Human life span has risen steadily in the last hundred years or so. The
world average life expectancy at birth in 1900 was 31. In 1950, it was 48. In
2014, it was 71.5. That's an increase of 40 years achieved in 114 years of
medical advances.
In other words, far from the dragon of ageing getting bigger and bigger and
ever more hungry, humanity has been winning fight after fight after bloody
fight against this evil beast.
I cannot believe the chutzpah in Bostrom's allegory, that sweeps this
remarkable achievement aside as insignificant and misguided, with his
description of "the king" sending "his army" to fight minor, incompetent
battles against the lesser evils of "tigers and snakes" - presumably that's
governments funding medical research into such minor threats as HIV and
malaria, that claim mere millions of people every year.
What's worse, he actually advocates that we set aside this actually,
currently, life-extending research and instead focus on finding ways to defeat
ageing: "Instead of a massive publicly-funded research program to halt aging,
we spend almost our entire health budget on health-care and on researching
individual diseases."
We already have the medical technology to save the lives of millions of people
in the developing world, who die of such "individual diseases" that are
treatable or preventable right now. And yet we don't provide those treatments
to the people who need them, because they can't afford them. We value the
profits of private enterprise more than long and healthy lives for everyone on
the planet. Long and healthy lives are for those who can afford Western
medicine- for the rest, well, tough. They live sick and die young.
This is the kind of ethical deficit we should be discussing: two thirds of the
world live significantly shorter, significantly less healthy lives than the
other third. We can fix this right now - and still keep looking for Nick
Bostrom's magical health-extending pills. And then make it available to
really-really everyone once we find it.
> Human life span has risen steadily in the last hundred years or so. The world average life expectancy at birth in 1900 was 31. In 1950, it was 48. In 2014, it was 71.5. That's an increase of 40 years achieved in 114 years of medical advances.
That's not true in the sense that most people think. Life expectancy at birth has increased, but most of that has come from reductions in infant mortality. Maximum life span has not increased. More people just die closer to it.
> We already have the medical technology to save the lives of millions of people in the developing world, who die of such "individual diseases" that are treatable or preventable right now. And yet we don't provide those treatments to the people who need them, because they can't afford them.
First, that's not true. For example: Malaria deaths have decreased by 25% in just six years[1], mostly due to aid from wealthy western countries and billionaires like Bill Gates.
Second, I doubt Bostrom is arguing against curing diseases such as malaria. It's just that malaria kills 450,000 people per year, while aging kills more than that every week. If we value lives equally, we should probably spend much more on anti-aging research than we spend on malaria research. Sadly, the opposite is the case. Billions are spent on malaria each year. The WHO alone spends over $60 million per year on malaria. A generous estimate of anti-aging research would be $10 million per year. So aging kills 100x more people than malaria, but the world spends 100x more on malaria than anti-aging research.
> We value the profits of private enterprise more than long and healthy lives for everyone on the planet. Long and healthy lives are for those who can afford Western medicine- for the rest, well, tough. They live sick and die young.
That's also not true. On every metric you care to measure, the developing world has been catching up to the west. Global inequality is decreasing, not increasing.[2] These improvements have come from a combination of government efforts and private companies. And if you're going to do an accounting of early deaths, governments will not come out ahead of private companies.
> This is the kind of ethical deficit we should be discussing: two thirds of the world live significantly shorter, significantly less healthy lives than the other third. We can fix this right now - and still keep looking for Nick Bostrom's magical health-extending pills. And then make it available to really-really everyone once we find it.
Every new technology starts off expensive. The original iPhone was too expensive for most people, and it wasn't very good by today's standards. A decade later, smartphones have gotten cheap enough for people to afford in the developing world. The same thing has been happening with computers, cars, televisions, radios, air travel, and medicine.
I think it's a good thing that some parts of the world have eliminated malaria. I'm glad we didn't wait for a magical malaria-eliminating pill. Likewise, I think it would be a good thing if some parts of the world eliminated aging. The sooner that problem is solved in one place, the sooner it will be solved everywhere.
>> On every metric you care to measure, the developing world has been catching up to the west. Global inequality is decreasing, not increasing.[2]
My other reply to your comment is, regretably, extremely long but I wanted to repeat this point:
Global income inequality is still very high and will stay very high for a long time
Even under a very optimistic scenario it will take several
decades for the poor to reach the income level of the global
top 10%.
2% is roughly the growth rate that the richest countries of
today experienced over the last decades (see here). We have
seen that poorer countries can achieve faster growth, but we
have not seen growth rates of more than 6% over a time frame
as long as necessary to reach the level of the global 10% in
such a short time. If the past is a good guide for the future,
the world will very likely be highly unequal for a long time.
>> Second, I doubt Bostrom is arguing against curing diseases such as malaria.
That's absolutely what he's arguning for. This is how he elucidates his
allegorical points about dragon-administration and war against tigers and
snakes:
(3) Administration became its own purpose. One seventh of the economy went to
dragon-administration (which is also the fraction of its GDP that the U.S.
spends on healthcare). Damage-limitation became such an exclusive focus that
it made people neglect the underlying cause. Instead of a massive
publicly-funded research program to halt aging, we spend almost our entire
health budget on health-care and on researching individual diseases.
He is clearly equating healthcare spending with "dragon administration".
If he believes that we should still spend as many resources in healthcare and
researching individual diseases, then why is he portraying these as futile and
misguided tasks, that have "become their own purpose"?
Also see the point I quoted above:
(5) The lack of a sense of proportion. A tiger killed a farmer. A rhumba of
rattlesnakes plagued a village. The king got rid of the tiger and the
rattlesnakes, and thereby did his people a service. Yet he was at fault,
because he got his priorities wrong.
The king "got his priorities wrong" because he went after lesser evils. That
doesn't seem like a resounding endorsement of continuing the research on
"individual diseases".
After all, Bostrom seems to believe that most causes of death will vanish if
we can halt ageing. So he's advocating that we stop bothering with every other
cause of death and focus our research on "the underlying cause" of all of
them, so we can save everyone in one go.
>> That's not true in the sense that most people think. Life expectancy at birth
has increased, but most of that has come from reductions in infant mortality.
Maximum life span has not increased. More people just die closer to it.
In what sense is the fact that most people die at an older age not an expansion of human life span? Are you saying we care
about the mode, more than we care about the mean?
That certainly seems to be Bostrom's way of thinking. I believe he is way more
interested of his chances to live to 300 than any other person's chance that
their kids will live to 70.
But that's not ethics. That's just pure selfishness.
>> First, that's not true. For example: Malaria deaths have decreased by 25% in
just six years[1], mostly due to aid from wealthy western countries and
billionaires like Bill Gates.
And yet:
Examples of health inequities between countries:
the infant mortality rate (the risk of a baby dying between birth and one year
of age) is 2 per 1000 live births in Iceland and over 120 per 1000 live births
in Mozambique;
the lifetime risk of maternal death during or shortly after pregnancy is only 1
in 17400 in Sweden but it is 1 in 8 in Afghanistan.
I am perhaps wrong to focus on health inequalities between countries, since
there are big inequalities in health within societies:
Examples of health inequities within countries:
in Bolivia, babies born to women with no education have infant mortality
greater than 100 per 1000 live births, while the infant mortality rate of
babies born to mothers with at least secondary education is under 40 per 1000;
life expectancy at birth among indigenous Australians is substantially lower
(59.4 for males and 64.8 for females) than that of non-indigenous Australians
(76.6 and 82.0, respectively);
But I am not wrong to say that we do have the technology to save many millions
of lives lost to disease, right now, yet we don't because they can't afford it.
>> On every metric you care to measure, the developing world has been catching up to the west. Global inequality is decreasing, not increasing
And yet again:
The benefits of the economic growth that has taken place over the last 25
years are unequally distributed. In 1980 the richest countries, containing
10% of the world’s population, had gross national income 60 times that of
the poorest countries, containing 10% of the world’s population. By 2005
this ratio had increased to 122.
International flows of aid – grossly inadequate in themselves, and well
below the levels promised – are dwarfed by the scale of many poor
countries’ debt repayment obligations. The result is that, in many cases,
there is a net financial outflow from poorer to richer countries – an alarming
state of affairs.
Same source.
Also, from the source you quote:
Global income inequality is still very high and will stay
very high for a long time
>> Every new technology starts off expensive. The original iPhone was too
expensive for most people, and it wasn't very good by today's standards. A
decade later, smartphones have gotten cheap enough for people to afford in the
developing world.
How many people in the developing world have iPhones?
> If he believes that we should still spend as many resources in healthcare and researching individual diseases, then why is he portraying these as futile and misguided tasks, that have "become their own purpose"?
Where are you getting "as many" from? You realize that it is in fact possible to spend less money on a thing without spending $0? You're acting like we have no choices between "spending 1/7 of our GDP on healthcare" and "ban all healthcare forever".
> The king "got his priorities wrong" because he went after lesser evils. That doesn't seem like a resounding endorsement of continuing the research on "individual diseases".
Lesser evils are still evils. We should spend more than $0 on eradicating them, but less than we spend on eradicating greater evils. That's what having proper priorities means.
> After all, Bostrom seems to believe that most causes of death will vanish if we can halt ageing. So he's advocating that we stop bothering with every other cause of death and focus our research on "the underlying cause" of all of them, so we can save everyone in one go.
These inferences about what he believes are nonsense and unsupported by the text.
> How many people in the developing world have iPhones?
This argument is whataboutism at its worst. He's not suggesting that we ignore healthcare and individual diseases. He's suggesting that we stop ignoring aging (and death in general) and take it seriously. The problem of medical patents and treatment distribution in the developing world is indeed a big one, but it's a political/economic one completely unrelated to the choice to ignore the biggest disease humans suffer from.
>> He's not suggesting that we ignore healthcare and individual diseases.
He is absolutely advocating that we do exactly that. He believes that halting ageing will cure every other disease and make people live longer, healthier lives. Therefore he's arguing that we should spend the majority of resources spend on health to combat ageing.
My other post, above, replying to chroma quotes the relevant passages from the original article.
In other words, far from the dragon of ageing getting bigger and bigger and ever more hungry, humanity has been winning fight after fight after bloody fight against this evil beast.
I cannot believe the chutzpah in Bostrom's allegory, that sweeps this remarkable achievement aside as insignificant and misguided, with his description of "the king" sending "his army" to fight minor, incompetent battles against the lesser evils of "tigers and snakes" - presumably that's governments funding medical research into such minor threats as HIV and malaria, that claim mere millions of people every year.
What's worse, he actually advocates that we set aside this actually, currently, life-extending research and instead focus on finding ways to defeat ageing: "Instead of a massive publicly-funded research program to halt aging, we spend almost our entire health budget on health-care and on researching individual diseases."
We already have the medical technology to save the lives of millions of people in the developing world, who die of such "individual diseases" that are treatable or preventable right now. And yet we don't provide those treatments to the people who need them, because they can't afford them. We value the profits of private enterprise more than long and healthy lives for everyone on the planet. Long and healthy lives are for those who can afford Western medicine- for the rest, well, tough. They live sick and die young.
This is the kind of ethical deficit we should be discussing: two thirds of the world live significantly shorter, significantly less healthy lives than the other third. We can fix this right now - and still keep looking for Nick Bostrom's magical health-extending pills. And then make it available to really-really everyone once we find it.