Social progress would change slower though. Actually even quoting Max Plank:

> A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it

Aka science advances one funeral at a time

I suspect that, if a scientist in his fifties knew that his cognitive function would remain at the same level up to at least age 150, he would be a lot more willing to spend years rethinking things and familiarizing himself with new and better conceptual approaches. Something similar could probably be said about programmers that seem attached to old and allegedly inferior tools.

Not sure that's how biases work.

Biases are about the interplay of pressures to perform and reform where the comfort of the known is more persuasive than the enticement of the new.

There needs to be the luxury of time and the space to fail, two things we don't have.

The technology of longevity won't fix this problem of culture, sure. But it would make such a fix a lot more meaningful

Basically what you're describing is the tradeoff between exploration and exploitation. Depending on situation in life and age people tend to lean towards one or another.

In more concrete terms, I'm quite persuaded by what I read and see about emacs, but 20 years of vim keeps bringing me back.

I mean seriously, emacs lisp looks so much more sane than vimscript, I've been telling myself to switch for 10 years now...

>> There needs to be the luxury of time and the space to fail, two things we don't have.

But once we have those, won't they be considered not luxurious, instead, standard?

And won't the argument still be that we lack the luxury we need?

I think we should improve the handover instead of pretending there will be no handover.

I guess the question is, if people lived to 200, would that mean a 50 year old's approach to new information would be the same as that of a today's 50 year old, or that of a today's 25 year old.

Basically are we just keeping old people alive longer or are people growing old slower.

If we are just treating causes of death then we are just keeping people alive for longer. What David Sinclair is doing is trying to keep people young for longer.

But that's partly because as people age, their brains get less flexible and open to learning new things. There's already been some work on fixing that specifically.

This happens with neural nets as well. As they progress in their training, epoch by epoch, accuracy plateaus. There is always a tradeoff between keeping on learning and applying knowledge. Companies have the same dilemma between research and production - if you keep researching too much, you never get to produce anything, and vice-versa.

So your solution is just that the whole population must die younger than necessary, then? Is that really the best we can do?

I don't know, maybe we could put a hard limit on academic positions of 50 years or so. We could figure something out. I like that solution more than, effectively - kill them, and everyone else!

Oh I don't have a solution, I just thought it might be an interesting side effect. It might make an interesting science fiction topic.

I hope my post didn't imply I thought killing people was a solution...

Its merely ageism. Not really any different than dissing quantum mechanics as "jewish physics" in the 30s.

> 140 year old Albert Einstein might have been writing an email,

140 year old Albert Einstein might have written an actual letter to 161 year old Max Planck because that's what they both knew and had known for more than a century, so why change things? Many of the technological and societal changes have come up because of old people dying, including the smart ones.

Maybe because email is far better than physical mail on any axis not primarily driven by nostalgia? Take a look at the actual old people around you, they all use tech too.

All the old people that I know at even half that age do not use any tech they are not familiar with (so yes to a landline telephone, no to email). Perhaps you live in an area with very progressive old people.

My grandfather is 91 and uses WhatsApp and YouTube daily. He grew up in rural Romania, and his formal education stopped after middle school.

Your comment assumes smart people stop learning things when they get old, which is demonstrably incorrect. I also doubt your statement that many changes have happened because old people died. I suspect new minds had more to do with making changes than the old ones dying. And it is unknown if we would have had more or better changes if people had longer lifespans.

Being "old" isn't necessarily a question of age.

There are 30-year-old "old" people who don't want to learn anything they don't already know. And there are 80-year-old "young" people who gladly learn an interesting new tech.

Unfortunately there are plenty of 15 year olds who decide they're done learning, time to drop out, etc.

People who give up are doomed, regardless of age or other living conditions.

In the Steve Jobs interview, also currently on the first page, he quotes a Hindu saying:

“For the first 30 years of your life, you make your habits. For the last 30 years of your life, your habits make you.”

I'm not sure that making that last phase ten times longer is a good investment.

Is there anything special about the (absolute) number 30? Surely it's just saying roughly 'for the first [resp. last] half of your life'?

Tangentially, is that actually 'a Hindu saying' - all I can find are other people quoting Jobs and claiming the same - or is it just something a guru said that Jobs happened to like and remember?

Anecdotally my grandfather from India used to tell my father something similar as a child (and then him me), and he was born in the 1910’s in a village and very unaware of Jobs throughout his life. So I am confident that it’s from some Indian/Hindu school of thought. Only difference was he said “work hard first 30//enjoy next 30”.

Ah, so he had it backwards :)

So the next step is encouraging neural plasticity. Don't be a deathist.

I imagine if you have a longer future to look forward to that also changes the incentives for investing in yourself. So not only would the people who invest in their futures be able to use their knowledge for longer, more people might invest in their future as well. The fixed costs of building a life are pretty high (let's say 25 years) and they're expected to pay off over the following 40 years of so - if this 40 becomes 70 or 100 that changes a lot.

Maybe the costs are not fixed at 25, but 1/3 or 1/4 of life.

If you could live to 300, competition would eventually make it that you have to spend 150 years "building a life" (but hey, you still get 150 years of a good life).

I think that's exactly the point that I'm trying to make. Most of the population ends up spending a much larger time of their life investing in skills and knowledge. So the total amount of knowledge in society would end up being far larger.

That would be true for the wrong type of knowledge also -- politics, manipulation, power accumulation and so on. If you think the 0.5% are bad enough now, wait until they can live to 500.

You are saying I could delay investing ?

I'm not sure how you read that in my comment. Maybe you could, but I think in general regardless of the length of a life it makes most sense to have most of the investment phase in the first part of your life (although when science/tech evolve you need to stay up to date of course).

I got you, I just cheekily tried to note that people are also excellent at procrastinating what they can.

I wonder though, after decades of study in numerous fields, how much would you actually be able to remember?

No doubt some events in your life might stick around in your mind for a long time, but by your 100th, 300th, whatever year would 50% of it just be a hazy memory?

Or maybe this technology could give you super memory, I mean even currently some people are born with the ability to remember tons of information, but often at the expense of other brain facilities.

Memory is more structure than stuff, providing foundations of future thoughts. Meaningful insights shape your interaction with the world and change how you interface with reality. the details fade but the evolution of mind's empowering constraints continues on.

Which would be even worse for unlearning things/talk therapy.

"I have this daddy issue, probably, but I don't really remember my dad..."

On the flip side, what improvements would we see just from tripling or quadrupling our training time? It'd be the human equivalent of "left it running over the holidays and now it's state of the art".

Rather than the potential accumulation of wisdom, I would be far more concerned with the continued concentration of wealth and power by the already wealthy and powerful.

Would the world be a better place, if Vanderbilt, Pullman, or Stalin were still alive? What would be the benefit to the world of, say, a Putin still in control a hundred years hence?

Death is an equaliser and a recycler.

SMBC did a fantastic comic on this one: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/immortality-2