Hacker News Reader

Comment by jvanderbot | Hacker News Reader

I've always thought eternal life would steal from the next generation if resources are scarce. If your reaction times, intelligence, etc are always good, and your experience and memories get better, it just seems like you'd out compete your kids and younger cohorts. All well and good but basically stops genetic turnover that got us to this point.

OTOH, you'd accumulate uncurable disease, injuries, etc as well. Maybe you become a disease resevoir inside your own growing family. Or you pass on as-yet-unknown genetic anomalies that are unhelpful, and you do so forever.

Granted that's a modern take, and in particular a modern rpg-like take. Regardless though getting rid of oldies seems like a reasonable way to move a species forward if natural selection is driving "forward".

View on HN

OTOH a vast amount of mayhem and madness arises just from each generation's memory being wiped clean. Within three or four generations the earth lacks any sense of what risks came before it, and repeats the same stupid stuff.

If we were managed by the interwar generation, little of what's happening today would be happening today.

That goes both ways.

Lack of experience is critical for risk taking. Even great successes like Jensen Huang have said that if they knew how hard it was going to be, he wouldn't choose his path again.

Memory blocks you from experimentation as much as it protects you from making recurrent mistakes. A species or civilization with too much memory will eventually wither away towards complete inaction and decay.

Yep, it allows you to climb out of local maxima.

Only if it works. Evolution works like this with local fitness maxima and wells of stability favored by entropy. You have to luck out with the right combination of mutations to not only get out of that well but fall into one of lower entropy. Imagine the size of the search space required for something like this. This is why evolution is "slow" in species that live as long as us and quite rapid in things that grow logarithmically by the hour.

There seems to be a balance point with the number of Chesterson's fences. Too many and you are penned in or routed on one vector only. Too few and you are blind.

OTOH same is true for wiping clean habits, prejudices and deeply held wrong beliefs. It's said that science advances one funeral at a time.

If we were managed by the colonial generation, slavery and segregation would still be the norm, only rich white men would be able to vote and a king would still have the final say.

>the earth lacks any sense of what risks came before it

The earth is a bad term here, how about human civilization?

Your DNA, epigenetics, and a ton of other subconscious intelligent processes are well aware of the risks and contain a massive set of tools to overcome them.

The problem? Many of these tools have to run from zero in an egg to work in the changing environment.

> If we were managed by the interwar generation, little of what's happening today would be happening today.

Doubtful. They were the ones who created the world we live in today.

> If your reaction times, intelligence, etc are always good, and your experience and memories get better, it just seems like you'd out compete your kids and younger cohorts.

On the other hand, always being around as a sort of Protector to protect your kids seems like it would generally be good for your genes. (Of course, you'd have to fight off other Protectors who are doing the same...)

One's kids may disagree.

Imagine still having helicopter parents at 50 years old.

My granddad tells the story of the time he left his parents house and they called out "Make sure to turn your burners on".

He was in his 60s....

Once a parent, always a parent, I guess.

Finally mankind can return to it's intended 3-phase form of existence as described by Niven

Not if that protection ended up making your offspring weaker. Some adversity is necessary to develop resilience and self-sufficiency.

This is where being a real parent vs a theoretical one makes a huge difference to your take. After seeing how much damage to their kids people adapted _their_ childhood do, I've started to think that humans should die around 40 with reproduction age being between 10 to 20 - like most other great apes. It's only in increadibly stable environments that waiting for as long as we do for children that it makes sence.

How this number is going to change in the future with exponential growth in the environment is left as an exercise to the reader.

Right, but should your kids get your protection? You can protect them to adulthood now, even your grandkids.

But 1000 generations of unassailable, un-evolving, 40IQ lions doesn't get you to the galaxy.

Hey, maybe this is the fermi paradox.

There's the saying in science that progress happens 'one funeral at a time,' but that's not because older scientists are less intelligent - it's more like they begin to intellectually ossify. Or in the arts, the critics that rejected Matisse's 'Woman With a Hat' weren't stupid, but their thinking had stagnated.

I think we underrate the value of a fresh perspective. People living longer lifespans would dilute that benefit, imo. Sidenote: this is also an underrated issue with LLMs and their application to science - collapsing to single modes of thought over time.

Could you all stop plotting to kill me off >:(

Sounds like an argument for pacing the frontier of geriatric medicine.

> getting rid of oldies seems like a reasonable way to move a species forward

This is the real feature of aging, death, and dying. Progress is measured in funerals, not years. If everyone lived forever, nothing would ever change.

>nothing would ever change

Including our fundamental biology.

If we want a chance at improved, more resilient biology, aging and death have to be a part of that.

Aging and death should be a more discussed and comfortable topic for people. Death and dying is natural, just as is being born.

I mean, "should"?... I don't know. Death is natural, but so is fear of death and not wanting to bring up topics that disturb you.

Fear of death is natural, completely agree. My point is that demystifying death and talking about it openly can help make it a less disturbing topic.

For instance, both of us in this conversation will die someday. It is a guaranteed fact.

The question then becomes: how do we live our lives well in view of that fact?

> I've always thought eternal life would steal from the next generation if resources are scarce.

This is almost the stated intention of longevists.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com