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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

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
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- 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.
  - kiba 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? Once you have the effective cure, it will likely be economically a no-brainer to implement, because a whole lot of illness of old age will just go away. It's essentially a self-funding cure that drastically reduce the cost of healthcare. However, a cure for aging will not be solved tomorrow, maybe not even a decade. It is a long term investment. The solution to the homeless isn't economically complicated. It doesn't require us to keep at a problem for ten years. It is strictly a matter of political will. It isn't even a matter of practical concerns, because we live right now is unsustainable economically and financially.
    - dorchadas 5y ago
      > Once you have the effective cure, it will likely be economically a no-brainer to implement, because a whole lot of illness of old age will just go away. It's essentially a self-funding cure that drastically reduce the cost of healthcare. Sure, it might be economically a no-brainer, but I don't see this happening. Why would the people in positions of power to implement this give it to the masses when they can have it and keep their power forever while the plebs have to continue to age and die?
    - danShumway 5y ago
      > Once you have the effective cure, it will likely be economically a no-brainer to implement, because a whole lot of illness of old age will just go away. It's essentially a self-funding cure that drastically reduce the cost of healthcare. Okay, but don't you see the disconnect here? Because we don't even have good preventative care right now in the US, and that is also economically a no-brainer. Being economically advantageous overall turns out to be not enough of an incentive to introduce political change. So you have this theory that once death is solved, naturally it will be in everyone's best interest to distribute the cure, but that doesn't match up with what we see in the world today. Again, going back to homelessness, if this isn't economically complicated, and we still haven't solved it, that to me suggests that it's not going to be simple in the future to distribute a cure for aging, even if you're right about the incentives. Figuring out how to bridge that gap between economic incentive and political will might be a giant, equally difficult problem to solve. Doesn't it worry you that fixing these kinds of problems today would clearly reduce overall health care costs on the system and yet the problems still exist? How are you so confident that aging will be different?
beebmam 5y ago
If you're frustrated by homelessness and you hold scientists who are working on a totally unrelated problem accountable for that homelessness, you're either participating in an absurd amount of Whataboutism, or you're not actually serious about what it takes to solve homelessness. Plenty of countries have solved homelessness, and it requires a very well funded social and economic safety net, fueled by high taxation. Be angry with people who oppose those safety nets, not some random scientists who have nothing to do with this problem.
- ckemere 5y ago
  I should clarify that I have no problem with research on aging. I do research on brain machine interfaces which is equally pie in the sky. I am frustrated by the interest/funding shown in this research. Also, I think that it's irresponsible to say that homelessness is a public policy problem and aging isn't. [Edit-more clarification]: My frustration is people who consider the problem of giving the median individual 10 more healthy-years of life unworthy of their attention/resources (attention is really the most valuable resource at some level) but are quite happy to get excited by those who promise infinite life. What if rather than a silver bullet, life extension requires society-level changes a small step at a time??
  - beebmam 5y ago
    I didn't say aging isn't a public policy problem. I said homelessness is. Plenty of governments have solved it, but it takes safety nets and taxation and funding. It's really not hard to understand.
radu_floricica 5y ago
That's a pretty transparent fallacy, slander and ad hominem. Fallacy: "but there are starving kids in Africa" is a Generic Counterargument that can be applied to anything. It says nothing useful. Slander: how do you know people who care about aging don't care _more_ about the homeless? Ad hominem: you take an idea (death is bad) and make it about the character of the people supporting it. Bad ckemere. Bad.
- danShumway 5y ago
  > you take an idea (death is bad) and make it about the character of the people supporting it Well... the Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant is not actually just about the idea that death is bad. It's both about the idea that death is bad, and it presents a specific set of ideas about how we should respond to death being bad. There is an element of fallacy here, and I think people should be careful about how they critique this, but there is also an element of real substantive criticism. Some passages from The Dragon-Tyrant: ---- > The next morning, a billion people woke up and realized that their turn to be sent to the dragon would come before the projectile would be completed. A tipping point was reached. Whereas before, active support for the anti-dragonist cause had been limited to a small group of visionaries, it now became the number one priority and concern on everybody’s mind. It's important to start with the fact that many of the critiques against the anti-aging movement are not actually critiques against the concept of anti-aging, they are critiques of a very real argument that the anti-aging crowd makes that researching and pouring public resources into this project should be the number one greatest priority that we have right now. Given that context, given that Bostrom is arguing that we should be focusing on aging first and foremost above everything else, it is reasonable to ask questions about whether or not anti-aging research is something that is likely to matter before the very-long-term for anyone other than a select few rich people (we don't have functioning health care right now, most people are not going to have access to anti-aging technology), and it is reasonable to ask whether it is ethical to abandon solvable problems today (and the people affected by them) in favor of problems that may take at best a huge amount of time to solve. Nobody criticizes cancer research over this kind of stuff because cancer research doesn't say that it should be the dominating social concern of the entire world. ---- Bostrom also writes: > The king and his people will face some major challenges when they recover from their celebration. Their society has been so conditioned and deformed by the presence of the dragon that a frightening void now exists. They will have to work creatively, on both an individual and a societal level, to develop conditions that will keep lives flourishingly dynamic and meaningful beyond the accustomed three-score-years-and-ten. [...] We can leave, for now, the long-lived fable people to grapple with these new challenges, while we try to make some progress in our own adventure Another criticism of the anti-aging movement is that they tend to hand-wave the significance of social change as a precondition to removing death, not something that can happen after the fact. I mentioned healthcare above; Bostrom is very cognizant of the lives that will be lost if aging is solved 5 years later than it could have been. He does not seem to be cognizant of the lives that would be lost if anti-aging technology is inaccessible for 5 additional years. His moral treats this like you flip a switch and suddenly millions of lives are saved as soon as the technology is invented. And that's just a really simplistic way to look at the world; if you're trying to cure aging, it doesn't make sense to think of radical social change as a future problem. Overpopulation is not the biggest problem we face after curing aging, and I think it's a fair criticism that anti-aging advocates are sometimes dismissive of extremely relevant, current problems that are not only worth solving for their own sake but are worth solving because you can't kill the dragon until after you solve problems like health care, resource scarcity, and entrenched wealth/resource hording. Again, not everyone needs to work on every problem. It's fine for Bostrom to go out and evangelize anti-aging research, and to advocate for more funding, and it's fine for scientists to work on it. These are generally less controversial ideas on average than people think. But the critique becomes different when Bostrom is arguing that this needs to be everyone's priority. At that point I do start questioning some of the motives, or at least I start questioning his perspective. It is impossible for me to imagine a world with universal immortality that looks anything like the world we have today. And if all anyone does is advocate for universal immortality, without first advocating for universal rights, universal access to care/resources/housing, universal human dignity, political changes, market changes, changes to how we think about how finite resources like property are distributed to an immortal population... those are not afterthoughts, if you wait until after you solve aging to tackle those problems, then you will create a horrifying dystopia for the majority of the population. ---- TLDR, Bostrom argues in the story for a complete redistribution of effort entirely towards anti-aging, which is worth criticizing on its own as out of touch with the reality of how society functions and how we make progress towards goals, and out of touch with the social/political problems that are going to get in the way of actually curing death, and also is advocating that we should accept higher current casualties/suffering and is advocating that we should ignore other problems (and even potentially introduce more of them) until after death is solved. There are dangers of falling into ad-hominems and fallacies about that argument, but it is still worth criticizing.
sockaddr 5y ago
This is a particularly silly argument. You could apply this same faulty logic to any hard problem anyone is working on.
pkdpic 5y ago
I'll just play devils advocate a little bit here and say that I totally agree with both sides of this budding argument. As someone born and raised in San Francisco / Marin I can confirm first hand how infuriating it is to hear and see millionaires indulging fantasy narratives about eternal youth, enlightenment, colonizing mars etc while the world around them that their children are going to inherit is falling apart. For people my age at the time (early 2000s) it was especially hard to be in cities where the roads were all falling apart, public transit was even less functional than other broken american cities, you would have to sit in traffic for 30-90 minutes just to get groceries or a sandwich and there were literally no job / career prospects for young people (still very true for my friends living in Marin). With that said now that Im in an infinitely more livable / walkable / functional feeling urban space (Sacramento) and can see the Bay Area from a distance, I can appreciate that there is an importance in a certain percentage of the population focusing on the problems of tomorrow. There are kind, sincere and intelligent people involved in those communities. At least in my first hand experience / memory.
wonderwonder 5y ago
That same argument can be made about anyone that supports anything. There is always going to be something that others deem more important that they feel resources should be devoted too. Just look at the current argument stating space exploration is wasting money that should be spent on earth. Different people can focus on different problems.
kragen 5y ago
I am very skeptical that you have seen Nick Bostrom do this. Certainly you have never seen me do this. So I think your argument rests purely on bigotry against a stereotype you are projecting onto people whose beliefs differ from your own. Even if you were right about Nick's personal vices, it would be irrelevant to his reasoning. The vilest grifter can tell you the Sun is a ball of plasma rather than truly the chariot of Apollo, and the Sun will not transmute; truth does not become falsehood merely because it is spoken by the unvirtuous. Such arguments are deplorable and have no place in decent society, or even on HN.

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.
- kiba 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? Once you have the effective cure, it will likely be economically a no-brainer to implement, because a whole lot of illness of old age will just go away. It's essentially a self-funding cure that drastically reduce the cost of healthcare. However, a cure for aging will not be solved tomorrow, maybe not even a decade. It is a long term investment. The solution to the homeless isn't economically complicated. It doesn't require us to keep at a problem for ten years. It is strictly a matter of political will. It isn't even a matter of practical concerns, because we live right now is unsustainable economically and financially.
  - dorchadas 5y ago
    > Once you have the effective cure, it will likely be economically a no-brainer to implement, because a whole lot of illness of old age will just go away. It's essentially a self-funding cure that drastically reduce the cost of healthcare. Sure, it might be economically a no-brainer, but I don't see this happening. Why would the people in positions of power to implement this give it to the masses when they can have it and keep their power forever while the plebs have to continue to age and die?
  - danShumway 5y ago
    > Once you have the effective cure, it will likely be economically a no-brainer to implement, because a whole lot of illness of old age will just go away. It's essentially a self-funding cure that drastically reduce the cost of healthcare. Okay, but don't you see the disconnect here? Because we don't even have good preventative care right now in the US, and that is also economically a no-brainer. Being economically advantageous overall turns out to be not enough of an incentive to introduce political change. So you have this theory that once death is solved, naturally it will be in everyone's best interest to distribute the cure, but that doesn't match up with what we see in the world today. Again, going back to homelessness, if this isn't economically complicated, and we still haven't solved it, that to me suggests that it's not going to be simple in the future to distribute a cure for aging, even if you're right about the incentives. Figuring out how to bridge that gap between economic incentive and political will might be a giant, equally difficult problem to solve. Doesn't it worry you that fixing these kinds of problems today would clearly reduce overall health care costs on the system and yet the problems still exist? How are you so confident that aging will be different?

beebmam 5y ago

If you're frustrated by homelessness and you hold scientists who are working on a totally unrelated problem accountable for that homelessness, you're either participating in an absurd amount of Whataboutism, or you're not actually serious about what it takes to solve homelessness. Plenty of countries have solved homelessness, and it requires a very well funded social and economic safety net, fueled by high taxation. Be angry with people who oppose those safety nets, not some random scientists who have nothing to do with this problem.

ckemere 5y ago
I should clarify that I have no problem with research on aging. I do research on brain machine interfaces which is equally pie in the sky. I am frustrated by the interest/funding shown in this research. Also, I think that it's irresponsible to say that homelessness is a public policy problem and aging isn't. [Edit-more clarification]: My frustration is people who consider the problem of giving the median individual 10 more healthy-years of life unworthy of their attention/resources (attention is really the most valuable resource at some level) but are quite happy to get excited by those who promise infinite life. What if rather than a silver bullet, life extension requires society-level changes a small step at a time??
- beebmam 5y ago
  I didn't say aging isn't a public policy problem. I said homelessness is. Plenty of governments have solved it, but it takes safety nets and taxation and funding. It's really not hard to understand.

radu_floricica 5y ago

That's a pretty transparent fallacy, slander and ad hominem. Fallacy: "but there are starving kids in Africa" is a Generic Counterargument that can be applied to anything. It says nothing useful. Slander: how do you know people who care about aging don't care _more_ about the homeless? Ad hominem: you take an idea (death is bad) and make it about the character of the people supporting it. Bad ckemere. Bad.

danShumway 5y ago
> you take an idea (death is bad) and make it about the character of the people supporting it Well... the Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant is not actually just about the idea that death is bad. It's both about the idea that death is bad, and it presents a specific set of ideas about how we should respond to death being bad. There is an element of fallacy here, and I think people should be careful about how they critique this, but there is also an element of real substantive criticism. Some passages from The Dragon-Tyrant: ---- > The next morning, a billion people woke up and realized that their turn to be sent to the dragon would come before the projectile would be completed. A tipping point was reached. Whereas before, active support for the anti-dragonist cause had been limited to a small group of visionaries, it now became the number one priority and concern on everybody’s mind. It's important to start with the fact that many of the critiques against the anti-aging movement are not actually critiques against the concept of anti-aging, they are critiques of a very real argument that the anti-aging crowd makes that researching and pouring public resources into this project should be the number one greatest priority that we have right now. Given that context, given that Bostrom is arguing that we should be focusing on aging first and foremost above everything else, it is reasonable to ask questions about whether or not anti-aging research is something that is likely to matter before the very-long-term for anyone other than a select few rich people (we don't have functioning health care right now, most people are not going to have access to anti-aging technology), and it is reasonable to ask whether it is ethical to abandon solvable problems today (and the people affected by them) in favor of problems that may take at best a huge amount of time to solve. Nobody criticizes cancer research over this kind of stuff because cancer research doesn't say that it should be the dominating social concern of the entire world. ---- Bostrom also writes: > The king and his people will face some major challenges when they recover from their celebration. Their society has been so conditioned and deformed by the presence of the dragon that a frightening void now exists. They will have to work creatively, on both an individual and a societal level, to develop conditions that will keep lives flourishingly dynamic and meaningful beyond the accustomed three-score-years-and-ten. [...] We can leave, for now, the long-lived fable people to grapple with these new challenges, while we try to make some progress in our own adventure Another criticism of the anti-aging movement is that they tend to hand-wave the significance of social change as a precondition to removing death, not something that can happen after the fact. I mentioned healthcare above; Bostrom is very cognizant of the lives that will be lost if aging is solved 5 years later than it could have been. He does not seem to be cognizant of the lives that would be lost if anti-aging technology is inaccessible for 5 additional years. His moral treats this like you flip a switch and suddenly millions of lives are saved as soon as the technology is invented. And that's just a really simplistic way to look at the world; if you're trying to cure aging, it doesn't make sense to think of radical social change as a future problem. Overpopulation is not the biggest problem we face after curing aging, and I think it's a fair criticism that anti-aging advocates are sometimes dismissive of extremely relevant, current problems that are not only worth solving for their own sake but are worth solving because you can't kill the dragon until after you solve problems like health care, resource scarcity, and entrenched wealth/resource hording. Again, not everyone needs to work on every problem. It's fine for Bostrom to go out and evangelize anti-aging research, and to advocate for more funding, and it's fine for scientists to work on it. These are generally less controversial ideas on average than people think. But the critique becomes different when Bostrom is arguing that this needs to be everyone's priority. At that point I do start questioning some of the motives, or at least I start questioning his perspective. It is impossible for me to imagine a world with universal immortality that looks anything like the world we have today. And if all anyone does is advocate for universal immortality, without first advocating for universal rights, universal access to care/resources/housing, universal human dignity, political changes, market changes, changes to how we think about how finite resources like property are distributed to an immortal population... those are not afterthoughts, if you wait until after you solve aging to tackle those problems, then you will create a horrifying dystopia for the majority of the population. ---- TLDR, Bostrom argues in the story for a complete redistribution of effort entirely towards anti-aging, which is worth criticizing on its own as out of touch with the reality of how society functions and how we make progress towards goals, and out of touch with the social/political problems that are going to get in the way of actually curing death, and also is advocating that we should accept higher current casualties/suffering and is advocating that we should ignore other problems (and even potentially introduce more of them) until after death is solved. There are dangers of falling into ad-hominems and fallacies about that argument, but it is still worth criticizing.

sockaddr 5y ago

This is a particularly silly argument. You could apply this same faulty logic to any hard problem anyone is working on.

pkdpic 5y ago

I'll just play devils advocate a little bit here and say that I totally agree with both sides of this budding argument. As someone born and raised in San Francisco / Marin I can confirm first hand how infuriating it is to hear and see millionaires indulging fantasy narratives about eternal youth, enlightenment, colonizing mars etc while the world around them that their children are going to inherit is falling apart. For people my age at the time (early 2000s) it was especially hard to be in cities where the roads were all falling apart, public transit was even less functional than other broken american cities, you would have to sit in traffic for 30-90 minutes just to get groceries or a sandwich and there were literally no job / career prospects for young people (still very true for my friends living in Marin). With that said now that Im in an infinitely more livable / walkable / functional feeling urban space (Sacramento) and can see the Bay Area from a distance, I can appreciate that there is an importance in a certain percentage of the population focusing on the problems of tomorrow. There are kind, sincere and intelligent people involved in those communities. At least in my first hand experience / memory.

wonderwonder 5y ago

That same argument can be made about anyone that supports anything. There is always going to be something that others deem more important that they feel resources should be devoted too. Just look at the current argument stating space exploration is wasting money that should be spent on earth. Different people can focus on different problems.

kragen 5y ago

I am very skeptical that you have seen Nick Bostrom do this. Certainly you have never seen me do this. So I think your argument rests purely on bigotry against a stereotype you are projecting onto people whose beliefs differ from your own. Even if you were right about Nick's personal vices, it would be irrelevant to his reasoning. The vilest grifter can tell you the Sun is a ball of plasma rather than truly the chariot of Apollo, and the Sun will not transmute; truth does not become falsehood merely because it is spoken by the unvirtuous. Such arguments are deplorable and have no place in decent society, or even on HN.