The Tithonius Error
Reason at Fight Aging! has a follow-up to Stephen's post from earlier this week:
Advocacy is certainly a spectrum - it's quite possible to be supporting efforts to obtain large-scale funding for the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) with one hand, while trying to dispel widespread and elementary myths with the other. Still, one would hope that some progress can be made in banishing the Tithonus error to the past. If half the population no longer knee-jerks in opposition to healthy life extension based on a false conception of "older for longer" - well, that can't be a bad thing for the prospects of raising a broad platform of support for research, can it?
Nope, sounds like a good thing to me. I think what will really slow the knee-jerking -- and in fact might start them jerking in the other direction -- is when people begin to realize that a few (at first a very few) of their friends and loved ones are enjoying longer and longer lives. The operative word there being enjoying.
A lot of folks cling to life even when it becomes painful and undignified. Few will hang on to the delusion that some law of nature or moral obligation requires us to be happy about our eventual demise when they see an alternative of more productive, healthy, happy years in their lives. At some point, the largely unspoken truth will be acknowledged more or less universally.