Down with Superstition, Down with Aging! Tuesday, Sep 1 2009
events 6:10 pm
The Singularity Institute (SIAI) is co-sponsoring an evening with Aubrey de Grey in New York on September 22nd, as part of the New York Academy of Science’s Provocative Thinkers 2009 series. There are other talks scheduled this month as well, including Richard Dawkins, who will launch his newest book The Greatest Show on Earth, laying out the evidence that evolution is an incontrovertible fact.
Down with superstition, down with aging!
Also, see Roko’s recent post on “Cure aging or give a small number of disabled people jobs as janitors?”
We shouldn’t have to choose between giving people decent lives today and expanding our knowledge for a better tomorrow. With that said, dismissing immediate human needs for ambitious long-term research screams privilege and arrogance. I think the anti-aging cause would be far better served by treating disabled people with respect rather than condescension. The calculating utilitarian morality and disdain for the species that Roko displays are exactly what people fear from transhumanism and the Singularity. He’s not doing the movement any favors by publishing such comments.
Labeling the image of the disabled janitors “Retards” doesn’t help either.
People have an immediate need not to suffer from heart disease and other deterioration associated with aging. I agree that we should treat disabled people with respect (I guess Roko doesn’t, judging from his “retards” image title), but I certainly do. Calculating utilitarian morality is what people fear? Give me a break. If the numbers work out, then helping the greatest number is most important. Of course, whether or not your numbers work out depend on your expected timeframe and costs of anti-aging research.
You could say that inventing the steam engine screams privilege and arrogance because it has more to do with speculative long-term goals and less with immediate human needs.
For the record, steam engines didn’t come out of some massive research and development program. But look at what I actually typed. It’s the dismissal that screams privilege and arrogance, not the choice itself. I support SENS too. If I ever get money, I plan on donating to combination of immediate and long-term projects.
I stand by what I said about calculating utilitarian morality. We desperately need to avoid any resemblance to sci-fi villains.
> Labeling the image of the disabled janitors “Retards” doesn’t help either.
not my labelling – blogger automatically labelled the image with the name it was saved on my computer as, without me even knowing; having that criticised on the web without my knowledge or consent kind of feels like a breach of personal privacy; the name was intended as a mnemonic for me to easily remember what the image was of so that I could quickly find it in a folder with hundreds of other photos.
Which I guess is a lesson to us in the internet age: the world still operates on old-fashioned principles of sophistry, political correctness and point-scoring, but the new technology exposes your uncensored thoughts out of their proper context to the rest of the world, in a permanently recorded form for eager sophists to bash you with when they don’t want to debate the real issues.
> The calculating utilitarian morality and disdain for the species that Roko displays are exactly what people fear from transhumanism and the Singularity. He’s not doing the movement any favors by publishing such comments.
Yes, down with utilitarianism. We don’t want to do the most good, do we?
As for disdain for the species, there are a lot of humans out there that I am not exactly proud to be of the same species as, but as I said: the only concept goodness that even makes philosophical sense is very much a human one. However much one dislikes certain humans, one must like some other humans more.
It certainly possible to give people who otherwise be completely dependent jobs. Is it possible to cure aging with a SENS approach? No one knows but the record of anti-aging medicine is so far not good. Perhaps, given the uncertainty associated with SENS, the people who picked the organization that trained the janitors were maximizing their expected value.
I don’t see that it’s necessarily rational to give money to the most ambitious organization asking for it.
> Perhaps, given the uncertainty associated with SENS, the people who picked the organization that trained the janitors were maximizing their expected value.
no. NO. NO!!!!!!!
do you even know what “expected value” means? Can you write out the definition in mathematical terms?
Roko, yes yes YES. If the probability of SENS’ success is sufficiently low, it would make sense to pick the janitor organization. Greycat probably does know what expected value means.
For SENS to have less expected value than the janitors would require that their chance of making *any* major anti-aging advance be less than 0.001% or something. But SENS has already found enzymes that can help dissolve amyloid plaques, and Aubrey founded the research program with a groundbreaking theory of mitochondrial aging. There is a reason why top mainstream scientists show up to SENS conferences, and the research program has attracted dozens of extremely bright young researchers.
Roko, I would suggest a dedicated folder for images you intend to use on your blog.
0.001% = 10^-5
That isn’t small enough. 6*10^7 people die per year. Assuming that human civilization will last another 200 years, the difference between SENS and NOT SENS is about 10^10 lives lost. Using the concept of a QUALY (quality adjusted life year), we could say that a disabled person’s QUALY count is increased by 50% by the LAHH charity, whereas a person saved from death has their QUALY count increased by a factor of about 5 by living for a thousand years rather than a hundred.
This would require the probability of SENS working should be 1 in 10^11.
Nobody has that much evidence against SENS, therefore anyone who gives to LAHH over SENS is either irrational or evil. I suspect that that former applies to most people who have even heard of SENS, but most people in the world don’t even know it exists.
> Roko, I would suggest a dedicated folder for images you intend to use on your blog.
I think I need to be more careful in general regarding PR…. this is, I admit, mostly my own fault…
ah, error above: inconsistent assumptions. Assume that someone’s QUALY count for living healthily for 150 years instead of 78 is increased by 50%. SENS must then have a probability of working of less than about 1 in 10^10.
I only respect utilitarian morality if combined with firm proscriptions against oppression and understanding of the future’s uncertainty. Sacrificing people in the name of progress will never be a moral act in my book. We all have the right to live well in the present.
> I only respect utilitarian morality if combined with firm proscriptions against oppression and understanding of the future’s uncertainty
But the whole point of utilitarianism is to do an *expected* utility calculation, which takes into account uncertainty…
> Sacrificing people in the name of progress will never be a moral act in my book.
which people? People in the present, or people in the future?
Partially because of bias and partially because there’s insufficient information, such calculations rarely accurately account for the uncertainty.
And I was referring, as you may have guessed, to people in the present. The Zen Buddhists stress that only the present exists. I wouldn’t go that far, but they have a point. Anyone who thinks they have to kill or deprive living, breathing humans for supposed future gains isn’t being creative enough.
> Anyone who thinks they have to kill or deprive living, breathing humans for supposed future gains isn’t being creative enough.
So, you would rather spend your money on a fast car today than save it for your kids to go to a good college?
> Anyone who thinks they have to kill or deprive living, breathing humans for supposed future gains isn’t being creative enough.
and would you omit to buy medical insurance for yourself and your family and instead spend the money on things you want today?
It seems to me that the idea that we should never forgo things we want today for far greater benefits tomorrow is indefensible.
Morality is a skicky problem, I admit, and I do not claim to have all the answers, but I deliberately chose the example of SENS vs. LAHH because I think that there is a very clear answer, and I think that the reason we cannot see that answer is human cognitive bias; we are all born into a worldview in which death is inevitable, so even when we omit the words “Death might be cured by science”, we don’t really mean it, and this shows up when we are asked to endorse actual policy decisions. I suffer from this kind of problem myself.
To my mind, lacking obvious luxuries such a fast car isn’t deprivation. No access to transportation, on the other, might well be. I’d want a balanced approach that meets current human needs before focusing on the future. This, of course, is what researchers and futurists practice on the personal level. I’ve yet to hear of anyone impoverishing themselves by donating to SENS or the Singularity Institute. That’s why I consider the idea that existing people have to suffer for progress a product of privilege.
Benjamin, if you want a “balanced” approach, look to the mainstream. Why read a niche blog like this when you are certain to completely disagree with my central point, which I make again and again in every post, which is that there are certain leveraged approaches to helping humanity that greatly outweigh mainstream immediate efforts?
The mainstream doesn’t offer much for me. I’m a determined radical in almost every respect. I support ambitious research projects such as SENS and (perhaps) SIAI. As I wrote earlier, I’d split my donations between such endeavors and those designed to either reduce current suffering or advance socialist politics if I had money to give. I don’t believe the two approaches need be mutually exclusive.
I agree, they aren’t, but in your comments here you’ve sort of been implying that future-orientation is mostly a deceptive illusion, and that we should throw away utilitarianism if it conflicts with our sensibilities.
I do think there’s a lot to be said for treating people like people, not statistics. If that’s what you mean by sensibilities, then yes. As I wrote earlier, I believe in boundaries for moral conduct. I’m deeply skeptical when folks justify crossing those lines with appeals to future gains. This doesn’t mean I reject the forward orientation entirely. Far from it. It’s profoundly important to look ahead. I’m optimistic that we can work for good future outcomes without mocking and opposing those focus on more immediate human needs.
To treat people like people, we have to be consistent and treat 1,000,000 people like 1,000,000 people, not like a scope-neglected statistic. That’s the whole point of utilitiarianism: to treat a small benefit to a large number as equivalent to a large benefit to a small number. I do think there is a time to mock and oppose immediate human needs when there is a much greater need for big picture, long-term solutions. People like Bill Gates agree. (Instead of mocking smaller initiatives, they just spend less time on them and more on big picture ideas like stopping hurricanes.)
As I believe in equality, whether I agree that a small benefit to many matches a large benefit to a few depends on the scenario. If we’re talking about a few rich folks giving up their yachts so working-class families can eat better, great. If instead it’s oppressing or depriving a few inconvenients in order to advance progress and civilization for all, no thank you.
(For the record, Bill Gates would be one of the last people to cite in order so convince me of anything, particularly moral behavior.)