Everytime I read about longevity research and how many people are in favor of it I can't stop thinking about this speech.
And one of the endings of Cyberpunk 2077.
Would I like to live a thousand years? Yes, with the obvious caveats.
Would the world be a better place if the technology for living a thousand years existed? Absolutely not, at least not at first, and certainly not today. There’s a great many people around right now who’s primary redeeming quality is their impending mortality - it’s not just science that advances one funeral at a time.
Specific to:
> all it really means is saving more lives from more things that kill them.
No, that’s not all it really means, not in our society, not in our time. As Ted Chiang put it, “Most of our fears or anxieties about technology are best understood as fears or anxiety about how capitalism will use technology against us,” and that’s also the case here: the outcome of this technology isn’t that my grandma lives to 150, it’s that Vladimir Putin lives to 150. If my grandma needs to die at 90 so we don’t have immortal god-emperors - if I have to die at 90 - then so be it. Some day we may live in a world where longevity technology is an unalloyed good, but until that day, we don’t get to just put the good stuff on the ledger and ignore the bad stuff.
Ha ha, that's funny (but not nice — but I like it).
Most notably Rupert Murdoch- while I do not wish death on the man, it's certainly true that he has a grip on the hearts and minds of people and often uses his media empire to convince people to go against their own interests.
He will be replaced by someone similar, but seldom are people as effective as their predecessors.
Well, yes, that’s his job. Do you think that news media exists to inform you?
Obviously they exist for that purpose, studying the foundations of news media and journalism... for even a day... shows concisely that it was painfully created for this reason.
I'm not a real believer in the "Great Man" theory of history - I think the ground needs to be set for an event for it to happen, I don't think the will of one person is truly sufficient to bend history - but there are certain people who you would have a very, very hard time replacing in a given scenario.
Rupert Murdoch is definitely one, and Donald Trump is another - without getting into specific judgements of the man, there's nobody else within easy reach who could do what he's done, and I don't really see his movement surviving him. He's a particular person for a particular moment, and it's hard to see anyone else doing what he has.
“a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” – Max Planck
1) Possible solutions aren't binary (true vs false) but trinary (true vs false vs indeterminate)
2) The devil is always in the details. The world is fucking complex and and a first order approximation isn't going to get you there anymore. We've had 100kyrs to solve problems, we got most of the simple ones down (appearing simple does not mean simple)
2.5) A clique wouldn't be a clique if it wasn't something practically everyone knows and can recite but is not something people demonstrate an actual understanding of by observing their actions. (Just like LLMs: just because you can repeat some knowledge does not mean you're able to (ineptitude), or have the will to (malice), use the knowledge in any meaningful way)
If you want to sacrifice your life for a better world, that is your decision. But do not force that decision to other people.