the unsung heroes who don't make time for brown-nosing and fame-whoring
is this the same termie from back in the flock day? http://www.flickr.com/photos/foolswisdom/43145184/
Ask HN: Whom do you admire most?
181–190 of 240 posts
Re: Ask HN: Whom do you admire most?
#182Alan Kay, for constantly inventing the future.
Re: Ask HN: Whom do you admire most?
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Aging isn't a disease, because lifespan is something which is subject to evolutionary pressure. Our lifespans are what they are because they evolved to be that way. That's incorrect. Our genes don't care if they carry on by reproduction or by living longer in a single individual, but we care. How a body ages after reproductive age is in an evolutionary blind spot. Individuals with mutations that promote longer life…
It's true that individuals that live a little bit longer but have the same end of their reproductive period do no better in the gene pool. However, if it were advantageous to live longer, and those folks had a slightly longer reproductive period, then we would expect the lifespan-while-fertile to increase. Presumably this would also increase the overall lifespan as well, but really that's irrelevant to this discussio…
1) For most of history, humans and their ancestors didn't live very long. When you die at 30, there's not much selection for biological mechanisms to fix the problems that happen in someone who is 60. Natural selection is looking for genes that are good at reproducing themselves, not genes that are good at giving an individual long life. Once you have sexual reproduction in place, it is much simpler to just have lots of offspring than to evolve even more repair mechanisms to extend life (at no great benefit to genes).
2) That's the whole point of SENS; repairing the damage for which we DON'T have repair mechanisms because of point #1. For example, our lysosomes (the "garbage collector/incinerator" in our cells) accumulate some molecules that they can't break down because they don't have the right enzymes, so they accumulate throughout our lives and end up affection cell function all around our bodies (lysosomes are full and can't do their jobs anymore). SENS has found other organisms that do have these enzymes, and are looking at ways for us humans to use those enzymes to clean up that "long-lived garbage".
> Cell damage is allowed to happen.
Yes, because your genes don't care about you (so to speak - read Dawkins's The Selfish Gene). After you've reproduced, there's no pressure to fix damage that only affects you after reproduction age.
Nothing causes more suffering in the world than the diseases of aging, and curing those diseases should be priority #1. Living longer is just a welcome side-effect.
Re: Ask HN: Whom do you admire most?
#184Marcus Aurelius - relentless in his quest for self perfection even while ruling one of the most powerful empires in the world.
Re: Ask HN: Whom do you admire most?
#185Leo Szilard. Had the idea for fission chain reaction, realized what would happen if Hitler got hold of it, and kept his mouth shut... while browbeating the skeptical Fermi into starting the Manhattan Project, and ghostwriting Einstein's letter to Roosevelt. Right up there with Norman Borlaug and Stanislav Petrov on the list of people you've never heard of because CNN is too busy covering Michael Jackson.
Is the Hitler story true? Wikipedia says that he got the idea in London, where he filed a patent (!) for the fission chain reaction. Here's the link to his patent, btw: http://v3.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/biblio?CC=GB&...
I think he filed the patent and then got the patent classified.
Re: Ask HN: Whom do you admire most?
#186Nikola Tesla
Indeed, the guy was really a genius. He pushed the whole of humanity towards using alternate current and it saddens me to see that he didn't (and still doesn't) get the credit he deserves.
In my mind he's the only true genius.
Re: Ask HN: Whom do you admire most?
#187A few off the top of my head (most are self-explanatory): Charles Darwin, Richard P. Feynman, J. Robert Oppenheimer, John Von Neuman, Paul Erdos, Alan Turing, Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, Richard Dawkins, Carl Sagan, Thomas Jefferson, Aubrey de Grey, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Douglas R. Hofstadter
Aubrey de Grey? You mean the crazy dude that tells people we're going to live forever without any evidence to support his claims? And Hofstadter, the guy who wrote that really dumb book? (Here I admit that I only read the introduction before being disgusted by his treatment with concept of things which are self referential. It's kind of a noob outlook to find something mind boogling about the fact that a mind can con…
> And Hofstadter, the guy who wrote that really dumb book? (Here I admit that I only read the introduction
...perhaps you should try reading the rest of the book.
> It's kind of a noob outlook to find something mind boogling about the fact that a mind can contemplate itself.)
Do you have a photo? Because if there's a Wikipedia article about how a fake blase-sophisticated seen-it-all-before pose of superiority can suck all the joy out of life, it should show your photo.
Re: Ask HN: Whom do you admire most?
#188Re: Ask HN: Whom do you admire most?
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
Through your own argument, you've conceded that aging happens when the body doesn't invest enough resources in controlling damge, and that the amount of investment made can vary widely between species and even within a species. So then what in the world leads you to believe that, provided with appropriate medical support, the body can't be made to invest far more?
I conceded nothing. You're confusing investment on an evolutionary timescale with investment on an individual timescale. A male spider couldn't spontaneously decide to live another 6 years- it would take hundreds of thousands of years of evolution to achieve that. On a physiological level, increasing investment in the individual is difficult because so much about how we are built is developmentally fixed. You can't c…
Here's you've just shown that you have no idea what Aubrey and SENS are proposing. Maybe, like with Hofstadter's book, you've just "read the introduction" and then stopped?
>We have no idea which genes contribute to aging, and how, and even how many. In all likelihood a simply astronomical number of genes would have to be altered to extend life.
The whole point of SENS is that it DOESN'T try to fiddle with metabolism (our genes). All of the genetic diseases you mention are different from the diseases of aging, so they're a bad example.
SENS is all about maintenance and periodical repair (like with an antique car, for example). Every, say, 10 years you go in and they remove accumulated damage (which can only be present in a limited number of long-lived molecules) BEFORE it causes pathologies. Most of this can probably be done with your own immune system (you train it to recognize some molecules), and some of it will have to be done other ways (gene therapy to make your body produce certain enzymes, etc).
Re: Ask HN: Whom do you admire most?
#190Winston Churchill. Saved western civilization.
Saved western civilization. From western civilization. Other than that, I pretty much agree with you.
I admire him for saving it. Whether he saved it from a rouge element of fringe western civilization (most of Germany not being part of the Roman Empire,) or the Muffin Man doesn't take away from his accomplishment.