Comment by nabla9 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nabla9 | Hacker News Reader

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What I suspect is true but obviously can't prove: Person with completely healthy brain at age 200 would not be well functioning human being in the society.

When we grow we gain experience. That experience shows as habits, perceptions, attitudes and thought trains that makes functioning in the society easy. We learn to see the world trough the past experience. All this turns from asset to liability when society where you live changes beyond the global parameters our cognition settles into.

In other words: Our 'mental posture at large' is path dependent and it gradually settles into some state and becomes less malleable over the years. We can still learn new things and change our thinking, but internalizing the changes becomes increasingly harder in the core level. We don't even want to try to change certain notions because our identity is tied to our 'core beliefs'.

Society where people (especially rich and powerful people) would live 200s would be some kind of dystopia of geriatric thinking. Young wold have to kill the old or stage revolutions from time to time.

This could be true. But on the other hand it could also be that if we modify people to live longer lives that our brains will also remain plastic and malleable for longer.

Society would adapt.

What's with the contempt for rich people in debates like this? Being mad at rich people for living longer is no less silly than being mad at them for having cars, mobile phones, personal computers back in the day.

I believe it is. Being rich and powerful means you'll most likely want to remain such. You would act in the best of your own interest. Ageing has been the absolute guarantee that even the worst of human beings (dictators, criminals with a lot of power) will eventually lose their power thus stop damaging society as a whole.

There are two points that you've conflated and dismissed glibly with one statement: the slightly longer (+5%? +10%) lifespans of the rich today, and the hypothetical doubling+ of lifespans being directly discussed here. They're totally different and can't be treated as one and the same. (Owning a car in 1910 and having a 200 year lifespan is a comparison so disingenuous that I'm not going to spend any more effort discussing it.)

The slight increase that wealth currently brings is unfortunate for those who don't benefit from it, but doesn't seem to draw widespread contempt or criticism. It does, and should, act as a spur to remove or mitigate the factors in poorer peoples' lives that stop them from living to the same age.

The 'contempt' in the parent --- pretty mild, and probably not contemptuous enough to accurately be called 'contempt' --- stems from the fact that the rich living much longer than everyone else would be yet another example of widening inequality in society. If we're talking some kind of treatment or technology that doubles lifespan, why shouldn't people be pissed off about not being able to access that? That's not a slight improvement like we're talking about above: that would effectively be an entire second life. I know for a fact that I'd be angry as hell knowing my fiancée would die at half the age of a rich person simply because we don't have the money to buy whatever it takes to make her live to 200+.

The very idea of some people having that whilst others radically and perhaps fatally undermines current human society, which is implicitly built on the idea that everyone only has one life.

It seems implicit in your comment that you think that this kind of imbalance is somehow fair or just or natural. Why shouldn't the aim always be to let everyone benefit from advances rather than just those who can afford it? You can argue that technological progress will allow life-extension to trickle-down, but that doesn't happened evenly or reliably, and seems a bad assumption upon which to base society's progress.

I don't think there's much wrong with inequality in cases like this. It's a bit like pirated software: someone gets a copy, but the original doesn't disappear. Some people live longer, but the other people don't live shorter. Sounds like plain old jealousy to me.

Anyway, my point with the cars and phones was: innovations will often be accessible only to rich people, at first, and then get commoditized later on. Some people say this is a big flaw in communism: if there's no rich upper class, who's gonna finance the fancy stuff?

I don't give a shit that people are expected to die after 100 years and society is built on that. I would sign for 200 years in an instant. Speaking of dystopia (like GP), robbing people of 100 years because it would hurt your feelings if they lived longer than you sounds like a few not-so-utopian scifi stories to me.

"Why shouldn't the aim always be to let everyone benefit from advances rather than just those who can afford it?"

Of course it should! Didn't mean to imply otherwise (tho I can see why one would interpret my comment that way). If you nip something in the bud (=upper class), you can be sure noone's gonna get it.

You know how tatoos will look ridiculous on you when you get older? That never happened because by the time it could become a concern, older peole with tatoos became common too.

For your second concern - How do you know that this loss of adaptability isn't an effect of aging?

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