Healthspan: The Self-Fulfilling Failure
5Vladimir Shakirov
2Andrei Panferov
5Vladimir Shakirov
2Andrei Panferov
1Vladimir Shakirov
1Andrei Panferov
There might also be a significant overlap between the red and blue strategies.
One might try to get work at Isomorphic Labs or smth, and get both excellent salary, reasonable work-life balance, excellent medicine, while also enjoying great network and growing potential for the blue strategy. Or one might aim for the position of a tenure professor.
The problem begins not from the healthy lifestyle itself, but from the moment, when it becomes the ideology or the 1st primary strategy of survival.
1) How 5000 dedicated people could lead to the defeat of aging and diseases happening 5 years earlier? How could it happen, what should they do? Should they be very talented, or just usual people?
2) Do we have a plan how to reach 5000 blue pillers? It seems to be quite a large number. The number of passionate transhumanists heavily involved in lobbying or cryonics is a few dozens to maybe a hundred, and doesn't grow too much despite of their attempts to grow
Great questions. Worth having a separate text.
1) Honestly, currently all the strategies lack people of all kinds. The post mentions a lot of potential actions that could be done.
2) This one is harder, as this requires not only the "lead generation", but also a ladder to help them succeed. In Welcome to Antimortality I describe how the ladder could look like. But we really need to build a good ladder, and try to scale at once. It's arguable to say that the amount isn't growing. New people are coming to the movement, but it's hard to measure the amount, and say which tools are the most efficient.
Presenting good red strategies that look efficient and maybe even interesting is a more convincing way to attract people into red, than attacking healthspan
If we don't understand the intellectual framework on how to think about health-span, we'll always be paralized when the topic comes to it. So for me this article reveals that... health-span is the separate value topic, more or less irrelevant for the struggle for existence.
Let's discuss how “taking care of yourself” becomes a generation killer by making life extension look impossible — and then making it being impossible. The idea inspired by recent post by Kai Micah Mills in X, but here we're adding some maths.
By healthspanners I mean a broad group of people that value the quality of life more than life itself and focus on healthy lifestyle practices, focusing on therapies that address purely on diseases, etc.
There are 2 pills.
The formula is simple:
The blue pill is not taken by idiots. It is taken by rational people. They want private gain now and collective upside later.
Direct damage from healthspanners
But here is the thing.
So:
For one person, blue is always better by 5. And the movement stagnates, as everyone wants their guaranteed +5 and nobody wants to become N. But without N, there is no X.
Without red-pilled people, there is none of what blue-pilled health-span people wish to consume in future: cryonics, brain preservation, organs replacement, legal infrastructure, rejuvenation therapies. Why they don't appear by themselves, or appear too slow read here.
Blue-pilled people think they are buying time. In reality, they reduce the number of people building the world where that time could matter.
Every healthspan person inside the life-extension movement causes damage equal to the contribution one did not make: 0.001.
So the blue-pilled person says: “The chance of a meaningful win from the red pill is too low, so I’ll take the blue pill”. But the chance is low exactly because people like him already took the blue pill. This is self-fulfilling failure. Worse: he gets to feel right.
But healthspan is rational only in a world where enough other people took the red pill. If there are too few red-pilled people, the blue-pilled person wins his 5 years and dies in a world with no exit. If there are enough red-pilled people, he gets his 5 years and parasitizes their victory. Either way, he is not a builder, but a passenger.
Healthspan eats the best years
The person thinks: “First I’ll build the base. Then I’ll contribute”. But the “base” is infinite: sleep, food, training, bloodwork, inflammation, hormones, microbiome, new protocol, new biomarkers. That is how the window passes.
The window where he still had a working head, anger, energy, risk appetite, and the ability to build. He wanted to extend his runway. He burned the runway.
Five extra years at the end of life are not equal to five years of agency now. A year when you can start a company, raise money, write a manifesto, gather people, and build infrastructure is stronger than a year when you simply die a little later.
Healthspan sells delay. Immortalism demands action.
Inside the movement the blue pill must not be a topic.
We shouldn't say: “He is doing great, he takes care of himself”. No.
The questions are:
If he is doing something of that and also took care of his body, fine.
If not, his +5 is a private delay. You have brushed your teeth? That's the news! Let's do something for the movement?
Healthspan is hijacking newcomers.
Healthspan inside movement is destructive, because it shows newcomers a false entrance. A newcomer arrives with horror of the death. He could become a builder.
Healthspan turns him into someone optimizing a trajectory to death. Then he looks at the low chance of achieving something in life extension and says: “Great, at least I took care of myself”.
Every time this happens, both immortalism and the healthspan person lose.
Death wins.