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I think there's a much more firm reason you're right - life expectancy isn't increasing how most think it is. There was an interesting study [1] that examined t

I think there's a much more firm reason you're right - life expectancy isn't increasing how most think it is. There was an interesting study [1] that examined the life expectancy of all known individuals from Ancient Greece, excluding those with violent deaths (assassination, forced suicide, etc) and found the average male born before 100BC lived to 72 years old on average. In America in 2019 (to avoid COVID biases), the life expectancy for a male was 76.3 years. The knee-jerk response is to imagine there was a literal survivorship bias. Yet these individuals all made their names long before their deaths. Had Hippocrates, Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, or whomever else (in general) died at 50 - their names would still have gone down in the annals of history. However, you certainly wouldn't have heard of them had they died at 10. And that's what's really changed. We're now able to keep infants, even those who are unhealthy, alive at a much higher rate. Something like 40% of children in Ancient Greece did not make it to their 10th birthday. But for those that did, there was a chance pretty comparable to modern times that they'd see many more decades yet. By contrast today, even for unhealthy children, mortality before age 10 is approaching 0. Life expectancy is increasing, but longevity isn't really changing much at all. Even in a world of mortality obsessed billionaires using every technological method known to try to increase their life expectancy, they're not really getting much further than the average man. What little longevity they do gain can probably be more accurately explained from simple things like better exercise habits and lower levels of obesity, than esoteric young blood plasma treatments and the like. [1] - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1294277/pdf/jrsocmed00089-0029.pdf https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1294277/pdf/jrs...

gizajob 3y ago
Well we’ve made heaps more people live that long, and live their potential. For me, Bostrom is an egotist of the type that wishes to escape his thanatotic drive and acceptance that life just ends. It’s unfortunate, terrible even, but it seems as natural as birth. Proposing solutions such as “mind uploading” are not only ridiculous but the reality of the idea would be hellish. What’s worse is that he’s a philosopher so actually creating the technology to do it simply is not his problem – someone else will have to do the implementation, regardless of how nightmarishly difficult it could be. He could just as easily be inventing hoverboards or time machines. It’s not his problem to stay within the bounds of possibility, even the accepted bounds of what can realistically be designed and coded and implemented – he just has his graphs and statistics of work that other people have done in the past, and can now order them to fulfil his desires in future, one of the main ones being his egotistic desire for his ego to never die.
mkl 3y ago
That study is based on a very biased sample, and is very much not about life expectancy at birth. It is based on records of noteworthy people: "both ancient and modern samples were comparable with respect to males who survived into adulthood and who achieved notability (or notoriety)."
- somenameforme 3y ago
  This was all covered in the post you are responding to.

gizajob 3y ago

Well we’ve made heaps more people live that long, and live their potential. For me, Bostrom is an egotist of the type that wishes to escape his thanatotic drive and acceptance that life just ends. It’s unfortunate, terrible even, but it seems as natural as birth. Proposing solutions such as “mind uploading” are not only ridiculous but the reality of the idea would be hellish. What’s worse is that he’s a philosopher so actually creating the technology to do it simply is not his problem – someone else will have to do the implementation, regardless of how nightmarishly difficult it could be. He could just as easily be inventing hoverboards or time machines. It’s not his problem to stay within the bounds of possibility, even the accepted bounds of what can realistically be designed and coded and implemented – he just has his graphs and statistics of work that other people have done in the past, and can now order them to fulfil his desires in future, one of the main ones being his egotistic desire for his ego to never die.

mkl 3y ago

That study is based on a very biased sample, and is very much not about life expectancy at birth. It is based on records of noteworthy people: "both ancient and modern samples were comparable with respect to males who survived into adulthood and who achieved notability (or notoriety)."

somenameforme 3y ago
This was all covered in the post you are responding to.