problem death, curing all sickness wouldn't solve the problem of death, preventing all accidents wouldn't solve the problem of death. Indeed, if we get philosophical (and transhumanist), we need to find a reasonable definition of death (and life), possibly detached from the necessity of continuous physical existence. [edited for readabiliy]

depaya 5y ago
Related to this - If you want to read a story about a truly post-death world check out the YA novel Scythe. CGP Grey recommended it awhile ago (I assume he read it while developing his video on this topic) and it's an interesting (and very easy) read.
fknorangesite 5y ago
> I think the dragon-tyrant here should be interpreted as a metaphor specifically for death through aging That is explicitly clear in the essay, yes.

ladyattis 5y ago

Looking back at this story now, I think I disagree with its argument. Yes, old age today is a costly drain on modern western societies but mostly because people are living much longer. If our society was accepting of euthanasia for people who don't want to suffer in old age as it was of trying to keep the old living as long as possible then maybe the cost wouldn't be so draining. The idea that we MUST live for as long as possible without any sense of what the person who's living through the suffering of the diseases that become more severe with old age shows how little we value those people. If we really did value the elderly we'd ask if they want to continue to live or allow them to choose to end their lives with their own subjective sense of dignity instead. This isn't to say I'm opposed to any kind of medical research to improve life in our final years. Anything that retains physical autonomy and removes pain from old age is great but the obsession with death itself is problematic to me. In my opinion, life ain't worth living if it leaves me in an adult diaper being constantly pumped full of drugs to just keep myself sane with the pain and indignities.

nilstycho 5y ago
You say the idea presented is “that we MUST live for as long as possible…” But the author claims that isn't his idea: > The argument is not in favor or life-span extension per se. Adding extra years of sickness and debility at the end of life would be pointless. The argument is in favor of extending, as far as possible, the human health-span. By slowing or halting the aging process, the healthy human life span would be extended. Individuals would be able to remain healthy, vigorous, and productive at ages at which they would otherwise be dead.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

dang 5y ago

Some past threads: The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant (2005) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24770566 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24770566 - Oct 2020 (91 comments) The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant (2005) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16945915 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16945915 - April 2018 (71 comments) The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant (CGP Grey) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16920532 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16920532 - April 2018 (1 comment) The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant (2005) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9559360 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9559360 - May 2015 (38 comments) The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant (2005) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=656713 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=656713 - June 2009 (25 comments)

jabthedang 5y ago

(if you are reading this, you were quick -- bound to be downvoted) mr. bostrom fails to mention the phoenix in the room.. meaning the incessant conception & birthing habit of humans. so, is the brilliant idea here that more (and more... AND MORE!!) ..is "better", or what? smh quite aside from the strawman bit of immortality somehow being comparable to flight.. rofl ok geniuses, press the downvote button, quick! and go back to your delusions of grandeur.

buildsjets 5y ago

The prospect of a society with significantly extended lifetimes is absolutely horrifying. My opinion does not frequently align with Elon Musk, but I fully agree with him on this one. Death is necessary for human progress. People, at the large scale, are not sufficiently capable of changing their deeply held convictions when the societal circumstances around them change. We need a mechanism for obsolete ideas and minds to grow senescent and die off, or we will be forever stagnant and bound to the ideals of 250 year old people. https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-believes-it-is-important-for-us-to-die-2021-12 https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-believes-it-is-imp...

DennisP 5y ago
One reason old people are inflexible is that their brains get worse at making new neural connections. If anti-aging affects the brain too, then that will improve.