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Comment by Houshalter | Hacker News Reader

Most of the comments here are about culture war and missing the more interesting point of the essay. We knew political tribalism was getting bad in SF. But isn't insane that things like life extension and genetic engineering are becoming a victim to this? I wouldn't have even thought these issues were controversial or political.

These are by far the most important technologies of our time. The consequences of them being set back even a little is utterly enormous, and we should be very concerned about this.

Another very important point was missed here. The smartest people can have the absolute weirdest political beliefs. They are the least likely to conform. And the most likely to not shut up about their weird ideas even when the consequences are obvious.

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Are life extension and genetic engineering really becoming a victim of this? Or is this just a mostly inconsequential reaction by people who have noticed that wealthy Silicon Valley technologists love to talk about improving humanity but mostly end up producing products which make life easier for wealthy Silicon Valley technologists?

I believe that it is a reality that people die through the side affects of political hegemony.

I used to be a Jehovah's Witness and am familiar with those outside the religion criticizing it because it frequently occurs that their children die due to the refusal of blood transfusions.

However I now think there is a similar type of ignorance which has stemmed out of politically correct thought.

I believe biracial children are more likely to die due to the side affects of ignoring racial topics in our society. Here is how: biracial children have a lower probability of organ donation matches, and a drastically lower probability of bone marrow matches.

I have never seen this discussed before but it seems self evident to me. In order for a Congolese-Belorussian (a real family I know) child to obtain a bone marrow match it must be sought out way in advance of the illness, if a match can be found at all that is.

Since few if any people are aware of the rarity of matches for biracial people it must mean a lot of them die, there just isn't enough time to source the match in time.

Of course there are failure modes for rightist thought also. Were biracial couples illegal I don't think that would be a step forward. Still the failures of our current order linger in my mind and I believe that a slightly more right wing policy with respect to biracial couples (activating searches for organ/marrow matches in advance) would save lives.

Some people here may suggest that this isn't right wing, it is merely common sense or logical. Sure, but as Sam Altman's blog post suggests, sometimes good ideas are quelled if they could potentially interfere with political heuristics.

>biracial children have a lower probability of organ donation matches, and a drastically lower probability of bone marrow matches.

Sure, but the vast majority of people will never need this in their lifetime. I doubt this alone would make a noticeable dent in life expectancy statistics. (Also we are within a few decades of being able to clone organs anyway.)

On the other hand biracial people are believed to have stronger immune systems and potentially other characteristics ("heterosis").

I don't disagree with anything you've said, but my point remains. Some people are inadvertently dying because of a political consensus view.

I think this occurs in every political system though.

The only route out is to adopt some form of the scientific process combined with metapolitics, seasteading is a hypothetical example.

>But isn't insane that things like life extension and genetic engineering are becoming a victim to this? I wouldn't have even thought these issues were controversial or political.

You don't think there are any political ramifications to the possibility of dividing the world into new categories of "haves" (life-extended and genetically-modified) and "have nots"?

There could be, but this is exactly why politics is toxic. People start to bicker about who gets what piece of a pie before it's even baked, and they're willing to kill each other and destroy the oven over that, even though without that pie, everyone will starve.

But it's clear who will have access to these technologies once they exist -- those who can pay the most. Access to such technologies will probably also give the user better economic outcomes, so there's a very legitimate fear that such technologies will significantly widen the already wide chasm separating rich from poor.

The kind of argument you're making only stands to benefit those who will get access to these technologies by default (i.e., the rich).

I'm not rich and yet I'm making the argument, because it seems to me that a) life-improving inventions that can scale eventually scale to everyone, even if initially they were limited to the well-off, and b) (and this may be controversial) all in all, still I find it strictly better to have a part of the population with access to life extension than nobody with access to it.

>still I find it strictly better to have a part of the population with access to life extension than nobody with access to it.

But that's already the case. There are people right now who will live longer than others because they have access to better healthcare.[1] Why should it be strictly better (addressing only your point b) for the situation to change from "people with an average lifespan plus people who live 10 years longer" to "people with the same average lifespan plus people who live 20 years longer"?

Or in other words, is longevity some sort of unalloyed good? Is arithemtic the only tool needed to judge the merits of life extension? Another comment asked us to consider what would happen if Einstein were still alive; maybe there are some other people whose continued existence would not have been a net benefit to humanity?

[1]Yes, as mentioned elsewhere in these comments, people on welfare have access to some healthcare, but after going from a premium employer-paid insurance plan to what's available under my state's Medicaid expansion, I can guarantee that the former has a higher standard of care.

Some foggy thoughts.

To me it's all contingent on whether your brain is healthy, functioning properly, ideally at an optimum. People who talk of Life Extension say that improving 'healthspan' and lifespan are connected.

Probably society needs a range of brain ages to function, or has done until now at least. That said there is no possible utility to people getting degenerative brain disease, I don't see the point of keeping the vehicle if the driver is dead.

Also consider the tasks a person does in life. A blue collar man dies much younger than rich woman, I think 20-30+ years. Some of that may be avoidable through better healthcare or technology or simply unavoidable because of genetics but it's also hard to imagine intense physical labour doesn't affect your metabolism in such a way that it ends your life sooner.

As a blue collar worker I'm becoming aware of this drawback..!

On the other side I know workers who've worked physically demanding jobs who are in their 90s and are still trotting about, have full head of dark hair.

This could be wrong, I am not a biological scientist.

I suspect in practice this is a non-issue, a kind of fake argument we like to make because it sounds right.

I think genetic improvements don't give massive improvements in a single healthy individual, that kind of technology is science fiction and would require many iterations of experimental use over many generations. So boosts of +20 or +200 IQ points or +20 or +200 attractiveness points is off the table.

What we have the power to do is reduce incident of genetic disease and very modestly improve outcomes for more healthy functioning brains.

This levels the playing field between the rich and poor because the rich hit the optimum for genetic improvement very fast (having already a lion's share of genetic advantages to start with), then they must experience diminishing returns for their money. It is likely that most common genetic improvements are also the most widely spread about in the population, the opposite of your vision.

Now having foolishly stuck my neck out I shall ask Gwern whether I am full of it. ;-)

> These are by far the most important technologies of our time. The consequences of them being set back even a little is utterly enormous, and we should be very concerned about this.

That's just like, your opinion man.

If genetic engineering and life extension become common place, especially if controlled by private companies which naturally seek profit above all else, who will benefit from them most? (hint: probably not people living on welfare)

These issues are fundamentally political, and there is no reason that they should be above any form of discourse or criticism.

If someone's feelings are hurt because there is a backlash against their technoscientism, that's on no one else but them.

>If genetic engineering and life extension become common place, especially if controlled by private companies which naturally seek profit above all else, who will benefit from them most? (hint: probably not people living on welfare)

Why not? People on welfare have access to better healthcare than the richest person on Earth did 50 years ago. They have access to pocket computers and communication systems far more powerful than the military could have afforded 50 years ago.

But this is beside the point. These ideas can and should be debated. Literally ostracizing people and thinking they are evil for having different opinions on them, is absurd.

>People on welfare have access to better healthcare than the richest person on Earth did 50 years ago. They have access to pocket computers and communication systems far more powerful than the military could have afforded 50 years ago.

Which doesn't really matter unless you have a time machine that can send them back 50 years. At least, none of the poor people I've known (including myself) have ever said "I can't afford to give my children better opportunities, let alone leave them something in my will, but hey! at least they'll have nifty pocket computers!"

It does matter as they live a healthier, happier and more productive life. I think the point is that people are better off now than 50 years earlier.

So in 50 years what used to only be available to billionaires will be over the counter.

Sorry, I just don't see the world in terms of "anything that makes one person better off, necessarily makes someone worse off." That kind of world view is toxic to progress. It completely flies in the face of everything we've achieved in the last 2 centuries.

> These ideas can and should be debated. Literally ostracizing people and thinking they are evil for having different opinions on them, is absurd.

Agreed. But wait, is anyone actually getting ostracized now for having different opinions? Has Sam Altman been refused service somewhere, or denied employment, or suffered any consequence for holding the opinions he does, besides maybe being called a dick on Twitter?

Because this all seems to me like rich people getting their panties in a bunch because they don’t like being called dicks on Twitter.

People in this very thread are saying anyone who works on such technologies are inherently unethical people. Do you not see how this kind of labelling is dangerous and distructive to debate?

It’s called “freedom of speech” my dude, and it’s actually essential to debate, even (particularly!) if you don’t agree with it.

> That's just like, your opinion man.

No. Given the technologies we're talking about, what the parent wrote in those two quoted sentences is literally as close to stating an obvious fact as possible when discussing future technology.

> These issues are fundamentally political, and there is no reason that they should be above any form of discourse or criticism.

Discourse and criticism? Fine. But first, understanding. And some basic math.

The way I see most of those objections look, some people would literally prefer everyone to keep dying over the possibility that they won't be the first to receive a life extension serum. It's one of the most selfish beliefs I've ever encountered.

It's not necessarily selfish. One argument I've heard against life extension is that if it is only - or even deferentially - available to the upper stratum, the power of compound interest will allow them to accumulate and hold even greater proportions of social and economic resources (esp. zero-sum resources like status and power). Others caution that social structures will become more resistant to change if those with the most social capital are also the longest-lived. Most people really do care about status relative to their contemporaries-not just absolute status - and how it affects their agency. And then there are environmentalists who have ecological worries, and others with different specific but impersonal concerns.

Death is a great redistributor for all forms of capital - social, economic, and organic.

I can think of counter-arguments to these points, but they do not necessarily stem from selfishness,merely different preferences.

Yeah, you summed up perfectly one of the main counter arguments.

If the richer you are, the healthier and smarter you can make your babies, and the healthier and the smarter your babies, the more access to jobs/education/etc they get, it’s not much comfort that poor people will be somewhat better off than they were 50 years prior as the inequality gaps keep getting wider and wider.

70 years later, our society is still very much suffering the consequences of things like real estate redlining, which heavily discriminated against black people in the US. Thinking that things like targeted gene therapy and radical life extension couldn’t be harmful in the same way is either pure ignorance or delusion.

> Given the technologies we're talking about, what the parent wrote in those two quoted sentences is literally as close to stating an obvious fact as possible when discussing future technology.

Yeah uh, it’s statements like these that make people so angry at Silicon Valley nerds who think they’ve got it all figured it out and that anyone who disagrees with them are beneath them.

These things aren’t facts, they’re statements that are very much up for debate and discussion. If you can’t even see that, maybe try signing up for an intro course to philosophy at your local community college or something.

(Oh and a little tip for you: angrily repeating that something is an obvious truth over and over doesn’t make it so, surprisingly enough)

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