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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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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