Thanks for considering my ideas even if you aren’t convinced yet.

You’re right, you did mention NAD+ and testing in previous posts. Hopefully the audience goes back and reads those after this one gets them interested in biohacking.

I think we both agree that modern lifestyle is deeply awful. There are several ways to deal with this:

Submission (never!)

Hack up something new: New drugs, new lifestyles, etc… Modafinil, polyamory, VR, ketone esters, escort rotation, MDMA cuddle parties…

Bring back something old: This means resurrecting an old practice, food, or social norm. Paleo and Weston Price are examples of this philosophy applied to nutrition. Of course, you can’t bring back the past exactly, but you can move towards it. In the area of lifestyle, this would mean monogamous marriage, family, a close-knit community, and religion.

My position is that many young males are overly biased towards the hacker mentality, which could be called “neophilia” (love of the new). But if you unwind the anthropological reasons why guys like us grew up with these visions, it all comes down to formative exposure to sources like Kurzweil, Dawkins, Yudkowsky, Star Trek, and other scifi. We recognized that society sucked, and transhumanism, technocracy, atheism, and internet dating gurus showed up at the right time with a solution.

Once we were armed with the technocratic hammer, every social problem started looking like a nail. This is the thought process of many guys in our cohort, no?

So what’s the problem? The problem is that we trusted our sources mostly for sociological reasons, not for good philosophical reasons. 5 years ago, I bristled whenever journalists would call the singularity the “rapture of the nerds,” but now I see they were correct.

The problem with neophilia is that it is biased towards novel, risky solutions with no track record. To attempt to convince you that neophilia can sometimes go wrong, let’s look at a few examples from the 20th century:

Soy

Fractional reserve banking

High fructose corn syrup

Low fat diets

Modern art and architecture

Hormonal birth control (serious nutritional and hormonal side effects)

Antibiotic overuse

Opiate crisis

Tinder

Veganism

All these things were hailed as cutting-edge, high-tech, enlightened experiments to improve the human condition, and they all turned out to be disasters with serious unintended consequences. I’m not inherently against transhumanism, but my concern is that transhumanism would suffer from the same hubris: irreversibly damaging the human condition while claiming to improve it. See the left panel of this meme as an illustration.

From the standpoint of people in the past, the present is a transhumanist dystopia. Transhumanists should also be worried about optimizing in the wrong direction. There are some good transhumanist futures, but I think the space of transhumanism and singularity scenarios are mostly bad, because our philosophy is bad. Transhumanism right now is about escaping being human because present-day society is stupid, rather than understanding what makes us human and how to improve on that.

Let’s take a closer look at your expected value argument on the Singularity. A low probability future event is completely dominating the expected value calculation of your behavior in the present. This is like a version of Pascal’s Wager, dubbed Pascal’s Mugging. I think we have to apply a ceiling function to the utility of low-probability events. The other solution is not be a utilitarian homo economicus, in which case you can’t get mugged by math like this.

I’ve read my transhumanism just like you and I think a Singularity could be great depending on how it turns out, but I think it’s a little bit early to have it influence my life path. Otherwise, there is a good chance of me feeling really dumb at age 80 while all alone, bitterly clutching my Kurzweil and Dawkins books, watching society getting taken over by Mormons, Muslims, and Catholics.

Back to your article:

A lifestyle of high-end escorts, using MDMA with friends, and blasting your hardware with neurotransmitters is experimental and risky. We just don’t have a large track record of people living like this over the long-term. The data that we do have is from people like rockstars who live life in the fast-lane, which generally leads to poor long-term outcomes (though they are taking much bigger health risks than you).

Now, I’m not saying that your lifestyle is just going to immediately blow up in your face; what I’m saying is that we don’t have sufficient evidence that it is robust over the long-term. In saying this, I’m not claiming that I have the perfect lifestyle, or that I’ve experienced everything you have. But since you are putting yourself out there as a public service, I’m going to take advantage of this to poking your lifestyle from various angles.

Let’s say you go to a barbeque with some of your business associates, and they have wives and kids. Who are you going to bring? The model of the week? That’s cool when you are in your 30s, but it becomes increasingly less cool each passing decade. There is a high chance of you eventually getting lonely for permanent romantic companionship, or feel jealousy of people with families. And if those feelings hit you like a sack of bricks one day, what’s the plan? Boosting neurotransmitters to make it go away? What if the feeling comes back?

Trying to live a good life via manipulating neurotransmitters is like trying to write a computer program in binary: it’s the wrong level of abstraction.

To a hedonist, the superstimulus pleasure is good, but to me, it’s bad, because it risks masking problems in your life, or becoming a crutch to escape them. As an analogy to health, certain symptom-management drugs are undesirable because they hide symptoms, like ibuprofen. How do you know your lifestyle and health are really optimal if you blow away any internal negative feedback via pharmaceutical and sexual hacks?

If you are unhealthy and having negative internal self-talk, there is a good chance that’s part of the disease state, but if you are healthy and you are having negative self-talk, then there’s a good chance it’s trying to tell you something valuable.

I think to say that someone is truly in healthy, they need to be able to stand on their own two feet neurologically. I understand the arguments for bacopa, lithium, and maybe lose dose SSRIs (for some people) to stabilize them, but if a tool is powerful enough to blow away bad feelings (like MDMA + sex), then there is a risk of using in an escapist way.

If hedonism is all that matters, then we might as well jump into stimulation vats, which is often called “wireheading” in transhumanist parlance. But most people object to vats for the same reason as they object to MMORPG lifestyles: it’s not meaningful. It’s like Cypher going back into the Matrix at Agent Smith’s invitation.

Cypher isn’t cool and nobody admires him. So who is cool? Napoleon is cool. George Washington is cool. Tsar Alexander is cool. These men went through hardship and changed the world, which is why they will be remembered. There are famous men who pursued pleasure, like the Marquis De Sade, and Lord Byron, but they end up with more ambiguous reputations. Some of our greatest heroes, like Jesus and Buddha, were known for suffering. Nobody admires Buddha during the period of his life when he lived as a prince in a pleasure dome.

The more your lifestyle deviates from the historical norm, the more you expose yourself to what we could call “lifestyle risk.” You have done a great job of biohacking to reduce health risks, but you are running your lifestyle with a high-risk, short-term hedonistic approach. This is creating a significant risk over the next couple decades of derailing your mental health and productivity (aka the “mid-life crisis”).

You might say that you can just pivot lifestyle if this happens. The problem is that some stuff is path-dependent and takes preparation. There is a tradeoff between hedonistic sex with models, and pair-bonding with a wife (I suppose you could do MDMA with your wife). There are also practical considerations like sperm quality, and your wife’s age. Even if you freeze your sperm, it will become harder to date fertile-aged women as you get into your 40s and 50s.

The way to mitigate lifestyle risk is to live a more historically normal life, which would mean marriage, family, community, and religion (religion even for atheists). These are the best practices for living a meaningful life; no modern experiment has topped them. For instance, contrary to the FUD, married men make more money, have more sex, and live longer—and if those are average marriages, think of what a 90th+ percentile marriage could be like (source). People in Silicon Valley may think that their polyamorous, vegan life experiment is going to “beat the market” in terms of life satisfaction, but chances are that they are going to be wrong over the long-term.

If you ever do have a family, you can always take them into the Singularity with you and start a pantheon of transhuman gods.