Link of the day: The fable of the dragon tyrant
Related to my post about cryonics, here is Nick Bostrom‘s somewhat famous fable of the dragon. I wouldn’t call it high class literature, but it is an interesting read nonetheless as it gives an unusual perspective about death. Most people consider death to be an integral part of life, something that gives meaning to the world and is ultimately something positive. Few people would prefer a world in which there was no death at all and even fewer do actually strive to bring that world about. But consider a world, where there was no death (or at least no certain death from ageing). Imagine yourself living in that world. If you think, death was good after all, would you support introducing a policy or *anything* that would randomly kill people with a likelihood increasing with their age? And now consider: Does it make that much of a difference to support introducing that *anything* if it isn’t there or to support not abolishing that *anything* in our world where it is?