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Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?

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Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?

#31

Post by tryitnow »

Aubrey de Grey's SENS approach to creating and maintaining a state of negligible senescence in humans.

Every advanced society faces an aging population. This population will put massive strains on healthcare expenses. It could also strain the economy as the elder population collects public sector pensions and slowly depletes its savings (i.e. retirement funds). The latter effect could be mitigated by automation.

Paradoxically our success in treating diseases that kill us now will merely make us victims of potentially more terrible diseases in the future. Look at the experiences of centenarians in the last decade:

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db233.htm

Alzheimer's will become increasingly common as will cognitive decline in general. What happens to all those people who don't die of cancer or heart disease? They will often succumb to slower acting chronic diseases involving long-term states of suffering and mental anguish.

The way out of this mess is to treat aging itself, not just the diseases that currently kill us. SENS targets the underlying mechanisms of aging.

Research into negligible senescence can also lay the foundation for potentially profitable therapeutics. Unlike the disease-centric model the total addressable market is nearly everyone.

Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?

#32

Post by dragonwriter »

pavornyoh wrote: post #11

How about; 1)Can racial balance in business, education, military be achieved without policies that promote Affirmative Action? 2)Placement by age vs. placement by academic ability 3)Are children smarter (or more socialized) because of the Internet? 4)How has United States censorship changed over the decades? 5)How did gunpowder change warfare? 6)What is “normal,” and to what extent is psychology reliant on culture to…

> Can racial balance in business, education, military be achieved without policies that promote Affirmative Action?

No, because Affirmative Action is simply a term of art (originating in a set of executive orders mandating such action) positive action taken with the aim of achieving such balance. If you take active steps targeting that balance you are by definition engaging in affirmative action.

Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?

#34

Post by JDiculous »

Land Value Tax.

I think this is the next big thing after basic income (especially when the question of how to pay for basic income comes up).

The land value tax is universally seen by economists as the most fair tax, yet for whatever reason we continue to ignore it in favor of income, sales, and property taxes - all of which distort markets (unlike the land value tax).

The lack of research and real life case studies on this topic is a huge obstacle to this entering the mainstream.

Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?

#35

Post by harigov »

Research on organizations and possible improvements through software -

An important aspect of organizational building is to structure it in a way that enables free flow of information, while at the same time, enable people to accomplish their productive best. Having a good understanding of what sort of organizational structures enable such goals, and what policies and procedures in such organizations can be automated and improved upon, can bring in significant improvements. One of the big reasons as to why poor countries remain poor is that there aren't enough people to employ and build large organizations. The small number of talented and motivated people are handcuffed because of lack of human resources to power their ambitions. Enabling even those small number of people to accomplish something great will lift everyone else from their dire situations.

Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?

#36

Post by AlexWest »

maxerickson wrote: post #28
AlexWest wrote: post #22

- Antibiotic alternatives (we're going to need them fast) - As another poster mentioned, how do we suck the carbon from 150 years of burning fossil fuels out of our atmosphere? - Cognitive enhancement - Re-wilding - rebuilding devastated ecosystems in the Anthropocene with engineered biodiversity

I can't imagine that approaching ecology from a perspective of re-wilding will be of much benefit. The wild is happy to take over a space that isn't kept civilized (for instance, the exclusion zone around Chernobyl), so you quickly end up with a situation where you want to be able to predict the consequences of any actions you take against the existing ecology, which is anyway how we are managing 'wild' spaces.

Unfortunately many of the effects of humans are long-lasting. The elimination of buffalo, for instance, or the loss of most wolf populations in North America which lead to the explosion of deer, IIRC. I am quite interested in the possibilities of selective breeding to replace extinct species, and the major die-off currently happening could have negative effects we have not yet even begun to see.

Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?

#38

Post by _isus »

How to provide tech seed funding for remote and underserved communities here and abroad.

This is looking beyond what YC Fellowship provides. This is not necessarily looking for unicorns, but what does it take to scale out tech seed funding to remote and underserved areas.

Edit: clarification

Re: Ask HN: What should we fund at YC Research?

#39

Post by lifeisstillgood »

- automated psychology for families (if every home has audio and video monitoring of every argument and discussion we will soon be able to tell what is normal and what is best practise)

- mesh wifi and local networking

- something around either making it really easy for people to move country or work remotely. When companies and countries have to compete for global talent, many things will change from Syria to salary negotiations. I cannot see how to do this but ...

(Contributed whilst drunk)

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