The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant (2005)

https://nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html

by warbaker • 6 years ago

61 91 6 years ago

nickbostrom.com

warbaker7• 6 years ago

CGP Grey's video adaptation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZYNADOHhVY

dang• 6 years ago

If curious see also

2018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16945915

2018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16920532 (1 comment)

2015 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9559360

2009 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=656713

0823498723498722• 6 years ago

For another take on dragons in particular: Farmer Giles of Ham.

and for monsters & maidens in general: https://blog.plover.com/book/myth/princess-andromeda.html

SilasX• 6 years ago

To save you from reading the 5000 words waiting for the point, I gave a summary on the 2015 submission. (Linking to avoid copy-paste per HN guidelines and mod feedback.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9561960

dash2• 6 years ago

Not quite accurate. The dragon is aging, not just any kind of death.

reasonattlm3• 6 years ago

Still as relevant 15 years later, as we still live in a world in which aging can be addressed via the construction of rejuvenation therapies, but most people are simply disinterested in the prospect, the science, and doing anything other than crumbling, suffering, and dying like their parents and grandparents.

The one big difference between the present and 15 years ago: the first rejuvenation therapies worthy of the name now exist in the form of senolytic treatments that selectively destroy senescent cells. Pretty much everyone over the age of 50 should be taking them once a year or so, and would have a better life as a result. It makes the pathos of the situation somewhat greater than it was.

DennisP2• 6 years ago

Are any of those senolytic treatments available now, or are they still in FDA purgatory?

SpicyLemonZest• 6 years ago

Not really even in purgatory, I'd say. The FDA doesn't recognize the general concept of aging as something for which you could be treated, so there's no approval process they could go through in the first place.

rhysrhaven2• 6 years ago

A story for a story. My father had children from the age of 19 to 55. Born in the 1930s, passed in his 80s, he had a good life. As the youngest of many brothers by different mothers, our paths have diverged massively as we experience the world separated by decades.

And yet the commonality of genetics lays down a pattern of personality that is striking to see. We share the same baseline, the same personality flaws, the same basic interests manifest in different ways. We are in so many ways variation on a theme that is my father. And seeing all these examples of the same pattern aging, each person slowly becomes poorly fit for the world that evolves around them. We learn as children, grow into men, and eventually become rigid in our patterns. I expect this is reflected in basic biology of the brain.

The one thing that this has convinced me of, seeing these patterns far beyond what I can control, is that one day it will be my time to die, and this will be a good thing. I can pass on what I've done, the important lessons I've learned, but eventually I must make way for a new variations of genes, a new attempt at learning, a new crack at adapting to a changing world.

An individual dying is not an end, but part of a cycle of change, which is the core of what life is. Everything must die in the end, because to become static and unchanging is the real death, the real dragon that we should fear.

kybernetikos• 6 years ago

What if we could fix both kinds of death?

rhysrhaven2• 6 years ago

Lets for a second imagine you're right, that a long lived human could take some drugs that returns them to a childlike state, sort of a Doctor Who-esque regeneration to readapt to a new world, a new teenage years. How many would take it? And would they really be any different? Is there a maximum to that?

Sure. Next problems. Are we going to fix the broken feedback loop of capitalism, where over time the rich keep getting richer? Are we just going to recreate the Meths from Altered Carbon? Those who can use their money to live forever, accumulating more and more wealth entirely voluntarily until they are as gods over the rest of humanity? To solve one problem is to spawn so many more dragons than aging ever was.

0823498723498722• 6 years ago

"Laisser la place aux jeunes" is a common french term to say one should make space for young people coming up. What is the anglophone equivalent? "Capture the rising elite" doesn't quite have the same connotations.

LeifCarrotson3• 6 years ago

From the article:

Spiritual men sought to comfort those who were afraid of being eaten by the dragon (which included almost everyone, although many denied it in public) by promising another life after death, a life that would be free from the dragon-scourge. Other orators argued that the dragon has its place in the natural order and a moral right to be fed. They said that it was part of the very meaning of being human to end up in the dragon’s stomach. Others still maintained that the dragon was good for the human species because it kept the population size down. To what extent these arguments convinced the worried souls is not known. Most people tried to cope by not thinking about the grim end that awaited them.

orangecat• 6 years ago

Even if death is on balance a good thing, the process that precedes it of your body and mind deteriorating over several decades is not. It greatly decreases quality of life and increases medical expenses. A world where people enjoyed 80 or 100 years of good health and were then painlessly euthanized would be a huge improvement.

Also, COVID-19 would be barely noticeable if everyone had the risk profile of 30 year olds.

warbaker7• 6 years ago

Imagine if we, somehow, had the technology to make humans live for 5000 years (bristlecone pine trees somehow manage it). Would you then say that we should still commit suicide at 90, in order to make room for the young?

My dad is in his 70's, and I consider his mortality to be a preventable tragedy, like a death from smallpox before the invention of the smallpox vaccine.

There's already a lot "unnatural" about humanity (unnatural only if you don't think of humanity as being part of nature). It used to be the case that about half of your siblings would die before reaching adulthood. Perhaps at the time, people felt that this gave their own life more meaning, and perhaps in some sense, it did. I'm still glad we don't have to go through that anymore, and grateful to generations past for spending the resources to make that so.

Children would have to be much rarer if we solve longevity, but our engineers and scientists would also be far more capable than they are right now, as they'll be able to accumulate far more knowledge and experience. Perhaps, once we solve longevity, it will be time to start the long term project of colonizing the solar system.

pistachiopro• 6 years ago

I think your first point gets to the heart of it. Yes, I'd be happy to be able to live to 5000, but there are also plenty of other people in the world I'm truly glad don't get to live much past 90. Until we figure out a societal system capable of reining in the extreme will to power present in some of the population, the dragon taking those people out makes me feel like he's on my side, even if I eventually have to pay the price, as well.

So, it's not that I don't wish for society to eventually conquer the dragon of death, but not until we conquer some of the even more pernicious social dragons that are currently being held in check by it.

Kednicma5• 6 years ago

Ha, hilariously naïve. I still have the "Black Dragon Fallacy" written down as something that deserves a full writeup, but in short: What's the missile made of, and how does Bostrom propose that we build it?

Bostrom brings us "fine phrases and hollow rhetoric," mostly. Sure, we should do something about aging, but what, exactly, are we failing to do as a society here? He seems to think that the problem is that we're treating aging and death as inevitable, but science already has marched past that position; instead, we now know that aging is part of a tradeoff involving cancer and is closely tied to maintenance of DNA as cells reproduce in multicellular organisms.

Further, the notion of agency is hopelessly confused by the design of the fable. Humans are deliberately sending other humans to the dragon while the missile is ready to go, in the story, and Bostrom insists that we are supposed to regret this. However, when we move back through the analogy to the real world, then the way that humans send other humans to the dragon is via war. Will ending aging end war? How?

Anthropomorphizing psychopomps may have been a mistake, since it has led to Bostrom imagining that if we just collect all of the psychopomps into one really big mean dragon, and then kill the dragon, that we'll have defeated death. Easy peasy!

ALittleLight3• 6 years ago

I think the main idea is to realize that aging is a disease we all have and it's lethal and we aren't doing enough to combat it. What's the budget for senescence research and why isn't it two or three orders of magnitude more?

Why isn't every ninety year old automatically enrolled in an experimental program to reduce senescence? Eighty? Seventy?

We should be desperate and taking desperate measures to fight aging tooth and nail. Instead, we seem to be casually studying it.

If we applied the world's productive and research efforts, and obliterated redtape, how much progress would we make?

Kednicma5• 6 years ago

...Are you suggesting sacrificing the old in order to save the old?

echlebek• 6 years ago

I don't know if death can really be considered a disease, since it's a fundamental part of evolution. If anything, lack of death could be detrimental to a species.

dragonwriter2• 6 years ago

I think the main idea is to realize that aging is a disease we all have and it's lethal and we aren't doing enough to combat it.

But...its not.

Its a label for the aggregate of the accumulated effects many different conditions and traumas. Its a very loose multicause syndrome, not a disease.

Why isn't every ninety year old automatically enrolled in an experimental program to reduce senescence?

Because consent, among other reasons.

We should be desperate and taking desperate measures to fight aging tooth and nail.

On a social level I think this is wrong for the same reason it is often wrong to desperately scrap at extending life on an individual level: the expected return in terms of life extension does not warrant the expected cost in terms of immediate quality of life.

warbaker7• 6 years ago

We are failing to sufficiently fund longevity research, and the basic science and engineering needed to enable it.

We are spending a ton of money on healthcare (analogous to the trains), and almost nothing on the root cause of most of these health problems.

The reason the fable is effective is that it frames aging as an adversary, which makes it much easier to understand the necessity of spending resources to defeat it.

Bostrom would say that your concern that aging and cancer are intertwined is akin to a scientist seeing that the scale is impenetrable to all known materials, and then giving up.

Somehow, whales live hundreds of years, and trees live thousands. What's different about their biology that accounts for this? Why aren't their bodies wracked with cancer?

tigen2• 6 years ago

"humans were far too heavy to fly and in any case lacked feathers"

Science has certainly not "marched past" the issue of life (or health) extension. Knowing that it is related to cancer or whatever does not end the story. That is like saying we now know humans don't have feathers.

Regarding agency, the story the humans have no real choice in the matter because the dragon will kill them all otherwise. Ending aging would be much more valuable than ending war. Wars do not kill billions of people. Of course, it is possible to destroy all life on the planet in a war, but this is orthogonal to solving other problems.

"You are hilariously naive to think about solving one problem when there is another."

Kednicma5• 6 years ago

Please pay attention. I did not say "cancer or whatever". I said cancer [0], a specific family of diseases characterized by normal cells becoming cancerous [1], a state marked by unbounded growth and self-reinforcing DNA damage. Cancer and aging are intimately linked via telomeres [2], part of the structure of cellular DNA. Indeed, quoting the first sentence of [3]:

Telomeres, the caps on the ends of eukaryotic chromosomes, play critical roles in cellular aging and cancer.

On war, we lose millions of people regularly [4]. We lose about a million people to genocide every year [5]. These are people that, in Bostrom's parlance, we have put on the train to go see the dragon; we sacrificed them for nothing at all. Nothing in Bostrom's tale suggests that, having defeated the dragon, we will stop killing millions of people.

On nuclear war or other disastrous climate change, something you only allude to, the Doomsday Clock [6] is currently at less than two minutes to midnight, and has never been closer. It is widely agreed that we are on the very edge of self-annihilation and that we expend a tremendous amount of political effort simply not destroying ourselves.

I can see that you're a relatively young and inexperienced account; I hope that you do some reading and improve your understanding of biology and history, rather than continuing to lean on mystic or mythic influences for your worldview.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancer

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinogenesis

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telomere

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telomeres_in_the_cell_cycle

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_Clock

billpg• 6 years ago

We are the dragon.

AlwaysRock• 6 years ago

The dragon is whatever you want or need it to be. I saw oil/natural gas the first time I read the story. Disease and cancer the second.

garmaine5• 6 years ago

Well according to the author it is aging. It's a parable, not literature.

goatlover• 6 years ago

It's aging, the one thing that all people succumb to if they don't die of something else first. In the story, the dragon is widely believed to be both inevitable and a necessary part of life, but there are always a few who thought otherwise. It was only when science reached a certain point did it become possible to see how the dragon might be slayed, potentially saving the increasing numbers of people taken by it every year as the human population grows.

Aging is the only thing that matches the dragon.

chosen111110• 6 years ago

Has anyone done a really good analysis of how much money it would take to end biological aging? And then eventually buy time to develop immortalist technologies.

Something like a punchlist.

Do we need to solve mind uploading or AGI first?

What precursor technologies need to be available and what intellectual pursuits should people be pursuing and at what scale?

What political, legal and resource obstacles exist that might succeed in stopping the development of this technology?

Books like Singularity is Near are great but I wish someone would create something truly like a roadmap, with risks, prerequisites, decision-trees, capital needs and obstacles.

idclip5• 6 years ago

Read paychoanalysis - immortality is actually inherent to the system as the phenomenon of the self and the primordial ouroboric plemora.

However the “experiencer” as it arises in humans as the adjucant to consciousness isnt, and the problem is in the experiencer identifying itself with the past.

Immortality of experience is impossible, since by definition of the experiencer as memory, living forever requires an infinite amount of matter to preserve the memory (as the body grows older, it loses DNA structure, its cells decay in time, losing information at the molecular level. Keeping that process alive “forever” will need constant “regeneration” - and forever means infinite energy to do so, and we assume here that the universe has finite amount of matter and energy)

Immortality of the plemora also assumes a cyclical nature to the universe as it decays and rises again (big bang, big crunch, but in psychoanalysis the ouroborus is depicted in myth as simply a cyclical organism/structure which is developed into various mythologies and religions)

The larger “self” is infact immortal. Let that sink in.

chosen111110• 6 years ago

Very interesting. You are right that true immortality is not possible as eventually the universe has an end, now if it crunches and repeats is another question.

If we solve biological aging we then would hopefully eventually be able to buy time before we can develop mind uploading, which brings forth more of the points you outlined.

I probably should have stated the roadmap to solving aging.

LeifCarrotson3• 6 years ago

A goal of remembering absolutely everything using infinite matter and infinite energy, surviving big bang/big crunch events, feels like a bit of scope creep. Also, I don't particularly care about the primordial ouroboric plemora, or whether some theoretical larger self is immortal, I'm not and the people I love are not. Like the kid in this fable, I say "Death is bad! It took my granny away."

Let's first aim to give humans the option to not die after a mere 3 billion seconds. Let's aim to first increase that by a factor of 100 or more. If the heat death of the universe or which centuries to keep in memory look like they're going to be a problem, then I'll be happy devote a few millenia to the effort.

nvader• 6 years ago

GPT-3, is that you?

chosen111110• 6 years ago

I'm thinking in terms of money, we are talking well into the trillions of dollars. And probably having to develop AGI.

garmaine5• 6 years ago

What does AGI have to do with anything?

ogennadi• 6 years ago

The blocker now is getting brain preservation equipment in every hospital; we already have techniques that will preserve brains for centuries until uploading tech is perfected.

See the BPF's article [1] or video series [2] if you prefer.

[1] https://www.brainpreservation.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2scSuw0om8

Disclosure: I volunteer for them.

chosen111110• 6 years ago

I know Nectome is a YC company. Altman has signed up I believe.

Vitrification is better than cryo as a last resort as I understand it, due to market risk.

reasonattlm3• 6 years ago

We don't need to end biological aging, just control it. Let aging run, producing molecular damage in tissues, and periodically repair and reverse that damage such that people don't become physically old.

The SENS Research Foundation folk have on occasion talked about what they think is the most funding that can be run through the research community to produce progress. Something like $100m/yr for each of the seven areas of interest would be a ballpark upper limit before you start to run out of competent research groups to fund productively.

Once you have a candidate therapy, expect $150M to get it through trials. It is very challenging to guess at how many different therapies are needed. It might be a hundred different forms of treatment in the case of cleaning up persistent metabolic waste. Even in the case of single target problems such as senescent cell accumulation (just selectively destroy those cells), it may still be the case that ten or twenty different therapies are funded to take a run at that grail.

(Then for every therapy approved, budget the usual industry size for providing a service to 3 billion people once every few years. Most such treatments will be biologic and small molecule drugs that can be mass produced, and the ballpark for infrequent treatments that are well into their mature, cost-optimized stage of manufacturing seems to top out at $10k or so - but that may well get crushed down lower by the economies of scale in providing to the world at large, rather than to the less than 1% who have a specific condition. But this is a whole other analysis).

Any attempt to say too much more than I have above about the control of aging approach is challenging at this stage. Too much variance.

chosen111110• 6 years ago

I personally think WAY more money would be needed.

mooneater2• 6 years ago

Death is the one great equalizer between billionaires and the poor. Remove that and we would get Eternal Robber-barons, which would be the new dragons.

riffraff• 6 years ago

A topic explored in plenty of SF literature, see e.g. Altered Carbon[0] for a recent take

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altered_Carbon

webmaven• 6 years ago

A topic explored in plenty of SF literature, see e.g. Altered Carbon[0] for a recent take
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altered_Carbon

Not sure 2002 counts as "recent"...

warbaker7• 6 years ago

Perhaps we'd simply adapt, say via a global wealth tax or something similar.

boxed2• 6 years ago

When the richest died from disease in numbers unheard of today we still had slavery. It's not a great equalizer if you think about it.

tekkk2• 6 years ago

But it is. We have progressed out of slavery over the years. Without those who were staunchly pro-slavery and who profited from it mightily dying, they would have been fighting against abolishing it to the tooth and nail over the years.

After we have been molded in our childhoods, we don't change from that very radically. Certain imprints just stay with us the rest of our lives. If billionaires would be able to live forever our world would divide heavily into those who could afford to be demigods and accumulate wealth in perpetuity, and those poor buggers who would toil away in the companies the rich would own.

Maybe at one point the cure could become universally available. But the aristocracy of super-wealthy would remain and the gap between the poor and the rich would become magnitudes greater than it is today.

tigen2• 6 years ago

Yes, even today the billionaires have set things up so that their children inherit most of their wealth, and these families kill all the other humans.

garmaine5• 6 years ago

I'd rather have a global wealth tax than die.

Nasrudith3• 6 years ago

That is a rather childish spiteful and envious logic masquerading as virtue. It is essentially saying "Because they have more than me (I want it and they have it therefore they stole it), it is fair that both of us will be hit by a train?"

Regardless of the views on fairness (the very definition is so solipsistic that the Just World hypothesis means that they can rationalize anything bad as happening because the victims clearly deserved it.) it makes the entire matter moot because both are dead.

Eternal and robber barron are is also both bad assumptions. It assumes that those with more neccessarily have stolen it and produce nothing. Stealing and production aren't mutually exclusive either. If someone actually dominates resource consumption without any production "prememium" to justify it then there is always something to gain by killing them and taking their stuff. If said "eternal robber barron" actually turns out to have been a net positive from say their lengthy experience in managing considerable holdings any bandit or revolutionary will taste their winnings turning to ashes in their mouth.

It is a morally awkward lesson but very grounded in the real world as even when the defeated actually was an oppressor instead of just looked upon with envy the new owners who never ran one before will find running the "old machine" whether a farm, factory, oil well, or mine or isn't as simple as they thought - let alone an entire country. Production soon crashes and on top of that are the market effects. Unsurprisingly property owners don't want to trade with those who are still is stained in blood with seized property who declares it all righteous. Would you show up on a cannibal warlord's doorstep to buy a used car from him? No because he might eat you and add your junker to sell.

Terr_• 6 years ago

Death is the one great equalizer between billionaires and the poor.

Firstly, that's not really true on an individual basis: Poor people die sooner. Just because they end up in the same place eventually doesn't mean the journeys were the same.

Secondly, death seldom matters for "billionaires" or "the poor" as classes, because biological death is the domain of individuals, not the clan or sociopolitical group. The billionaires have technology called "private property" and "inheritance" to adjust for the deaths.

Amusing and slightly related: https://existentialcomics.com/comic/259

0_gravitas3• 6 years ago

Unless life extension treatments were administered to all, as in, there is a functioning non-adversarial healthcare system.

X6S1x6Okd1st• 6 years ago

We've been living in a time when almost all goods and technology have been consistently available to more and more of the population.

Many things start out as only available to the rich. Something as innocuous as pineapple used to be a status symbol.

mooneater2• 6 years ago

Does anyone think that the social advances of the recent centuries would have ever happened, if there was no death? If we had the same society with the same people with the same prejudices?

Womens rights. Democracy. Anti-racism. Religious tolerance. Gay rights. Environmentalism.

All of these would have never happened if had managed to kill "the dragon".

Death is not just suffering, its a critical part of the cycle of renewal. Author is nuts imo.

SQueeeeeL• 6 years ago

To imagine we have to wait for the intolerant to die to have progress is just as nuts, and forces a passive view that no one should advocate for social change in their era...

warbaker7• 6 years ago

I think they would have, yes. Both effects are occurring at the same time - younger people are more liberal, but also older people are getting more liberal over their lifespans.

And, in any case, if the price of longevity is slower social change, I'll take it!

tosh• 6 years ago

3rd story in Steve Jobs' commencement speech on death:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hd_ptbiPoXM&t=982

warbaker7• 6 years ago

I think you can courageously follow your heart even if you know you won't die for thousands of years.

Perhaps a world in which a 5000-year lifespan is common will be a world in which people are more socially courageous, more daring, as they know they'll have plenty of time to recover from a mistake.

jackcosgrove• 6 years ago

Ending senescence would not hinder human adaptation.

First of all is there any evidence that death is biologically planned, rather than simply being the result of degrading bodies for which nature never found a solution?

More importantly, we have other means of information transmission between organisms such as language, such that DNA is practically obsolete as an adaptation mechanism.

yters• 6 years ago

No amount of money can eliminate the second law of thermodynamics, and a finite timeline always comes to an end.

0_gravitas3• 6 years ago

I am always surprised/disheartend by the amount of people in threads regarding this topic who are quintessentially "pro-death".

Kednicma5• 6 years ago

I'll put to you what I put to Bostrom in my analysis further downthread: What, exactly, do you think we should be doing which we aren't currently doing? Everything he implies that we should be working on, we are working on.

0_gravitas3• 6 years ago

We are working on it with only so many resources dedicated to the effort (which, right up with/on-top-of climate-change, is one of the most impactful problems to ever be solved as far as I can fathom). This is secondary however.

My __main__ concern is that these efforts are vulnerable to being rendered null due to short-sighted, dogmatic, legislation, a la similar restrictions on things like CRISPR and stem-cell research. Gauging from responses I've seen in this thread here and in the past, if it was a matter of a simple, single democratic vote on "Should we eliminate/drastically decrease the negative physical effects of aging?", I have serious doubts that the end total would be in favor of that action; an overwhelming number of people seem to hold this stockholm-syndrome-y view of death/aging. __THAT__ is the part that concerns me, and that is the/a part that I think concerns Bostrom, and what I believe the story is trying to address.

The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant (2005)

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