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Age Reduction Breakthrough?

joshmitteldorf.scienceblog.com

361–370 of 426 posts

Re: Age Reduction Breakthrough?

#361
post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do rich people leech and from who?

If you think someone can become worth tens or hundreds of billions of dollars without exploiting anyone then boy howdy do I have news for you.

I don't mean to sound obtuse. I've heard this claim many times and I can imagine it being true, but I have no way of knowing whether it is or not. So I wanted to see what the reasoning is.

Re: Age Reduction Breakthrough?

#362
post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone I work with looks very youthful for their actual age, and that isn't always a good thing. When the team went on an offsite morale event jet skiing, he was told by the proprietor that he couldn't participate because their policy requires you to be at least 16 years old. He was 27 at the time. He never lived that down with his peers. When he tries to go to a bar with friends, he's sometimes accused of trying to…

Here's a response that he can use when people comment on his youthful appearance. "You look so young." "I have this portrait in my attic."

I appreciate the dorian gray reference :)

Re: Age Reduction Breakthrough?

#363
post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with not wanting to die?

You ask a valid question. Not wanting to die is fine, I think more importantly, not wanting to age and gradually become a burden towards end of life is also natural. Not wanting to be lost and missed (nevertheless hoping that you've done well enough to be missed). The idea of being bedridden and helpless is more scary to me than death. But not wanting to die __ever__ can be driven by narcissism. If no one dies or get…

>But not wanting to die __ever__ can be driven by narcissism.

Couldn't it also be driven by deep, abiding curiosity? This seems to me at least as likely as narcissism as a motivation.

Re: Age Reduction Breakthrough?

#364
post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Internet is full of these stories, I believe none. For one, even if there are people who look younger (say, Selena Gomez, or Lucy Liu) even them cannot pass to be 10+ years younger than they are, after looking at them in person. Have you actually met a 30+ year old person who could pass consistently as a teenager? I have never met one. The second thing is that if you are "routinely" told that you look XX or YY years…

These responses happen after people encounter me first, then see my kids come up to join the conversation (in their 20's) getting introduced as my kids, at which point the person I'm talking with realizes I am way older than they thought and they freak out. "Routinely" doesn't mean daily, but it does mean it happens often enough to be a thing.

I've gotten that from time to time. My oldest is turning 22 this year. When people hear that, they do a double take and say, "wow, you're not old enough to have a kid that old," to which I agree. I had her at 15 - a bit young to have a kid that age indeed.

Re: Age Reduction Breakthrough?

#365
post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You ask a valid question. Not wanting to die is fine, I think more importantly, not wanting to age and gradually become a burden towards end of life is also natural. Not wanting to be lost and missed (nevertheless hoping that you've done well enough to be missed). The idea of being bedridden and helpless is more scary to me than death. But not wanting to die __ever__ can be driven by narcissism. If no one dies or get…

>But not wanting to die __ever__ can be driven by narcissism. Couldn't it also be driven by deep, abiding curiosity? This seems to me at least as likely as narcissism as a motivation.

I agree, that is a very likely cause as well.

Re: Age Reduction Breakthrough?

#366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe the most impactful thing you can do is drastically reduce caloric intake - like by 50%. Experiments have show large increases in lifespan, across mammals.

Except that worldwide, life expectancy has increased along with increases in caloric intake. Of course there can be other factors involved, but everywhere you had increases in caloric intake, you've had significant increases in life expectancy.

yes and no. if you look at how the numbers are collected and aggregated life expectancy was actually a bimodal distribution and the average was impacted by infant mortality. If you remove that you will see that the improvement in life expectancy is not as impressive. Also, it may be that the increase is not due to caloric intake as much as it is due to technological progress.

see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy#Life_expectanc...

Re: Age Reduction Breakthrough?

#367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that many major scientific discoveries occurred with the prototypical mad scientist working alone, often apart from their main field, this description doesn't seem out of the norm for what I'd expect in somebody trying to urgently raise the signal of a very early and promising discovery. Let's consider the universe where Katcher has discovered the secret to aging. At some point in that universe, Katcher's work…

That may have been true a century or two ago, but that seldom occurs anymore now that scientific discovery has matured into an industry. The vast vast majority of research discoveries happen within the system as part of large collaborations. It's always healthy to have people going against the grain, but even they can find funding if they have ideas they can express coherently and that stand up to scrutiny.

This is still true. Your second sentence is correct, but the rest is not. Most research does come from within the system. Unconventional research does not and cannot come from within the system.

Funding comes from calls from proposals which are within existing, established research fields. Funding outside of a current research field is nearly impossible to find. If your research isn't in an established field, there isn't an NSF/DARPA/etc. call to respond to, and there is no program officer who has any interest in your work.

Similar through the whole research pipeline. New areas of research don't have established venues where you can publish, people to cite your papers, or a community to write academic reference letters for you. People who work in new fields are usually doing so as nights and weekends projects, or are independently wealthy.

And although the vast majority of independent researchers are crackpots, a few are credible and do occasionally make major breakthroughs. Importantly, the majority of breakthroughs outside of established fields are made be people unsupported by NSF, and without good venues to publish (although quite often, those individuals are academics working in their spare time, so half within the system and half outside).

Re: Age Reduction Breakthrough?

#368
I thought one of the main purposes of research publications was to allow others to reproduce/verify or refute your work.

If you look at the methods section, here is what you get for a description of the magic plasma:

'We used a unique plasma fraction "Elixir" developed by Nugenics Research.'

This seems to run counter to the philosophy of reproducibility.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.07.082917v1....

Re: Age Reduction Breakthrough?

#369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By 50% TDEE, or by 50% of what? And for how long? If that's the most impactful thing, these factors should very much be included

> And for how long? Permanently.

50% of TDEE permanently? Goodbye muscle tissue, hello injury, hello terrible moods. Life will not feel like it's worth living. (You must be joking?)

If not joking: Have you tried this? I lost 36% of my bodyweight by eating under TDEE. It requires huge amounts of effort to even hit 25% under TDEE consistently. A lot of that effort involves annoying your friends and family by not eating the way they do. We're social animals. It's hard. Plus when you get to a certain weight you will realize you have to regain muscle tissue, and the question of a bulk/cut cycle will come to mind. Goodbye 50% under TDEE.

Re: Age Reduction Breakthrough?

#370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are some animals that don't "age" like we do. These animals can live indefinitely, until they are eaten or die in some accidental way. Aging is a set of complex bio-physical-chemical processes. We have actually made a lot of progress in recent decades understanding how this happens. There is no fundamental reason we won't be able to better understand these processes and then mitigate them heavily, if not entire…

I'm terrified. Imagine the current crop of elderly rich mostly white men in positions of political power. Now imagine they're never going to die or retire. Sounds pretty dystopian to me.

Let's not bring race into this. It would be extremely easy to claim that for a lot of other races as well depending on how racist I wanted to sound.

Anyway, once they die their children will take over, as it is usual, so nothing will change if they were to just live forever.

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