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A review by ishanjmukherjee
The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant by Nick Bostrom
4.0
This fable is held up as the reason for writing altruistically minded fiction: Vitalik Buterin, a billionaire, has it linked on his Twitter bio! Like Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, and The Sequences, it is inspiring how much The Fable is bothered with making the world a better place. The sequence about the man who says that death gives life meaning is one of the most emotionally forceful arguments I've read in fiction, or really anywhere. (The chapter on free will and the criminal justice system in Behave by Robert Sapolsky was another deeply impactful section for me in this regard.)
That said, I don't know how tractable anti-aging research is. There are good reasons to think it's not as tractable as slaying the dragon is in the fable: unlike reducing existential risk or slowing down climate change, averting aging isn't a public service, you can profit off of it. It seems unlikely to me that people who work on curing, say, cancer, haven't thought of tackling the problem of aging. While it is possible to argue that working on the moonshot problem of averting aging is worth it because the social value of this research could far outstrip the profits to the inventor of a cure (hence why not many people are working on it), curing aging is *highly* profitable -- you'd expect lots of people to be working on it even if it is only remotely tractable.
Nevertheless, this story is a nice reminder to care viscerally about improving the world.
Relatedly, I'm in awe of Nick Bostrom's memetic resume: anthropic bias, the vulnerable world hypothesis, the reversal test, astronomical waste, the unilateralist's curse. How does he come up with so many good ideas?
That said, I don't know how tractable anti-aging research is. There are good reasons to think it's not as tractable as slaying the dragon is in the fable: unlike reducing existential risk or slowing down climate change, averting aging isn't a public service, you can profit off of it. It seems unlikely to me that people who work on curing, say, cancer, haven't thought of tackling the problem of aging. While it is possible to argue that working on the moonshot problem of averting aging is worth it because the social value of this research could far outstrip the profits to the inventor of a cure (hence why not many people are working on it), curing aging is *highly* profitable -- you'd expect lots of people to be working on it even if it is only remotely tractable.
Nevertheless, this story is a nice reminder to care viscerally about improving the world.
Relatedly, I'm in awe of Nick Bostrom's memetic resume: anthropic bias, the vulnerable world hypothesis, the reversal test, astronomical waste, the unilateralist's curse. How does he come up with so many good ideas?