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“Personally, I’ve been hearing all my life about the Serious Philosophical Issues posed by life extension, and my attitude has always been that I’m willing to g

“Personally, I’ve been hearing all my life about the Serious Philosophical Issues posed by life extension, and my attitude has always been that I’m willing to grapple with those issues for as many centuries as it takes.” -Patrick Hayden

gaius 13y ago
It's funny, I have a friend who is a full-time professional philosopher (teaches at a university) and you would not believe the amount of earnest essay writing there was in the philosophy community about Miley Cyrus's performance at the VMAs (something I've not actually seen myself). All sorts of theories about Freud and Hegel and this and that. Look Philos, I said to him, she got up on stage and did a little dance and that's really all there was to it. The moral of this story is, serious philosophical issues have absolutely no bearing on real life. So full steam ahead says I! The longer we can prolong life, the greater leverage we can extract from experience, imagine being immersed in a subject for hundreds of years, what could you not do in a minute what would take someone with even decades of experience, years?
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- baudehlo 13y ago
  The flip side to that argument is that right now life is short, and so I try and fit as many wonderful experiences into it as I can. If life were long I could put everything off until tomorrow. And that doesn't sound good to me.
  - jamesaguilar 13y ago
    Are you really saying that you'd prefer to DIE in order to incent yourself to do exciting things sooner? Erm. Well, I guess that's one set of preferences.
    - tesseractive 13y ago
      There's a classic A Softer World comic that's been turned into a t-shirt that says "I would rather die screaming than live forever." There are downsides to the kind of extreme prudence that planning to be around for centuries would imply. Also, there's a fantastic novel from Bruce Sterling called Holy Fire that is devoted to exploring the tension between living to continue living and living in the moment.
      - delinquentme 13y ago
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fox_and_the_Grapes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fox_and_the_Grapes
      - krisgee 13y ago
        >I would rather die screaming than live forever I'll take the time to work through my problems thanks.
        tesseractive 13y ago
        Among other things, a commitment to "live forever" is a statement about acceptable risk tolerance. Ever wanted to climb mountains? Take up skydiving? Drink too much sometimes? Eat foods that are bad for you? If your goal really is to live forever, the risk profile of doing anything that doesn't minimize the expected value of the long-term risk to your person is probably unacceptable. You personally might rather live a vastly extended span than spend the time you do have skydiving, parasailing, climbing mountains, and doing whatever it is that allows you to enjoy your life to its fullest for however long you have. But that's a real, legitimate choice, and choosing to take risks and experience everything you can is a perfectly valid choice -- even if there's a very real risk that something will go wrong at some point and you will indeed "die screaming."
        krisgee 13y ago
        I never said a thing about not taking risks or having fun but those are my choices. I'd rather not be forced to die from some sort of disease, or just old age completely outside of my control.
  - neilk 13y ago
    Well, there are obvious limits to that argument. Even a hundred years ago, it was common to die in your 60s. Taking on a new career or new relationship at the age of 60 would be ridiculous. Today, it's still a bit unusual but not unheard of. Given a longer life, I think we would come up with new ways to motivate ourselves, and new challenges. This isn't an insoluble problem, it's a business opportunity for Tony Robbins. That said I'm not sure a human being could ever fully escape ennui, so maybe there is some upper limit. I don't think 80 years is even close though.
  - User1398 13y ago
    I've thought about this once or twice before. I wonder how we would view life if we didn't die from aging or disease, but only accidents, like a fire, car crash, gun shot, etc. What would happen to religion? Do you choose to continue aging, die, and take your chances with the heaven you've been saying exists, or do you take the new pill, and live forever? If you take the pill, what does that say about your faith in the afterlife? Do we fear death even more? If I'm going to die in a few decades of old age as my health deteriorates, I might as well enjoy my prime, and take some risks now. If I die, well, no big deal, I was going to die soon enough anyway. If I'm married, 60 years old, and my wife dies, that would be a sad day, but let's not kid ourselves, we're getting old. If your grandma passes away, well, it was her time, she lived a long life. But, if we live forever, we fear those accidents. If your wife dies in a plane crash age 60, how does that affect you? You might have expected to spend the next ten thousand years together, and she's gone. Do we stop taking these risks? Do I step in a car, or on a plane? I'm willing to take that risk now, but if I knew I could potentially live forever, I wouldn't want to risk dying with so much time still remaining. Do we enter the world of virtual reality? Why leave my home, I could get hit by lightning, I could get shot walking down the street, hit by a car, or attacked by animals. Why don't I lock myself in an underground bunker facility, and connect to the world through virtual reality? I toss on the goggles, and I enter the VR world where I meet with friends and family, and go on wild adventures, because I can take these risks in the VR world. If I die, I respawn. My body is safe in the bunker, while I pretend to be outside.
    - melling 13y ago
      You can't live forever because the universe won't last forever. The earth will die out much sooner, of course.
    - kamaal 13y ago
      I am assuming in the very far future even if you die of an accident/gun shot etc they should be able to resurrect you as-is, like you are with all your memory. It will be like you fell asleep and just woke up! If anything, I vote for the simulated reality thing. Its like once you are dead, they should be able to take your brain out and connect it to a simulated paradise which would run forever.
- tesseractive 13y ago
  More accurately, professional philosophers don't have any particular standing to discuss "serious philosophical issues." At any point in the discussion on whether people have a right to die, or whether it was ok to use tissue from aborted fetuses for stem cell research or whether we need universal health care, has anyone ever asked, "Well, what do the philosophers think?" (I have nothing against philosophers, btw. I have a degree in philosophy.)
  - bsaul 13y ago
    You should live in france.
  - thenerdfiles 13y ago
    "Philosophers" haven't had "serious philosophical issues" with this topic since Spinoza. Heck, even the Stoics. It's theology that has a problem, not philosophy, where theology crafts its ideas, very often, from the architectures of philosophical thought. Outside of a theological context, there isn't much of a debate anyway. Again: the Stoics. We do ask philosophers about "right to die" and "permissibility of stem cell research from humans". Philosophers outline the conditions under which we rationally approach these things — they obviously do not license or themselves permit such behavior. No one asks a philosopher if that philosopher personally thinks some act is okay or not okay... I'm just not sure what to say here. That's not what philosophy is about, but I have a strange feeling that "it's all personal opinion anyway" really motivates this idea that philosophers do not contribute meaningfully to law and morality. They inform ultimately what becomes legislation. Bertrand Russell was all over popular science in the 20th century. So was Bernard Williams. Dworkin. HLA Hart. The countless articles on ethics on JSTOR. All the philosophical journals. Stacks and stacks on anthologies collecting debates on abortion. ExPhi puts current opinion in the context of great thinkers of the history of philosophy, and helps us understand why we have the opinions we do have. We don't ask them to describe the scientific innerworkings of these techniques. We do ask them to explain these things in broader cultural terms, and in that case the Scientist often times plays Philosopher, where that person so too must pick up a great work of Philosophy. Ethics Committees are real things. I'm not sure what you're talking about, but it's radically in error and shockingly misleading...
- morganherlocker 13y ago
  I would just point out that most of modern philosophy is not really like this. I think most people think philosophers spend there time arguing about ethics, when this is only one tiny part of philosophy. A good chunk of the current discussion in philosophy of science, for example, centers around epistemology to varying degrees as it relates to current discoveries in genetics and neuroscience. The top philosophers in these fields are far from armchair scientists. The overlap in philosophy of the mind and computer science is also particularly striking. I studied both in university and often found myself taking what amounted to the same class at the same time, but in two different departments. I work quite a bit with machine learning nowadays, and I learned 90% of the background I needed in my higher level philosophy courses, not my CS courses. I have often thought of CS as something along the lines of "applied philosophy". Obviously, this is not meant to be disparaging towards CS. I love CS and it is what I have made a career in; I think they are different, but equally interesting and useful.
  - DennisP 13y ago
    If I wanted to learn the parts of philosophy that apply to machine learning, and how they apply, where should I look?
    - nl 13y ago
      Not the OP, but I have some interest in this too. Knowledge Engineering is so closely linked it's an obvious place to start (but in some ways Linguistics is even more interesting - and useful). But for Knowledge Engineering (from the philospipical side), start with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology Useful bits: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth#Semantic_theory_of_truth http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth#Semantic_theory_of_truth http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliabilism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliabilism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_priori_and_a_posteriori http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_priori_and_a_posteriori Then go the other way (Assuming you know relational database theory): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Description_Framework#Statement_reification_and_context http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Description_Framework#... You'll find the two concepts meet somewhere around http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predicate_logic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predicate_logic
- thenerdfiles 13y ago
  I'm full steam ahead myself. I am fascinated by the idea of Open Aging. But anti-intellectualism is not cool. Saying "she did a little dance and that's all there is to it" or even "she's just being young" is more obnoxious than the fact that she did it. There are cultural analyses to be made, if not merely to gain an understanding of how activities like this will affect culture and influence opinion. Cultural nihilism and cultural solipsism are less sophisticated than cultural relativism, and these probably do more harm than good. No one should really critique from cultural apathy — I mean, just, why? "I don't care, so you shouldn't either"? Really? That's just picking your nose at the Weird Kids table.
  - haliax 13y ago
    > But anti-intellectualism is not cool. Saying "she did a little dance and that's all there is to it" or even "she's just being young" is more obnoxious than the fact that she did it. It isn't anti-intellectual to question the validity of any analysis. Your argument, taken to its conclusion, provides as much protection for the previously mentioned analysis of Miley Cyrus's dance being a grounded argument to make, as it does for my claim that she was subconsciously invoking the goddess Kali.
- ekianjo 13y ago
  Agree. someone who would have 100 years of experience in any matter would be invaluable. theres a lot to gain rather than to lose.
- coldtea 13y ago
  >Look Philos, I said to him, she got up on stage and did a little dance and that's really all there was to it. The moral of this story is, serious philosophical issues have absolutely no bearing on real life. You'd be surprised. A lot of pulp philosophy is indeed crap. But most peoples lives, and the systems we structure our everyday and working lives on, are analysed, to a T, from various angles, and found lacking and wanting. And when you find you are being crashed by those systems (as people eventually do), or that they don't work properly, there's a philosophical explanation of their workings written 100 or 2000 years ago that's perfectly logical. To put it in another way, reading into (good) philosophy, is like reading the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programmers among Java people struggling with Java EE in early 2000, and understanding things from 10 levels higher and also that there are far better ways to go about it. Oh, and no, good philosophy is not just about technicalities of reality and understanding, like Hume or Kant or Quine etc -- the only kind some geeks will accept. Regular moral, political, ontological, existencial etc philosophy, with seemingly "imprecise" language, is just as isnightful in other ways, if you spend the time to understand it.
- chongli 13y ago
  My only objection to life extension, philosophically speaking, is a political one. What if life extension becomes another tool of dominance for the rich and powerful? An eternal, dystopic corporatocracy sounds pretty damn horrible to me.
  - trendoid 13y ago
    Yeah, and hence moral education(which imparts critical thinking and rational moral values) of next generation seems like the most important task to me. Why too much money and power are not the most important things in this world and showing them examples of how they can corrupt you. Learning, sharing and making the world a 'better' place is what should motivate next generation and we urgently need to find a way to bring about that motivation. Right now most of the behavior revolves around what was selected by natural selection and we need to find a way to overcome that(atleast see if it can be overcome).
    - rubinelli 13y ago
      But do we really know what we are supposed to teach them? Imagine this magic pill was available three hundred years ago. Imagine what the world would be like, if people who believed slavery was part of life, and that women were inherently inferior to men, were not only alive, but still calling the shots.
      - trendoid 13y ago
        We are not sure what will work but thats why new models need to be experimented starting now. Coming up with tools for teaching critical thinking and morality should be on high priority in SV. Yes, magic pill invented 300 yrs ago would have had devastating consequences. But I am not sure whether that sort of thing is practically possible. It seems there is somewhat direct correlation between scientific revolutions(like renaissance) and moral values of the society(dont have data to back that up, just using history as an example).
msg 13y ago
FYI the guy's name is actually Patrick Nielsen Hayden. He's an award-winning editor for Tor. http://nielsenhayden.com/name.html http://nielsenhayden.com/name.html

gaius 13y ago

It's funny, I have a friend who is a full-time professional philosopher (teaches at a university) and you would not believe the amount of earnest essay writing there was in the philosophy community about Miley Cyrus's performance at the VMAs (something I've not actually seen myself). All sorts of theories about Freud and Hegel and this and that. Look Philos, I said to him, she got up on stage and did a little dance and that's really all there was to it. The moral of this story is, serious philosophical issues have absolutely no bearing on real life. So full steam ahead says I! The longer we can prolong life, the greater leverage we can extract from experience, imagine being immersed in a subject for hundreds of years, what could you not do in a minute what would take someone with even decades of experience, years?

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
baudehlo 13y ago
The flip side to that argument is that right now life is short, and so I try and fit as many wonderful experiences into it as I can. If life were long I could put everything off until tomorrow. And that doesn't sound good to me.
- jamesaguilar 13y ago
  Are you really saying that you'd prefer to DIE in order to incent yourself to do exciting things sooner? Erm. Well, I guess that's one set of preferences.
  - tesseractive 13y ago
    There's a classic A Softer World comic that's been turned into a t-shirt that says "I would rather die screaming than live forever." There are downsides to the kind of extreme prudence that planning to be around for centuries would imply. Also, there's a fantastic novel from Bruce Sterling called Holy Fire that is devoted to exploring the tension between living to continue living and living in the moment.
    - delinquentme 13y ago
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fox_and_the_Grapes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fox_and_the_Grapes
    - krisgee 13y ago
      >I would rather die screaming than live forever I'll take the time to work through my problems thanks.
      - tesseractive 13y ago
        Among other things, a commitment to "live forever" is a statement about acceptable risk tolerance. Ever wanted to climb mountains? Take up skydiving? Drink too much sometimes? Eat foods that are bad for you? If your goal really is to live forever, the risk profile of doing anything that doesn't minimize the expected value of the long-term risk to your person is probably unacceptable. You personally might rather live a vastly extended span than spend the time you do have skydiving, parasailing, climbing mountains, and doing whatever it is that allows you to enjoy your life to its fullest for however long you have. But that's a real, legitimate choice, and choosing to take risks and experience everything you can is a perfectly valid choice -- even if there's a very real risk that something will go wrong at some point and you will indeed "die screaming."
        krisgee 13y ago
        I never said a thing about not taking risks or having fun but those are my choices. I'd rather not be forced to die from some sort of disease, or just old age completely outside of my control.
- neilk 13y ago
  Well, there are obvious limits to that argument. Even a hundred years ago, it was common to die in your 60s. Taking on a new career or new relationship at the age of 60 would be ridiculous. Today, it's still a bit unusual but not unheard of. Given a longer life, I think we would come up with new ways to motivate ourselves, and new challenges. This isn't an insoluble problem, it's a business opportunity for Tony Robbins. That said I'm not sure a human being could ever fully escape ennui, so maybe there is some upper limit. I don't think 80 years is even close though.
- User1398 13y ago
  I've thought about this once or twice before. I wonder how we would view life if we didn't die from aging or disease, but only accidents, like a fire, car crash, gun shot, etc. What would happen to religion? Do you choose to continue aging, die, and take your chances with the heaven you've been saying exists, or do you take the new pill, and live forever? If you take the pill, what does that say about your faith in the afterlife? Do we fear death even more? If I'm going to die in a few decades of old age as my health deteriorates, I might as well enjoy my prime, and take some risks now. If I die, well, no big deal, I was going to die soon enough anyway. If I'm married, 60 years old, and my wife dies, that would be a sad day, but let's not kid ourselves, we're getting old. If your grandma passes away, well, it was her time, she lived a long life. But, if we live forever, we fear those accidents. If your wife dies in a plane crash age 60, how does that affect you? You might have expected to spend the next ten thousand years together, and she's gone. Do we stop taking these risks? Do I step in a car, or on a plane? I'm willing to take that risk now, but if I knew I could potentially live forever, I wouldn't want to risk dying with so much time still remaining. Do we enter the world of virtual reality? Why leave my home, I could get hit by lightning, I could get shot walking down the street, hit by a car, or attacked by animals. Why don't I lock myself in an underground bunker facility, and connect to the world through virtual reality? I toss on the goggles, and I enter the VR world where I meet with friends and family, and go on wild adventures, because I can take these risks in the VR world. If I die, I respawn. My body is safe in the bunker, while I pretend to be outside.
  - melling 13y ago
    You can't live forever because the universe won't last forever. The earth will die out much sooner, of course.
  - kamaal 13y ago
    I am assuming in the very far future even if you die of an accident/gun shot etc they should be able to resurrect you as-is, like you are with all your memory. It will be like you fell asleep and just woke up! If anything, I vote for the simulated reality thing. Its like once you are dead, they should be able to take your brain out and connect it to a simulated paradise which would run forever.
tesseractive 13y ago
More accurately, professional philosophers don't have any particular standing to discuss "serious philosophical issues." At any point in the discussion on whether people have a right to die, or whether it was ok to use tissue from aborted fetuses for stem cell research or whether we need universal health care, has anyone ever asked, "Well, what do the philosophers think?" (I have nothing against philosophers, btw. I have a degree in philosophy.)
- bsaul 13y ago
  You should live in france.
- thenerdfiles 13y ago
  "Philosophers" haven't had "serious philosophical issues" with this topic since Spinoza. Heck, even the Stoics. It's theology that has a problem, not philosophy, where theology crafts its ideas, very often, from the architectures of philosophical thought. Outside of a theological context, there isn't much of a debate anyway. Again: the Stoics. We do ask philosophers about "right to die" and "permissibility of stem cell research from humans". Philosophers outline the conditions under which we rationally approach these things — they obviously do not license or themselves permit such behavior. No one asks a philosopher if that philosopher personally thinks some act is okay or not okay... I'm just not sure what to say here. That's not what philosophy is about, but I have a strange feeling that "it's all personal opinion anyway" really motivates this idea that philosophers do not contribute meaningfully to law and morality. They inform ultimately what becomes legislation. Bertrand Russell was all over popular science in the 20th century. So was Bernard Williams. Dworkin. HLA Hart. The countless articles on ethics on JSTOR. All the philosophical journals. Stacks and stacks on anthologies collecting debates on abortion. ExPhi puts current opinion in the context of great thinkers of the history of philosophy, and helps us understand why we have the opinions we do have. We don't ask them to describe the scientific innerworkings of these techniques. We do ask them to explain these things in broader cultural terms, and in that case the Scientist often times plays Philosopher, where that person so too must pick up a great work of Philosophy. Ethics Committees are real things. I'm not sure what you're talking about, but it's radically in error and shockingly misleading...
morganherlocker 13y ago
I would just point out that most of modern philosophy is not really like this. I think most people think philosophers spend there time arguing about ethics, when this is only one tiny part of philosophy. A good chunk of the current discussion in philosophy of science, for example, centers around epistemology to varying degrees as it relates to current discoveries in genetics and neuroscience. The top philosophers in these fields are far from armchair scientists. The overlap in philosophy of the mind and computer science is also particularly striking. I studied both in university and often found myself taking what amounted to the same class at the same time, but in two different departments. I work quite a bit with machine learning nowadays, and I learned 90% of the background I needed in my higher level philosophy courses, not my CS courses. I have often thought of CS as something along the lines of "applied philosophy". Obviously, this is not meant to be disparaging towards CS. I love CS and it is what I have made a career in; I think they are different, but equally interesting and useful.
- DennisP 13y ago
  If I wanted to learn the parts of philosophy that apply to machine learning, and how they apply, where should I look?
  - nl 13y ago
    Not the OP, but I have some interest in this too. Knowledge Engineering is so closely linked it's an obvious place to start (but in some ways Linguistics is even more interesting - and useful). But for Knowledge Engineering (from the philospipical side), start with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology Useful bits: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth#Semantic_theory_of_truth http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth#Semantic_theory_of_truth http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliabilism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliabilism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_priori_and_a_posteriori http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_priori_and_a_posteriori Then go the other way (Assuming you know relational database theory): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Description_Framework#Statement_reification_and_context http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Description_Framework#... You'll find the two concepts meet somewhere around http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predicate_logic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predicate_logic
thenerdfiles 13y ago
I'm full steam ahead myself. I am fascinated by the idea of Open Aging. But anti-intellectualism is not cool. Saying "she did a little dance and that's all there is to it" or even "she's just being young" is more obnoxious than the fact that she did it. There are cultural analyses to be made, if not merely to gain an understanding of how activities like this will affect culture and influence opinion. Cultural nihilism and cultural solipsism are less sophisticated than cultural relativism, and these probably do more harm than good. No one should really critique from cultural apathy — I mean, just, why? "I don't care, so you shouldn't either"? Really? That's just picking your nose at the Weird Kids table.
- haliax 13y ago
  > But anti-intellectualism is not cool. Saying "she did a little dance and that's all there is to it" or even "she's just being young" is more obnoxious than the fact that she did it. It isn't anti-intellectual to question the validity of any analysis. Your argument, taken to its conclusion, provides as much protection for the previously mentioned analysis of Miley Cyrus's dance being a grounded argument to make, as it does for my claim that she was subconsciously invoking the goddess Kali.
ekianjo 13y ago
Agree. someone who would have 100 years of experience in any matter would be invaluable. theres a lot to gain rather than to lose.
coldtea 13y ago
>Look Philos, I said to him, she got up on stage and did a little dance and that's really all there was to it. The moral of this story is, serious philosophical issues have absolutely no bearing on real life. You'd be surprised. A lot of pulp philosophy is indeed crap. But most peoples lives, and the systems we structure our everyday and working lives on, are analysed, to a T, from various angles, and found lacking and wanting. And when you find you are being crashed by those systems (as people eventually do), or that they don't work properly, there's a philosophical explanation of their workings written 100 or 2000 years ago that's perfectly logical. To put it in another way, reading into (good) philosophy, is like reading the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programmers among Java people struggling with Java EE in early 2000, and understanding things from 10 levels higher and also that there are far better ways to go about it. Oh, and no, good philosophy is not just about technicalities of reality and understanding, like Hume or Kant or Quine etc -- the only kind some geeks will accept. Regular moral, political, ontological, existencial etc philosophy, with seemingly "imprecise" language, is just as isnightful in other ways, if you spend the time to understand it.
chongli 13y ago
My only objection to life extension, philosophically speaking, is a political one. What if life extension becomes another tool of dominance for the rich and powerful? An eternal, dystopic corporatocracy sounds pretty damn horrible to me.
- trendoid 13y ago
  Yeah, and hence moral education(which imparts critical thinking and rational moral values) of next generation seems like the most important task to me. Why too much money and power are not the most important things in this world and showing them examples of how they can corrupt you. Learning, sharing and making the world a 'better' place is what should motivate next generation and we urgently need to find a way to bring about that motivation. Right now most of the behavior revolves around what was selected by natural selection and we need to find a way to overcome that(atleast see if it can be overcome).
  - rubinelli 13y ago
    But do we really know what we are supposed to teach them? Imagine this magic pill was available three hundred years ago. Imagine what the world would be like, if people who believed slavery was part of life, and that women were inherently inferior to men, were not only alive, but still calling the shots.
    - trendoid 13y ago
      We are not sure what will work but thats why new models need to be experimented starting now. Coming up with tools for teaching critical thinking and morality should be on high priority in SV. Yes, magic pill invented 300 yrs ago would have had devastating consequences. But I am not sure whether that sort of thing is practically possible. It seems there is somewhat direct correlation between scientific revolutions(like renaissance) and moral values of the society(dont have data to back that up, just using history as an example).

msg 13y ago

FYI the guy's name is actually Patrick Nielsen Hayden. He's an award-winning editor for Tor. http://nielsenhayden.com/name.html http://nielsenhayden.com/name.html