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The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant (2005)

by warbaker on 10/13/20, 9:32 PM with 91 comments

  • by warbaker on 10/13/20, 9:44 PM

    CGP Grey's video adaptation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZYNADOHhVY

  • by SilasX on 10/14/20, 3:10 PM

    To save you from reading the 5000 words waiting for the point, I gave a summary on the 2015 submission. (Linking to avoid copy-paste per HN guidelines and mod feedback.)

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9561960

  • by mooneater on 10/14/20, 5:47 PM

    Death is the one great equalizer between billionaires and the poor. Remove that and we would get Eternal Robber-barons, which would be the new dragons.

  • by dang on 10/13/20, 10:29 PM

  • by jackcosgrove on 10/14/20, 7:55 PM

    Ending senescence would not hinder human adaptation.

    First of all is there any evidence that death is biologically planned, rather than simply being the result of degrading bodies for which nature never found a solution?

    More importantly, we have other means of information transmission between organisms such as language, such that DNA is practically obsolete as an adaptation mechanism.

  • by reasonattlm on 10/14/20, 3:21 PM

    Still as relevant 15 years later, as we still live in a world in which aging can be addressed via the construction of rejuvenation therapies, but most people are simply disinterested in the prospect, the science, and doing anything other than crumbling, suffering, and dying like their parents and grandparents.

    The one big difference between the present and 15 years ago: the first rejuvenation therapies worthy of the name now exist in the form of senolytic treatments that selectively destroy senescent cells. Pretty much everyone over the age of 50 should be taking them once a year or so, and would have a better life as a result. It makes the pathos of the situation somewhat greater than it was.

  • by rhysrhaven on 10/14/20, 3:28 PM

    A story for a story. My father had children from the age of 19 to 55. Born in the 1930s, passed in his 80s, he had a good life. As the youngest of many brothers by different mothers, our paths have diverged massively as we experience the world separated by decades.

    And yet the commonality of genetics lays down a pattern of personality that is striking to see. We share the same baseline, the same personality flaws, the same basic interests manifest in different ways. We are in so many ways variation on a theme that is my father. And seeing all these examples of the same pattern aging, each person slowly becomes poorly fit for the world that evolves around them. We learn as children, grow into men, and eventually become rigid in our patterns. I expect this is reflected in basic biology of the brain.

    The one thing that this has convinced me of, seeing these patterns far beyond what I can control, is that one day it will be my time to die, and this will be a good thing. I can pass on what I've done, the important lessons I've learned, but eventually I must make way for a new variations of genes, a new attempt at learning, a new crack at adapting to a changing world.

    An individual dying is not an end, but part of a cycle of change, which is the core of what life is. Everything must die in the end, because to become static and unchanging is the real death, the real dragon that we should fear.

  • by 0_gravitas on 10/15/20, 3:34 AM

    I am always surprised/disheartend by the amount of people in threads regarding this topic who are quintessentially "pro-death".

  • by chosen1111 on 10/14/20, 5:11 PM

    Has anyone done a really good analysis of how much money it would take to end biological aging? And then eventually buy time to develop immortalist technologies.

    Something like a punchlist.

    Do we need to solve mind uploading or AGI first?

    What precursor technologies need to be available and what intellectual pursuits should people be pursuing and at what scale?

    What political, legal and resource obstacles exist that might succeed in stopping the development of this technology?

    Books like Singularity is Near are great but I wish someone would create something truly like a roadmap, with risks, prerequisites, decision-trees, capital needs and obstacles.

  • by 082349872349872 on 10/14/20, 5:35 AM

    For another take on dragons in particular: Farmer Giles of Ham.

    and for monsters & maidens in general: https://blog.plover.com/book/myth/princess-andromeda.html

  • by tosh on 10/14/20, 6:36 PM

    3rd story in Steve Jobs' commencement speech on death:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hd_ptbiPoXM&t=982

  • by yters on 10/14/20, 8:18 PM

    No amount of money can eliminate the second law of thermodynamics, and a finite timeline always comes to an end.

  • by billpg on 10/14/20, 4:33 PM

    We are the dragon.

  • by mooneater on 10/14/20, 6:17 PM

    Does anyone think that the social advances of the recent centuries would have ever happened, if there was no death? If we had the same society with the same people with the same prejudices?

    Womens rights. Democracy. Anti-racism. Religious tolerance. Gay rights. Environmentalism.

    All of these would have never happened if had managed to kill "the dragon".

    Death is not just suffering, its a critical part of the cycle of renewal. Author is nuts imo.

  • by Kednicma on 10/14/20, 4:08 PM

    Ha, hilariously naïve. I still have the "Black Dragon Fallacy" written down as something that deserves a full writeup, but in short: What's the missile made of, and how does Bostrom propose that we build it?

    Bostrom brings us "fine phrases and hollow rhetoric," mostly. Sure, we should do something about aging, but what, exactly, are we failing to do as a society here? He seems to think that the problem is that we're treating aging and death as inevitable, but science already has marched past that position; instead, we now know that aging is part of a tradeoff involving cancer and is closely tied to maintenance of DNA as cells reproduce in multicellular organisms.

    Further, the notion of agency is hopelessly confused by the design of the fable. Humans are deliberately sending other humans to the dragon while the missile is ready to go, in the story, and Bostrom insists that we are supposed to regret this. However, when we move back through the analogy to the real world, then the way that humans send other humans to the dragon is via war. Will ending aging end war? How?

    Anthropomorphizing psychopomps may have been a mistake, since it has led to Bostrom imagining that if we just collect all of the psychopomps into one really big mean dragon, and then kill the dragon, that we'll have defeated death. Easy peasy!