Social Security was created based on the premise that people of certain ages are unable to support themselves due to poor and declining health. Yet Aubrey de Grey has made a fairly strong argument that this bad health can be cured (see Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence), so that the elderly will be as healthy as the young.
Since it’s probably inevitable that the government will end up paying for the initial round of anti-aging treatments, why not make government payments for such treatments conditional on the beneficiary leaving the Social Security system? This would probably save the government enough that it would be worthwhile for it to speed the research up by offering a few billion dollars in prizes for people who complete milestones such as extending the lifespans of lab animals.
There’s a good deal of doubt as to how many decades it will take to produce a good enough cure (and some ambiguity as to how good a cure would need to be to qualify). But the a combination of Aubrey de Grey’s arguments and those of Rob Freitas and Eric Drexler suggest that there’s a very good chance that it can be done before Social Security is expected to collapse. And anyone who thinks Congress might turn Social Security into a system that is certain to remain solvent is drastically overestimating the reliability of demographic forecasts and/or the far-sightedness of Congress.
Life, the Universe, and Everything
Book Review: Anthropic Bias: Observation Selections Effects in Science and Philosophy by Nick Bostrom
This book discusses selection effects as they affect reasoning on topics such as the Doomsday Argument, whether you will choose a lane of traffic that is slower than average, and whether we can get evidence for or against the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics. Along the way it poses some unusual thought experiments that at first glance seem to prove some absurd conclusions. It then points out the questionable assumptions about what constitute “similar observers” upon which the absurd conclusions depend, and in doing so it convinced me that the Doomsday Argument is weaker than I had previously thought.
It says some interesting things about the implications of a spatially infinite universe, and of the possibility that the number of humans will be infinite.
It is not easy to read, but there’s little reason to expect a book on this subject could be both easy to read and correct.
The author has a web site for the book.
I highly recommend VeganEssentials.com as a source of healthy and tasty food for when it’s hard to have fresh fruits and veggies available (e.g. hiking, snowboarding, kayaking). Some of my favorites are the Larabar (made entirely of fruit and nuts) and the mushroom jerky.
Be sure to have any guests at your celebration of Isaac Newton’s birthday sign a Guest Liability and Indemnification Agreement (PDF) before you overfeed them.
Book Review: The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700-2100 by Robert Fogel
This book presents good arguments that hunger was a major cause of health problems everywhere a century ago, and that the effects last long enough that even the richest countries are still suffering from problems caused by hunger. His arguments imply that experts persistently underestimate improvements in life expectancy, and even with little improvement in medical technology life expectancy will improve a good deal because people born today have much better nutrition than today’s elderly had as children.
This goes a long way toward explaining the Flynn effect (even though the book doesn’t mention Flynn or IQ). It correctly implies the biggest intelligence increase should be seen at the low end of the IQ range, unlike a number of other interesting theories I’ve come across.
Another peculiar fact that the book helps to explain is the high frequency with which the tallest presidential candidate wins. Fogel’s arguments that height has been one of the best indicators of health/wealth suggest that this is not an arbitrary criterion (although it is probably a selfish I-want-to-ally-with-a-winner strategy that may be obsolete).
The book is mostly non-idealogical, but occasionally has some good political arguments (page 42):
government transfers were incapable of solving the problems of beggary
and homelessness during the eighteenth and much of the nineteenth centuries,
because the root cause of the problems was chronic malnutrition. … At
the end of the eighteenth century British agriculture, even when supplemented
by imports, was simply not productive enough to provide more than 80 percent
of the potential labor force with enough calories to sustain regular manual
labor.
(page 106):
Readers may be surprised that I have not emphasized the extension of health insurance policies to the 15 percent of the population not currently insured. The flap over insurance has more to do with taxation than with health services. … Most proposals for extending health insurance involve taxing their wages for services they already receive.
See also Mike Linksvayer’s comments.
Rare Earth : Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe provides some fairly strong (and not well known) arguments that animal life on earth has been very lucky, and that planetary surfaces are typically much more hostile to multicellular life than our experience leads us to expect.
The most convincing parts of the book deal with geological and astronomical phenomena that suggest that earth-like conditions are unstable, and that it would have been normal for animal life to have been wiped out by disasters such as asteroids, extreme temperatures, supernovae, etc.
The parts of the book that deal with biology and evolution are disappointing. The “enigma” of the Cambrian explosion seems to have been explained by Andrew Parker (see his book In the Blink of an Eye) in a way that undercuts Rare Earth’s use of it (dramatic changes of this nature seem very likely when eyes first evolve). This theory was apparently first published in a technical journal in 1998 (i.e. before Rare Earth).
They often assume that intelligence could only develop as it has in humans, even suggesting that it couldn’t evolve in the ocean, which is rather odd given how close the octopus is to qualifying. But the various arguments in the book are independent enough that the weak parts don’t have much affect on the rest of the arguments.
I was surprised that they never mentioned the Fermi Paradox, which I consider to be the strongest single argument for their position. Apparently they don’t give it much thought because they don’t expect technological growth to produce effects that encompass more than our planet and are visible at galactic distances.
Their concern over biodiversity seems rather misplaced. I can understand why people who overestimate mother nature’s benevolence think that preserving the status quo is a safe strategy for humanity, but it seems to me that anyone sharing Rare Earth’s belief that nature could wipe us out any time now should tend to prefer a strategy of putting more of our effort into creating technology that will allow us to survive natural disasters.
I am disappointed that they rarely attempt to quantify the range of probabilities they would consider reasonable for the risks they discuss.
Stephen Webb has written a book on roughly the same subject called Where is Everybody? that is more carefully argued, but less entertaining, than Rare Earth.