LessWrong user bits suggested that people will start planning around future anti-aging therapies before they become available
LessWrong user bits suggested that people will start planning around future anti-aging therapies before they become available
On July 20, bits published an essay about when radical life extension will begin to shape people’s personal plans. He defines it as extending healthy lifespan and overall lifespan beyond what current medicine and lifestyle practices can provide.
In the essay, bits asks when a person will decide that they are likely to live long enough to benefit from a future therapy. That belief changes the person’s planning horizon: decisions about retirement, savings, children, and career begin to depend on a new estimate of how much time remains.
To explain this process, bits uses a concept developed by Turkish-American economist Timur Kuran: preference falsification. A person may want to live much longer but continue to repeat the prevailing social norm in public while that desire is treated as an implausible fantasy. Once a future therapy begins to seem credible, people become more willing to discuss it openly, which makes it easier for others to do the same.
This model rests on two assumptions: many people already want to live longer but conceal that preference, and a change in social norms would allow them to express it. In the essay, this is an explanatory hypothesis rather than a measurement of public opinion. The author provides no data on either the scale of this hidden demand or the speed at which such a cascade might develop.
In his scenario, the cascade could be triggered by signals that are easy to observe and describe: a scientifically accepted result showing rejuvenation in humans, a prominent discovery made with the help of AI, a new therapy that attracts broad public attention, or regulatory permission to measure aging in clinical trials. Such signals would make future therapy a normal subject of conversation. Bits suggests that this shift would then affect demand for research, funding, and political decisions.
In a comment on the essay, Dagon proposes a different sequence. “The strongest influence on expected lifespan will be a measured, or at least claimed, extension of life or a substantial extension of health in old age,” he writes. In his view, the general public will revise its expectations after seeing a result. Early supporters may become convinced sooner, but they may also misjudge the timing.
The disagreement concerns the order of events. In bits’s model, public expectations can build support for future research. In Dagon’s model, a visible result that people trust must come first. If people begin changing their plans before such a result appears, that would support bits’s hypothesis. If expectations change only after results emerge, Dagon’s account will be supported.