If anti-aging technology was the medical standard, few would opt out of it. Many people would opt for voluntary suicide of some sort after 10^x years for x between roughly 2 and 4.
The claim that “people want to die” basically caches out to “if effective anti-ageing tech were available for free/cheap, then most voluntary suicides would just so happen to coincide with the present-day life expectancy of 80 years, or people would actually opt out of anti-ageing treatments entirely and decide to age”.
Well, I find it extremely unlikely that that would be true.
So years pass on the calendar without them ageing and they hit roughly 80. Will they suddenly decide to just kill themselves because it’s been about 30 years since their kids grew up? But not 10 years or 60? It seems pretty unreasonable to me that the point of psychological exhaustion with life will happen to coincide with the point when biological bodies currently wear out.
The variance will be huge. Maybe Mr Metrosexual will just want to go clubbing, get drunk, play football, have a long series of major relationships, go on holidays, play xbox etc for 10^3 years? Why the hell not? Maybe mind modification will at some point become popular in non-nerdy circles at some point over those 1000 years? I don’t think you have to be into majorly nerdy stuff to get 10^3 years of fun out of life.
You could alternatively argue that the claim that “people want to die” basically caches out to “people will eventually want to die rather than live for a literally infinite amout of time”. At that point I think it basically becomes vacuous for reasons that have probably been debated ad nauseum in futurist spaces; finite dynamical system cannot evolve indefinitely without looping etc etc.
To comment on my own comment, what we are really arguing about is the form of the frequency distribution of suicide ages T_ suicide conditional on cheap, readily available anti-ageing tech.
I am saying it will look nothing like that; the psychological factors determining suicide decisions will just produce loads of variance. It’ll look more like a lognormal, where the log10 of T_ suicide is normally distributed with mean 3 and variance 2. Actually even that is probably wrong, but it’s a pretty good starting point.
People often want to die long before they commit suicide or even consider it. I think Sister Y said at one point that she had wanted to die for years, without ever committing suicide.
It doesn’t seem to me highly unlikely that the point of psychological exhaustion would be close to the physical one. That seems like the sort of fit that evolution could produce pretty easily.
If you live in an extended family or something similar, as long as you don’t give out physically, it’s helpful not to give out psychologically. So if psychological exhaustion is something that naturally happens, selection could push it off until physical exhaustion so that you can keep contributing to the tribe as long as possible.
Of course this is a just-so story but I don’t see why it’s an unreasonable one.
So if psychological exhaustion is something that naturally happens, selection could push it off until physical exhaustion so that you can keep contributing to the tribe as long
But why would psychological exhaustion naturally happen at a rate that’s fast enough to be relevant? There’s no second law of thermodynamics for algorithms; it’s simpler for evolution to build a brain that never gets psychologically exhausted, so that’s (to a first approximation) what would happen. It seems that evolution layered a routine for suicide on top of our brains too, but it seems that that routine doesn’t check for “how old are you”, it checks for “how low status are you”, probably because your family may lose resources trying to help you and thereby reduce the inclusive genetic fitness of your genes etc.
The argument that you’re making (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selection_shadow) specifically only works for things that need active effort to prevent them from breaking, which tends to mean physical stuff. Psychology isn’t really susceptible in the same way, because although or psychological health will be in the selection shadow at e.g. age 300, there isn’t that pressure of thermodynamics to break it.
There may not be any second law of themodynamics for algorithms, but there’s surely something pretty similar. If I leave my computer running indefinitely, it quickly becomes “psychologically exhausted”, runs slowly, starts causing programs to crash, and so on. If I leave it on anyway, at some point it’s going to commit suicide with a blue screen.
So I still don’t see why it would be simpler for evolution to build a brain that never gets exhausted, or why my story isn’t a reasonable one.
If I leave my computer running indefinitely, it quickly becomes “psychologically exhausted”, runs slowly, starts causing programs to crash, and so on.
really? Oh you mean if you kept using it, not if you just left it there? I would suspect that the equivalent (and this is a stretched analogy, but let’s go with it) would be that a human brain would “fill up” with memories. But over what timescale? The amount of genuinely “new” experiences that a human has probably already varies by 1-2 orders of magnitude. Do people with particularly exciting lives full of new careers/hobbies/travel/goals/relationships go insane after 20 years? No… I mean maybe they would after 1000 years. But that’s my point: the timescale for psychological “exhaustion” will be hugely varied. We kind of already know that it is.
The politically incorrect Manosphere blogs discuss how women who reject traditional roles for themselves, namely, early marriage and family formation, seem to hit a “wall” in their later 20′s as they realize that men will stop paying attention to them (as their fertility crashes) in favor of younger crops of women. The women who miss the marriage and childbirth window altogether wind up living alone with their cats, and they seem to lack much meaning and purpose in life because they neglected doing what women evolved to do.
I suppose if you could rejuvenate these women, restock their eggs and make them fertile like 18 year old girls again, they might find a renewed zest for life. Only I doubt that because I don’t see how you can de-experience them psychologically to undo the damage from having all those sterile sexual encounters the first time around.
So, yes, I do find it plausible that most women probably lack the inner resources to handle radical life extension, given the limited nature of their lives under current circumstances.
Only I doubt that because I don’t see how you can de-experience them psychologically to undo the damage from having all those sterile sexual encounters the first time around.
be careful: there’s a decent amount of variance in how people respond to things. Maybe some people are “damaged” by having a lot of non-procreative sexual encounters. Maybe this applies particularly to women. But I highly doubt that it’s a uniform effect.
So, yes, I do find it plausible that most women probably lack the inner resources to handle radical life extension, given the limited nature of their lives under current circumstances.
Do you seriously think there’ll be a big gender difference? BTW I am definitely not particularly politically correct with respect to gender politics and I’ve read the blogs you mention, but as a rationalist I am not sure you’re on sound footing here. Yes, men and women are different (on average!) psychologically.
But if women didn’t physically age and men didn’t physically age why would the average woman deal with immortality by committing suicide more quickly than the average man? Is there any contemporary analogue of a woman having a family and suddenly being biologically 18 again that we can generalize from? I suspect you could look at women from affluent backgrounds who got pregnant at a young age and see what they did in, e.g. their late 30s. Sill, that’s considered “old” by society, and there is a decent amount of sexism and sexist taboo which kind of shoehorns such people in some ways, though this is decreasing.
On the other side men in their 40s and 50s definitely seem to want to be 20 again. We call it a mid-life crisis!
Basically I think you are extrapolating into fairly unknown territory, and what I do think we can extrapolate seems to point to just a lot of variability based on personality, life-philosophy, etc.
Though I suppose the fact that “mid life crisis/buying a sports car and a leather jacket” is associated with men does count as evidence in favour of your hypothesis.
If anti-aging technology was the medical standard, few would opt out of it. Many people would opt for voluntary suicide of some sort after 10^x years for x between roughly 2 and 4.
The claim that “people want to die” basically caches out to “if effective anti-ageing tech were available for free/cheap, then most voluntary suicides would just so happen to coincide with the present-day life expectancy of 80 years, or people would actually opt out of anti-ageing treatments entirely and decide to age”.
Well, I find it extremely unlikely that that would be true.
Suppose that miss average woman who reads women’s health magazines articles on the “top 8 natural anti-ageing solutions” today and buys expensive snake-oil anti ageing cream today is transported to the year 2200, as is Mr mid 30s metrosexual man with his “grooming arsenal”. Will they use the cheap actually effective anti-ageing treatments instead of their snake oil that they spend money on today? Absolutely.
So years pass on the calendar without them ageing and they hit roughly 80. Will they suddenly decide to just kill themselves because it’s been about 30 years since their kids grew up? But not 10 years or 60? It seems pretty unreasonable to me that the point of psychological exhaustion with life will happen to coincide with the point when biological bodies currently wear out.
The variance will be huge. Maybe Mr Metrosexual will just want to go clubbing, get drunk, play football, have a long series of major relationships, go on holidays, play xbox etc for 10^3 years? Why the hell not? Maybe mind modification will at some point become popular in non-nerdy circles at some point over those 1000 years? I don’t think you have to be into majorly nerdy stuff to get 10^3 years of fun out of life.
You could alternatively argue that the claim that “people want to die” basically caches out to “people will eventually want to die rather than live for a literally infinite amout of time”. At that point I think it basically becomes vacuous for reasons that have probably been debated ad nauseum in futurist spaces; finite dynamical system cannot evolve indefinitely without looping etc etc.
How many people die sooner because they decide to smoke?
You likely will never have an anti-aging pill that completely eliminates it but a series of actions that require effort.
It’s hard to imagine eliminating natural cancer without also eliminating smoking-caused cancer. Ditto heart disease.
To comment on my own comment, what we are really arguing about is the form of the frequency distribution of suicide ages T_ suicide conditional on cheap, readily available anti-ageing tech.
The OP is basically saying that that distribution will be close to frequency distribution of age at death for ageing-related deaths that we see today (see page 9 of that document)
I am saying it will look nothing like that; the psychological factors determining suicide decisions will just produce loads of variance. It’ll look more like a lognormal, where the log10 of T_ suicide is normally distributed with mean 3 and variance 2. Actually even that is probably wrong, but it’s a pretty good starting point.
People often want to die long before they commit suicide or even consider it. I think Sister Y said at one point that she had wanted to die for years, without ever committing suicide.
It doesn’t seem to me highly unlikely that the point of psychological exhaustion would be close to the physical one. That seems like the sort of fit that evolution could produce pretty easily.
meh, I don’t think so. I can’t see the fitness advantage.
If you live in an extended family or something similar, as long as you don’t give out physically, it’s helpful not to give out psychologically. So if psychological exhaustion is something that naturally happens, selection could push it off until physical exhaustion so that you can keep contributing to the tribe as long as possible.
Of course this is a just-so story but I don’t see why it’s an unreasonable one.
But why would psychological exhaustion naturally happen at a rate that’s fast enough to be relevant? There’s no second law of thermodynamics for algorithms; it’s simpler for evolution to build a brain that never gets psychologically exhausted, so that’s (to a first approximation) what would happen. It seems that evolution layered a routine for suicide on top of our brains too, but it seems that that routine doesn’t check for “how old are you”, it checks for “how low status are you”, probably because your family may lose resources trying to help you and thereby reduce the inclusive genetic fitness of your genes etc.
The argument that you’re making (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selection_shadow) specifically only works for things that need active effort to prevent them from breaking, which tends to mean physical stuff. Psychology isn’t really susceptible in the same way, because although or psychological health will be in the selection shadow at e.g. age 300, there isn’t that pressure of thermodynamics to break it.
There may not be any second law of themodynamics for algorithms, but there’s surely something pretty similar. If I leave my computer running indefinitely, it quickly becomes “psychologically exhausted”, runs slowly, starts causing programs to crash, and so on. If I leave it on anyway, at some point it’s going to commit suicide with a blue screen.
So I still don’t see why it would be simpler for evolution to build a brain that never gets exhausted, or why my story isn’t a reasonable one.
really? Oh you mean if you kept using it, not if you just left it there? I would suspect that the equivalent (and this is a stretched analogy, but let’s go with it) would be that a human brain would “fill up” with memories. But over what timescale? The amount of genuinely “new” experiences that a human has probably already varies by 1-2 orders of magnitude. Do people with particularly exciting lives full of new careers/hobbies/travel/goals/relationships go insane after 20 years? No… I mean maybe they would after 1000 years. But that’s my point: the timescale for psychological “exhaustion” will be hugely varied. We kind of already know that it is.
The politically incorrect Manosphere blogs discuss how women who reject traditional roles for themselves, namely, early marriage and family formation, seem to hit a “wall” in their later 20′s as they realize that men will stop paying attention to them (as their fertility crashes) in favor of younger crops of women. The women who miss the marriage and childbirth window altogether wind up living alone with their cats, and they seem to lack much meaning and purpose in life because they neglected doing what women evolved to do.
I suppose if you could rejuvenate these women, restock their eggs and make them fertile like 18 year old girls again, they might find a renewed zest for life. Only I doubt that because I don’t see how you can de-experience them psychologically to undo the damage from having all those sterile sexual encounters the first time around.
So, yes, I do find it plausible that most women probably lack the inner resources to handle radical life extension, given the limited nature of their lives under current circumstances.
be careful: there’s a decent amount of variance in how people respond to things. Maybe some people are “damaged” by having a lot of non-procreative sexual encounters. Maybe this applies particularly to women. But I highly doubt that it’s a uniform effect.
Do you seriously think there’ll be a big gender difference? BTW I am definitely not particularly politically correct with respect to gender politics and I’ve read the blogs you mention, but as a rationalist I am not sure you’re on sound footing here. Yes, men and women are different (on average!) psychologically.
But if women didn’t physically age and men didn’t physically age why would the average woman deal with immortality by committing suicide more quickly than the average man? Is there any contemporary analogue of a woman having a family and suddenly being biologically 18 again that we can generalize from? I suspect you could look at women from affluent backgrounds who got pregnant at a young age and see what they did in, e.g. their late 30s. Sill, that’s considered “old” by society, and there is a decent amount of sexism and sexist taboo which kind of shoehorns such people in some ways, though this is decreasing.
On the other side men in their 40s and 50s definitely seem to want to be 20 again. We call it a mid-life crisis!
Basically I think you are extrapolating into fairly unknown territory, and what I do think we can extrapolate seems to point to just a lot of variability based on personality, life-philosophy, etc.
Though I suppose the fact that “mid life crisis/buying a sports car and a leather jacket” is associated with men does count as evidence in favour of your hypothesis.