Do we? Or do we need more realistic perspective about death? Why quantity over quality?
Seems there's a lot of quality improvements that could be made [1]. For instance, I read recently (can't recall source) that San Fransisco's homeless is the least happy in the world. Also that the top 1% in the world make over $35K a year, but there are far happier people than exist in middle America living in poverty [2]. Looking at populations that are happier - but in poverty - is perhaps an interesting study. Imagine a cross disciplinary study between (perhaps) techniques used in epidemiology/health informatics & anthropology / the humanities.
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[1] Notice that cancer, heart-disease, Alzheimer, etc research also falls into this category - allowing people to live with less suffering.
[2] Yeah, 3 assertions, no sources, sorry - just my word & unreliable memory of something someone said in a book once folks :)
> Or do we need more realistic perspective about death?
We do: we need to realize how horrible it is that we treat it so casually, rather than as a tragedy. Perhaps then we'll do something about it.
> [1] Notice that cancer, heart-disease, Alzheimer, etc research also falls into this category - allowing people to live with less suffering.
All three of which (especially the first and last) have heavy ties to aging. It isn't just about living longer; it's about not aging. We're not talking about getting a few more decades like those in your 90s; we're talking about getting a few more centuries like those in your 30s-40s. (And hopefully that will buy us enough time for the next such improvement, and the next.)
Wanting to live forever has to be the apex of egoism and arrogance and all that is wrong with the human mind. Death is good because it leaves room for new people with new ideas.
Being against death reveals a profound misunderstanding about what life is about, which is: finiteness, urgency, novelty, creativity.
I think defining other people to be "profound[ly] misunderstanding what life is about" just because they do not believe the same as you when it comes to something so fundamental and personal as one's life is much closer to "the apex of egoism and arrogance and all that is wrong with the human mind".
We don't need room for new people with new ideas, room isn't the issue: as far as we know so far, the Universe is virtually infinite. When we come around to defeating death (it's bound to eventually happen) we'll start terraforming, doing generation-ships to reach even further, and the rate of growth of human knowledge will reach an even more unimaginably fast pace.
I suspect you're going to get hammered here but this is an incredibly important point. Aging and death forces the passing of the torch from the old generation to the new, and I think this is a crucial part of progress. A tragedy on par with death would be the rise of some oligarchical class of immortal technocrats, wielding power and influence for centuries on end.
I can see the job description now: "75+ years of relevant experience required." At the same time, allowing the Einsteins of society to continue their work indefinitely would provide a net increase in the rate of scientific advancement. Unfortunately climbing the corporate ladder would be nearly impossible as positions would almost never go vacant. It has both pros and cons, but allowing a larger fraction of the population to be in the workforce might just outweigh the negatives.
I don't think it would ever happen, but the only real counter I can think of to that is modifying our brains to have intermittent periods where they are more plastic than normal. Honestly, our current system works really really well... I still don't want to die though.
Hypothetical bogey men of an imaginary dystopia should not concern you nearly so much as the loss of productive life, physical and mental decay, and the reckless violence of the hopeless which surrounds you today.
A valid point, but why should the pessimistic outlook be any less likely than the utopian one? Are you sure that a major missing link between where we are now and a prosperous future for everyone is the fountain of youth? Sure, the HN'ers want the Einsteins and Feynmans of the world to live forever? But what about the Nixons, King Leopold II's, and Kim Kardashians of the world? Is it okay with you that they will be given first dibs at the antidote?
You're seeing it as the key to suffering, but its equally reasonable to view it as what it will likely become - an instrument of power.
>Death is good because it leaves room for new people with new ideas.
Congratulations: you've managed to point out one of the very, very few nice things about having your body slowly but unstoppably degrade for six decades starting in your mid-20s.
You can add more people without destroying the information contained in their predecessors. We are on the cusp of interstellar travel, once we are no longer bound to our singular space rock our population no longer needs to have limits.
Not everyone has to share your profound insight about the meaning and purpose of life.
This is a classic example of a limited rationalised mindset. Imagine how much more enriched people lives would be if they got to know their great grandparents and more. Death is a tragedy, there is nothing stopping you and others who share your beliefs from ending life at any moment they want. This is about options, think about the potential -- it would change society is so many ways.
Something I've been thinking about for a while is: what would it mean for peoples' willingness to save another person from a burning building, or swim to rescue someone drowning at sea, or donate a kidney, etc, if we all developed a sense of entitlement that we should be able to live forever?
When so many people at all levels of society are unable to enjoy the lives they have, I feel that life extension research is not something that should be a high priority for investment.
"Wanting to live forever has to be the apex of egoism and arrogance..."
I would gladly sacrifice my life to prevent the rest of the species suffering the physical agony, mental degeneration, poverty, frustration, and violence which result from pandemic senescence.
Your moralizing aesthetic judgements do not justify the misery of billions of people, or inaction in the face of its preventable imminence.
I think the key here is to introduce the concept slowly because saying "stop ageing" freaks people out. A lot of people have this idea of what "natural" means and stopping ageing just doesn't sit right with them. I think a better strategy would be to call it "eradicating diseases and higher quality of life towards the end of your life", both of which is really ageing research, but with a better spin.
We've been extending our lifespan for the last century through various technological advances. We are just continuing that trajectory, albeit at a faster pace.
> Is this just for rich people or do poor people get to live for centuries too?
"centuries" is far too short-term; "forever" is the goal, and "centuries" just buys enough time to get there. And of course that lifespan should be available to everyone. If the solution itself doesn't already imply a post-scarcity world, then it'll help that once you have a cure for aging, it's more economical to supply that to everyone than to treat the myriad complications that arise from aging. It's hard to get people to fund such a cure, but it seems far simpler to get funding for "we have a proven cure, let's get it to everyone".
> How would people remember everything?
In the short term, curing aging seems likely to help greatly with many degenerative mental disorders. In the long term, I expect people will find increasingly successful ways to augment their own capabilities. I doubt I'll have the same brain structure a hundred thousand years from now that I do today, if only because I expect we'll eventually run out of effective ways to debug biology in-place.
> How would you spend all that time? What would everyone do?
What wouldn't everyone do? I don't have a finite "bucket list"; my list contains everything positive I can possibly imagine, with a sort order applied, and it will always grow faster than it shrinks. Quite apart from the rest of the universe, other people provide an unbounded source of novelty.
Do you think people thousands of years ago would have asked such questions about a 120-year lifespan, and think it sounded too long?
If you lived for ten thousand years by default, would you think it too long and decide to die at 120? How about if you lived indefinitely?
> > Is this just for rich people or do poor people get to live for centuries too?
> "centuries" is far too short-term; "forever" is the goal, and "centuries" just buys enough time to get there. And of course that lifespan should be available to everyone. If the solution itself doesn't already imply a post-scarcity world, then it'll help that once you have a cure for aging, it's more economical to supply that to everyone than to treat the myriad complications that arise from aging. It's hard to get people to fund such a cure, but it seems far simpler to get funding for "we have a proven cure, let's get it to everyone".
You do know that every culture, since the beginning of time, has thought that they would live to be immortal in their lifetime. What makes you think you're different? Sure, you might have a better chance, but it's still a slim chance. Pining for a cure to aging rather than living your life is a sad way to spend something as short and precious as your life.
> > How would people remember everything?
> In the short term, curing aging seems likely to help greatly with many degenerative mental disorders. In the long term, I expect people will find increasingly successful ways to augment their own capabilities. I doubt I'll have the same brain structure a hundred thousand years from now that I do today, if only because I expect we'll eventually run out of effective ways to debug biology in-place.
> > How would you spend all that time? What would everyone do?
> What wouldn't everyone do? I don't have a finite "bucket list"; my list contains everything positive I can possibly imagine, with a sort order applied, and it will always grow faster than it shrinks. Quite apart from the rest of the universe, other people provide an unbounded source of novelty.
I don't think so. Wanting to live forever is a childish thing, it's a fear of death mixed with a type of greed. Actually living forever would be a greater hell than anything I can imagine. After the first few hundred years, when you realise that it's never going to end, after you've read every book and done all you've wanted to do, what then?
> Do you think people thousands of years ago would have asked such questions about a 120-year lifespan, and think it sounded too long?
No, because the maximum lifespan of a human hasn't fundamentally changed. The only difference is that more people are living to old age.
> You do know that every culture, since the beginning of time, has thought that they would live to be immortal in their lifetime. What makes you think you're different? Sure, you might have a better chance, but it's still a slim chance.
A slim chance is infinitely better than no chance at all. How many cultures had even the remotest chance of actually doing something about it?
And no, I'm not certain it'll happen in my lifetime. I'd say that I'd be sad and disappointed if that didn't happen, but really if that doesn't happen then I won't be anything at all. But I still consider it by far the most important problem that could possibly be solved, and worth putting incredible effort and resources towards. I also consider it worth advocating, to encourage others to push for the same goal, or at the very least discourage others from perpetuating arguments that shut down such efforts.
> Actually living forever would be a greater hell than anything I can imagine.
Then don't. But I'd suggest trying it first, or significantly expanding your imagination.
> After the first few hundred years, when you realise that it's never going to end, after you've read every book and done all you've wanted to do, what then?
With all the imagination you can bring to bear, and a universe full of possibilities, you can only think of a few hundred years worth of things to do before you'd not only get bored but get so bored you'd long for death?
To give even a minimal lower bound based on your own comment, books and stories are already being written today faster than they can be read. And that's only one of myriad possibilities. A few minutes imagination can easily produce far more interesting ones.
Do you currently get bored with life and want it to end? If not, then why do you expect that to change in only a few hundred years?
> > You do know that every culture, since the beginning of time, has thought that they would live to be immortal in their lifetime. What makes you think you're different? Sure, you might have a better chance, but it's still a slim chance.
> A slim chance is infinitely better than no chance at all. How many cultures had even the remotest chance of actually doing something about it?
None, and we're no different. Why would we be?
> And no, I'm not certain it'll happen in my lifetime. I'd say that I'd be sad and disappointed if that didn't happen,
Well, no. You'll be dead. Dead people aren't disappointed.
> I also consider it worth advocating, to encourage others to push for the same goal, or at the very least discourage others from perpetuating arguments that shut down such efforts.
I don't agree that it's worth advocating. Yes, curing diseases and other such things is a worthwhile goal. But the goal of living forever is just selfish. Note that children couldn't exist in a world where people live forever (otherwise we'd run out of resources even faster than we are now).
> > Actually living forever would be a greater hell than anything I can imagine.
> Then don't. But I'd suggest trying it first, or significantly expanding your imagination.
I have a very vivid imagination. That's how I came to that conclusion. Also, how can I "try it"?
> > After the first few hundred years, when you realise that it's never going to end, after you've read every book and done all you've wanted to do, what then?
> With all the imagination you can bring to bear, and a universe full of possibilities, you can only think of a few hundred years worth of things to do before you'd not only get bored but get so bored you'd long for death?
Yes. Why do you think any differently? Evolution has placed a cap on our lifespan, because living longer than that wasn't better for our species. Have you considered that? Why do you think we'd be able to contribute anything meaningful to the world after we are 80 years old? Aside from helping younger generations (which don't exist in your world), we have nothing left to do.
More than 98% of people who ever lived are dead. It's incredibly arrogant (and akin to a tantruming child) to assume that you will survive.
> To give even a minimal lower bound based on your own comment, books and stories are already being written today faster than they can be read. And that's only one of myriad possibilities. A few minutes imagination can easily produce far more interesting ones.
I'm a scientist (as well as programmer). So I can imagine spending several hundred years trying to solve all of the scientific problems that exist. But after a few hundred years, I'll definitely get bored of that. So, I'll have to move on to something else.
> Do you currently get bored with life and want it to end? If not, then why do you expect that to change in only a few hundred years?
No. But that doesn't mean I won't get bored of it eventually. Not to mention that I can see myself being bored with <things I'm interested in now>, and no doubt I'll eventually get bored of all of the things that make me a productive member of society. At that point, I'm a drain on the world's resources. What benefit is there to keeping me alive?
If we cure aging and live for centuries we will still be subject to accidents while we are trying to work out how to live without a body at all. I would be interested to know how likely it is to get maimed or killed during this extended period and how it would affect the psychology of a person. I assume it would be a pretty frightened bunch not leaving home much.
One of several rough estimates I've seen suggests that if you eliminated all biological causes of death, and left only accident and similar, that would bring the average lifespan to around a thousand years. Producing such an estimate seems straightforward enough, given statistics about causes of death.
As for how that might affect psychology: honestly, I'd love to see how the world might change if people adopted drastically different attitudes towards death, but I don't think it likely that this would produce far more risk aversion than we have today. Not least of which because I see no signs of tobacco companies going out of business.
For myself personally, I'm not going to stop leaving the house, but I certainly have no intention of taking up hobbies like hang gliding or motorcycle racing, any more than I plan to start smoking. (Side note: for an interesting measure of risk, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort) I don't think that level of risk aversion qualifies as "a pretty frightened bunch not leaving home much".
Living for centuries would be absolutely awful. Death is necessary. It's the world's chnge-agent. Think about how slow the rates of social progress would be without death.
Also the fact that life is only a fleeting moment in time is beautiful and again, I believe necessary.
Therapies after the SENS model will be mass-produced infusions (gene therapies, small molecule drugs, etc) coupled with some personalized stuff based on growing cells from a cell sample. It will be the same treatment for everyone, and subject to economies of scale that are the same as for today's drugs. Most will cost a few dollars per treatment after being in circulation for a few decades, the same as mass produced generic drugs today, and 30 years further into autologous stem cell therapies, those also will cost a lot less than the few thousand that they do now.
People have done the modeling on what radical life span does to population growth. The answer is a lot less than you think. See: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3192186/ "For example, we applied the cohort-component method of population projections to 2005 Swedish population for several scenarios of life extension and a fertility schedule observed in 2005. Even for very long 100-year projection horizon, with the most radical life extension scenario (assuming no aging at all after age 60), the total population increases by 22% only (from 9.1 to 11.0 million)."
Most of the objections of the type that you voice can be answered by moving you to 1850 and making the same objections to the progress of medicine, and then seeing that they are obviously false concerns given where we are today. You could argue in 1920 that the same objections exist to building treatments that prevent people dying from heart disease: isn't it just for rich people, won't there be too many people if the old don't die on time, what would they do with all those extra years, isn't the present length of life just right, etc, etc.
Why not? Veterinaries would love novel approaches. Plus the pre-research is always carried in animals.
> How would people remember everything?
You should ask Google's Director of Engineering (Ray Kurzweil) about that. Hint: within 25-30 years your brain could have x1000 capacity via cloud computing (mobile + brain-cloud interfaces).
> Is this just for rich people or do poor people get to live for centuries too?
Your questions are quite common and have been answered hundreds of times in any of the SENS presentations. Answer: humanity as a whole will benefit from this research.
> Haven't done the math but if 8 billion people lived for say 500 years each, plus new arrivals constantly, wouldn't we accumulate rather?
The fact that we live twice as long, and we have duplicated the human lifespan in the last 100 years (in the western world), but now we have less natality tells you something? Overpopulation comes from the 3rd world and decreases as a country starts to develop...
You must be young. That's what people were saying 50 years ago. When I was in high school the reason I was told we had to learn square dancing was because in the future we would have so much leisure time.
I remember when I first deconverted. I was horrified that there was no heaven, and that my loved ones weren't waiting for me. That they were just gone forever. They didn't exist. They weren't happy, and I would never see them again.
I see many atheists carry on religious memes after they deconvert. Which is only natural, religion isn't just a single idea, it's deeply ingrained into our culture. One of those memes is that death is natural and ok. Which, if you believe in religion, it absolutely is. It's the way things are supposed to be according to a trustworthy higher power. There is a life afterwards that makes it all ok. People don't really "die", they just go to a different place.
I don't see anything ok about true death. It's natural, sure, but there's no law that says nature has to be good. We are the product of an uncaring universe and plenty of bad things exist that shouldn't. Death is one of those things.
So I came to the idea that if Heaven didn't really exist, we should build it. I was quite young at the time and influenced by science fiction. I thought that maybe future humans could invent time travel and come back in time and save people who died.
I've since come to the conclusion that time travel is very unlikely to be physically possible in our universe. But other advanced technologies, like curing aging, are certainly not. Perhaps even within our reach. And if backwards time travel might be impossible, we have invented a way to do forwards time travel with cryonics.
> One of those memes is that death is natural and ok. Which, if you believe in religion, it absolutely is.
To be clear, this is pretty untrue of Christianity, the dominant religion in Western civilization, so I'm constantly puzzled about this claim. (HPMOR makes the same claim.) The central story of Christianity is that God takes human form, dies, and cannot stay dead. If it were just "Jesus died for our sins", there would be no need for a resurrection story; his followers would have had way more credibility saying merely that he was killed, which is far more objectively verifiable.
From 1 Corinthians: "The last enemy to be destroyed is death" (which, incidentally, comes up in canon HP), and, quoting the prophets: "When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: 'Death has been swallowed up in victory.' 'Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?'" From Revelation, also quoting Isaiah: "He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away." From a 1500-year-old hymn: "Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death."
Death is an enemy; death is not good, and should not exist. Perhaps other religions disagree, but Christians and atheists should be able to agree on this basic fact.
I don't know what scripture says, all I know is that actual Christians believe that their loved ones are in Heaven and that humans have immortal souls. There are a lot of memes in our culture about death from religion. Just go to a Christian funeral and listen to the pastor talk about Death is natural and ok. Of course they still think death is sad, but the religion provides comfort and meaning to it.
I think death is probably a selective evolutionary advantage for a species.
A species is basically self perpetuating genetic code stuck somewhere in an evolutionary local maxima. In our case there may be an advantage in adaptability by having individuals die and genetic code mix/change more frequently.
This still sucks and if we could figure out how the brain actually worked to prevent it that would be cool, but we'd start getting into identity issues (what makes you you? how does consciousness actually work?).
Sleep is interesting to think about here since it likely has something to do with re-calculating weights in a neural net, garbage collection, persisting memories etc. Though we don't consider going to sleep dying and waking up new because of the sense of continuity. If a copy of you was made and the original then killed though we wouldn't like that.
Sense of purpose difficulties still exist in our relatively brief lifespans, but at least we get an easy out with the biological one - we'd have to think more about this with death out of the way. Also the drive to have sex and reproduce would probably still be around since it's core to our existence, not sure how we deal with that.
Though I'd still prefer a star trek future where we're colonizing the galaxy and the goal is to learn.
The evolution selects for death idea is a hypothesis, but I don't' think it's very strong.
Evolution works at the level of genes. Genes that cause more copies of themselves to spread will spread. Even to the detriment of the group or the species.
An organism that lives longer will have time to have more offspring, and those offspring will carry it's longer living genes. An organism that lives shorter will have fewer offspring, and so fewer organisms will carry it's genes. Very rapidly these genes would be selected for or against.
A simple alternative explanation is just that evolution doesn't care. 90% of organisms will die of other causes long before they reach old age. Evolution will end up devoting almost all of it's resources on improving survival rates there, and none on fighting aging.
>This still sucks and if we could figure out how the brain actually worked to prevent it that would be cool, but we'd start getting into identity issues (what makes you you? how does consciousness actually work?).
You can live for a thousand years and you will still procrastinate and you will still not want to die. An extended lifespan won't help those issues. You need to get over them whether you live 50 years or 500.
> You can live for a thousand years and you will still procrastinate and you will still not want to die.
Of course not! Why should you ever want to die? Why should you ever "get over" that?
It's a bug. We haven't fixed it yet. It should not be romanticized, and it should most certainly not be treated as inevitable. It's an abomination we have yet to eliminate.
There is a pine tree that is almost 5,000 years old, and a number of plants "reproduce" by spreading out their root system where what we see as a multitude of plants is essentially one long-lived organism under the surface.
For humans (or at least for me), I think the main concern is really more of continuity of experience than maintaining a particular body configuration indefinitely. I.e. I would like to run into an old friend in 10,000 years and reminisce about that time we did something hilarious. It wouldn't be very satisfying to undergo a procedure that resets my body but wipes out my memories in the process.
It wouldn't be very satisfying to undergo a procedure that resets my body but wipes out my memories in the process.
We whipe out memories every day. Your memory of your childhood is a half imagined highlight reel of moments. If you lived 10,000 years, you might only have a couple moments left from this century.
Do you think of cancer as inevitable? Or do you think of it as something humans could cure someday?
Do you think of degenerative mental disorders as inevitable? Or do you think humans can cure them someday?
I don't think of death as inevitable. I think of it as something humans can cure someday. Thinking of it as inevitable means giving up on all possible solutions.
I think you've used an unconventional definition of "death" here, distinct from the one thus far used in this discussion.
Lack of change seems closer to death than change does.
But in any case, whatever definition of death you've used doesn't seem to relate in any way to the ones that people in this discussion have advocated eliminating.
If you 'survive' (say every cell is replaced) then what is "you"? I'd say it's more likely to be a set of linguistic & cultural norms than it is to be anything fundamental from the view point of physics.
So that raises the point: is 'you' conceptual or is there anything fundamental? It makes sense for evolution to have selected for organisms to believe there was, no matter what, something fundamental, existant & worth preserving about them, but really - we're this group of cells & the plants we ate for breakfast (and the efforts of the farmer of those plants and so on)
Of course, as a "manner of speaking" (that is, in common every day culturally contingent world), all this is bogus.
But from a fundamental, naturalistic point of view, I don't see anywhere else to go :) It's also a very parsimonious view as you get to explain a lot of stuff with less entities, etc :)
In my own life there are several things I'd like to do that will take somewhere between 5-10 years each. I only have 2-3 of those spans left and 100 of those things I want to do.
Wanting more lifespan is a different thing. The claim that most people want to live longer is not as controversial as the claim that most people need to live longer.
If you will certainly die for the lack of some thing, then you can truly say that you need that thing.
Senescence and death costs the species and the planet a horrible price in lost productivity, social conflict, medical costs, human desperation and suffering. Even if you don't want to live beyond some fixed span, if you want to impose suffering and death upon others...well, I don't even...
Agreed. With overpopulation already a problem I'm not sure that living longer is a pressing need for the world. Better to help people make the most of the time they have allotted on this planet.
Thank you for sharing "Don't Panic", watching that is really an hour well-spent.
Since permanent growth comes from fertility and as "Don't Panic" shows we're getting to a sustainable average of 2 child per woman, augmenting our lifespan will only increase our maximum population, not our population growth.
However I think YC research would be better spent trying to find better ways to fight climate change, world stability and/or lift billions out of poverty. This way if we ever augment lifespans in a significant way it will be available to more people and in a healthier world. Also lifting billions out of great poverty will have the added benefit of allowing more minds to work on issues like increasing life expectancy.
Also, we should really focus on getting people on board with the life-preserving tech that currently exists (medicine, water treatment, doctor training, etc) before developing new (and potentially expensive) tech that will only widen the gap between what the rich can do that the poor can only dream of.
Indeed. From a biological standpoint, it's important to realize that an indefinite lifespan, as a life history trait [1], does not confer evolutionary fitness. The fact is that organisms do not appear to evolve to a maximal lifespan — they evolve to an optimal lifespan. Humans are already considered to be K-selected [2], and increasing lifespan appears to necessarily decrease fitness in other areas, as has been seen in worms [3] and flies [4] (e.g. reproductive fitness decreases and age of maturity increases, when lifespan increases).
More importantly, "near-infinite" lifespans reduce the efficacy of natural selection — longer-living organisms evolve at a slower rate. While, perhaps, unappealing, the culling of species members well past reproductive age is necessary to allow for more resources and potential for competition and selection in their offspring. And humans are certainly still undergoing natural selection in many arenas; just look at sickle cell trait [5] or or CCR5-Δ32 [6].
These are all arguments that apply to the house you live in, the blankets on your bed, the medicine you use. You are absolutely fine with all of those - you don't live in a cave, shun treatment for infectious disease, and wear furs. In fact I would go so far as to say that you probably think that modern technology is a good thing, and you are better off for it. Yet that already greatly manipulates your proposed optimal condition for the human species. So why does treating aging as a medical condition bring out this view? This seems like a very selective appeal to nature.
It may not have been expressed the most clearly, but the intention was not quite as you describe. Shelter, clothing, and modern medicine all confer enhanced fitness — I was attempting to suggest that increased lifespan does not.
Reminds me of Seneca's De Brevitate Vitae[1], an essay about (as the title suggests) the shortness of life. He argues that what matters is not how long one lives, but what he accomplishes and/or how "well" he lives.
It is important to recognize that arguments for quality over quantity are written from the perspective of operating within an absolute and unchangeable limit, and an absolute and largely unchangeable high risk of unexpected death before that limit due to infectious disease. We've done a lot to reduce the latter, and now the former is up for grabs as well. This is not the same landscape for the human condition as occupied by Seneca and his peers.
We can work towards both quality and quantity. That is the point of technology, to make everything better, to remove limits, to enable the human condition to be more than it was before, to give us choice where there was no choice. The choice to fly, to talk to distant people, to be healthy, to live rather than to die before we want to.
it's not quantity over quality, they are directly proportional to each other, maybe, if meassured in absolute terms. There's an optimum and quantity is hampered by lack of quality.
Do we? Or do we need more realistic perspective about death? Why quantity over quality?
Seems there's a lot of quality improvements that could be made [1]. For instance, I read recently (can't recall source) that San Fransisco's homeless is the least happy in the world. Also that the top 1% in the world make over $35K a year, but there are far happier people than exist in middle America living in poverty [2]. Looking at populations that are happier - but in poverty - is perhaps an interesting study. Imagine a cross disciplinary study between (perhaps) techniques used in epidemiology/health informatics & anthropology / the humanities.
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[1] Notice that cancer, heart-disease, Alzheimer, etc research also falls into this category - allowing people to live with less suffering.
[2] Yeah, 3 assertions, no sources, sorry - just my word & unreliable memory of something someone said in a book once folks :)