Comment by Kednicma | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Kednicma | Hacker News Reader

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Ha, hilariously naïve. I still have the "Black Dragon Fallacy" written down as something that deserves a full writeup, but in short: What's the missile made of, and how does Bostrom propose that we build it?

Bostrom brings us "fine phrases and hollow rhetoric," mostly. Sure, we should do something about aging, but what, exactly, are we failing to do as a society here? He seems to think that the problem is that we're treating aging and death as inevitable, but science already has marched past that position; instead, we now know that aging is part of a tradeoff involving cancer and is closely tied to maintenance of DNA as cells reproduce in multicellular organisms.

Further, the notion of agency is hopelessly confused by the design of the fable. Humans are deliberately sending other humans to the dragon while the missile is ready to go, in the story, and Bostrom insists that we are supposed to regret this. However, when we move back through the analogy to the real world, then the way that humans send other humans to the dragon is via war. Will ending aging end war? How?

Anthropomorphizing psychopomps may have been a mistake, since it has led to Bostrom imagining that if we just collect all of the psychopomps into one really big mean dragon, and then kill the dragon, that we'll have defeated death. Easy peasy!

I think the main idea is to realize that aging is a disease we all have and it's lethal and we aren't doing enough to combat it. What's the budget for senescence research and why isn't it two or three orders of magnitude more?

Why isn't every ninety year old automatically enrolled in an experimental program to reduce senescence? Eighty? Seventy?

We should be desperate and taking desperate measures to fight aging tooth and nail. Instead, we seem to be casually studying it.

If we applied the world's productive and research efforts, and obliterated redtape, how much progress would we make?

> I think the main idea is to realize that aging is a disease we all have and it's lethal and we aren't doing enough to combat it.

But...its not.

Its a label for the aggregate of the accumulated effects many different conditions and traumas. Its a very loose multicause syndrome, not a disease.

> Why isn't every ninety year old automatically enrolled in an experimental program to reduce senescence?

Because consent, among other reasons.

> We should be desperate and taking desperate measures to fight aging tooth and nail.

On a social level I think this is wrong for the same reason it is often wrong to desperately scrap at extending life on an individual level: the expected return in terms of life extension does not warrant the expected cost in terms of immediate quality of life.

...Are you suggesting sacrificing the old in order to save the old?

Yes, of course. Given that they are going to die regardless, using the elderly for experimentation seems reasonable. We could be as humane and considerate and provide anaesthesia and care as much as possible, but it's a false kindness to let the dying die because trying to save them is risky and uncomfortable.

With twenty years of massive effort like this, and hard risk taking, would we have improvements against aging? Would the human-years saved be massively greater than the human-years we lost in experimentation? I think both answers are likely "Yes".

> ...Are you suggesting sacrificing the old in order to save the old?

Sacrificing the liberty and quality of life of the current old for the benefit of the future (probably just rich) old.

I don't know if death can really be considered a disease, since it's a fundamental part of evolution. If anything, lack of death could be detrimental to a species.

You're wrong. Death is not a fundamental part of evolution.

Natural selection does not imply that the only type of selective pressure is survival. Death is merely one factor that affects reproduction. Further, only premature death matters directly for reproduction. Most people die long after they reproduce (or have had a chance to reproduce).

That's not to say that curing aging won't change the trajectory of the human species' evolution, but to be frank I don't really care about the human species. I care about humans. If someone said: "we should continually kill off the weakest 50% of humans to make the species stronger", I'd say that person is a monster.

According to https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4635662/ the only non-specific cause of death for senility (R54) is insufficient for cause of death and must be split into predicted causes if no positively identified disease or disorder was the cause of death.

Postponing death is a matter of treating diseases and disorders and preventing accidents and violence.

Evolution has non-death mechanisms too; bacteria exchange plasmids. With genetic modifications we're beyond the need for death anyway if we want species-level improvements.

> Evolution has non-death mechanisms too

Very importantly: different reproduction rates. This is already more important in human evolution than premature death.

"humans were far too heavy to fly and in any case lacked feathers"

Science has certainly not "marched past" the issue of life (or health) extension. Knowing that it is related to cancer or whatever does not end the story. That is like saying we now know humans don't have feathers.

Regarding agency, the story the humans have no real choice in the matter because the dragon will kill them all otherwise. Ending aging would be much more valuable than ending war. Wars do not kill billions of people. Of course, it is possible to destroy all life on the planet in a war, but this is orthogonal to solving other problems.

"You are hilariously naive to think about solving one problem when there is another."

Please pay attention. I did not say "cancer or whatever". I said cancer [0], a specific family of diseases characterized by normal cells becoming cancerous [1], a state marked by unbounded growth and self-reinforcing DNA damage. Cancer and aging are intimately linked via telomeres [2], part of the structure of cellular DNA. Indeed, quoting the first sentence of [3]:

> Telomeres, the caps on the ends of eukaryotic chromosomes, play critical roles in cellular aging and cancer.

On war, we lose millions of people regularly [4]. We lose about a million people to genocide every year [5]. These are people that, in Bostrom's parlance, we have put on the train to go see the dragon; we sacrificed them for nothing at all. Nothing in Bostrom's tale suggests that, having defeated the dragon, we will stop killing millions of people.

On nuclear war or other disastrous climate change, something you only allude to, the Doomsday Clock [6] is currently at less than two minutes to midnight, and has never been closer. It is widely agreed that we are on the very edge of self-annihilation and that we expend a tremendous amount of political effort simply not destroying ourselves.

I can see that you're a relatively young and inexperienced account; I hope that you do some reading and improve your understanding of biology and history, rather than continuing to lean on mystic or mythic influences for your worldview.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancer

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinogenesis

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telomere

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telomeres_in_the_cell_cycle

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_Clock

You still need to explain why some whales live hundreds of years, and some trees live thousands.

If you believe that telomere shortening is the issue, we should be investigating therapies to encourage telomere lengthening.

We have access to powerful technologies (e.g. CRISPR), and we can develop technologies that are more powerful still.

Hi, to be gentle and brief: Lengthening telomeres can provoke cancerous behavior. Therefore we cannot simply lengthen telomeres by giving people more telomerase; we need a more holistic approach which understands the cancer/senescence tradeoff.

It is not a problem for a creature to live for a long time; the inevitability of cancer seems to itself be genetic and part of the human experience but not for all life. You mention whales, but lobsters are even more interesting: They do manufacture telomerase throughout their lives, and they are not killed by cancer in old age, but by being unable to molt and continue growing. Trees are interesting too; they must always grow in order to keep living, but past a certain size, the physics of water limits their ability to grow.

Indeed, if we want to understand trees and whales, my first guideline would be that, because they are so large, the rules for cellular homeostasis are different at that scale. The things which allow us or lobsters to live for long times are not the things which allow whales or trees to live for long times.

We are failing to sufficiently fund longevity research, and the basic science and engineering needed to enable it.

We are spending a ton of money on healthcare (analogous to the trains), and almost nothing on the root cause of most of these health problems.

The reason the fable is effective is that it frames aging as an adversary, which makes it much easier to understand the necessity of spending resources to defeat it.

Bostrom would say that your concern that aging and cancer are intertwined is akin to a scientist seeing that the scale is impenetrable to all known materials, and then giving up.

Somehow, whales live hundreds of years, and trees live thousands. What's different about their biology that accounts for this? Why aren't their bodies wracked with cancer?

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