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I raised $27M for longevity research (SENS.org). Summary of pro death arguments: Fairness Only rich people will get it. (No tech has ever done this.)

I raised $27M for longevity research (SENS.org). Summary of pro death arguments: Fairness Only rich people will get it. (No tech has ever done this.) Better to give money to the poor than science. (family, city, state, nation, has proven local investment beats foreign.) Bad for society Dead people make more room for new, other people. (consider going first.) Run out of resources (live people discover/extract/renew better than dead or nonexistent) Overpopulation (colonize the seas, solar system, or have a war.) Stop having kids Worse wars (nukes are more dangerous than having your first 220 year old person in 2136) Dictators never die (they die all the time and rarely of age) Old people are expensive (50% of your lifetime medical cost occur in your final year. Delay is profitable.) Old people suck. (death is an inferior cure to robustness.) Bad for individual You'll get bored. (your memory isn't that good, or your boredom isn't age related) You'll have to watch your loved ones die. (so you prefer they watch you?) You'll live forever in a terrible state. (longevity requires robustness.) Against gods will (not if he disallows suicide, then it is required.) People will force you to live forever (they aren't able to do this now, why would they begin to be?) Do you think less people make progress faster? What's your target level of depriving life of existence? How do you plan to keep mankind robust from extinction events on a single planet? You might just need more people. What do you think our technology would look like if we had 10x less people for the last 100 years? More people make more progress faster. Aren’t you glad your parents didn't decide the world would be prettier or work better without you in it? If great minds like Einstein, Bell, Tesla, Da Vinci etc., were still alive and productive today, the world would be a better place. You're literally asking for others to die out of your fear. The burden should be higher. Have courage. If living longer comes with too many disadvantages, we'll know 100 years from now and decide then. Man up, save your family, save yourself. P.S. Curing aging isn't immortality. You die at 600 on average by accident, and if the parade of imaginary horrible things comes true, even earlier.

bachback 5y ago
richard, do you think a DAO would be better for this than traditional non-for profit organisation? notably newlimit is a for-profit. given the aubrey de grey was ousted from sens in suspicious way after the capital injection, its time to rethink traditional legal entities for this kind of work?
- RichardHeart 5y ago
  Registered charities get special tax treatment. Tangentially, profit is sustainability.
  - bachback 5y ago
    makes sense. would you consider supporting a longevity DAO effort? mechanisms like onchain treasury to fund projects and voting on those. who knows what the barriers for newlimit will be, but surely one challenge is the traditional legal process.
cblconfederate 5y ago
To me, longevity is just a bridge to get us to live long enough to transfer our consciousness to small robots. I'd rather live 1000 years as an solar-powered ion rocket roaming around the nearby stars than as a fragile protein meatpack
- dharmaturtle 5y ago
  I personally think it would just be fun to re-program myself. What would life be like if I could make myself less argumentative? If I could turn myself Christian? If I could make myself enjoy OOP? Also, imagine all the various hardware updates I could get - how cool would it be to see UV/IR?
  - datameta 5y ago
    "I don’t want to be human! I want to see gamma rays, I want to hear X-rays, and I want to smell dark matter. Do you see the absurdity of what I am? I can’t even express these things properly, because I have to—I have to conceptualize complex ideas in this stupid, limiting spoken language, but I know I want to reach out with something other than these prehensile paws, and feel the solar wind of a supernova flowing over me. I’m a machine, and I can know much more." https://youtu.be/mPnx3zO3SDc https://youtu.be/mPnx3zO3SDc Context at 1:14, quote at 2:08
i000 5y ago
I find the way you summarized the discussion unhelpful, because your goal is to present very reasonable critiques to living forever in the most absurd way, and insult those who have those opinions "Man up, save your family, save yourself"? Was it really necessary to insult, among many, the curage of people who may have no fear of dying? I do not even where one would start to debate this. > More people make more progress faster. Really? Have you ever seen an urban slum, or an overpopulated rural area? > Stop having kids Even if this were a viable solution (history teaches us it is not) dont you think that this wouldnot deprive many from most of the meaningful aspects of their lives? > If living longer comes with too many disadvantages, we'll know 100 years from now and decide then. What if longevity causes social changes which are difficult or impossible to reverse? What about those who will suffer the many disadvantages? > Old people suck. No, they don't. Whoever makes this argument does not deserver a response. What is true however is that most old people seem to have less flexibility to adapting to change, and with accelerating progress the chasm between the generation widens. The generational conflicts may be very high in the ageless society you envision.
- xvector 5y ago
  > insult, among many, the curage of people who may have no fear of dying? There is no courage in choosing death. If people could live forever, and some people suddenly started choosing death at 80, that wouldn't be seen as "courageous" but just plain weird. > Have you ever seen an urban slum, or an overpopulated rural area? Historically, higher populations do result in faster progress. This is pretty much fact. > dont you think that this wouldnot deprive many from most of the meaningful aspects of their lives? It would be a choice - live forever or have kids. Many people would find life much more meaningful choosing the former. > What if longevity causes social changes which are difficult or impossible to reverse? The slow deaths of billions of people, entire generations, is not an acceptable cost for faster progress. It is absurd to justify the cost of progress with death. If people lived for 10k+ years in a static society, you would be called a monster if you implied that they should be dying slowly and painfully at 80 so some aspects of their society evolve faster. > The generational conflicts may be very high in the ageless society you envision. Again, this is not worth the deaths of literally BILLIONS of people! It is mad scientist talk to say that death on such a massive scale is acceptable for any cost.
tomp 5y ago
> Dead people make more room for new, other people. (consider going first.) Thank you for this snarky remark. Every time I hear people arguing against having kids for reasons (overpopulation, bad for environment, pessimism about the future), I cannot help but think: "why doesn't that argument extend to the present generation - i.e. suicide?" So far, the best answer I've gotten is equivalent to "suicide is bad" (a.k.a. "I have no good rational arguments but it makes me feel bad")
xvector 5y ago
Richard, besides donating, how can those of us with technical skills help the effort?

bachback 5y ago

richard, do you think a DAO would be better for this than traditional non-for profit organisation? notably newlimit is a for-profit. given the aubrey de grey was ousted from sens in suspicious way after the capital injection, its time to rethink traditional legal entities for this kind of work?

RichardHeart 5y ago
Registered charities get special tax treatment. Tangentially, profit is sustainability.
- bachback 5y ago
  makes sense. would you consider supporting a longevity DAO effort? mechanisms like onchain treasury to fund projects and voting on those. who knows what the barriers for newlimit will be, but surely one challenge is the traditional legal process.

cblconfederate 5y ago

To me, longevity is just a bridge to get us to live long enough to transfer our consciousness to small robots. I'd rather live 1000 years as an solar-powered ion rocket roaming around the nearby stars than as a fragile protein meatpack

dharmaturtle 5y ago
I personally think it would just be fun to re-program myself. What would life be like if I could make myself less argumentative? If I could turn myself Christian? If I could make myself enjoy OOP? Also, imagine all the various hardware updates I could get - how cool would it be to see UV/IR?
- datameta 5y ago
  "I don’t want to be human! I want to see gamma rays, I want to hear X-rays, and I want to smell dark matter. Do you see the absurdity of what I am? I can’t even express these things properly, because I have to—I have to conceptualize complex ideas in this stupid, limiting spoken language, but I know I want to reach out with something other than these prehensile paws, and feel the solar wind of a supernova flowing over me. I’m a machine, and I can know much more." https://youtu.be/mPnx3zO3SDc https://youtu.be/mPnx3zO3SDc Context at 1:14, quote at 2:08

i000 5y ago

I find the way you summarized the discussion unhelpful, because your goal is to present very reasonable critiques to living forever in the most absurd way, and insult those who have those opinions "Man up, save your family, save yourself"? Was it really necessary to insult, among many, the curage of people who may have no fear of dying? I do not even where one would start to debate this. > More people make more progress faster. Really? Have you ever seen an urban slum, or an overpopulated rural area? > Stop having kids Even if this were a viable solution (history teaches us it is not) dont you think that this wouldnot deprive many from most of the meaningful aspects of their lives? > If living longer comes with too many disadvantages, we'll know 100 years from now and decide then. What if longevity causes social changes which are difficult or impossible to reverse? What about those who will suffer the many disadvantages? > Old people suck. No, they don't. Whoever makes this argument does not deserver a response. What is true however is that most old people seem to have less flexibility to adapting to change, and with accelerating progress the chasm between the generation widens. The generational conflicts may be very high in the ageless society you envision.

xvector 5y ago
> insult, among many, the curage of people who may have no fear of dying? There is no courage in choosing death. If people could live forever, and some people suddenly started choosing death at 80, that wouldn't be seen as "courageous" but just plain weird. > Have you ever seen an urban slum, or an overpopulated rural area? Historically, higher populations do result in faster progress. This is pretty much fact. > dont you think that this wouldnot deprive many from most of the meaningful aspects of their lives? It would be a choice - live forever or have kids. Many people would find life much more meaningful choosing the former. > What if longevity causes social changes which are difficult or impossible to reverse? The slow deaths of billions of people, entire generations, is not an acceptable cost for faster progress. It is absurd to justify the cost of progress with death. If people lived for 10k+ years in a static society, you would be called a monster if you implied that they should be dying slowly and painfully at 80 so some aspects of their society evolve faster. > The generational conflicts may be very high in the ageless society you envision. Again, this is not worth the deaths of literally BILLIONS of people! It is mad scientist talk to say that death on such a massive scale is acceptable for any cost.

tomp 5y ago

> Dead people make more room for new, other people. (consider going first.) Thank you for this snarky remark. Every time I hear people arguing against having kids for reasons (overpopulation, bad for environment, pessimism about the future), I cannot help but think: "why doesn't that argument extend to the present generation - i.e. suicide?" So far, the best answer I've gotten is equivalent to "suicide is bad" (a.k.a. "I have no good rational arguments but it makes me feel bad")

xvector 5y ago

Richard, besides donating, how can those of us with technical skills help the effort?