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Comment by go_elmo | Hacker News Reader

This is one of the most important and mostly actively ignored facts that I know of. It is a uncomfortable truth regarding it as an individual but it is the only good solution for humanity as a whole.

People (mostly) don't change - they (have to) die for change to happen. I'm considering myself to be modern - today. In 70 years I'm quite sure I will no longer be by a large margin and I highly doubt that I'll be able to adapt my thinking incorporating them - just as I observe my parents and their peers not to be fully able to do so. As humanity with this we have a pool of new approaches (young) and tons of experience (older) which maximizes the likelyhood of finding the right approach to new challenges & making us survive as a species

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>People (mostly) don't change - they (have to) die for change to happen.

An excellent justification for the forced retirement at 65 years of faculty in universities in East Asia. The sclerotic atmosphere in most US research universities, where over-privileged professors often linger into their 80s, has in my lifetime led to a growing intellectual stagnation in many (most? all?) academic fields.

If you lived a thousand years, you would have a thousand years to adapt. And if everybody lived a thousand years, society would adapt because geriatrics wouldn't conveniently drop dead in a few years but instead form the largest chunk of the market and stick around shaking their fists at people who think smart phones are a good UI for the retired.

The causality here seems unobvious. Is aging a necessity because we inherently lack the ability to change? Or do we become inflexible because we age?

Measures of willingness to change your mind and ability to learn new concepts is correlated with age. It seems just as reasonable to argue that if we could solve aging, we'd solve stagnation.

I think it's just a roll of the dice with age as a side effect.

Evolution's primary mechanism is to promote traits that increase the likelihood that you'll survive until you can reproduce. Perhaps multiple times. And for some species an additional period to raise the new generation.

So if evolution selects for a hard protective shell, this increases the odds that you reach reproductive age, which is the goal. This may accidentally also add an additional 100 years of lifespan. Which does nothing for reproduction, but it just happens anyway.

Yeah, the lack of connection to reproduction is why I'm skeptical of aging being an evolutionary mechanism. The above quote (appears to be from Steve Jobs) seems like an application of old ideas about the natural order to our current understanding.

I think Jobs' comments are indeed to be seen within the human cultural context only. Culture being a fancy word for stuff we made up.

Quite a few examples in nature where species drop dead directly after mating.

I disagree. If we would not age and stay 25 years old until we have an accident, we could have hundreds of children each, which would drastically increase reproduction and should therefore be preferred by evolutionary selection.

Today, you may be right, but historically you're wrong.

Take any period in human history before 10,000 years ago and you'd find that nothing ever happened. As old person, the world would look exactly the same as when you were young. Even in modern times, there's centuries with no progress at all.

> People (mostly) don't change - they (have to) die for change to happen.

How much of that is a consequence of the fact that our brains physiologically lose the ability to change over time though?

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