How curing aging could help progress

Also on the old guard problem: Let's say you're one of the luminaries of a field, and you have a lot invested in one particular approach or theory for doing things—maybe you invented this approach and you remain one of the best in the world at it.  Now suppose there's a new approach that shows strong signs of being better than the one you're invested in.

If your career is going to end "soon" due to age, then taking the time to learn the new approach and become really good at it—as good as you currently are with your approach—may take up a substantial portion of the remainder of your career.  In that case, just from a calculated-risk perspective, it may be in your interest to double down on your current approach even at times when the new approach is clearly the right choice for newcomers.  But if you expect your career to last another 200 years, then it's much more likely in your interest to keep up with the times.

"Approach" is a very general term here.  It might describe "experimental method and type of equipment used", "sub-area of study", "hypothesized method of treatment of a disease", "programming language and editor used", and lots of other possibilities.

A few thoughts about the old guard problem:

In a population without changes in lifespan, the median birthtime will increase by one year for every year that passes. E.g. say for simplicity that life expectancy is 80 years and noone died before 40, then the median birth year in 2020 is 1980, and 2030 it is 1990 and so on. If life expectancy increases, this with go slower. I dont know the numbers, but I would think median birthtime increases with 10-11 months per year in the developed world today. If people stopped dying and new people were born at constant rate, median birthtime would still be increasing with around 6 months a year. So in a democracy, I would expect moral development to continue, although at a somewhat slower rate.

Of course, if we look at the birthtime of the 10% oldest, that would only increase with around 1/10 year per year, so there might develop an old elite. Still, people born before, say, 2100 would become a smaller and smaller minority, and the same can be said for any other year.

I still think the “old guard” problem is real, and we’d have to come up with new mechanisms to address it. (Perhaps influential positions would institute a mandatory retirement age of 350.)

I was thinking about this the other day, but from a slightly different perspective. Consider trust in the society. If a country goes through a civil war, or maybe a period of a state collapse, the people are - based on their experience - less trusting of strangers and maybe even willing to take advantage of a defenseless stranger. The prospects for cooperation (and therefore societal progress) are not great. One is likely to see clique formation, tribal thinking, corruption.

Now, new generation doesn't have the civil war experience (or a street gang experience, or whatever). It is generally more trusting. They are able to cooperate on a higher level, but the old generation is distrustful, considers the youngsters to be dangerously naive and throws a wrench into the machine. And the longer the average length of life is, the slower the process of moving away from zero-sum games to positive-sum games becomes.

The interesting observations are:

1. Solutions like "retire at 350" are not going to work - you can't retire a person from the society.
2. The "old guard" problem could be, in theory, solved if the old generation would learn to change their mind, to adjust to the changed conditions on the ground. However, I am not sure how realistic is the unlearning the civil war experience, unlearning of not trusting the people around you.

I want to live a healthy life for as long as I feel like, but in utilitarian terms, the societally active lifespan needs to be commensurate with intelligence. Intelligence + experience -> wisdom, and at some point one's wisdom hits the ceiling and long-living people become a drag and a drain. So, if I were to put more research points toward human life stats, I'd split it roughly evenly between intelligence (without detrimental effects in other areas) and longevity.

David Gems “The programmatic theory of aging as developed by @Blagosklonny and de Magalhães promises to eventually serve as part of a general framework of understanding aging and the pathophysiology of late-life disease.” “This could at long last provide the field of biogerontology with an effective explanatory paradigm similar to that provided by the germ theory for the study of infectious disease, and the periodic table for chemistry.” https://preprints.org/manuscript/202108.0552/v1/download

I think this would be on-topic for the EA Forum too!

I can't imagine any scenario where both progress has continued, and physical humans still exist a century or two from now. Software humans will be free from the horrors of aging of course, and all the problems listed above.

Why wouldn't the oldest just monopolize all important positions forever? 

What exactly will a 40 year old in a society of 4000 year olds do other than the least desirable work?