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The average age of university presidents and members of Congress in the USA is in the 70s. At the risk of sounding callous can we fix our gerontoctratic system and then fix aging?
I know some really spry older (60-80) people. Good diet and exercise is what they have in common. It also helps with mental health (which we have an epidemic of in the US). By all means, this research should continue. But we do already have very good solutions to aging which are sorely overlooked.
Not my observation so feel free to caveat me away, but I'm just regurgitating what some doctors who studying aging observe and perhaps I'm not remembering all the evidence they provide.
It’s obvious that healthy people that live shorter are better for the ‘economy’ but clearly humanity doesn’t live to optimize for the economy. If we did, we would be fighting obesity with 10x the seriousness of how we fight COVID.
Individuals optimize for their own (often short-term) economic benefit. That's it.
The corporate overlords at ACME don't care about fighting obesity, because there are more than enough non-obese workers for them to exploit, and they don't want to cannibalize their highly profitable line of products that obese people need (i.e. insulin).
Governments are composed of individuals, and the structures we have to hold these individuals accountable to their constituents are weak, so they still end up using their levers of power for their own gain, and for the gain of their corporate sponsors (also often short-term).
Despite ~70 year lifespans, it seems that most of the population can't even be bothered to optimize for medium-term outcomes. This isn't going to change just because we invent a magic pill that lets you live youthfully till ~150.
The problem isn't lifespan, the problem is that humanity is innately selfish and short-sighted. If this can't be fixed, we are completely fucked.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Back when I was _really_ into longevity stuff, aubrey de gret etc... I seem to recall that even if we removed all forms of aging people would have an expected lifespan of roughly 1000 years due to trauma death (eg: getting hit by a bus) . So that could serve as a rough rule of thumb for how to think about risk/reward on increasing health in later years. That is it generally has a good EROI for how safe (accident wise…
If you don't mind me asking (off-topic), are you less into longevity stuff now? if yes, what made you less into it/possibly more skeptical of it?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Back when I was _really_ into longevity stuff, aubrey de gret etc... I seem to recall that even if we removed all forms of aging people would have an expected lifespan of roughly 1000 years due to trauma death (eg: getting hit by a bus) . So that could serve as a rough rule of thumb for how to think about risk/reward on increasing health in later years. That is it generally has a good EROI for how safe (accident wise…
Sure, it's generally safe. The point I was trying make is why work extra years to pay for a single year when it's not guaranteed. I'd rather quit at 60 and die at 78 than pay $200k, quit at 64, and die at 79.
But some percent of the population makes a lot more than that. And much like all things in the economy as they start to consume the products it gets cheaper and moves down classes until it becomes ubiquitous kinda like food is today.
The average age of university presidents and members of Congress in the USA is in the 70s. At the risk of sounding callous can we fix our gerontoctratic system and then fix aging?
I suspect gerontocracy would be a distinct without a difference after someone invents any real fountain-of-youth category of tech (mind uploading included), in much the same way that land ownership went from being a requirement for voting to merely one of many ways to hold wealth as the USA went from an agrarian to an industrial society. Big difference going from 50 to 70; proportionally less going from 600 to 700, e…
A distracting thought: isn't it striking how "real property ownership" has returned as a marker of better societal status? A mere 50-60 years ago, even working class could own (arguably not very nice) dwellings in coastal California etc.
The same development can be seen in Europe.
If I had to choose, I'd rather be an owner of 3-4 nice pieces of real estate than a highly qualified professional. This is a certain return to feudalism, in a sense.
As for your original idea: going from 600 to 700 is not a big deal. But the intermediate phase is going to be a big challenge. The first generation that enjoys the possibility of life extension to, say, 120, is going occupy their positions of power for a disproportionately long time and will need to be persuaded to step away; possibly in exchange for a lot of money.
It’s obvious that healthy people that live shorter are better for the ‘economy’ but clearly humanity doesn’t live to optimize for the economy. If we did, we would be fighting obesity with 10x the seriousness of how we fight COVID.
The average age of university presidents and members of Congress in the USA is in the 70s. At the risk of sounding callous can we fix our gerontoctratic system and then fix aging?
My favorite response to this and related objections to ending aging (such as “what about the dictators”): imagine a scenario where humans did not age, but still had the problems of “gerontocracy” and dictatorships. Would you propose subjecting the whole of humanity to debilitating degenerative diseases and ultimately death to solve these societal problems? I picked this up from Ageless by Andrew Steele, a highly reco…
At the country-level scale, that certainly sounds better than everyone aging and dying.
But what would individuals do on a smaller scale? Would this also incentive a lot more violent death among the rest of the population too, to change things up in a world where probably everyone is their own long-lived dictator of some little domain they carved out. Sure, this would be illegal, but you can only catch and prosecute so much crime; what if it becomes unmanageable? Would people create unnatural death to serve the role natural death causes today? I think so. But I think this could still be potentially "better" than today in some measure - you're comparatively healthy and pain-free before your demise, instead of a slow painful decades-long decline.
The average age of university presidents and members of Congress in the USA is in the 70s. At the risk of sounding callous can we fix our gerontoctratic system and then fix aging?
My favorite response to this and related objections to ending aging (such as “what about the dictators”): imagine a scenario where humans did not age, but still had the problems of “gerontocracy” and dictatorships. Would you propose subjecting the whole of humanity to debilitating degenerative diseases and ultimately death to solve these societal problems? I picked this up from Ageless by Andrew Steele, a highly reco…