Vitalist Right vs Transhumanists

A chat with Gale Tunisia

Having stumbled upon this topic, me and Gale decided to cover it more throughly on voicechat and here’s an edited, structured result:

[Note: it’s long so scroll to see all the headings, each topic is quite independent]

Perceptions of traditionalism

Doxometrist:

You said that there’s a certain dualism in the perception of ‘trad’ (traditionalism), could you tell more about this?

Gale Tunisia:

There is a lot of misperception about the idea of traditionalism, a lot of dumbing it down. Both from the opposing side and the trads themselves. At one end we have a primitivist approach: living in the woods, hunting, growing your own food, etc. That is primitivism in its basic utilitarian form. But when we talk about society - and we DO live in society - in that case, ‘trad’ is organizing the society in a way that was previously shown to work. That is, I think, the fundamental essence of what tradition is: it is a collection of techniques and practices that have been shown to work. Conversely, progressivism is an attempt to forcibly replace those practices and ways of living with things that should be better in theory, but have not been demonstrated to work. They might be better, but as a century of practice shows us, most of the time they are worse. 

I am very sensitive to that, to the "century of practice" argument, because I’m Russian and century of practice of progressivism has been mainly done on my ancestors. I’ve been intergenerationally fucked by people wanting to improve society based on abstract theory. So for me, ‘trad’ - as in ‘constructing society and comporting yourself in society in ways that were previously shown to work' - that’s just returning to normalcy I guess. But it does not mean that you must reject every new invention. In fact incorporating new inventions is in itself very traditional, and as they say, ‘lindy’. It’s just that changes need to be evaluated, vetted, to demonstrate that they work before incorporation into society. That's true for both technology and social changes. 

Smartphones did that successfully, despite any arguments that can be made to the artificiality of that market. As a social phenomena, they are really strange, artificial, forced on us by marketing. But underneath that, they’re useful, help us live better. Of course they have some problems, but that’s true for every change. Change that brings more usefulness than new problems is good, change that brings more problems is bad. My view is that smartphones are good in net utility, OnlyFans is bad. And so to try and incorporate the changes and scientific advances into traditional fabric of society, we need to do it the way it used to work for millenia, before massive experimentation started. We have to be brave, because we have to take risks to test stuff on ourselves. 

Nassim Nicolas Taleb is arguably one of the most influential proponents of trad in the modern intellectual milieu. He has nothing but praise for innovators and experimenters, even while he’s slamming people who force sweeping social and economic changes on the back of unproven theory. That’s what helped me formulate my own position on that.If we are to build a stable society, we have to continuously evaluate and implement changes to it. Without changes, without constant improvements, there’s stagnation and decay, that’s a biological fact. You either adapt and evolve, or stagnate and die, there is no stasis.

Progressivism vs conservatism

D 

The way I see it, the traditionalism you portray is closer to ‘progressivism with safety checks’ than conservatism. As you emphasize innovation and improvements, you agree with the general idea that improvements are out there, in the realm of possibility, in the unknown and then that the society is progressively incorporating some of them. 

That would be contrasted with conservative stance, this picture of a ship on the waves, just about keeping it all together, keeping in full shape, as opposed to taking it to some specific place, or direction.

Would you agree with such characterization?

GT 

I’ll respond by referencing T aleb again. One of his core ideas is distinction between:

• fragility

• robustness

• antifragility

As three modes of existence for an entity; fragility and robustness exist on one axis. Robustness is the maximum size of the wave that the ship can get hit with without losing structural integrity and falling apart. Increasing robustness is a good idea on the face of it, but there is antifragility - property of biological systems. When an object gets some input, gets hit by something in the environment, not only it can suffer and come alive from this, but also be better prepared for future impacts

D 

Like vaccination...

GT 

Yes just like that, with a general philosophical term being hormesis - hardening in response to external trauma. The same way as in the gym, training muscles, fatiguing and traumatizing them by moving objects heavier than you should. You rest, recover and muscles recover to size and density they didn't have before. That's overcompensation. You can do that weight easily now, so you increase the weight, traumatize your muscles again, they grow again, rinse and repeat until you reach your target bicep size, or whatever. There is a failure mode - when you’re in a gym and trying to lift something way beyond your ability, for example you are new and try to deadlift twice your weight. You break something inside yourself, now you’re worse for it, in all possibility for the duration of your life.

The same works for society. I’ll return to the example of Russia in 1917. There was plenty of system stress, it was modernizing at neck breaking pace, it was modernizing too fast for the government to catch up. The shock of modernization, war and internal instability. Eventually these shocks combined were too much for the system to bear. Czar’s brothers pushed it over the line. Giant trauma.That’s the problem with conservatives, they try to fix the ship, but not steer to calmer water and/or build the ship up. Then, a wave will come that will overcome structural integrity and they all will drown.Conservatism is reactive, not proactive. As Yarvin and many others noted, American conservatism is progressivism of 20 years ago. The gap is narrowing, the current one is from 10 years ago.   

D 

To be fair, in this way you cover many of the usual points of criticism. You disconnect from the arcadian lifestyle, also you’re making your stance immune to the criticism ‘such lifestyle has never existed’. Traditionalism as a process of creative exploration, open minded, while progressivism just goes towards one set destination.

GT 

Yes, that’s correct

 Before mass democracy was a thing, countries were led by somewhat competent leaders. Some countries adapted to changes faster, some broke by going too fast - French Revolution. Some adapted slower, got conquered - China in the 19th century. Some countries were just at the right speed. Individualistic mindset and dread of dying alone.

Individualistic mindset and dread of dying alone

D

Vitalist right sees itself as a middle way between two visions of the future: one of corporate state, Neo-Tokyo aesthetics, technological dystopia, and another one of chaotic right wing accelerationism collapse porn. You said that this unique vision of the future is because of a certain diagnosis of the present, which has to do with ‘the fear of dying alone’. How does this feature of Zeitgeist impact our society and our future?   

GT 

Dread of dying alone is what you get when you break down low-level structures in society and replace them with government and industries that are faceless in nature, as opposed to the normal interactions, bonds between people. When you do that, what you produce is the fear of dying alone, fear of missing out. On the individual level, it comes from lack of meaningful social contact, from attention spans ruined by accelerating technology, cognitive ability shredded by fractal distraction. The naive answer to that fear would be to never die. Fear of dying is an essential human emotion, inseparable from life. So is loneliness. 

When you combine the two with lack of appreciation for maturity, you get the absolute state of modern Western society. For people in this society, people smart enough to ask the question "what if I die?" - the naive answer would be to not to die at all. That’s how we arrive at radical life extension, immortalism, mind upload, and whatever sci-fi ideas are out there. The idea that death is an illness to be cured, much like medicine eliminated smallpox. Pox was not beneficial in any way to humans. On the face of it you can say that dying is not beneficial for a single human. If you think from a perspective of a single, atomized human, you arrive at such conclusions - never accumulate generational wealth, never have kids, etc. That mindset is becoming quite natural for any argument we start in our culture, that’s often the default position we find ourselves in. If we pick a different starting point, it’s different. Not wanting to die is absolutely natural. 

The problem is with the starting position, not the argument. The state Cathedral is interested in you staying in that individualistic hedonistic mindset - that makes you a perfect subject, perfect consumer, perfect cog in their machine. When you are not connected to anything but market and state, you are a cog in that machine. If you are connected to something else, it’s that much harder to spin you like that. Imagine, if you will, a cog that is tied with wire to ten random cogs nearby. It would be way harder for the machine to spin it. 

But the transhumanist "left", the immortalist crowd - instead of examining that loneliness and fear of death, they’re furiously trying to dig themselves out of it, into the state of being they perceive to be superior. They are going through attempts to improve their health, mental health. Single modern humans go through yoga, meditation, diets, supplements... if they get far enough down that rabbit hole - stuff like cryonics. Someone might even be able to afford organ replacements from black markets. That's very cyberpunk, but examining how they arrived there, they are trying to give technical, material answers to a philosophical question. And their answer is quite morbid. If you will, look up any picture of Aubrey de Grey, one of the prime transhumanists. Dude is, like, 57 but he has looked like a wizard since forever.  He has grown out a wizard beard, long hair and all the attributes of an old wise man, since he was 38. He has drawn himself into early and drawn-out senility, popping up to a hundred pills daily. He has become old before his years because of trying to live forever. That’s symptomatic of the whole transhumanist movement. Guys are trying to stay old forever. They’re naively trying to extend life using (post)modern medicine to extend lifespan, leading just to prolonged old age.

Human capital argument for immortality

D 

That’s on the individual level. Yet there’s also a civilization scale argument - ‘Tale of the dragon tyrant’.

You have a kingdom and a dragon who excises sacrifices, some percentage of population. That’s normalized in society, every year some people are transported there. The king does not do anything, as more or less impactful, but better PR-wise things need his attention. As a result the dragon scourge is not reduced in any way. There’s also a statistic that people dying each year is loss of knowledge equal or more than the size of the Library of Congress. [Can’t find the source, please reach me if you know it]. One of the commonalities these share is the real loss of knowledge through death. What would you say to that civilizational scale argument for immortality?      

GT 

I remember myself making a counter argument against that on twitter. In Roko’s thread where we have started this topic. One of my mutuals made an argument to Roko’s life extension DAO concept, that motivation for immortality is protection of human capital - when people with 40-60 years of experience die, we lose all that capital.What's wrong with that argument is that it’s from the POV of an isolated human being. 

Traditional societies fixed that problem - of dying human capital - with apprenticeship. People teach other people directly about what they know. Personal experience is very hard to quantify and making it into reusable data is a skill most craftsmen don't have. Knowing something and teaching other people something are not linked skill sets. Easier to teach directly than to write a book. Apprenticeship is both a transfer of knowledge and filter of knowledge. People make value judgments that might be correct at some point, but get wrong later. You can train in a mistake, and have a habit of making that mistake. Apprenticeship is a filter against obsolescence. An apprentice puts acquired knowledge into their own context, necessarily different from the master’s context. That’s a filter through which knowledge is refined, cleaned from accumulated human error. When you repeat that process a few times - you get a tradition. If you examine things like traditional arts and craft, in any part of the world, are passed down in that exact manner. They innovate on the data they see, new forms of the art while preserving its essence.

If you look at Afgan rugs, there’s a long tradition of that form of craft in the mountains. In the 80s, with Soviet invasion, helicopters, soldiers and tanks started featuring in these rugs. Art imitates life. Nowadays, the shape of military themed objects has become different, as the American army has been there for 20 years. Tradition absorbs modernity.

The problem of loss of human capital has been solved long ago. The argument that a person dying represents knowledge lost is only valid if that person dies having spent their life alone. Obviously, there is still some loss - the very amount of rediscovery from historical documents that’s happening demonstrates how much of it is there. What we need are better systems of knowledge sharing, not immortal masters of the arts.

Skills transfer and StackOverflow

D 

Before we go on, I’ll just briefly restate the argument you mentioned which was stated under Roko’s thread: 

• regular scenario: one person dying and 2nd one continuing work

• immortal scenario: both work, no retraining cost

In the second one capital expenditure to replace weariness of capital (here human capital) is reduced, leaving more purchasing and hence economic power for operating expenditure. I don’t agree entirely with the civilizational size response. Tradition solves problems. 

The apprentice system is just ‘a solution’, possibly not THE optimal one (for our tech level, etc). I think it’s better now when we have large scale. For Instance, imagine this situation: a 12th century blacksmith, good at his job, adds some smooth, gradual improvements to the craft. But there’s a problem with transfer of that knowledge. There’s a limited pool of possible apprentices in the town that can transmit - chances are they wont’ be as intelligent and / or hard working.There’s a difference between ‘showable’ manual labor where dexterity plays a role. There are different mechanisms in biological, chemical research, etc. Error is not accumulating on human level, more in the whole system of science. There is (some) error correction in the sciences, more so physical ones, less in ‘social sciences’...apprenticeships worked for societies before demographic transition, now we have more communication within the field, on human lifetime scales. Knowledge is more corrected by ‘progressing with every funeral’ - over the last 100 years rather than apprentice - master scheme, especially with conformist mass education.  The largest place of programming knowledge is Stack Overflow. That’s a Landian theme, meltdown of the information process. There’s less space for a role of the intergenerational filter, this process is outsourced to technology. Apprenticeships were once for practical ideas, now they are more now highly formalized. The future of ideas is computer science, not intergenerational. What do you think about this?      

GT

Technology is dumb, only humans parse information into knowledge into implementation. Once that is changed, my whole argument is moot because singularity ensures. My personal belief is that it will never happen, but that's beside the point. Social horizontal as opposed to intergenerational vertical transfer enhances propagation of error as well, leaving less time to check. Filtering is done by experience: you do things, see what works and what does not. That takes time. 

Stack Exchange's model is pretty good for trivial things. Most questions asked there are trivia about how to implement some specific thing. It’s good to have an impossibly huge database of searchable trivia, but at the cutting edge of science or deep in the guts of some complex system, core fundamentals are needed. If you talk to any senior programmer, they have this general displeasure with the junior programmer type who just copy pastes from StackExchange. That’s because the senior ones have the fundamentals. 

In late 80s - early 00s, Russian scientists, physicists and mathematicians mostly, re-specialized into programming, became very good programmers. Today’s success of Russian IT is built on their backs, and they trained the next generation of senior big-brain programmers. The takeaway from this is that the key differentiating factors are understanding the fundamentals and a proper mindset. For that you need person to person interaction. You can try and adopt a described mindset, but as the self-help book industry shows us, it doesn't work very well. There are thousands of useful mindsets created by singular people in their experience. A common theme is the author's experience, struggle, in overcoming that struggle the author constructs a relevant mindset, which helps them prevail, then writes a book about it. The deeper we go there, the more "prevailing" and writing books become the same thing! It’s a financial success path from poverty to writing books about getting out of poverty.

Going back to stack overflow: massive amounts of trivia help with implementation, but does not teach people fundamentals. See the amount of websites that slow down your browsers. Web programmers are not real programmers, very few of them learned any real computer science. You can fake it by juggling trivia up to some point, later you just can’t. The quality of work you can do by juggling trivia is enough in some roles, but to rise above them you have to know fundamentals to have a basic level of competence.

Global monoculture

GT

Knowledge transfer mechanisms do propagate errors. Look at the crisis of replication in psychology - all of that made up bullshit propagated, corrupting entire scientific fields. That creates a monoculture. It’s global, it has no outside, it has no external reservoir - it’s stuck. It cannot create anything new, it’s interconnected, levelled itself down to the ground. Cheap sharing of data improves results, creating more problems. That’s visible even in formal education, hard sciences. On the other hand there are still limited forms of apprenticeship - having a professor who’s interested in a field of knowledge, will drive the students to that field. That ‘influence of the master’ is still present in higher education, not so much in lower forms of education, schools and such. Schools are not teaching you craft, just required amounts of knowledge to operate in society. Why it sometimes fails to do that is a different topic…

One bankruptcy at a time

D 

Stack Overflow was a wrong example for what I intended to say.

The process of updating is less by generational filter of master - apprentice, but the way we have viral stuff, twitter, reddit - ways of promoting memes that are not controlled by any single human. Hyperstiations, like GME stock. The full knowledge base is growing organically, not guided by masters but on its own. Less affected by human degenerated decisions, more by random occurrences. Instead of innovation tested by blacksmiths or other craftsmen you get blind market forces. You can’t change that, because it’s commercial, directly applied to profit margins. 

It’s not even about scientific paradigms, but engineering ones. They are not changed by intergenerational change, but getting outcompeted. This process is from inhuman, capitalistic competition. The trade wanting to increase the role of the human filter, would also need to incorporate anti-capitalist themes (as it already does).

GT
You mentioned that science advances one funeral at the time. It’s true for the market as well, going one bankruptcy at a time. Capital can advance much faster than the intergenerational processes do.The smartphone - did not exist prior to 2000. In 2007 few people knew about it and was everywhere by 2017. Now it’s stuck in the monoculture.There are levels to this thing. The market will filter out any wrong / inefficient ideas but at its own speed. The speed of the market is different in different instances. 

There’s this capitalist metric, one of the favorites in startup circles, Time To Market (TTM), as a period between having an idea of a product and the company unveiling a product ready to market. TTM is different between industries. In the smartphone market - (which is currently stagnating) - any new idea would be in next year smartphones. Then we have steel production - if chemical innovation, some better steel, the time from proven in the laboratory to custom made knives - that’s where you see innovation in this industry first -  it would be 2-3 years. Now consider energy production, some new way to generate electricity - 5 years at the least. Some truly massive paradigm shifts - thermonuclear energy - it’s already been in development for over 50 years now, potentially 50 years still in the future. But once it works, it will obsolete the entire industry.And it is in these long timescale that it becomes interesting. When time to market exceeds human scale, the market filter stops being effective. We have 3-4 projects that have existed for decades trying to make that thing, people worked there, retired and died within that time frame. Big projects need that knowledge transfer between humans. Without retirements and funerals we wouldn’t advance from early Soviet tokamaks to ITER.

Cultural mix and downfall of Google

D 

Let’s move to the global monoculture question

It’s so bad that it’s the case. But there are people working to encourage different thinking and make companies diverse! There are many people who want to have the opposite of monoculture, Diversity. /s

GT 

[laugh]

[laugh] Sadly, it’s not the opposite. It’s diversity as defined by the monoculture. It’s diversity of ethnicity and social status in the workplace, not diversity of ways of thinking, not of cultural assumptions within the same market. As the great poet of our times said - we all live in America, America is wunderbar’. It’s not not diversity, but mixing everything together into a monotone grey / brown colour.

D 

So a sort of cultural mix would prevent technological development?

GT 

It already does, because some things are better than others. To pretend that they are not is to invite disaster. More specifically, some ways of thinking are better than others in certain fields. American low power distance, high risk, high ambition culture is better for fast development technical fields, like currently information technology. Indian caste system is not better, it’s the opposite. It’s not better than the original American ‘Silicon Valley mindset’. So when that Indian caste system is imported to Google, (by whomever appointed an Indian CEO), Google stagnates. Distance of power increases, time-to-market increases as well, aesthetics becomes ugly globohomo kitsch. Eventually, that mindset change overpowers the inertia and the massive market advantage of the first mover. Google will crash and go bankrupt. That’ll be within the time of our lives. Nobody there seems to be willing to acknowledge that for their own reasons, and the dude who tried got fired and cancelled.

Our monoculture contains a single mode of management - it’s called managerial capitalism. That’s when publicly traded companies have their founder ousted or he passed away. From there on there is no vision, the thing functions on the basis of quarterly shareholder reports. It’s maximizing, legally required to maximize that profit, at the expense of all other things - and it eventually crumbles...It’d be sad to see Apple go that way but it does seem inevitable. Also sad, though not that much, will be to see Google go that way. It rejected all that innovation once changed into Alphabet holding. Maybe some good things are happening under Alphabet somewhere, but it’s not very transparent. At Google itself I can’t see anything fresh.      

D 

Bullish for Urbit...

GT 

Yes, in fact, to any decentralization.

Future 2050

D 

Let’s talk about the future. Picture this: 2050 you have boomers over 100 years old, artificial organs, etc, etc. Individualist culture, people are living longer, and claim to be happier. Life extension technologies are heavily marketed, senile Cyberpunk.

GT 

British Queen still alive

[laugh]

About Cyberpunk, Takeshi Covacs book series by Richard K. Morgan that got turned into Altered Carbon TV series is about that topic. In its first installment it deals explicitly with the Methuselah problem: when we have extensive immortality - it will accelerate accumulation of capital...      

D 

Hang on, I need to formulate the problem. 

This medical replacement, immortality-ish stuff, no one has bored themselves to death yet. It’s just out there, few have it, everyone wants it, no obvious a posteriori downsides (besides those criticisms that we make now of it, a priori to these technosocial developments).

What's the vitalist right alternative? How to appeal, compete with that lifestyle? What message to send to people when the rival it’s so powerful…?

GT

We already have this, not as market proposition, but philosophical argument from Yuval Harari, author of ‘Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow’.  He argues that immortalism will be the next American dream. That the American dream before was a dream for many people outside America, personal and family wealth. Not opulence, but comfort, unprecedented historically, personal and familial comfort. Idealized Americana is that idealized comfort zone. He argues that achieving immortality via biology or upload, will be humanity’s overarching goal for the 21st century, and maybe beyond. He does propose that, he analyses that somewhat, values some negatives against that but ultimately is for this concept. He’s the most mainstream thinker with these views. 

The problem - it’s still argued from a standpoint of an atomized single human. We can read Alex Kashuta’s twitter feed to see how this mindset fails. It looks like her hobby is to point out and analyse how breakdown of traditional social systems is making humans unhappy. To deepen that by making some humans immortal... it's unlikely that’ll make a lot of people happy.How to act? What kind of argument creates it? At first glance one can make an argument for a happy life, not infinite malleability. Links of opulence and longevity have been examined for thousands of years - by the way, the Biblical account Methuselah is a happy story - dude lived 900 years and his progeny populated the land within that time frame.

Going back to Altered Carbon, Morgan, being a good writer gives an interesting examination of immortal capitalism. People there are bored, bored as fuck.Lawrence Bancroft is the name of the character ( played by James Purefoy), head of the Bancroft family. The whole family is unkillable. The whole family is bored as fuck. The whole family is degenerate as fuck. Eventually the head of the family commits something that he cannot live with. He cannot die, so that’s a problem, a solution for which creates other problems, launching the plot. The argument against individual immortality is just a careful reading of these books. The protagonist, Takeshi Kovacs, in the final novel acknowledges his own degeneracy, having lived in dozens of bodies across centuries and attempts to redeem himself by reverting back to an old mindstate. In the end he becomes a "communist", ideologically flipping against the very system that enabled his whole experience. That’s the argument against immortality.

The argument for Vitalist Right is: first, that same Arcadian rural chillout vision, so to speak - in harmony with nature. That’s the oldest argument against civlizaiton. And it still applies. The second is that you’d be the same all the time without death, you lose the most powerful incentive to improve yourself. The feeling of inevitable clock ticking over our heads is one of the most powerful impulses in the human mind. The capital uses that against us. Without it you’d have very little motivation to improve, would stagnate and get outcompeted. The Methuselah question is promised to be resolved in the last book Takeshi Covacs goes ‘full communist’ because he grasped the societal problem of immortality. A person who has enjoyed a truly interesting lifestyle over planets and centuries has a unique perspective - understands that it’s not very good for the people. A pretty enlightening moment.

Let’s take a step back from sci-fi. There’s a word in Russian mostly used for Soviet general secretaries to describe what happened once they assumed their post. "Zabronzovel" - "became bronze". They became a bronze bust of themselves, a state of mental stasis, not changing since the moment they became the leader to the entire nation. Brezniew’s rule was called ‘Zastoy’ - in the great tradition of implementing Russian political science terms wholesale into English we should use it. The literal translation is "stagnation". What’s ‘zastoy’? It happens when you have leadership structure incapable of change. That was a time of great improvement of standard of living of an average Soviet subject, but coupled with great intellectual and spiritual strife. Nothing new was allowed. Stagnation lasted, until it eventually led into Perestroika when USSR started to change at such a pace it fell apart at the seams.You have to modulate the pace of change, by rotating leaders. That’s true for any system, every scale from family to nation-state. Monarchy, for example, changes leaders by succession; everyone brings some changes, even if mostly upholding ancestors’ tradition. That’s how kingdoms evolved, while staying the same in spirit.

D

So with first secretary leadership it’s also possible? It could be rotating

GT

Theoretically possible, just there are no incentives to exist - why give up leadership if you are immortal? First secretaries were removed when got senile or died. Sometimes were senile before assuming post…

D

That’s not limited to the USSR first secretaries…

GT

[laugh]

When they were removed a change ensued, which was at breakneck pace. Soviet Union was a few different states, under Stalin, Khrushchev...

D

Just like with monarchy.

GT

But there you have continuity - not succeeding a dude you killed or outcompeted, but your family.

D

We could discuss it for a long time, court assassinations, wars of succession, etc, I’ll just link this extensive exposition of the topic.

 Let’s move to an elite circulation thought experiment. When you’re immortal and society is technologically nearly optimized there’s little incentive to have power in one period and not the other. You wouldn’t object to sharing power if the confrontation cost / benefit matrix was good enough. That could be done not only space-wise (usual human agreement), but also timewise. You could implement a system (on blockchain?) that rotates power (literal electricity?) automatically  within some techno social system, I think ensuring a method of outsourcing power rotation into technology, what do you think?      

GT

This is inventing solutions to problems we invented ourselves. The problem with power is that it always resides in people, not in technology. Technology is a means of communication between humans. Power resides in human minds. If you accept someone as your ruler, flip of a bit will not change that, unless you accept the algorithm itself as your ruler, and this circles back into Matrix-esque post-singularity dystopia.      

D

If the power was connected to the power supply to the city and on switch another person has this person, ‘power is the ability to turn the whole thing off’.

It’s just an idea, and technical problem

3 answers from vitalist right

D

 You mentioned the Methuselah question of the worth of immortality, and you wish to avoid the nihilism occuring when humans experience too long lifetimes, know too much. My thought experiment was just 2050. It’s short timescales here, not fully degenerate after centuries, just an early phase, just a sceptre of immortality showing, like Communism before the USSR. It’s not not Methuselah dystopia. The situation will not have been cleared (to extend or to not?) for many. In this context of current ideological and proximate market struggle you have some propositions. You stated in your twitter thread that immortality as a target should be countered by other 3 things with which the Vitalist Right exorcises this sceptre of immortalism. The first point, extended active lifespan, how would it work? 

GT
Vitalist Right here will not face the immortalists head on, will not compete for the same demographics, though probably with a broader scope in general. Extended active lifespan is pretty simple and has an appeal for everyone. I’ll sketch how it looks now and how I’d like to change it. In human life there’s a period when you’re incapable, you’re an infant. Next there’s a period of learning and training, gradually you become more useful to society. But in adolescence and youth you’re often aimless, without a pure idea of what you want to do, so you test the waters. Ideally, you procreate as part of your personal development and biologically at that optimal point. Then, by middle age you have solidified your understanding of your position, status and place in life and society, executing on that role, raising your children, creating generational wealth. Creating something you’ll pass on, your children will start in a better place than you did. Then the old age - accumulated, ingested and integrated knowledge that you possess is the main reason you are valuable. And then you die, the cycle runs in your children, et cetera ad infinitum.

My idea is to extend the youth and middle age, possibly even at the expense of childhood development (low priority) and old age phase (high priority). In absolute years you’d live the same, but start having age-related problems later. You can already do that with exercise, good food and other lifestyle engineering stuff. If I could add some biotech to extend my "forties" until I’m 65, why not?      

D

What technological method do you see in this context as most successful? genetics? protheses, injections? replaced organs. or maybe 40s is too early for that?

GT

Unless these organs fail prematurely, not necessarily. I think genetic therapies are a promising path, being most effective in the youth. Genetic therapies might be for things that might have gone wrong, mutated. There are things like cellular, hormones therapy. TRT or just blasting 'roids is a crude form of this.      

D

The second of your proposals and definitely the most controversial one is the comeback of positive eugenics...

GT

Now there’s some German war march supposed to be playing right now…

D

[laugh]

Not like the Allies did not have these ideas...

GT

As if Captain America is different… First let’s define positive eugenics. Eugenics is a science and practice of improving the human genome, or human gene pool more broadly by any possible means. It is negative eugenics that gets so much flak. Positive eugenics amplifies good parts, stimulates high quality individuals to procreate, and improves the quality of their offspring. Negative eugenics is about removing genes from the gene pool. At the individual level, it can be done by medical intervention, so essentially - designer babies. At societal level, Planned Parenthood is a form of negative eugenics, and Bill Gates' famous African vaccines program is another. So, while progs are doing negative eugenics on others, Trads would do positive eugenics on themselves. Get genome-scanned (by an org that respects your privacy), check for markers, select mate accordingly. If you're smart enough, create genetic therapies, if you're rich enough, fund them.      

D

And the last of the three, social longevity - the least known one; GATTACA was about the second one, the first one is already present, but ‘social longevity’ is not a term you hear very often...

GT

The situation we’re in right now demonstrates decay of society to the profit of the state and capital. Capital is eating the society. Labour becomes more and more automated, capital needs less and less people and shifts from vampirism to cannibalism as such. #landian_theme Social longevity is about creating and maintaining social structures that will outlive you, and also survive the collapse of global monoculture or even technological civilization. That’s a task bigger than the first two... But also simpler to start at an individual level: hitting the gym, cultivating strong friendships in real life, having a strong family with children, raising them with good values. During your lifetime, ideally, as your power, ability to influence people and reality grows, your ability to create these structures will grow as well. 

These kinds of social engineering approaches are gaining popularity. People are dissatisfied with the state of monoculture. It has no answer to the world we live in. The best answer monoculture has is individualism and pills, side effects include school shootings and suicide. The first one, improving quality of life and extending an active lifestyle is easy to start. You can ‘clean your room, wash your penis, go to the gym, get strong’. The second part is mostly science-heavy, with a smaller social engineering part. The roadblock to positive eugenics is in politics, the thing called bioethics, where progressives dictate what areas of knowledge are permitted, because ‘literally Hitler’. If you remove bioethics, genetic enhancement would be a good, marketable idea; everyone has a biological incentive to make your babies the best, so you can sell that. It would fare well in the market, not a niche thing for a few millionaires who want to be immortal, I really think it would be a product for a large audience.

This is the kind of an outline to a plan. I am personally doing something about my life, those actions; I have a group of friends, I’m starting a family, making some generational wealth, working on my own shape… Something anyone can do. Anyone can get a hundred supplements like Kurzweil, but these might have side effects and high budget to entry. For a fraction of that cost and a bit more attention, get a gym membership, join a sports team, find friends, you’ll see improvement in your mind and spirit, not just body.That’s the proposition that I saw Bronze Age Pervert make at the first level, beyond his posing and some insane ideas about stuff. That’s his proposition of vitalist rights: make ourselves better, find friends who want the same. And... if you add some science to it, you can make that group of friends a superhuman tribe within a few generations.  

D

Sounds fun!

GT

That’s the point, it sounds fun!

Living in cyberpunk dystopia is not fun, unless you’re the overlord, but consider the odds.

D

That ties back to what started this topic, Roko’s thread. Maybe a Decentralized Autonomous Organization should focus on designer babies funding, instead of immortality?

GT

Roko’s a smart guy, when he’s not insane about stuff. With some market analysis he might find that designer babies are a more marketable proposition. For sure the more deliverable at this stage of the two. If you remove the frankly artificial roadblock of bioethics, then it is a blue sky market - no one’s doing it, everyone wants it, even if they don't know it yet. The same way as the iPhone was, no one wanted one before Steve showed us one. 

D

We’ll be wrapping up, thank you coming.

GT 

Thank you for having me.