Dreams of improving the human race are no longer science fiction | Hacker News Reader

Dreams of improving the human race are no longer science fiction

economist.com

25 pointsrbanffy32 comments

While life extension with exercise, supplements, and what have you can just be a wasted effort because these people die anyway with variable lifespans in the normal range like the rest of us, someone needs to maintain a list of sane things we should try just because they make our lives better, so that people don’t waste their lives with bad info, e.g. people eating mostly carbs in a blue zone living longer, which has been proven to be B.S.

For example:

- Walk a lot if possible, or do some sort of low impact sustained activity that involves as much of the body as you can.

- Reduce carbs- higher ketone levels can reduce Alzheimer’s.

- Reduce processed food- MTHFR mutations and too much folic acid enriched flour can cause ADD symptoms.

- Eat salmon/sardines, broccoli, carrots, blueberries, spinach, with squeeze of lemon or lime- get omegas, vitamins, nutrients, healthy carbs.

- Some meds, multi-vitamins, and supplements can screw you up depending on the person- they might be causing or multiplying aggression, flight of ideas, paranoia, etc. and it can take years to undo some damage even partially.

- Supplements may be needed especially as you get older- like calcium and potassium.

- Always keep a watch out for answers- e.g. one day this popped up on HN about a possible cure for Crohn’s disease: https://www.crick.ac.uk/news-and-reports/2024-06-05_major-ca...

- Do your best to get sufficient sleep but just get up if you can’t sleep for a long time rather than stressing about it.

- Brush and floss your teeth.

- Be social, but don’t force it, and reduce dysfunction.

- Go for it, but don’t worry about it.

There are a lot of people working in this area. One of the most prominent is Peter Attia.

Paraphrasing Slate Star Codex from memory: I don't want it because then everyone will be pressured to take the most invasive "improvements" they can get, or risk being outcompeted, and then after the whale fall we'll still be miserable, but also with brain bugs.

For that to work, we need to evolve past competition and remove the fear of being outcompeted.

which makes no sense on it’s face, as as evolution (and nature itself) is fundamentally competitive. you might as well say we should ‘compile ourselves past compilers’.

Laughed out loud at that, thanks.

Artificial selection need not be competitive in the same way that natural selection is. And even if it were, competition between genes doesn't necessarily equate to competition between individuals.

And certainly there is no competitive or evolutionary advantage for one person (or geneset) to convince a naive group of individuals that is what is going on while they pull the strings in the background.

Or a person or set of individuals to pretend to be going along with said program (if said program is honest) while actually abusing/manipulating the program to benefit them eh? [https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/health-family/late...] among dozens (hundreds?) of others.

Ignore the incentives of reality at your peril.

Competitive societies have more and more serious mental health issues. What program are you referring to? When I mentioned evolving past competition, I didn't say anything about gene-based evolution, but social evolution, where we consciously place a higher value on cooperation over competition.

Gene based evolution is constant. There is no way to avoid it; any more than it’s possible to avoid a compiler (somewhere) for any decent sized computer program, even if you’re writing in Python.

So what you’re describing is not what you think you’re describing at all.

Those ‘non-competitive’ societies are actually just those where the competition has been decided through structural elements which are not currently being contested to the same extent. Because someone either ‘won’ the war already, or the ‘war’ is more subtle and manipulative rather than being out in the open.

If you happen to be on the ‘winning’ side of that war, then that looks great. If you’re on the losing side, you won’t get much of a chance to notice or fight about it. And what cannot be ‘seen’, ‘doesn’t exist’.

War, after all, only can occur when someone is able to actually fight - and can see a reason to want to.

Because in either one, someone is making the choices (explicitly, or implicitly!) which decide whose genes actually end up spreading.

Complaining about mental health issues in competitive societies is like complaining about people getting maimed in war. And if people just stopped trying to fight back, then hey, world peace! (Once whatever Emperor conquered first won, of course)

Society is the increasingly abstract and confusing game we build on top of all this so we’re not all writing the equivalent of assembly - aka Ghenghis Khan’ng each other. But it’s all the same at the end of the day - the computer (aka reality) runs whatever instructions gets spit out (aka genes). And whoever decides that, ‘wins’.

Okay. But if social norms lead to almost everyone mating randomly and couples having the same number of kids on average, then what happens to genetic evolution?

Do you think that is what is happening? Because the statistics definitely don’t agree.

No, no one suggested that's happening now. It would require a lot of social change.

And what’s in it for the various factions to want that?

The advancement and flourishing of the human species. But that's beside the point. What rbanffy suggests might be absurd, but not because it somehow violates the laws of biology.

I don’t see any point in human history where what is being described matches any stable human behavior. So while not impossible, it is probably unlikely eh?

And think of what that would actually mean, and if you’d even want it - you’d be as likely to match up with a random Chinese 60 year old, or a 13 year old African tribe member, or 30 something European (while being one of those other two) or whatever.

I can’t think of any sane person that would be willing to mate with someone truly randomly. And if it wasn’t truly random, who gets to decide on the criteria? Because that is exactly where the moral hazard comes in.

> you’d be as likely to match up with a random Chinese 60 year old, or a 13 year old African tribe member, or 30 something European

Any such system would probably match people within the same generation. At a future point humans may be far more ethnically homogeneous. Or reproduction may be separated from romance - you donate to the seed bank but sex is a sterile act. There's lots of possibilities. I admit most look unlikely; but like, if that's what it takes to thrive at a galactic level, then it's simply unlikely we never reach that level. But let's not pretend that this is some sort of fundamental biological impossibility.

you’re literally the only one talking about impossibility. hard pass.

> [evolving past competition] makes no sense ... as evolution is fundamentally competitive

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44208547

You seem to have some trouble with words and concepts. And what seems to be a - creepy? - obsession with people losing their individual reproductive autonomy for some nebulous ‘greater good’.

Taking a hammer and using it to smash my hand for no individual benefit is unlikely and makes no sense, but certainly not impossible. Everyone on the planet doing it all at once, continuously, is also technically not impossible - but is never going to happen. For reasons that are very good for humanity in the long run.

Such as it is with evolution.

Not unless the borg take over anyway. Which we all should hope never, ever, happens.

There's no need for that hostility. I'm just spitballing charitable interpretations of rbanffy's statement. And you have pushed impossibility arguments e.g.

> Gene based evolution is constant. There is no way to avoid it

Regardless of what humans do, gene based evolution is constant. And even if we go full cloning - there is still gene based evolution which can (and certainly would) occur even in humans because humans work like humans. Regardless of what we pretend to work as.

Which is back to my original point. You can’t ‘compile your way out of compilers’ either. The entire discussion is just ignoring actual reality in a way that makes no actual sense to even discuss.

If there was a free lunch, biology would have taken it.

That's unconvincing given how the modern environment is so different than the environment that we evolved in.

Interestingly this is Ted Kaczysnki's argument for what will inevitably happen with genetic engineering of humans

https://archive.ph/uFfuK

Why science fiction? The Nazi plans to clean the race by killing handicapped childs were real, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_hygiene and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aktion_T4 .

These dreams of improving the race can get nightmares very quickly. Lets not repeat that.

Nowhere in the article did it advocate for forcibly killing or sterilizing people. If your objections are over selecting for desirable traits, what are your thoughts on screening for down syndrome and other genetic diseases? Are those also bad because "These dreams of improving the race can get nightmares very quickly. Lets not repeat that"? Is it better to ban such genetic screening lest we turn into nazis?

modify, not "improve", perhaps speciate, perhaps become like insects with physicly different specialised castes, perhaps fail to understand the complecity and end up unable to outperform natural selection, but most definitly the game is on and the game is open ended, and the technology is fairly strait forward ,useing tools that do not require the ulra high precision and refinement of elecro/mechanical technologys, so containment and control of bio/genetic technology will be impossible. the main constraint on unhinged out of control developments is that iterating will remain slow, and require carefull planing and methodical implimentation over generational time spans, but costs will be low, and any sufficiently motivated small group/company/country can join the"fun", which is another point, this will be more "art" that science, as there is no equivalent to other types of engineering, so cloning will be atractive, but will present serious problems if large numbers of cloned indivuals are attempted. I leave out ethics and morality and refer anyone to the blank stare response that will be given by the types of people who are, right now, giving, while they go about realising there ideal society.

> Having passed through the “gateway to God” opened by psychedelic drugs, the German tech billionaire wanted to

I closed the article right about there.

Thank you for braving the undiscovered country and reporting back as a warning to future travelers. I too shall journey elsewhere.

Did we invent public education?

Ha, no, just a rant against outdated regulations that are annoying to tech bro billionaire on a mission from God that he met during an acid trip (or was it burning man?)

Not sure if from 1998, or satyre?

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