Forgetting arguments but remembering conclusions may be part of this. Same with already being vaccinated against a wide-range of memes. Also, Dunning-Kruger, as we either forget more than we realize but still think we’re an expert, or as the state-of-the-art progresses far beyond where it was the last decade we looked. Also, just acquiring more random knowledge makes it easier to offer counterarguments to anything we don’t want to change our mind about, or even create fully-general counterarguments.
If “wisdom” really is the result of something like declining brain function due to NMDA receptor decline, though, maybe anti-aging drugs will help? One argument against biological immortality is that “science advances one funeral at a time”. Same applies culturally. Imagine if all the catholics from 1500 were still alive and voting. No religious tolerance, no enlightenment, no abolition of slavery, and certainly no gender equality or LGBTQ rights.
But, if resistance to such ideas is mainly due to NMDA receptor decline, or decreasing neural plasticity, or hormonal shifts or whatever, then that’s fantastic news. It means we might naturally sidestep the whole ethical conundrum of weighing all social progress against genocide-by-inaction form not curing aging. (And, ending social/philosophical/scientific progress certainly counts as an X-risk.)
No need to limit the voting age to below 130, or quarantine billions of centinarians in internment camps for millennia, or keep them off the internet or whatever memespaces they might poison, or whatever other dystopias society decides are less bad than the genocide-by-aging dystopia and the end of progress.
Forgetting arguments but remembering conclusions may be part of this. Same with already being vaccinated against a wide-range of memes. Also, Dunning-Kruger, as we either forget more than we realize but still think we’re an expert, or as the state-of-the-art progresses far beyond where it was the last decade we looked. Also, just acquiring more random knowledge makes it easier to offer counterarguments to anything we don’t want to change our mind about, or even create fully-general counterarguments.
If “wisdom” really is the result of something like declining brain function due to NMDA receptor decline, though, maybe anti-aging drugs will help? One argument against biological immortality is that “science advances one funeral at a time”. Same applies culturally. Imagine if all the catholics from 1500 were still alive and voting. No religious tolerance, no enlightenment, no abolition of slavery, and certainly no gender equality or LGBTQ rights.
But, if resistance to such ideas is mainly due to NMDA receptor decline, or decreasing neural plasticity, or hormonal shifts or whatever, then that’s fantastic news. It means we might naturally sidestep the whole ethical conundrum of weighing all social progress against genocide-by-inaction form not curing aging. (And, ending social/philosophical/scientific progress certainly counts as an X-risk.)
No need to limit the voting age to below 130, or quarantine billions of centinarians in internment camps for millennia, or keep them off the internet or whatever memespaces they might poison, or whatever other dystopias society decides are less bad than the genocide-by-aging dystopia and the end of progress.