Hacker News Reader

Comment by anonymous777 | Hacker News Reader

This whole thread reeks of death acceptance culture. HN readers show off how cool they are for accepting death instead of discussing how we as a tech community could help cure these diseases or at least give more people an option of being cryopreserved.

The really unpleasant truth is that if we as a society began doing serious focused R&D on these life-threatening diseases earlier, the OP and many others wouldn't have to die.

But we didn't. Enjoy marketing your mobile apps until cancer suddenly makes you rot away.

View on HN

Can't we do both?

Our track record on cures rather than palliative treatments is abysmal. So yes, let's research disease and cures. Let's consider quality of life and the wishes of those involved above all. A greater element of the system not squarely focussed on profit would be helpful.

For many forms of cancer we actually have one of the few exceptions. Survival rates from cancers are far higher than twenty or thirty years ago. Often healthy survival at that with full remission.

For those unlucky enough to have a terminal condition (and regardless of progress there will always be some), or riddled with chronic conditions and infirmity, let's allow them to pass with dignity, when and how they choose.

My dog had a better experience than my father. My father knew his time had come and didn't want his last six months of bedridden suffering. He didn't want it for his family, especially wife, either. Neither my father nor I believed in a life after, and accepted this was it, so there was no bullshit of "going to a better place".

I also want more acceptance of death and better treatment and consideration of those dying. We can't yet abolish it.

>For those unlucky enough to have a terminal condition (and regardless of progress there will always be some), or riddled with chronic conditions and infirmity, let's allow them to pass with dignity, when and how they choose.

I'm all for that, after all one can decide what to do with his/her life and how to end it. But I think it would be much more fair to give people another choice: being cryopreserved. Sounds futuristic, but I don't see anything futuristic in storing humans in a tank of liquid N2. The technology to do this on scale is half a century old.

Of course euthanasia is cheaper than cryo, and that makes us ask ourselves another unpleasant question: What is the real market value of human life? Is it really lower than the price of infrastructure for preserving humans in liquid nitrogen?

I can speak only for me. I don't want to be an anachronism in some distant future. We're a very long way from cryo being a viable solution anyway. Bring a formerly healthy rat back, then we'll talk. :)

Consider how our current world would treat people from the 18th or 19th C. Would it be endless media titilation, Buzzfeed memes of 20 things you didn't know about Bob the Victorian? Would there be the discrimination akin to how we treat indigenous or third world peoples? Would we help Bob the Victorian to get fully up to speed with society, or just see a curiosity?

So, for now, I'm happy with my lot.

Um? Sorry for being frank, but: are you saying you would commit suicide if the world were more confusing? In any case, I doubt that our future civilization would be at a total loss to help "anachronisms" transition into a surprising world.

>Bring a formerly healthy rat back, then we'll talk.

As the saying goes: That is like a terminal ill patient refusing to get into the ambulance because "I don't want to be in an ambulance here, I want to be in the hospital; call me when the ambulance is at the hospital, then maybe I'll get in."

I'm sure the society of the future will be way more humane than the current one, or at least not worse. I don't consider it as a problem.

About rat, you have a point, but there was recent experiment where cryopreserved rabbit kidney was successfully reimplanted and worked as intended. Also there was a recent brain preservation competition, and the winning method was shown by SEM microscopy to preserve very fine synaptic structure. You can google these things if you are interested (I won't post the links to avoid looking like a shill or a fanatic).

Looks like a better alternative to 20k$ (as was said earlier in this thread) euthanasia + perhaps 10k$ for funeral expense.

I appreciate your point, though I didn't read it this way.

> The really unpleasant truth is that if we as a society began doing serious focused R&D on these life-threatening diseases earlier, the OP and many others wouldn't have to die.

I absolutely agree with that and the fact that fighting death is so low on social priorities is something that boggles my mind. However even if we dropped everything and started working on it, many of us will still die. I am regularly afraid, in the back of my head, that I'll go down young because of some cancer. Or that my loved ones will. I need to be able to handle this, both dying and dealing with the dying. That's why I'm grateful for this article. It has solid points about communication.

As I said - it's not either/or. Many - maybe all - of us will die, but this is not an excuse for not working on curing death.

I can accept the idea of prolonging one's life for a meaningful purpose. But, to think that we should aim for "curing dead"?

You talk about death as it is some kind of disease... Dead is part of life everywhere you look and not in the disease sense. There's a cyclic constant in all nature. You have seasons. You have day and night. Even stars that "live" for millions of years wither and "die" at some point. Why do you think we, as humanity, deserve to be the exception to that rule and escape a cyclic order that's been around like... forever?

Also, "life" feeds from "dead", no the other way around. It's not a coincidence that it's this way...

Can you give a reason why we shouldn't cure death that isn't vague mystical equivocation? People are not seasons, they are not days, they are not stars. We do not need to "deserve" immortality, we just need to be able to make it happen.

Death sucks. It would be better if it didn't happen.

It's worth reminding that we cannot be immortal. We can only live indefinitely. But the universe will eventually see to it that we will end. Most models of the cosmos say so.

Barring some discovery that allows us to hit the reset button on matter and energy every trillion or so years, time will end for us all, no matter how long it seems.

True, and I'd happily spend a few thousand years researching a way around it.

Well yeah, the universe being finite sucks as well. Maybe we can't ever change that, but that doesn't mean it wouldn't be better if we could.

> I absolutely agree with that and the fact that fighting death is so low on social priorities is something that boggles my mind.

Really? Because the amount of money put into researching how to cure life-threatening diseases, as well as prevent and vaccinate against them, seems pretty high.

Pharmaceutical companies spend billions trying to research drugs to cure diseases, and so do governments, universities, private research funders, and charities.

There are people who dedicate huge portions of their lives to raising money and resources for charities trying to research cures for diseases that kill millions of people.

And we've had some success. Just the other day, there was an article published about the men who thought they were going to die of AIDS in the 80s, but whose lives are now in their 60s and approaching retirement age because of the provision of highly active anti-retroviral therapy. (And now they face issues because they never thought they'd survive and so didn't plan to have a career or a retirement etc.)

http://projects.sfchronicle.com/2016/living-with-aids/story/

I just don't see how anyone can claim that society isn't "doing serious focused R&D" on life-threatening diseases.

Well I'm sure you'll be down-voted but in case you come back to check the replies I'll just say I'm sorry that you can't accept the world at the moment.

Unless the singularity happens really soon and someone bootstraps a benign godlike AI to take us under it's wing I think we're stuck with a very high (five 9s ?) probability of dying.

It's fine to rail against it but sometimes you have to accept that you were born in the dark ages and life is short.

It's not either/or. We could accept that and fight it, so that our children, or our children's children won't have to die anymore.

I can accept the world. I have 2 relatives already dead, though I'm not very emotional about it.

I just want to emphasize that this is the world we have built with our own hands. It's not the worst world possible, but we can do better than that.

>Unless the singularity happens I think S-word in mostly a meme. You can apply ML to biological problems right now. You don't need strong AI for it (though ofc even subhuman general ai would be of great help to science, if you look at deepmind's interview that's exactly their goal)

>I think we're stuck with a very high (five 9s ?) probability of dying. It depends on our own actions as well. At least one could opt for cryo, ofc it isn't a guarantee of anything but still it's a chance.

You may think I'm talking like a futurist or a transhumanist, but in fact I'm just an ordinary technical person trying to be realistic (and disliking involuntary death). If our western culture really values human life as much as declared, then we as a society should focus more on increasing quality of life and longevity, instead of exploiting each other for profit.

Wouldn't that be lovely?

I wish that the immediate reaction by most people to such a thing wasn't something preposterous like "death is natural." Yeah? So? We are not beaten in the heads with rubber mallets every day at noon. If aliens showed up and proposed that we adopt the rubber-mallet system for no benefit, we'd call them crazy.[1] Yet death, which is completely real, is treated as something not even worth attempting to cure (although we sure love trying to prevent it when it's basically too late!)

[1] I'm paraphrasing Eliezer Yudkowsky here; he has cool writings on this subject if you're interested, which can be found in "Rationality from AI to Zombies," a large, cleaned-up collection of his years of blog posts at Less Wrong.

I wish that the immediate reaction by most people to such a thing wasn't something preposterous like "let's cure death before we all die." Death has already arrived, exists for all natural beings on our planet, and has existed for millions of years. We don't need to wait for it to show up with rubber mallets.

The point there is that, say humans were largely the same but instead we naturally lived a very long time, e.g. a thousand years. Then someone comes to you and says, "Hey I have this great idea with lots of societal benefits: Why not kill each person before they reach 100 years?"

We would say no, that is insane and pointless, why would we sacrifice hundreds of beautiful years off of everyone's life? Indeed, consider that environmental improvements and medical technology have more than doubled the human lifespan. Would you voluntarily choose for your children to live until they're at most 35, rather than their current "natural" lifespan?

Whether or not death is "natural" doesn't seem like it ought to have much bearing on whether or not we want it. If life is good, then loss of life is bad. A beautiful mind that ceases to shine, is something I'd just as soon untruncate.

Thank you for restating my point more clearly.

I agree that it is confusing and painful (and stupid) that cryopreservation does not get way more attention.

But, your comment seems a little overly barbed, no? It seems like there would be more positive ways to say what you are saying.

I'm not from the 1st world, so it adds a bit of a darker attitude. To me it looks pretty insane that you earn so much money, have so high quality of life and yet you don't invest nearly as much as possible into life extension. Instead you buy big overpriced houses and other weird stuff.

Also looks like the mods banned me.

Ok, I think I can see why that would be extra frustrating, on top of the already quite sufficient horror of death. Nevertheless, it is probably a good idea to stay civil and try to communicate meaningfully, rather than venting emotions in a forum that is about a specific person's pain and death. I think it's important to have difficult discussions about e.g. death, deathism, etc., but being combatative---even if it makes perfect emotional sense---does not seem likely to have good effects on most people, including yourself.

I find this anger against death weird.

We are alive because we are not death. Death is part of our lives and we should accept it without the drama, just like Peter is doing.

It's not sincere anger. It's trolls who are trying to find ways to annoy and provoke people. There is no point in arguing with them logically, they'll just continue in a different direction.

>>> There is no point in arguing with them logically

Viewing his reply confirms this. Once again, you are right.

Godspeed Pieter.

I don't know if you were including me, but either way I'm sorry and I'll stop now (just saw this).

For the record: I sincerely am not trying to annoy or provoke anyone; I've been concerned about derailing the thread, but a discussion of other emotions around death didn't seem too inappropriate. I sincerely think death is painful and difficult to think about, but that it is worth thinking about sanely, and that death is obviously a bad thing in this world. I am sincerely angry when conscious human minds are prevented by Death from exploring, creating, and loving as much as they want.

> I find this anger against death weird.

Of course you do, because accepting death is a huge part of our culture, a part we developed to make coping easier. It's hard to think differently from how you have been taught to.

>Death is part of our lives and we should accept it without the drama

Who says that and for what purpose (who benefits from status quo) ? Note that death isn't even a law of physics, it's just a consequence of our biological structure and our genetic makeup. Many organisms live much shorter lives than humans, but some live 3-10x longer than us (For example Arctica Islandica clamshell lives >400 years, Bowhead Whales and Koi fish live ~200 years, Pinus longaeva trees live up to 5000 years). These are scientific facts.

Then, there are genetic engineering experiments [1] that produce C. Elegans nematodes that live 5x longer lives than wild ones. There are less dramatic but positive results for mice.

Humans aren't special, it means that some future variants of these techniques could be applied to humans either to produce longer-living individuals or to increase lifespan of existing ones.

If you still think that someone's life is not worth extending you are simply being amoral. Please decide such important matters only for yourself and not for others. I'm sure there are more than enough humans that would prefer to extend their lives.

1. Germline signaling mediates the synergistically prolonged longevity produced by double mutations in daf-2 and rsks-1 in C. elegans. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24332851

Sorry, can't compute this. And I mean it.

I could not agree more.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com