scrape_r_rational/data/cache/2fa6ef.md

[RT] The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant

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• u/Empiricist_or_not:

  There really should be a good way to establish this as foundation work for the subreddit.  There is plenty of confirmation bias within us as a community, but there is a reason why people come up with names like "the great common task" for this theme.
  

• u/PeridexisErrant:

  An excellent parable, and a good thing to post here.  
  
  That said... I'm not sure what the appropriate tag would be!
  
  * `[RT]` doesn't seem quite right to me, since the setting and characters are clearly designed to convey a particular message rather than interact realistically.  That might be more the style though, and it's not wrong.
  
  * It has the flavor of a rationalist story, but by instruction rather than by example.  What does that make it?
  
  * Is it SF?  Fantasy?  A genre deconstruction (of reality?)?
  
  Discuss!
  

  • u/duffmancd:

    Educational?
    
    Personally I'd go for [DC] and [EDU]. It may not be strictly deconstructive but it has the same feeling of a story used to point out the flaws in something. In this case the something is our world rather than a story world.  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
    
    In any case it is a great story I fully support placing it on here.
    

  • u/Zephyr1011:

    I was unsure which tag really fitted, but RT seemed the best of them. I wouldn't really call it educational for the same reason that HPMOR isn't tagged EDU, despite both of them teaching you something
    

• u/othermike:

  Am I really the only one flat-out *terrified* of anyone making progress toward life extension before we've reached any kind of workable consensus on long-term population control or wealth distribution?
  
  I honestly see this as a doomsday scenario on a par with runaway unfriendly AI, but more likely in the short-to-medium term.
  

  • u/None:

    Population is not such a problem: humans don't *naturally* want to have huge numbers of kids (really), and we can always just start getting tyrannical about things (what did you think was appropriate?).  Wealth distribution is a *major* problem.
    

    • u/JackStargazer:

      This times ten. Population fear is unwarranted. It's been proven time and again that by increasing life expectancy and reducing child mortality, you can reduce population growth. As countries get wealthier, they have less children.
      
      [Hans Rosling explains it better than I can, being an actual researcher on the subject.](http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen?language=en)
      
      The wealth distribution... that one's a bit harder.
      

  • u/Nepene:

    That's not really a first world problem, we're more worried about population shortages because not enough people are being born.
    

    • u/othermike:

      It becomes a problem in pretty short order if *people stop dying*.
      

      • u/alexanderwales:

        Assuming that it was distributed uniformly across the population, sure. But life extension won't be like that - it's going to come to the rich first, and probably in fits and starts as we eat away at the long tail. We're not going to conquer death in an afternoon, and not in a few decades either. Given that, there's no reason that we can't work on multiple problems simultaneously - the elimination of death being one of those.
        

        • u/othermike:

          Well, we're both making unwarranted assumptions. I'm assuming worst-case because I'm trying to make a cautionary point, you're assuming best case because you want to move ahead with research. Yes, conquering *all* forms of death up to and including pianos falling on heads isn't going to happen anytime soon, but a general anagathic would trigger 95% of the economic issues associated with my doomsday fear, and we have no idea what that might look like.
          
          Also, many of the issues don't need the technology to be *available*, they just need it to be *plausible*. Take pensions, for example. As soon as a working anagathic within a decade or two starts to look as if it has any chance of happening, annuity rates go to zero everywhere, and stay there forever.
          
          You might think implementing a UBI or similar scheme should be a trivial problem compared to conquering death. You might be right. You might think the same about healthcare provision, but look at the US. You might think the same about housing, but look at the UK. Never underestimate how determinedly elites - elites who by that time may have no reliance on the general population either economically or militarily - can do the wrong thing when they aren't the ones suffering consequences.
          
          I also think you're severely underestimating the likely resistance to a state veto on reproduction. Even the Chinese had a tough time with that; how do you think the Catholics are going to react?
          

          • u/Timewinders:

            Even if we had an antiageing drug right now wouldn't it take around a century just to test it? And ageing, and the human body in general, is so poorly understood that I highly doubt that any treatment will be available for at least another century, which means at least two hundred years until it's distributed to even just the rich people. The human population is already set to plateau at around 2050, and might even decrease after that as standards of living improve in India and China. Higher standards of living are probably more likely to put a strain on the environment than population growth. Not to mention agricultural problems related to climate change, scarcity of fresh water, overfishing, etc. which might result in famines and many millions of people dying before then and possible societal collapse. So I think the risk posed by getting an antiageing drug too soon is relatively low.
            

            • u/PeridexisErrant:

              For full long-term testing, sure.  That takes a long time.  
              
              However: if you give a cohort of 80-90 year olds the treatment, and after a decade they're much healthier than the control group... the old and powerful are generally not idiots.
              

      • u/Nepene:

        In one or two hundred years maybe.
        
        Plus we may be able to deactivate hormonal changes that boost baby making desires.
        

  • u/Izeinwinter:

    No, you are not the only one, because population growth doom fears are a perennial fallacy dating back ages. That part is almost certainly just wrong, because curing old age instantly kills two of the major factors motivating people to have kids  (legacy, someone to keep things going in your old age)  
    And heck, thanks to the wonders of math, even given true "My mind is backed up onto the cloud, my home harddrive daily, and weekly onto memory diamondstored in the repurposed yucca mountain dig" immortality every couple could have one kid and that would still be fine (Generation sizes halving: End result slightly less than a doubling of population over infinite time) 
    
    Old farts hanging on to all the wealth and all the power for ever? Uhm. Ever so slightly more of a problem. Already a problem even with them dying on their own.
    

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