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Comment by chillacy | Hacker News Reader

Social progress would change slower though. Actually even quoting Max Plank:

> A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it

Aka science advances one funeral at a time

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I suspect that, if a scientist in his fifties knew that his cognitive function would remain at the same level up to at least age 150, he would be a lot more willing to spend years rethinking things and familiarizing himself with new and better conceptual approaches. Something similar could probably be said about programmers that seem attached to old and allegedly inferior tools.

Not sure that's how biases work.

Biases are about the interplay of pressures to perform and reform where the comfort of the known is more persuasive than the enticement of the new.

There needs to be the luxury of time and the space to fail, two things we don't have.

The technology of longevity won't fix this problem of culture, sure. But it would make such a fix a lot more meaningful

>> There needs to be the luxury of time and the space to fail, two things we don't have.

But once we have those, won't they be considered not luxurious, instead, standard?

And won't the argument still be that we lack the luxury we need?

I think we should improve the handover instead of pretending there will be no handover.

Basically what you're describing is the tradeoff between exploration and exploitation. Depending on situation in life and age people tend to lean towards one or another.

In more concrete terms, I'm quite persuaded by what I read and see about emacs, but 20 years of vim keeps bringing me back.

I mean seriously, emacs lisp looks so much more sane than vimscript, I've been telling myself to switch for 10 years now...

I guess the question is, if people lived to 200, would that mean a 50 year old's approach to new information would be the same as that of a today's 50 year old, or that of a today's 25 year old.

Basically are we just keeping old people alive longer or are people growing old slower.

If we are just treating causes of death then we are just keeping people alive for longer. What David Sinclair is doing is trying to keep people young for longer.

But that's partly because as people age, their brains get less flexible and open to learning new things. There's already been some work on fixing that specifically.

This happens with neural nets as well. As they progress in their training, epoch by epoch, accuracy plateaus. There is always a tradeoff between keeping on learning and applying knowledge. Companies have the same dilemma between research and production - if you keep researching too much, you never get to produce anything, and vice-versa.

So your solution is just that the whole population must die younger than necessary, then? Is that really the best we can do?

I don't know, maybe we could put a hard limit on academic positions of 50 years or so. We could figure something out. I like that solution more than, effectively - kill them, and everyone else!

Oh I don't have a solution, I just thought it might be an interesting side effect. It might make an interesting science fiction topic.

I hope my post didn't imply I thought killing people was a solution...

Its merely ageism. Not really any different than dissing quantum mechanics as "jewish physics" in the 30s.

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