>> Second, I doubt Bostrom is arguing against curing diseases such as malaria.
That's absolutely what he's arguning for. This is how he elucidates his
allegorical points about dragon-administration and war against tigers and
snakes:
(3) Administration became its own purpose. One seventh of the economy went to
dragon-administration (which is also the fraction of its GDP that the U.S.
spends on healthcare). Damage-limitation became such an exclusive focus that
it made people neglect the underlying cause. Instead of a massive
publicly-funded research program to halt aging, we spend almost our entire
health budget on health-care and on researching individual diseases.
He is clearly equating healthcare spending with "dragon administration".
If he believes that we should still spend as many resources in healthcare and
researching individual diseases, then why is he portraying these as futile and
misguided tasks, that have "become their own purpose"?
Also see the point I quoted above:
(5) The lack of a sense of proportion. A tiger killed a farmer. A rhumba of
rattlesnakes plagued a village. The king got rid of the tiger and the
rattlesnakes, and thereby did his people a service. Yet he was at fault,
because he got his priorities wrong.
The king "got his priorities wrong" because he went after lesser evils. That
doesn't seem like a resounding endorsement of continuing the research on
"individual diseases".
After all, Bostrom seems to believe that most causes of death will vanish if
we can halt ageing. So he's advocating that we stop bothering with every other
cause of death and focus our research on "the underlying cause" of all of
them, so we can save everyone in one go.
>> That's not true in the sense that most people think. Life expectancy at birth
has increased, but most of that has come from reductions in infant mortality.
Maximum life span has not increased. More people just die closer to it.
In what sense is the fact that most people die at an older age not an expansion of human life span? Are you saying we care
about the mode, more than we care about the mean?
That certainly seems to be Bostrom's way of thinking. I believe he is way more
interested of his chances to live to 300 than any other person's chance that
their kids will live to 70.
But that's not ethics. That's just pure selfishness.
>> First, that's not true. For example: Malaria deaths have decreased by 25% in
just six years[1], mostly due to aid from wealthy western countries and
billionaires like Bill Gates.
And yet:
Examples of health inequities between countries:
the infant mortality rate (the risk of a baby dying between birth and one year
of age) is 2 per 1000 live births in Iceland and over 120 per 1000 live births
in Mozambique;
the lifetime risk of maternal death during or shortly after pregnancy is only 1
in 17400 in Sweden but it is 1 in 8 in Afghanistan.
I am perhaps wrong to focus on health inequalities between countries, since
there are big inequalities in health within societies:
Examples of health inequities within countries:
in Bolivia, babies born to women with no education have infant mortality
greater than 100 per 1000 live births, while the infant mortality rate of
babies born to mothers with at least secondary education is under 40 per 1000;
life expectancy at birth among indigenous Australians is substantially lower
(59.4 for males and 64.8 for females) than that of non-indigenous Australians
(76.6 and 82.0, respectively);
But I am not wrong to say that we do have the technology to save many millions
of lives lost to disease, right now, yet we don't because they can't afford it.
Quotes from: http://www.who.int/social_determinants/thecommission/finalre...
>> On every metric you care to measure, the developing world has been catching up to the west. Global inequality is decreasing, not increasing
And yet again:
The benefits of the economic growth that has taken place over the last 25
years are unequally distributed. In 1980 the richest countries, containing
10% of the world’s population, had gross national income 60 times that of
the poorest countries, containing 10% of the world’s population. By 2005
this ratio had increased to 122.
International flows of aid – grossly inadequate in themselves, and well
below the levels promised – are dwarfed by the scale of many poor
countries’ debt repayment obligations. The result is that, in many cases,
there is a net financial outflow from poorer to richer countries – an alarming
state of affairs.
Same source.
Also, from the source you quote:
Global income inequality is still very high and will stay
very high for a long time
>> Every new technology starts off expensive. The original iPhone was too
expensive for most people, and it wasn't very good by today's standards. A
decade later, smartphones have gotten cheap enough for people to afford in the
developing world.
How many people in the developing world have iPhones?