10 ms·

The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant (2005)

72 points by spacebuffer 4y ago

Khelavaster 4y ago
A real classic!
felipemesquita 4y ago
Nicely done animated version by CGP Grey: https://youtu.be/cZYNADOHhVY https://youtu.be/cZYNADOHhVY
publius_ 4y ago
I love this one. I can also recommend Letter from Utopia.
jabthedang 4y ago
[dead]
hirundo 4y ago
Without death and scarcity we could never have evolved. That fierce and terrible dragon is mother to us all. Before killing mom we should figure out what she's good for. Like hugely accelerating biological adaptation. Do you think that we're all grown up now and only require cultural adaptation going forward? As terrible as death is, as much as I too miss Grandma, it is an evil necessary to fend off the higher order of evil, the greater dragon, extinction.
- kiba 4y ago
  What a weird take. Evolution doesn't care about being a mother. It is just a process, indifferent to us humans. Likewise, 'accelerating' biological adaptation is neither good or bad, it just is. There is no moral character unless we give it human intention.
  - hirundo 4y ago
    The story anthropomorphizes death as a dragon (dracomorphizes?). I'm pointing out that it is doing so to an essential mechanism of biological evolution. That gives evolution a moral valence, per the story. In general, it should be clear that to cut a species off from a primary source of biological evolution would not usually be beneficial to that species' survival prospects. Maybe that is no longer true of Homo sapiens, but I doubt it.
    - blkhawk 4y ago
      We are already cut of from general evolution as long as we have a society that relies mostly on factors externally to genetics. Those factors are so much more rapid and impactful than the slow evolution by procreation and death statistical processes that it makes little sense to even consider them.
    - kiba 4y ago
      Destroying death doesn't cut off evolution, since humans are able to reproduce, which is our primary source of variation. Moreover, the story is about aging, not death. Although the ultimate outcome of aging is death.
    - ben_w 4y ago
      Genetic evolution is probably already no longer part of humanity's future, regardless of death. We have generic engineering, albeit limited. Direct genetic engineering will be driven by memetic evolution within a generation or two.
      - kiba 4y ago
        As long humanity continued to have children, there will be evolution.
        ben_w 4y ago
        Just not of the genetic variety, not when we can read and write DNA like a book (or even like decompiled assembly language).
- ben_w 4y ago
  Unlike the dead, death and scarcity can always be brought back. I'm optimistic that all the supposed benefits of death have other, better, alternatives.
- naasking 4y ago
  > Without death and scarcity we could never have evolved. Without disease, we would have never evolved an immune system. Therefore we shouldn't try to cure disease. I think the flaw is very clear in this analogy: human ingenuity and science is better than evolution by natural selection in pretty much every way. Now that we've evolved science, we no longer need evolution by natural selection.
tester457 4y ago
A life without death is dystopia.
- Mistletoe 4y ago
  We don’t really know that though, do we? Imagine how much more people would worry about climate change if they were going to be here to experience the wrath of it. The wrath of running out of oil, the wrath of the oceans and air polluted. Old people know it is real and coming for their descendants, they just don’t care because they won’t be here. Most humans care about things that will directly affect them only.
  - tester457 4y ago
    I worry it will end up that the older than old rich will trash this planet for resources and leave, like in "Don't Look Up" or "Elysium."
- ben_w 4y ago
  If it turns out to be more dystopian than the reality of watching our loved ones fade and disappear while we ourselves grow weak and fade, we can always bring death back. We can't bring the dead back, though.
  - zokier 4y ago
    > If it turns out to be more dystopian than the reality of watching our loved ones fade and disappear while we ourselves grow weak and fade, we can always bring death back. Usually the dystopian aspects of immortality revolve around power imbalance/inequality; in such scenarios its not obvious that death can be brought back
    - ben_w 4y ago
      In fiction, perhaps. In history, literal slaves have overthrown their captors, and the powerful often have cognitive blind spots.
dinamic 4y ago
> but, by constitutional law, nobody, not even the king himself, could put off their turn indefinitely. I'm not sure that any real-life moral imperatives could be based on made-up story about obviously utopian society. For me, immortality does not sound as a good idea even as a thought experiment. We already have problems with wealth and power imbalance. The invention of immortality would just deepen these problems exponentially.
- naasking 4y ago
  So solve the problems of wealth and inequality too. I fail to see why these must be intrinsically linked. If anything, the compounding effect of immortality on wealth inequality would almost certainly lead by itself lead to a structural revolution.
amadeuspagel 4y ago
People die for lots of reasons. Comparing death to one dragon that one could just kill is absurd.
- mLuby 4y ago
  Don't get lost in the metaphor.
- Smaug123 4y ago
  There may be ten thousand dragons; that's not an argument against slaying them all!
Smaug123 4y ago
For those after more, https://blog.jaibot.com/500-million-but-not-a-single-one-more/ https://blog.jaibot.com/500-million-but-not-a-single-one-mor... is another piece I find deeply moving on the subject of dragon-slaying.
Gygash 4y ago
what is the deal with western cultures hating on dragons?
machina_ex_deus 4y ago
It's a bad analogy. Ironically, this story flips the assymetry of death on its head. It is always easier to destroy than to create something durable. It's not a coincidence that when the story flips the difficulty on its head such that the job was killing (bringing death) to a dragon, intuitions flipped too. Every programmer knows that getting his program to crash is always an easier job than to keep it running indefinitely. Every probablistic bug eventually will happen on long enough timescales, and defeating death isn't defeating a single bug, it's defeating all of them. It isn't a single dragon but infinite bugs. I preferred Blade runner take on it: when they tell the replicant that there was no built in destruction mechanism, they built him as best as they could, and that was simply it.
- idle_zealot 4y ago
  The story isn't about whether or not curing aging is difficult, it's about whether it's desirable. It turns the real-life scenario on its head to prompt reexamination of the desirability of the undertaking.
gallerdude 4y ago
I'm young, and most older people I know have peace with the idea of death, so I could be totally wrong. Yet, I never understand the idea that curing death would be a bad thing. There is so much in the world to experience - what does it feel like to: * master tennis? * hitchhike through snowy Hokkaido? * craft an oak desk with just your hands? * fall so deeply in love you feel whole? * direct a movie with just your dreams? * completely understand the ins and outs of a field of study? * make friends with someone you've read for decades? I would love to experience all of these things and more, but it would take huge amounts of dedication, risk, and luck to get close to a full list. By curing death, this gets way more achievable and accessible to everyone. One of my favorite book quotes: > “Science is not enough, religion is not enough, art is not enough, politics and economics is not enough, nor is love, nor is duty, nor is action however disinterested, nor, however sublime, is contemplation. Nothing short of everything will really do.” - Aldous Huxley
- evo_9 4y ago
  It’s not about a single person - aka mastering tennis. How are we as a species suppose to take to the stars if our lifespan is relatively short? I would wager that this is another step in becoming an interstellar race. Aka the challenge is not just about bending space-time. What if Einstein lived to 500 or was still alive? Anyway, I think people need to step way back on the true necessity of solving aging. At a minimum it’s about ensuring we have a high quality of life while living out our final days and long term it’s about the human species viability as an interstellar civilization.
  - Qem 4y ago
    > What if Einstein lived to 500 or was still alive? The flipside would be, what if Aristotle or Ptolemy lived to 2500 and were still alive? Would we still be arguing if everything revolves around Earth, or if fire, earth, water and air constitute everything?
  - zem 4y ago
    8<---------------- "I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops." Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History 8<---------------- if you want to improve the net intellectual progress of humanity solving inequality will do a lot more than solving aging.
yyyk 4y ago
I'm not very impressed by the article. I'm sympathetic to the idea behind it, but the analogy is misleading and intended to make an emotional appeal. The Dragon is an external malevolent force. The Dragon wants to eat more just because. People often die due to the natural evolution of their own bodies or choices other people make, and death is impersonal (Prachett books aside). Replacing Death with Dragon is a rhetorical device to allow hate to colour our judgement, and make the issue simpler than it is (you can't 'kill' death. Even a perfect medical science will still have the problem that some people may want to kill other people). The effects and choices here are also a tiny bit more complicated. We could spend a lot more on health after all. Presumably the author isn't fine with redirecting 100% of the budget to the health sector, and I don't think he judges each allocation decision by 'this could have gone to health!'. How about merely winding down all AI research and redirecting the funds to hospitals? So there must be some limiting principles. By the same token, I doubt anyone (even a 'deathist') thinks 'We should have a lower average lifespan'. So it's just an allocation decision, and the criteria are probably boring and political. --- This does leaves us with the 'sexy' issue, that of mortality itself. It's actually not much of an issue in practice? Barring absurdly extreme scenarios*, even people who favour mortality won't kill anyone who refuses to die, or prevent Bostrom et. all from trying. Given the wealthy are just as subject to the 'Dragon' as the rest of us, I'm sure they'll have no shortage of funds. If they succeed, society will 'suffer' the consequences, no matter what theoretical discussion may think. * e.g. a life extension tech based on parasitism. Or an uploading tech that warps the subject to the point we can't say they have anything nearing a morality allowing them to participate in society.
- whythre 4y ago
  I think it is a mercy that corrupt despots die of old age. Every tyrant with an iron grip on their society eventually succumbs to the ‘dragon,’ offering a chance for reform and renewal.
  - yyyk 4y ago
    I thought about pointing out that Bostrom doesn't actually consider the strongest arguments of the other side. But I decided it doesn't matter practically. For example, we can't stop despots from investing in longevity research. This is probably better then them investing in more repression or a bigger army, so we won't stop it even if we could.
evo_9 4y ago
Funny I thought I was the first person to post this to HN like 9 years or so ago… searching I find the oldest post for this is 14 years ago.
mihaic 4y ago
How is death by dragon an analogy to death in general? While I understand the general concept, the metaphor is way too forced -- you can't just toggle something in your universe and keep everything the same. Exhalation by Ted Chiang for instance is a great short story that deals with mortality more effectively, since the characters are not exactly human and the concept can be explored better.
dang 4y ago
Related: The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant (2005) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29445605 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29445605 - Dec 2021 (63 comments) 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)
mannykannot 4y ago
Making this pivot is not so easy as Bostrom's fable tacitly suggests. From his publishing history, over the 17 years since its publication, it does not seem he has personally prioritized this goal to the extent that he chides the population of his story for not so doing.

72 points by spacebuffer 4y ago

Khelavaster 4y ago

A real classic!

felipemesquita 4y ago

Nicely done animated version by CGP Grey: https://youtu.be/cZYNADOHhVY https://youtu.be/cZYNADOHhVY

publius_ 4y ago

I love this one. I can also recommend Letter from Utopia.

jabthedang 4y ago

[dead]

hirundo 4y ago

Without death and scarcity we could never have evolved. That fierce and terrible dragon is mother to us all. Before killing mom we should figure out what she's good for. Like hugely accelerating biological adaptation. Do you think that we're all grown up now and only require cultural adaptation going forward? As terrible as death is, as much as I too miss Grandma, it is an evil necessary to fend off the higher order of evil, the greater dragon, extinction.

kiba 4y ago
What a weird take. Evolution doesn't care about being a mother. It is just a process, indifferent to us humans. Likewise, 'accelerating' biological adaptation is neither good or bad, it just is. There is no moral character unless we give it human intention.
- hirundo 4y ago
  The story anthropomorphizes death as a dragon (dracomorphizes?). I'm pointing out that it is doing so to an essential mechanism of biological evolution. That gives evolution a moral valence, per the story. In general, it should be clear that to cut a species off from a primary source of biological evolution would not usually be beneficial to that species' survival prospects. Maybe that is no longer true of Homo sapiens, but I doubt it.
  - blkhawk 4y ago
    We are already cut of from general evolution as long as we have a society that relies mostly on factors externally to genetics. Those factors are so much more rapid and impactful than the slow evolution by procreation and death statistical processes that it makes little sense to even consider them.
  - kiba 4y ago
    Destroying death doesn't cut off evolution, since humans are able to reproduce, which is our primary source of variation. Moreover, the story is about aging, not death. Although the ultimate outcome of aging is death.
  - ben_w 4y ago
    Genetic evolution is probably already no longer part of humanity's future, regardless of death. We have generic engineering, albeit limited. Direct genetic engineering will be driven by memetic evolution within a generation or two.
    - kiba 4y ago
      As long humanity continued to have children, there will be evolution.
      - ben_w 4y ago
        Just not of the genetic variety, not when we can read and write DNA like a book (or even like decompiled assembly language).
ben_w 4y ago
Unlike the dead, death and scarcity can always be brought back. I'm optimistic that all the supposed benefits of death have other, better, alternatives.
naasking 4y ago
> Without death and scarcity we could never have evolved. Without disease, we would have never evolved an immune system. Therefore we shouldn't try to cure disease. I think the flaw is very clear in this analogy: human ingenuity and science is better than evolution by natural selection in pretty much every way. Now that we've evolved science, we no longer need evolution by natural selection.

tester457 4y ago

A life without death is dystopia.

Mistletoe 4y ago
We don’t really know that though, do we? Imagine how much more people would worry about climate change if they were going to be here to experience the wrath of it. The wrath of running out of oil, the wrath of the oceans and air polluted. Old people know it is real and coming for their descendants, they just don’t care because they won’t be here. Most humans care about things that will directly affect them only.
- tester457 4y ago
  I worry it will end up that the older than old rich will trash this planet for resources and leave, like in "Don't Look Up" or "Elysium."
ben_w 4y ago
If it turns out to be more dystopian than the reality of watching our loved ones fade and disappear while we ourselves grow weak and fade, we can always bring death back. We can't bring the dead back, though.
- zokier 4y ago
  > If it turns out to be more dystopian than the reality of watching our loved ones fade and disappear while we ourselves grow weak and fade, we can always bring death back. Usually the dystopian aspects of immortality revolve around power imbalance/inequality; in such scenarios its not obvious that death can be brought back
  - ben_w 4y ago
    In fiction, perhaps. In history, literal slaves have overthrown their captors, and the powerful often have cognitive blind spots.

dinamic 4y ago

> but, by constitutional law, nobody, not even the king himself, could put off their turn indefinitely. I'm not sure that any real-life moral imperatives could be based on made-up story about obviously utopian society. For me, immortality does not sound as a good idea even as a thought experiment. We already have problems with wealth and power imbalance. The invention of immortality would just deepen these problems exponentially.

naasking 4y ago
So solve the problems of wealth and inequality too. I fail to see why these must be intrinsically linked. If anything, the compounding effect of immortality on wealth inequality would almost certainly lead by itself lead to a structural revolution.

amadeuspagel 4y ago

People die for lots of reasons. Comparing death to one dragon that one could just kill is absurd.

mLuby 4y ago
Don't get lost in the metaphor.
Smaug123 4y ago
There may be ten thousand dragons; that's not an argument against slaying them all!

Smaug123 4y ago

For those after more, https://blog.jaibot.com/500-million-but-not-a-single-one-more/ https://blog.jaibot.com/500-million-but-not-a-single-one-mor... is another piece I find deeply moving on the subject of dragon-slaying.

Gygash 4y ago

what is the deal with western cultures hating on dragons?

machina_ex_deus 4y ago

It's a bad analogy. Ironically, this story flips the assymetry of death on its head. It is always easier to destroy than to create something durable. It's not a coincidence that when the story flips the difficulty on its head such that the job was killing (bringing death) to a dragon, intuitions flipped too. Every programmer knows that getting his program to crash is always an easier job than to keep it running indefinitely. Every probablistic bug eventually will happen on long enough timescales, and defeating death isn't defeating a single bug, it's defeating all of them. It isn't a single dragon but infinite bugs. I preferred Blade runner take on it: when they tell the replicant that there was no built in destruction mechanism, they built him as best as they could, and that was simply it.

idle_zealot 4y ago
The story isn't about whether or not curing aging is difficult, it's about whether it's desirable. It turns the real-life scenario on its head to prompt reexamination of the desirability of the undertaking.

gallerdude 4y ago

I'm young, and most older people I know have peace with the idea of death, so I could be totally wrong. Yet, I never understand the idea that curing death would be a bad thing. There is so much in the world to experience - what does it feel like to: * master tennis? * hitchhike through snowy Hokkaido? * craft an oak desk with just your hands? * fall so deeply in love you feel whole? * direct a movie with just your dreams? * completely understand the ins and outs of a field of study? * make friends with someone you've read for decades? I would love to experience all of these things and more, but it would take huge amounts of dedication, risk, and luck to get close to a full list. By curing death, this gets way more achievable and accessible to everyone. One of my favorite book quotes: > “Science is not enough, religion is not enough, art is not enough, politics and economics is not enough, nor is love, nor is duty, nor is action however disinterested, nor, however sublime, is contemplation. Nothing short of everything will really do.” - Aldous Huxley

evo_9 4y ago
It’s not about a single person - aka mastering tennis. How are we as a species suppose to take to the stars if our lifespan is relatively short? I would wager that this is another step in becoming an interstellar race. Aka the challenge is not just about bending space-time. What if Einstein lived to 500 or was still alive? Anyway, I think people need to step way back on the true necessity of solving aging. At a minimum it’s about ensuring we have a high quality of life while living out our final days and long term it’s about the human species viability as an interstellar civilization.
- Qem 4y ago
  > What if Einstein lived to 500 or was still alive? The flipside would be, what if Aristotle or Ptolemy lived to 2500 and were still alive? Would we still be arguing if everything revolves around Earth, or if fire, earth, water and air constitute everything?
- zem 4y ago
  8<---------------- "I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops." Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History 8<---------------- if you want to improve the net intellectual progress of humanity solving inequality will do a lot more than solving aging.

yyyk 4y ago

I'm not very impressed by the article. I'm sympathetic to the idea behind it, but the analogy is misleading and intended to make an emotional appeal. The Dragon is an external malevolent force. The Dragon wants to eat more just because. People often die due to the natural evolution of their own bodies or choices other people make, and death is impersonal (Prachett books aside). Replacing Death with Dragon is a rhetorical device to allow hate to colour our judgement, and make the issue simpler than it is (you can't 'kill' death. Even a perfect medical science will still have the problem that some people may want to kill other people). The effects and choices here are also a tiny bit more complicated. We could spend a lot more on health after all. Presumably the author isn't fine with redirecting 100% of the budget to the health sector, and I don't think he judges each allocation decision by 'this could have gone to health!'. How about merely winding down all AI research and redirecting the funds to hospitals? So there must be some limiting principles. By the same token, I doubt anyone (even a 'deathist') thinks 'We should have a lower average lifespan'. So it's just an allocation decision, and the criteria are probably boring and political. --- This does leaves us with the 'sexy' issue, that of mortality itself. It's actually not much of an issue in practice? Barring absurdly extreme scenarios*, even people who favour mortality won't kill anyone who refuses to die, or prevent Bostrom et. all from trying. Given the wealthy are just as subject to the 'Dragon' as the rest of us, I'm sure they'll have no shortage of funds. If they succeed, society will 'suffer' the consequences, no matter what theoretical discussion may think. * e.g. a life extension tech based on parasitism. Or an uploading tech that warps the subject to the point we can't say they have anything nearing a morality allowing them to participate in society.

whythre 4y ago
I think it is a mercy that corrupt despots die of old age. Every tyrant with an iron grip on their society eventually succumbs to the ‘dragon,’ offering a chance for reform and renewal.
- yyyk 4y ago
  I thought about pointing out that Bostrom doesn't actually consider the strongest arguments of the other side. But I decided it doesn't matter practically. For example, we can't stop despots from investing in longevity research. This is probably better then them investing in more repression or a bigger army, so we won't stop it even if we could.

evo_9 4y ago

Funny I thought I was the first person to post this to HN like 9 years or so ago… searching I find the oldest post for this is 14 years ago.

mihaic 4y ago

How is death by dragon an analogy to death in general? While I understand the general concept, the metaphor is way too forced -- you can't just toggle something in your universe and keep everything the same. Exhalation by Ted Chiang for instance is a great short story that deals with mortality more effectively, since the characters are not exactly human and the concept can be explored better.

dang 4y ago

Related: The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant (2005) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29445605 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29445605 - Dec 2021 (63 comments) 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)

mannykannot 4y ago

Making this pivot is not so easy as Bostrom's fable tacitly suggests. From his publishing history, over the 17 years since its publication, it does not seem he has personally prioritized this goal to the extent that he chides the population of his story for not so doing.