The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant (2005) | Hacker News Reader

The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant (2005)

nickbostrom.com

57 pointsforloop38 comments

If you agree with the sentiments in this piece, then the best way to help make the end of aging come about in the real world is to materially support ongoing early-stage research into the repair of the known causes of aging. The best way to do that is to make a donation to the SENS Research Foundation, an organization with a stellar track record of helping to unblock languishing fields of research - such as senescent cell clearance - and convincing other funding sources to join in or strike out on their own in the resulting research programs:

http://sens.org

http://sens.org/donate

Personally, while I'm entirely in favor of all reasonable efforts to eliminate aging, and I think it quite likely that SENS could buy us more years, maybe even centuries, I don't think SENS is a complete solution to the problem of mortality. Not least of which because if we eliminate aging but not mortality, the leading causes of death will become accidents, and people are no less dead when hit by a bus.

Plus, SENS eliminates the hard boundary at ~120, but doesn't ensure that we actually get there, and I don't relish the whack-a-mole fight against a thousand random diseases (even if we sensibly prioritize those lower than eliminating aging).

So, personally, I'd suggest donating at least as much to to efforts like MIRI rather than (or in addition to) SENS. My main hope for SENS is that it will buy us enough years for MIRI to give us a trillion more.

According to estimates I've seen, if accidents are the only cause of death and we maintain our current accidental death rate, we get an average lifespan of about a thousand years. Assuming people become more cautious, it could extend to five thousand.

To actually achieve that we'd need to be good with infectious diseases, cancer, acquired auto-immune disorders, etc. But a lot of this stuff hits older people harder anyway.

So I'm thinking I'll stick with SENS and related efforts for now, and if I make it through the next century or two, I'll have another millennium or two to support mind upload research.

One day, an anti-dragonist on a speaking tour visited a town. When he arrived, most of the town's inns were already full, and he had to make do with a small room in a small in in a run-down part of the town.

The next morning, he stood outside the inn on his soap box and told people about how the dragon could be defeated. A small crowd gathered around him. When he had finished speaking, a woman asked: "My children are hungry. My husband went off to war against the tigers and never came back. How does killing the dragon help them?"

"Well, they too will one day be fed to the dragon!"

"But they are hungry now. My baby is very weak. She cries all the time. Even if she doesn't die, she's going to grow up stunted."

"I'm sure you can find a way. Anyway, I'm here to talk about the dragon, it's..."

Another interrupted him: "My son was killed by the king's men three weeks ago. They laughed as they cut him down. No one will hear my case."

"Well, I'm sure they had a good reason. Your son was probably a criminal."

Another said: "My family beats me because I don't want to marry the man they chose for me. Right now, I wouldn't mind being eaten."

"Listen. I'm not interested in the problems of you little people. They're not my problems, and anyway, you're probably lying, or exaggerating, or just not trying hard enough. But I'm scared of the dragon, because the dragon's going to eat everyone, including me. So we should concentrate on that, don't you agree?"

And the people rolled their eyes and walked away.

Few people die of hunger or being shot by police (Seriously, that is your example?). Yes, even in Africa. (Think about the implications of a global life expectancy of 70+, and African life expectancies ranging from 47-74, and 59 average.)

Yes, we can take preventable diseases as an example instead, if you prefer.

That sentiment was already expressed in the article, in the form of the tigers and snakes. There are far too many small-scale distractions that people find appealing to focus on, whether because they seem more approachable or because they're the actual culprit in the death of specific people.

Hunger and diseases are not "small-scale distractions".

Every year about 3 million children under five die of hunger-related causes. Is that not another dragon, one that specializes in babies and toddlers? If this dragon is easier and cheaper to slay than the other, why not fight it first?

And 3 million of malaria, and 38 million due to aging. Enormous sums are spent on removing the former, very little on removing the latter. None of the priorities are correct, and it isn't even a matter of resources going to one or the other to get it done first - it's a matter of convincing people to direct more than the present tiny fraction of a fraction of a fraction of overall resources to these goals.

Early stage medical research funding and programs aimed at prevention of poverty are both small potatoes in comparison to the throughput of the alcohol industry or the professional sports edifice, for example. In a world in which the beer and the circuses are a massive expenditure, there is plenty of room to convince more funding for things that actually matter without taking from one beneficial program to prioritize another.

I'm all in favour of funding for anti-aging research if the money gets taken out of our beer and circuses budget. What I object to is the way the article insists that aging is some kind of low-hanging fruit we could pick if only we realized it, and describes all other problems in the world as distractions.

Depends on what approach you favor to fight the dragon. I tend to favor solutions that simultaneously solve those problems as well, along with many others. However, if you primarily favor the SENS approach, then I certainly agree that hunger is a large-scale orthogonal problem that needs proportionally large attention.

Disease, on the other hand, is not a single problem, and does not have a single solution. Any one individual disease is far smaller of a problem. (Even cancer, though the research on SENS is will likely need to address that one anyway in the course of figuring out how to eliminate cell death without creating cancer.)

Everything I've read on the topic of aging suggests that it too, is not a single problem with a single solution. There is no "senescence switch" that can be turned off. Our bodies break down in a myriad of ways, and to "kill the dragon", we have to deal with all of them. This is a massive sleight of hand on part of this article: describing the fix for aging as a single event.

False-dichotomy much??

Every single day, we give birth to ~400,000 new people. All of them will most certainly die -- many of them after a difficult, heart-rending stint on this planet.

Allowing people to live longer (while an admirable goal, to be sure) doesn't improve the overall human experience at all. The same % of us will still live in poverty (and most likely that % would be even higher).

Before making people live longer... we should get better at providing for the folks who are already here.

This dude is like the guy that tried to convince everyone that killing the dragon was a bad idea...

This technology isn't a luxury. The vigor of youth and the wisdom of age underlie all of human flourishing. Whatever meager good we manage to achieve in the world flows from these things.

The first world wouldn't be doing the third world any good by forgoing this type of research. Far to the contrary.

If people had thousand-year life spans they might take a greater interest in what is going to happen to Earth ecology further out than 2050. Right now, thinking about 2050 is considered to be taking a 'long-term' view - it is anything but that.

Biological death is like a dragon that kills a bunch of people every day, but which can be defeated with technology if society makes the investment.

I just saved you from reading 5000 words waiting for the point.

Too late for me but future generations of HN readers thank you!

On one hand, I am in favor of people striving to increase longevity and maybe even eliminate death.

On the other hand, I view organizations such as SENS as nothing more than "wizards" of the past who promised kings that if they drank the blood of their foes or consumed gold, they would find eternity.

I think, for me at least, the comparison of death to a dragon is a poor one. Death is not some malignant entity that causes harm. It is, now, and for the foreseeable future, the reality for all living creatures. I understand people are afraid of it, but I think the real dragon is the fear of death, not death itself.

> As he strode to the podium, a small boy yelled out from the audience: “The dragon is bad!” ... "The dragon is bad and it eats people"

Sometimes I wonder if the only thing between us and widespread support for ending mortality is someone standing up and stating the obvious for everyone to hear: "Death is bad!"

We see high-profile people acting as spokespeople for various health-related causes. Where are the high-profile people calling for an end to death? Not just the people that scientists and engineers will listen to, but the people that everyone will listen to?

But what would happen if we actually succeeded in preventing aging and death? Death is, as far as I can tell, not an accident or some kind of cosmic tragedy. It's the constant, forced renewal that makes biological and social evolution possible.

Of course I'd love to live more than a paltry few decades, and I'm desperately afraid of losing my loved ones someday. But to just end death - assuming we had the means - would be robbing our descendants of their birthright and put the brakes on the main force for human adaptation. I honestly believe that the death of individuals serves a key role in the health of our species as a whole.

Please go read the article again, and think carefully about what you're advocating for. Why do you believe that? What, precisely, is death buying us as a species that's worth 150000 lives ended every single day? In what way are we incapable of "renewal" without it? And wouldn't you prefer to solve those problems some other way? Wouldn't that be a wonderful problem to have?

Death is an accident: it's the result of an evolutionary process that selects for reproduction but pointedly not for longevity.

And we've already curtailed many of the large-scale forces of evolution, for the better. We go to great lengths to help people survive who would have simply died if born mere hundreds of years ago, let alone thousands of years ago. Would you let them die for being "unfit", so that evolution works more efficiently?

If the cure was available within your lifetime, in reality rather than in a hypothetical, would you really choose not to take it? Why? What would you possibly have to gain by doing so? You mentioned not wanting to lose your loved ones; presumably they wouldn't want to lose you either.

But if you feel so strongly about dying, nobody's stopping you. I certainly don't think it's sensible to force anyone to accept a cure for mortality. On the other hand, attempting to prevent others from creating and using such a cure would be tantamount to mass murder.

Please, think very carefully about the implications of what you're advocating before repeating the romanticisms that have sprung up around death. Death is bad. Aging kills a hundred thousand people a day, and other causes kill another fifty thousand. Let's make it stop, and the sooner the better.

>Sometimes I wonder if the only thing between us and widespread support for ending mortality is someone standing up and stating the obvious for everyone to hear: "Death is bad!"

No. What's needed for widespread support is a clear idea of what the world looks like after death, which gives people a clearly imaginable goal of a desirable possible world to pull towards.

First, that was an amazing story and extremely well written! Second, the analogy it represents and your critique afterwards were fabulous! Kudos to you sir!

It's by Nick Bostrom[0].

He's the same guy that wrote 'Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies'[1]; which is reportedly the book which 'alerted' Elon Musk to the dangers of AI.

---

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Bostrom

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superintelligence:_Paths,_Dange...

I hope this day does come about, when we have slain the dragon, for the rich and poor alike. But there is one huge challenge we must solve first, where do we put those extra 100,000 people every day? How do we clothe them, or more importantly feed them?

Watching the first half of torchwood "Miracle Day" was both enlightening and frightening in that regard.

That's the real problem we need to solve first

There is no overpopulation and no realistic prospect of it. It is a myth, a mistaken belief arising as a consequence of the fundamental Malthusian misunderstanding of human action and economics - that what is now is what will be in the future, the false prediction of stasis rather than technological progress and change, the constant creation of new resources and more efficient use of old ones. There is inhumanity and kleptocracy and poverty in plenty in this world, and much could be done about it, but those issues are not a function of the number of people involved. They are a function of societal organization, of disuse of resources, and individual willingness to let evil be done. All of that takes place in the midst of plentiful resources, were they actually being used.

Demographic Consequences of Defeating Aging: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3192186/

Too many people? No, too many Malthusians: http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/7723

Superlongevity Without Overpopulation: https://books.google.com/books?id=EakLzDV-xJ0C&pg=PA169&lpg=...

The Eternal Return of Overpopulation: http://reason.com/archives/2010/10/19/the-eternal-return-of-...

> There is no overpopulation and no realistic prospect of it.

If everyone stopped dying, there's a very real prospect of this occurring. Unchecked, it results in the population equivalent of compound interest: when combined with our current population growth rate of 1.1%, we end up with a projected population in 100 years to over 46 billion.

Even Japan, with their currently negative growth rate of -.14%, would experience sudden and staggering (for them) population growth rate of upwards of .6%.

To address the Malthusian argument: could we alter our behaviors to reduce the birth rate to mitigate the population growth caused by "slaying the dragon"? Definitely.

Could we potentially find a way to support humanity's exponentially growing energy and dietary needs sustainably? For a little while (there are hard limits[1] to how much more energy we can create while limited to the Earth).

Could we convince everyone to cope with an even higher population density? That one's harder.

The real problem is that most of these hurdles aren't technological. They're sociological - a place where we have historically advanced much more slowly; the eradication of death worldwide couldn't tolerate slowness. China's current condition is a great example of how hard it is to impose checks on population growth.

All that said, there's an even more fundamental question: could we find a way to prevent an asteroid from hitting earth and wiping out all benefits of "slaying the dragon"? Unless something major changes, no, we could not. In my opinion, this is more important than creating any form of superlongevity. It's the difference between the continuation of humanity and our extinction.

The Earth has a ticking clock, and we don't know the position of the hands. What will we do with the time we have?

[1] http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic-scale-e...

That seems a bit like putting the cart before the horse, doesn't it? Solving a side effect of a cure before the cure itself is solved? I imagine it's a lot less difficult to figure out what to do with overpopulation - especially if those people are healthy, vigorous adults, which is kind of the point of this fable - than it is to figure out how to negate aging.

It's not a side effect of the cure; it's a problem we're facing today. The earth is in the middle of a cosmic shooting gallery which could end any population on earth at any point in the future. We're going to quickly run up against some hard limits on how much energy we can extract from the sun and earth based on our current growth rates.

Ultimately, for humanity to survive this planet, we will need to expand. Even with all Malthusian predictions aside, humanity's existence is up against a ticking clock whose hands we can't even see.

I agree with your last paragraph; we're putting all of our collective eggs in one basket, and we need to branch out.

However, if we eliminate "old and infirm" as a Very Large social category by making our species effectively immortal and perpetually healthy, then our efficiency as a species goes way, way up.

Older people feel better. Our species becomes stronger and more capable. We get to colonize other planets sooner. Everybody wins.

No, we solve that one second, when there is actually a reason to solve it. Step one is ending the ongoing holocaust. Step 2 is finding room for the refugees.

Would you have argued that absent provocation the Allied powers should have done nothing to stop Nazi persecution of Jews, Gypsies, and homosexuals because (and this was true) no nation was willing to take in the refugees? No. Priority #1 is stopping the ongoing slaughter of 100,000 people _per day_.

This is one of the rare cases that Godwin's Law does not apply, because the magnitude of the atrocity of mortality is if anything larger, and ongoing. And if it is less lacking in malicious intent, it is certainly not lacking for the casual malice of indifference.

Extra? Those people were already somewhere before they died. We'll put them where they already were. First World countries have declining populations, more so when you factor out immigration. What overpopulation crisis?

Extra, as in there are (using real world numbers now - 7.6 billion people estimated in 2015, .85% crude death rate per year) 170,000 more people tomorrow than there would have normally been. At the end of the year, that would be 6.2 million additional people who we would not have to normally support, whose place would have been taken by the new births every year.

6.2 million doesn't seem like much (a little less than creating and populating a New New York City), but I believe it's fair to say that the number of children which are produced won't change too much (barring outside forces), resulting in the population equivalent of compound interest.

In 100 years, this means the planet will be supporting (somewhow) more than 17 billion people.

Population is growing exponentially already, and that means there are many more young people than old people. Consequently, extending the lives of old people has a much less significant effect than reducing the birth rate.

Urbanization, good retirement systems, voluntary birth control, education and economic opportunities for women, and lower child mortality are all proven ways of lowering birth rates. Many developed nations hare having children well under replacement rates.

Even if there was a technology that halted aging and let you live indefinitely (barring accidents), there's no way that treatment could be given to everyone.

For all you know, the technology already exists in some military research lab but is being kept secret.

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