Re: How do you calm down the hot-heads?

From: Aubrey de Grey (ag24@gen.cam.ac.uk)
Date: Mon Aug 25 2003 - 08:20:32 MDT

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    Alex Bokov wrote:

    > By productive detente I mean: we do science, they do science, and
    > nobody calls anybody else 'kooks', at least not in public. By moving
    > *any* legitimate scientific study forward, even people who disagree
    > with my goals contribute to them. Just some more directly than others.
    > Active cooperation is best of course, but I'll take passive cooperation
    > over active opposition any day. Heck, even in the field of aging I
    > suspect most people view it as 'just an interesting puzzle' and don't
    > concern themselves with the implications.

    Your last statement is undoubtedly true and is a fine example of what you
    go on to say about being programmed to want to die. However, the problem
    is that the mainstream actively oppose *all* work that furthers real life
    extension in the foreseeable future, on the basis that it's absurdly far
    away and hence anything remotely goal-directed at this point is a waste
    of money. This is of course self-serving -- by accepting that it's time
    to start doing genuinely biomedical gerontology, the researcher who does
    purely curiosity-driven stuff implicitly acknowledges that their emphasis
    is misplaced -- and I'm afraid that is part of why it's so hard to get
    biogerontologists to actually study the relevant biotechnological fields.
    (It's difficult to say that something is impossible when you've read the
    literature by those who are already most of the way there, but it's easy
    when you haven't and can thus maintain your illusion that any such work
    that others may speak of is overblown or erroneous or whatever.)

    My view, therefore, is that to a certain extent fire must be fought with
    fire -- we must make such scientists uncomfortable (though in the nicest
    possible way, of course). The best way to make scientists uncomfortable
    about their belief in a particular dogma is to challenge them to find a
    hole in a position that contradicts that dogma. That's why my "How you
    can help" page (<http://www.gen.cam.ac.uk/sens/how.htm>) says this:

       IF YOU'RE A JOURNALIST: write about my work, but most importantly of
       all please interview other mainstream biogerontologists (the more
       senior and high-profile the better) and ask them to explain why they
       don't think we'd cure aging any time soon by the approach I advocate.

    I find that my colleagues' opposition to what I say is diminishing very
    rapidly -- more so than I'd expected, honestly -- and I believe this is
    largely because I've been saying essentially the same thing for a couple
    of years now without my position being found glaringly flawed. If other
    people start saying it too, to senior gerontologists' faces, it may not
    be long at all before the balance of opinion (and funding) tips sharply
    in the biomedical direction.

    > With regard to logic being on our side. I agree, but a PhD does not
    > automatically confer rationality in all facets of life. I've been
    > trying all my life to understand the knee-jerk "hubris" reaction people
    > like us seem to provoke, and still cannot understand it. It's almost as
    > if the majority of the world is somehow programmed to want to die. The
    > only useful thing I've learned from years of debates on this topic is
    > to circumvent the issue by focusing attention on more 'mundane' aspects
    > of the research.

    Unfortunately, this circumvents the issue rather too thoroughly (see
    above).

    > Furthermore, there is one anti life-extension argument that I cannot
    > accept, yet also cannot fully refute: overpopulation.

    You almost answered yourself here. Since people are so overwhelmingly
    fixated on the idea that making everyone live indefinitely is an awful
    idea, the problem is not one of sociology, nor even philosophy, but of
    psychology. There is no appreciable prospect of making someone more
    enthusiastic about life extension by describing how humanity might be
    able to cope with overpopulation (or boredom, or loss of "meaning",
    etc): as you point out, they can just say "but you're hoping for the
    best -- it's safer not to go there in the first place". No: what one
    must do is ask them what they would do if given the choice between (a)
    living for (say) the next year, but thereby (by some unspecified
    mechanism) denying some unconceived person the chance to be born and
    some other living person the right to procreate, or (b) giving those
    people those chances, but dying in (say) the next year. This is the
    choice we will each be making, every day in one way or another, in a
    post-aging world in the worst-case scenario where emigration off the
    planet does not arrive (or does not appeal), birth rate fails to fall
    fast enough, etc. Thus, it is the choice we today give or deny those
    who might be alive to have that choice if we develop real anti-aging
    medicine as soon as we can but not if we delay. (Those people may or
    may not include some of us, of course.) Putting the issue in these
    personal terms is powerful, because the only way out of approving of
    life extension while choosing (a) above (and while answering similar
    questions about boredom etc similarly) is to argue that it's wrong to
    give others a choice that one would take if one had it oneself, and
    luckily that's a position that most educated people in the developed
    world don't enjoy finding themselves taking.

    Aubrey de Grey



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