Transhumanism as Simplified Humanism

5) status quo bias.

Most people will change they minds the moment the technology is available and cheap. Or rather, they will keep disliking the idea of 'immortality' while profusely consuming anti-aging products without ever noticing the contradiction, because in their minds these will belong in two different realms : grand theories VS everyday life. Those will conjure different images (ubermensch consumed by hubris VS sympathetic grandpa taking his pills to be able to keep playing with his grandkids). Eventually, they'll have to notice that life expectancy has risen well above what was traditionnally accepted, but by then that will be the new status quo.

6) concern about inequalities. The layman has always had the consolation that however rich and powerful someone is, and however evil they are, at least they die like everyone else eventually. But what will happen when some people can escape death indefinitely ? It means that someone who has accumulated power all his life... can keep accumulating power. Patrimony will no more be splitted among heirs. IMO, people would be right to be suspicious that such a game-changing advantage would end up in the hands of a small super-rich class.

7) popular culture has always envisioned the quest for immortality as a faustian bargain. This conditions people against seeing life lengthening as harmless.

I just read this article from the Atlantic - I wrote the comment first- but I think it eloquently highlights most of these points.

https://www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/379329/

Consider: “having food is good. Having more and tastier food is better. This is common sense. Transfoodism is the philosophy that we should take this common sense seriously, and have as much food as possible, as tasty as we can make it, even if doing so involves strange new technology.” But we tried that, and what happened was obesity, addiction, terrible things happening to our gut flora, etc. It is just blatantly false in general that having more of a good thing is better.

Conclusion does not follow from example.

You are making exactly the mistake which I described in detail [LW(p) · GW(p)] (and again [LW(p) · GW(p)] in the comments to this post). You’re conflating desirability with prudence.

It is desirable to have as much food as possible, as tasty as we can make it. It may, however, not be prudent, because the costs make it a net loss. But if we could solve the problems you list—if we could cure and prevent obesity and addiction, if we could reverse and prevent damage to our gut flora—then of course having lots of tasty food would be great! (Or would it? Would other problems crop up? Perhaps they might! And what we would want to do then, is to solve those problems—because having lots of tasty food is still desirable.)

So, in fact, your example shows nothing like what you say it shows. Your example is precisely a case where more of a good thing is better… though the costs, given current technology and scientific understanding, are too high to make it prudent to have as much of that good thing as we’d like.

As for “common sense”: in many human societies it was “common sense” to own slaves, to beat your children, again etc. Today it’s “common sense” to circumcise male babies, to eat meat, to send people who commit petty crimes to jail, etc., to pick some examples of things that might be considered morally repugnant by future human societies. Common sense is mostly moral fashion, or if you prefer it’s mostly the memes that were most virulent when you were growing up, and it’s clearly unreliable as a guide to moral behavior in general.

Now this does prove too much. Ok, so “common sense” can’t be trusted. Now what? Do we just discard everything it tells us? Reject all our moral intuitions?

Yes, by all means let’s examine our intuitions, let us interrogate the output of our common sense. This is good!

But sometimes, when we examine our intuitions and interrogate our common sense, we come up with the same answer that we got at first. We examine our intuitions, and find that actually, yeah, they’re exactly correct. We interrogate our common sense, and find that it passes muster.

And that’s fine. Answers don’t have to be complex, surprising, or unintuitive. Sometimes, the obvious answer is the right one.

That is Eliezer’s point.

Yeah, "Life is good" doesn't validly imply "Living forever is good". There can obviously be offsetting costs; I think it's good to point this out, so we don't confuse "there's a presumption of evidence for (transhumanist intervention blah)" with "there's an ironclad argument against any possible offsetting risks/costs turning up in the future".

Like Said, I took Eliezer to just be saying "there's no currently obvious reason to think that the optimal healthy lifespan for most people is <200 (or <1000, etc.)." My read is that 2007-Eliezer is trying to explain why bioconservatives need to point to some concrete cost at all (rather than taking it for granted that sci-fi-ish outcomes are weird and alien and therefore bad), and not trying to systematically respond to every particular scenario one might come up with where the utilities do flip at a certain age.

The goal is to provide an intuition pump: "Wanting people to live radically longer, be radically smarter, be radically happier, etc. is totally mundane and doesn't require any exotic assumptions or bizarre preferences." Pretty similar to another Eliezer intuition pump:

In addition to standard biases, I have personally observed what look like harmful modes of thinking specific to existential risks. The Spanish flu of 1918 killed 25-50 million people. World War II killed 60 million people. ${10}^8$ is the order of the largest catastrophes in humanity’s written history. Substantially larger numbers, such as 500 million deaths, and especially qualitatively different scenarios such as the extinction of the entire human species, seem to trigger a different mode of thinking—enter into a “separate magisterium.” People who would never dream of hurting a child hear of an existential risk, and say, “Well, maybe the human species doesn’t really deserve to survive.”

There is a saying in heuristics and biases that people do not evaluate events, but descriptions of events—what is called non-extensional reasoning. The extension of humanity’s extinction includes the death of yourself, of your friends, of your family, of your loved ones, of your city, of your country, of your political fellows. Yet people who would take great offense at a proposal to wipe the country of Britain from the map, to kill every member of the Democratic Party in the U.S., to turn the city of Paris to glass—who would feel still greater horror on hearing the doctor say that their child had cancer— these people will discuss the extinction of humanity with perfect calm. “Extinction of humanity,” as words on paper, appears in fictional novels, or is discussed in philosophy books—it belongs to a different context than the Spanish flu. We evaluate descriptions of events, not extensions of events. The cliché phrase end of the world invokes the magisterium of myth and dream, of prophecy and apocalypse, of novels and movies. The challenge of existential risks to rationality is that, the catastrophes being so huge, people snap into a different mode of thinking.

People tend to think about the long-term future in Far Mode, which makes near-mode good things like "watching a really good movie" or "helping a sick child" feel less cognitively available/relevant/salient. The point of Eliezer's "transhumanist proof by induction" isn't to establish that there can never be offsetting costs (or diminishing returns, etc.) to having more of a good thing. It's just to remind us that small concrete near-mode good things don't stop being good when we talk about far-mode topics. (Indeed, they're often the dominant consideration, because they can end up adding up to so much value when we talk about large-scale things.)

Nah, just this post never got posted to LW, and we were sad that it wasn't (it's only been available on Yudkowsky.net).

Indeed; hence the term “transhumanism” (and, relatedly, “posthumanism”).

Change is terrifying. This is to be expected, not least because most change is bad; in fact, change is inherently bad. Any change must be an improvement, must justify itself, to be worthwhile. And any such justification can only be uncertain. When we look out along a line of successive changes, what we see on the horizon terrifies us—all the more so because we can only see it dimly, as a vague shape, whose outlines are provided more by our imagination than our vision.

But the alternative is an endless continuation of the cycle, in its current form, with no improvement or hope for escape, until the heat death of the universe. That is far more horrifying. If that were all humanity had to look forward to, then we would have no need of Hell.

Aesthetic preferences are a huge part of our personalities, so who would agree to any enhancement that would destroy them? And as long as they’re present, a transhuman will be even more effective at making everything look, sound, smell etc. beautiful — in some form or another (maybe in a simulation if it’s detailed enough and if we decide there’s no difference), because a transhuman will be more effective at everything.

If you’re talking about the human body specifically, I don’t think a believable LMD (with artificial skin and everything) is impossible. Or maybe we’ll find a way to build organic bodies with some kind of reciever instead of a brain, to be controlled remotely by an uploaded mind. Or we’ll settle for a simulation, who knows. Smarter versions of us will find a solution.

Any moral framework that doesn’t acknowledge tradeoffs is broken. The interesting questions aren’t “should we save this person if it doesn’t cost anything?”—truly, that’s trivial as you say. The interesting ones, which authors and ethicists try to address even if they’re not all that clear are, “who should suffer and by how much in order to let this person live better/longer?“.

The problem comes in when people start inventing imaginary tradeoffs, purely out of a sense that there must be tradeoffs—and, critically, then use the existence of those (alleged) tradeoffs as a reason to simply reject the proposal.

And then you have the flaw in reasoning that I described in this old comment [LW(p) · GW(p)]:

I think that this post conflates two issues, and is an example of a flaw of reasoning that goes like this:

Alice: It would be good if we could change [thing X].
Bob: Ah, but if we changed X, then problems A, B, and C would ensue! Therefore, it would not be good if we could change X.

Bob is confusing the desirability of the change with the prudence of the change. Alice isn’t necessarily saying that we should make the change she’s proposing. She’s saying it would be good if we could do so. But Bob immediately jumps to examining what problems would ensue if we changed X, decides that changing X would be imprudent, and concludes from this that it would also be undesirable.

[…]

I think that Bob’s mistake is rooted in the fact that he is treating Alice’s proposal as, essentially, a wish made to a genie. “Oh great genie,” says Alice, “please make it so that death is no more!” Bob, horrified, stops Alice before she can finish speaking, and shouts “No! Think of all the ways the words of your wish can be twisted! Think of the unintended consequences! You haven’t considered the implications! No, Alice, you must not make such grand wishes of a genie, for they will inevitably go awry.”

Interestingly, fighting aging is winning in this logic against many other causes. For example, if we assume that giving Aubrey de Grey 1 trillion dollars is enough to solve aging (ok, I know, but), than this imply that 10 billions people will be saved from death, and the cost of the saved life is around 100 USD. There are some obvious caveats, but life extension research still seems to be one of the most cost-effective interventions.

Could you explain what you mean by resource allocation? Certainly there's a lot of political and public opinion resistance to any new technology that would help the rich and not the poor. I think that stems from the thought that it will provide even more incentive for the rich to increase inequality (a view to which I'm sympathetic), but I don't see how it would imply that only the distribution of wealth is important...