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Longevity FAQ: A beginner's guide to longevity research

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Re: Longevity FAQ: A beginner's guide to longevity research

#111

Post by est31 »

est31 wrote: post #90
koonsolo wrote: post #67

I stopped reading after seeing the cancer/hearth disease chart. It reinforces the belief that most deaths are caused by cancer, while actually it's hearth disease. So if you make a chart, please make it accurate. Therefore I couldn't trust the rest, since it might all be "drawn from the wrist".

If you unify all cancers into one category, then cancer is the top cause. If you split them up into the different types, then heart disease is bigger than any single of them. So you are wrong. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/the-top-10-... Shows heart disease as #1 with 3 million deaths but separates the cancer types. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/cancer Says there were 9.6 million…

Can't edit any more but I got the heart disease number wrong, it's way more than 3 million (no idea where I got the 3 from). Not mentioned in the text of the first link but here it's observable as 9.4 million: https://www.who.int/gho/mortality_burden_disease/causes_deat...

So the two causes heart disease and cancer are mostly comparable in terms of number of people killed.

Re: Longevity FAQ: A beginner's guide to longevity research

#112

Post by auganov »

staticassertion wrote: post #109
auganov wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Exercise The evidence on exercise is extremely poor. In cultures that promote athleticism the sheer willingness to exercise correlates so strongly with healthiness that it's extremely hard to control for. And even then meta studies give you at best only a few extra years. Exercise itself is a risky activity. Over a lifetime the risk of injury is non-trivial. Studies that go against this pro-exercise bias are usuall…

> (seems like there are open questions here, like how much is actually important) Yes, see this part of my post. It does seem that lots of types of exercise are not at all necessary for health. This trial, for example, shows that HIIT for 3 intervals of 2-3 minutes had better impact than HIIT for 4 intervals of 4 minutes. So obviously there's still a lot to learn. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31565193/ And then th…

Oh, there's absolutely a huge body of evidence showing exercise has "beneficial" effects on this or that measure. But it's hard to go from there and claim a huge life expectancy increase.

> There's also research showing impact on blood glucose levels when you exercise before/ after eating, etc. "

And we had studies showing that fructose has undesirable effects in that area. But so far most studies tracking food consumption in real life situations don't show anything bad happening.

Most of the world already believes exercise must be good for you, how many researchers are designing studies trying to uncover negative effects? Probably very few.

When most studies struggle badly to show anything above 5 extra years it's in the placebo category. Optimism might as well get you more [0].

[0] "Optimism is associated with exceptional longevity in 2 epidemiologic cohorts of men and women" https://www.pnas.org/content/116/37/18357

Re: Longevity FAQ: A beginner's guide to longevity research

#113

Post by apsec112 »

turing_complete wrote: post #95

I want to get involved in longevity - first as a side project, maybe later full-time. What would be the best way to support the cause as a software engineer or data scientist?

Laura's website also has a "How Can I Help?" page:

https://www.ldeming.com/how-to-help

Re: Longevity FAQ: A beginner's guide to longevity research

#114

Post by bausano_michael »

swyx wrote: post #91
0-_-0 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...in mice, which evolved to eat mainly carbohydrates, while humans evolved to eat whatever they could

what's that rule about research that most research should come with the disclaimer "in mice"?

https://mobile.twitter.com/justsaysinmice

Re: Longevity FAQ: A beginner's guide to longevity research

#116

Post by larssorenson »

swyx wrote: post #91
0-_-0 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...in mice, which evolved to eat mainly carbohydrates, while humans evolved to eat whatever they could

what's that rule about research that most research should come with the disclaimer "in mice"?

You're probably thinking of the twitter account @justsaysinmice, https://twitter.com/justsaysinmice.

For the uninitiated and otherwise unaware, many studies regarding illnesses, disease, nutrition, exercise, medicine, etc. perform clinical trials with mice. Resultant publications are picked up by news outlets who headline the results, without the caveat that the results were only found in mice. Mice are, notably, not humans and the results don't (in fact, rarely ever) carry over 1:1.

Re: Longevity FAQ: A beginner's guide to longevity research

#117

Post by acituan »

PeterisP wrote: post #102
kgin wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would ask why 80 just happens to be the best lifespan for humans. If we’re optimizing for things you listed, imagine how much more child-inspired joy and new idea throughput we could get if we had kids at 18 and died at 40? I’m still unclear on the point of life, but I’m not convinced it’s that kind of optimization exercise.

I would look at this as something where the interests of the society or species as a whole diverge from the interests of individuals. It may be quite reasonable for someone to prefer a more dynamic society and social structures caused by an average life span of 50 years, while at the same time preferring themselves and their loved ones to live for 100+ years on average. The question of "do you want to live much longe…

> I would look at this as something where the interests of the society or species as a whole diverge from the interests of individuals.

This is spot on, and exactly what is going at the genetic level.

The reason we have sexual reproduction as opposed to mere cloning ourselves is the fact that environment that the initial set of genes worked well changes over time and the genes have to continuously innovate and experiment to have a chance in adapting to the new environment. Sexual reproduction introduces this variability to build these A/B/C... tests in the form of mini niches we are constructing.

Granted, humans don't only reproduce genetically but also memetically, to borrow from Dawkins. And the memetic transmission is complicated, on one hand technology makes it trivial for ideas to spread, on the other hand 1-1 care of grandparents and parents still matter a lot for example in child development. But at the genetic level, wishing to extend life means essentially "cloning" one's genes more and more into the future.

Re: Longevity FAQ: A beginner's guide to longevity research

#118

Post by acituan »

echelon wrote: post #13
flyinglizard wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also don’t want to pay taxes but here I am, grudgingly paying them for the benefit of our societal structure. Would I want to live in a world where people don’t have kids, where people can take as much time as they want because time is infinite, a world where you wouldn’t even go out on the street for the chance something would happen to you and deprive you of eternal existence? I’m not sure, and in any case, it wi…

You do you. I want to live 900 years and explore every discipline under the sun. I want to travel the world twenty times, read every book, see a hundred thousand sunsets. Don't tell me I or anyone else doesn't deserve that. Evolution left us with bodies that don't permit it, but we'll escape that limit someday.

Not meaning this in an derogatory manner but this sounds to me something like what Peter Pan wanted. He didn't want to leave neverland and he wanted to be everything (pan). This is also well studied in the Jungian psychology under the term puer aeternus, the infinite child.

The problem with this is, personal harm it causes aside, if all adults wanted to be infinite children, it wouldn't leave space to (at least compete with) the incoming, actual children. It would cause great intergenerational conflict. Not leaving resources for the next generation also means endangering the continuity of species altogether.

If we take a step back, one might even argue that this is already what is going on today.

Re: Longevity FAQ: A beginner's guide to longevity research

#119

Post by staticassertion »

auganov wrote: post #112
staticassertion wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (seems like there are open questions here, like how much is actually important) Yes, see this part of my post. It does seem that lots of types of exercise are not at all necessary for health. This trial, for example, shows that HIIT for 3 intervals of 2-3 minutes had better impact than HIIT for 4 intervals of 4 minutes. So obviously there's still a lot to learn. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31565193/ And then th…

Oh, there's absolutely a huge body of evidence showing exercise has "beneficial" effects on this or that measure. But it's hard to go from there and claim a huge life expectancy increase. > There's also research showing impact on blood glucose levels when you exercise before/ after eating, etc. " And we had studies showing that fructose has undesirable effects in that area. But so far most studies tracking food consu…

Longevity studies in humans are pretty hard. You have to wait until the person dies. So instead signals are used, like "had non fatal heart attacks", if you're lucky. Most signals are going to instead be closer to "lowered or raised some metric that, from other research, we believe will lead to longevity".

I don't know how many papers there are on negative vs positive effects of exercise, but HIIT has had plenty of research done explicitly to determine safety, or to see if there are more effective exercises with lower rates of injury.

No question that there are very, very few studies that are directly "X leads to longer or better life", it's just "X leads to Y, we separately think Y leads to a longer or better life". Of course that's not as good... but it's a symptom of those studies being expensive and difficult.

Re: Longevity FAQ: A beginner's guide to longevity research

#120

Post by acituan »

alirsgp wrote: post #27

Anyone don't want longevity for humans? I think death is a beautiful thing and for a lot of us including myself life has been really tough at times. The fact that there is an equalizer in death makes life comforting at times.

> Anyone don't want longevity for humans?

Not sure what the downvotes are about but problems of longevity is studied under vampire stories, e.g. Interview with the Vampire. They eventually get nihilistic and lost in ennui because they have lost connection with past and future generations and lost a lot, if not all, meaning in their life.

There is a school of psychotherapy (existential psychotherapy) that builds around death along with other existential problems (isolation, responsibility, meaning). A proper relationship with death seems to be meaning enhancing and anxiety alleviating than not, but it heavily clashes with other people who don't simply want to think about death.

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