You Are Going to Die
opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com
opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com
Even though I was raised in the U.S., I find the American approach to the elderly a bit bizarre. My family is from Bangladesh. My grandparents moved in with their children when they were too old to take care of themselves. Yet here in the U.S., the popular culture strongly pushes back against multi-generational living. So we end up with a fairly bizarre situation: a country that is in crisis about how to take care of retirees, and also faces the challenge of middle class couples not wanting to have children because of, among other things, the enormous costs of child care. I feel like one problem is a built in solution to the other problem.
I'm not trying to criticize anyone's lifestyle choices. But to an extent our lifestyle choices are cultural. See, e.g., the cultural attitudes about young people living with their parents into their 20's in places like Spain versus the U.S. I think one thing the economy and the retirement crisis will force is a changing attitude towards multi-generational living. We're facing a future with fewer workers per retiree. At this instant it's a zero-sum game: we either tax working people more so the elderly can maintain independent lifestyles, or we reduce benefits to older people and force them to depend more on their children. Either way, the efficiencies that are inherent in multi-generational living will be an attractive way to deal with the smaller than expected pie that must be split amongst more people.
It is messed up and you are right it is cultural and also financial. Here are a few reasons I can think of:
* The sense of independence and individualism, be self sufficient, don't depend on other, keep to your own business.
* The health care system is messed up. Having health care tied to the workplace is all kinds of fucked up. Not being able to add parents as regular "dependents" to the health care plans is also messed up. I would expect these from a developing country not from US.
* Increased mobility. Jobs become more transient and families are moving more, sometimes across country. Now the elderly parents have a hard choice, stay in a place they know and have friends or follow the family of the child (who now has to support and provide for a large extended family).
* Living quality expectations. The idea that "if you make this much salary, you fit in this social group and are expected to have this standard of living". Like say someone making $50K taking care of 4 elderly people and 2 kids might have to scale down on the food they eat, vacations they take, type of cars they can buy, parts of town they can afford to live.
As someone who has spent a lot of time thinking about this, I feel that the status quo will be remembered as a peculiar little historical blip.
It is so outrageous to me that my kids' grandparents are lonely as heck wasting away in their 55 & older retirement community in an inhospitable desert wasteland at the same time I have spent literally tens of thousands of dollars on child care. Whenever I see other grandparents actively grandparenting, I am filled with jealous resentment.
I'm mexican so it's normal to have multi-generational homes but I always wondered why white people don't do this more.
Certainly when I was a kid I was usually watched by my grandparents, great-grandparents, aunts, and so on. Only very rarely was I watched by sitters.
Part of it is modern mobility. Parents may live thousands of miles away from the grandparents, and elders are working in their own careers longer nowadays.
I already see signs of this "peculiar little historical blip" ending. I know a lot of adults who are married and/or have children who live with their parents or other relatives. I know a lot of grandparents who babysit their grandchildren multiple days per week. It seems to be fairly common among low income families, and I think it's becoming considerably more common among middle-class families.
I'm not judging but genuine question.. have you ever brought up the potential for co-habitation or discussed this point with them or your SO? Maybe it could work out.
Professional group care facilities are also a symptom of the steady loss of purchasing power for the middle class and those who have less means. We can point fingers at the baseness of the decision to put relatives into these institutions, but the alternatives of home-based care are almost exclusively available to the wealthy, so it ends up being a class-based critique that could do more to empathize with the financial and emotional toll these decisions take.
American culture is not perfect in this regard at all, and I think your point about a general stigma against multigenerational living is well-made. I also think that it's more complex than selfishness or corruption. I'm sure though that we could find some examples of people who prove me wrong and are just assholes to their grandparents, but I don't think that's representative of the general population.
I don't know if I'd consider heart attacks mundane, they've just become that given western diets. heart attack used to be rarer 100 years ago, but now a combination of longer life and diets that have more negative cardiac impact leads to the growth of heart attack and the subsequent research and improvement in cardiac intervention that can be seen in healthcare today. We've made them mundane through our collective wild ass lifestyle choices.
| also faces the challenge of middle class couples not
| wanting to have children because of, among other
| things, the enormous costs of child care. I feel
| like one problem is a built in solution to the other
| problem.
| we either tax working people more so the elderly can maintain
| independent lifestyles, or we reduce benefits to older
| people and force them to depend more on their children.
[Queue, "they made their bed, now they should lay in it!" responses by extreme libertarians.]
Obviously relying on kids isn't an option for everyone, but I think it's a mutually beneficial option for a larger group of people than seriously consider it.
This is coming to other parts of the world too. Even in societies like India, neglecting the elderly is setting a trend where most urban middle class couples either settle for one kid or in some cases now don't even bother if they are having medical problems having kids.
Human beings need motivation for doing things. For a while having kids was a matter of pride in societies back. And kids were best retirement and old age guarantees. That has changed, if you all have to face when you grow old is a old age home- Why bother spending crazy money on an additional member in the family? Kids these days are expensive, rude, mean, disobedient, selfish and are likely to dump you in an old age home when you come of age. So why bother having them?
Though societies like India and China are facing population problems, I'm pretty darn sure its pretty much a momentary thing and the trend is likely to be reversed very soon.
Also things like Alimony, abuse of divorce, dowry and domestic violence laws is scaring away men from marriage big time.
In some decades you likely to have a situation where the government may just offer tax breaks or incentives for just getting married and having kids.
So, same as always, then :)
We're afraid of old people fucking.
We're afraid to know our parents had sex. We're afraid for our kids to know we have sex. We're afraid of what happens when we get old and wrinkly. We're afraid that when we're old and wrinkly, nobody taut and sexy will want to have sex with us. We're secretly afraid when we're old and wrinkly we won't be able to get it up. And, of course, we're terrified that our widowed grandparents might be having sex with other widowed grandparents.
I think the whole youth and beauty thing falls out of this.
Yes, you're right but that is more of a side-effect of why we value youth and beauty: our primary drive for sex is to reproduce, and there is a nice bell-curve on the age of a person as to when that is optimal, made clearly obvious by their outward appearance of youth and beauty.
Plenty of older people have sex, and I've heard anecdotally that retirement homes are a good place for finding a partner.
Clearly you and I are not watching the same pornography.
> Plenty of older people have sex
Sure. I'm just positing that the retirement home phenomenon is exacerbated by our cultural fear of finding out about this.
Right now, the primary barriers to its widespread addoption are still probably incredulity and religious objections, but I think those would quickly fall by the wayside if it didn't cost as much as a house.
Perhaps an X-Prize style competition to develop more cost-effective technologies and techniques?
Alcor has published a cost break-down http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/CostOfCryonicsTables.txt and explained it at http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/CostOfCryonics.html
A big chunk of cash is spent keeping a team on-site while waiting for the person to die. Assisted suicide for the terminally ill would help reduce costs significantly.
Oh come on, quoting the cheapest price isn't fair or realistic. How about showing us something more representative, or at least quoting the most expensive rate as well?
I didn't quote the cheapest price. I quoted what I pay. I have no idea how much older people pay for life insurance. If you looked at their website, you'd see that Alcor dues are $800/year. Neuropreservation is $80k and whole-body is $200k (http://alcor.org/BecomeMember/scheduleA.html). This may sound like a lot, but the standard way to pay is to buy life insurance. When you die, the policy pays Alcor. You can see the cost break-down in my GP comment.
Alcor is expensive. Cryonics Institute is the budget option. CI dues are $120/year and whole-body preservation costs $35k. CI members usually pay with life insurance as well. CI can charge less because they have less staff. Their research budget is practically zero. Most importantly, they won't camp at your deathbed. IIRC, Eliezer is signed up with CI and pays around $300/year. That's the cheapest price possible.
It's often said that getting cryopreserved is the second-worst thing that can happen to you. Cryonics gives you a small chance of living a much longer life. I'll be the first to admit that it's highly unlikely to work. But for myself and many others, the expected value calculation heavily favors signing up. After all, consider the alternative: You die slightly wealthier.
The alternative is that you do a little bit more with your life, because you don't spend $120/year and all the mental energy for planning your after-life.
If cryonics works, this is the sort of evidence you'd expect to see today. Demanding a revival doesn't make sense, because cryonics relies on the vast gap between preservation tech and revival tech.
> Defying death will always be lucrative
As it should be! I'll pay literally every cent I have not to die.
> the actual demonstration of results will always be forthcoming
This is nothing but speculation on your behalf.
Yes, Cryonics is speculation - no one claims otherwise. But you're also speculating in saying that it will never work, which is what I understood from your statement.
You're very likely right. But the upside of Cryonics actually working would be worth a lot to most people, if they'd stop to think about it, and afaik might very well make a sensible investment.
The expected value of lotteries is less than the ticket price, so it's not a sensible investment, if we assume "sensible investment" means maximizing expected value on every dollar spent (which is what you seem to be doing implicitly. Feel free to suggest another definition).
On the other hand, people will tend to put very high utility on living longer, and if cryonics works, the potentially vast number of added years is amazingly valuable.
Run an expected value computation on this, and because of the crazy upside of cryonics, you can have very low levels of confidence that it will actually work, and it will still be worth it from an expected value point of view.
That you've managed to convince yourself that p > 0 with cryonics is just evidence that snake oil production is a better investment.
In that case, do you have any reason to think it's 0? My main evidence to the contrary is:
1. A smart group of people say that the probability is > 0: (Eliezer Yudkowsky, Robin Hanson, various others at LessWrong). They have nothing to gain from selling me on it, so I don't think they're biased.
2. It seems to me that future medical advances are pretty likely (based on history), including advances leading to being able to fix practically anything that kills people today. And it seems pretty sensible that cryonic preservation basically stops all processes at the moment of death. Combine the two, and it makes sense to me it might be possible to revive people.
I'm not saying the probability is > 50%, I'm saying it can be < 1%, but still over 0, and still be worth it.
> I'm not saying the probability is > 50%, I'm saying it can be < 1%, but still over 0, and still be worth it.
Well, we're simply going to have to disagree. I don't find endorsement by smart people compelling. We have plenty of evidence that medicine can extend lifespans, but we have no evidence that we'll figure out a safe way to revive someone cryogenically frozen and no reason to believe extension will reach infinity. If they only solve one of the two problems you're looking at wasting a lot of money on a very strange burial or a very disappointing revival.
If p < 1% but > 0 and it's worth it to you, great. But don't kid yourself about it being an investment. It's a huge gamble. And I retain the right to consider gamblers suckers.
That's the nicest thing someone's ever said to me on HN :)
"Well, we're simply going to have to disagree."
Yes, we will. Not that I've signed up to cryonics or anything yet (still checking how it works from outside the US), but I'm almost convinced that it's worth it. Thanks for another interesting viewpoint on the topic.
It so happens that quite a few rather smart people believe that cryonics has a non-zero chance of success, so if you have some conclusive evidence to the contrary, let's hear it. Otherwise, your uninformed opinion is just that.
I look forward to hearing precisely how you figure I'm going to lose 100% on an investment I'm not making. You're comparing the 100% likely outcome that I do not live forever having spent my money on non-snake oil with the 100% likely outcome that you do not live forever having spent your money on snake oil. The idea that something impossible is going to be more likely because you're spending money on it is just assuming the outcome you want. Unicorns continue not to exist despite every little girl wishing for them. I point out that spending money on unicorn research isn't going to generate them any faster.
So the true death is the information-theoretic death. Does current cryonics technology prevent that? I don't know, but it's a better shot than the alternative.
Here is what I believe instead:
"you" are the countless processes running inside your brain, interacting with each other. When these stop, you're dead. When you're asleep, they interact with each other less, and "you" are reduced. When you're in a coma, they interact with each other much less, and "you" are much reduced. But when you're frozen after your brain activity has stopped, anyone revived out of your body isn't "you" anymore. It'll be someone else with your memories. The only benefit of this would not be to you but to your family and friends (if they're still here) or to projects you're working on but want to have finished even if you won't see the results.
I suppose there's a chance cryonics can be useful, but only if it manages to "preserve" someone before their brain activity stops (which CAN be after the person is clinically dead, e.g. heart stopping != brain dead), and their brain activity continues at a very slow pace, but continues nonetheless.
Assuming as hypothesis that cryonics or some other technology manage to preserve all the information about your mind processes and that we can reinstantiate them in a new substrate, what is exactly the difference?
Exactly what property of these processes is lost when they stop, if hypothetically cryonics stores all the information? There is nothing else!
I think that we have an intuition of having some kind of "ineffable essence", but that's an illusion.
(I could accept that current cryonics is insufficient and that some information is lost in the process, but that is a completely different argument.)
I don't think so, even if information was perfectly copied!; from this point on whatever happens to the first web server might not happen to the second. Therefore they are difference instances.
Same with human cloning. You can make a perfect clone of me, and that person won't be me, just an identical copy, who from now on will have separate experiences than me. If I die first before the clone is made, it still doesn't make a difference; I am not my clone.
Now, if I died first, and a clone is made, you're arguing my information theoretic death is prevented. but nonetheless my clone isn't me. and I can't tell how cryonics preserving my body after I am _dead_, and then repairing my body, is different to cloning. It's basically just cloning but reusing my existing parts, and if that is correct, the revived person is not me.
The property is "process continuity" - as long as some of the processes that form "me" at this moment will be present in the next, I will continue to, at least be some part, me; If all the processes are stopped, then any processes after that point are no longer me.
I am saying there's a difference between processes running on hardware and the hardware itself. I am the emergent property of all the processes that are running in my body.
I can't either, but it might be, we just don't know enough to say for sure. People whose hearts have stopped beating have still been brought back, at what point do you declare that when they're brought back they're a "clone" and not their original selves? Where's the line between physical death and "soul"-death?
The idea of there not being any "process continuity" when someone is frozen just seems to be speculation on your part.
There isn't likely to be process continuity if you are freezing people after they are dead.
On another somber note, even if we could transcribe our consciousness to machines, achieve singularity, etc -- all we do is delay it by another number. The sun is going to burn out, explode an expand, and eventually stars in general will run out of fuel. Is only hope is to change your conscious understanding of life and existence to accept non existence?
10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 > 80
That said, it does seem even if we gain a mind-boggling level of energy manipulation, 10^20..10^40 years is a rough expectation for regular matter, as we know it, to continue to exist.
Absolutely, I can't think of anything worse than living forever. Enjoy this brief period of time you have being alive, and accept that it is finite. The only thing you need to worry about with death is that it doesn't come too early, and to try and avoid it being in absolute agony (if you can).
The real enemy of technical progress is natural complexity of things.
You far underestimate the problem. We are now living in a virtual dark ages compared to what is possible under a proper system of government.
Why wouldn't you pick a proper one?
Don't let depressed assholes like Tim Kreider affect your outlook on life. You'll note that he, at age 45, is right next to the statistically lowest point of self-reported well-being. One day he, like his Mother, will learn to enjoy the good things in life and not look so morbidly at his pending doom.
I think we spend a lot of time and mental energy suppressing the fact of our own eventual decline and death, leading to stress and cognitive dissonance. It's nice to occasionally face the facts directly.
I remember a conversation with my mom a few years back, where she started with something like "If I had died a few years ago." That was unfathomable to me because the thought of losing my parents is something I've always wrestled with and my mom is still very much youthful and carefree despite her advancing age.
Its a great piece that highlights the fact that at sometime we can and do come to terms with the fact that we won't be here forever. It's a sobering thought, but one that gives us perspective on life about the things that matter. In addition, realizing that we are mortal makes us want to leave behind a legacy, whether its a family, a product, or a book, we all want to be remembered for something.
I think we all come to this realization at different points in our lives.
What are YOU doing?
born to die, blink of an eye, gone, become, everything.
This line jumped out at me, as if taken from my own thoughts of the day. I have found, anytime that I am functioning at anything less than 100%, that almost every other human becomes like a jackal. Nonchalantly, politely divesting me of whatever scraps are left of my spirit, dignity or bank account, with a smile.
The same goes for people who are thought to be helpers, like doctors, nurses, counselors, social workers and the like. Human instincts to prey on the weaker seem to trump professional narratives in many cases.
I see this in the way doctors treat my grandfather. I see it in the way well-off members of the family treat poorer. Life is brutal, and as ever, it's we who make it so.
http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violen...
You should make a conscious effort to see this. Otherwise you're going to begin to believe the amygdala-driven "what is the world coming to" type statements.
Getting care for the elderly is nice. Modern medicine is a mixed blessing, where we live long enough to get old with alzheimers and cancer.
Make the most of the years you get, the last one will be bad no matter what you do, unless you die of a heart attack during sex.
And set up your grandparents with Skype or FaceTime or Hangouts, the joy it brings them is beyond measure. Nothing is better for the cost of a device and Internet connectivity.
Not everyone wants to live forever. My grandparents lived to their 80's. My father, who is a bit over 60, considers that to be a very reasonable number, and I feel the same way. I don't want to still be here in 60+ years straining the resources of my daughter's generation.
Death is not a failure of the design. It's an integral part of it.
And that's Stockholm syndrome at its maximum expression.