121–130 of 146 posts
I remember reading recently that Peter Thiel gets blood transfusions from children (parabiosis). Is that accurate?
>When questioned further on the matter, he denied that he has ever injected himself with a "young person's blood,"
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/ne...
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> As long as the fertility rate is less than 2 children/woman, the total population will still converge even if no one dies. Converge to what? How?
To population 0. 1.9 children / woman is a .95 multiplier on human population per generation, like a -5% interest rate. Assuming birth rate is constant < 2, it converges to 0.
https://khn.org/news/a-fountain-of-youth-pill-sure-if-youre-...
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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 r…
Common sense would tell you that physical activity has to spuriously correlate with healthiness. Many conditions will simply render you unable (or less able) to exercise.
So what are the odds a properly designed longitudinal study would actually yield a bigger life expectancy increase? Seems very unlikely to me. The ones that we do have set an upper bound as far as I'm concerned. Almost certainly has to be lower.
I understand that you're talking about a specific kind of exercise and most of what's out there doesn't speak to that. But nonetheless I'd be very skeptical given how little effect has been shown for general physical activity. And we do have plenty of similar studies showing random benefits of various exercises in a clinical setting.
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To population 0. 1.9 children / woman is a .95 multiplier on human population per generation, like a -5% interest rate. Assuming birth rate is constant < 2, it converges to 0.
Not "if no one dies" which was part of GGP's claim.
I've been trying some of the David Sinclair NMN + resveratrol stuff for a couple of months. I think I can safely state there has been no noticeable effect in my case. There's a guy on the internet been trying it for 6 months with seemingly some positive effects https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWx77ARQ9lo And it seems to do stuff in mice. https://khn.org/news/a-fountain-of-youth-pill-sure-if-youre-...
Re reservatol, the jury is really out on that one too. [3,4]
[1] https://theconversation.com/of-mice-and-men-why-animal-trial...
[2] https://www.nature.com/news/chilly-lab-mice-skew-cancer-stud...
[3] https://www.bostonmagazine.com/health/2019/10/29/david-sincl...
[4] https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/diet-rich-resveratrol-of...
In 1897, philosopher Paul Janet came up with the model that current moments of time in our lives might be perceived by their "fraction of life lived thus far". This would seem to undermine the value of longevity somewhat: according to this visualization of the idea: https://www.maximiliankiener.com/digitalprojects/time/
I don't like this argument, it has a singularly at age zero. The visualisation sidesteps the problem by starting at year one. You can also add arbitrary constants or other tweaks, but then the idea lose its elegance and you can make it say anything you want.
One could say that's because I lacked the experience to interpret and store my sensations at the time, and that those were gradually gained, but to my view that's not a refutation but actually reenforcement of the argument. I'm still learning higher level abstractions every day; the tools to more efficiently store sensation are gathered as new sensations are gathered.
When I was 14, every day at work was radically different than the last. At 44, they're pretty much the same. When I was 14, 8 hours was like forever. These days, if you asked me at 9PM, there might be a 2-3 second delay for me to remember if I worked at all that day.
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I think we stagnate because we accumulate experience. As we grow old, we gain wisdom, but our wisdom is centralized in the past. We can't shed our experiences without forgetting ourselves. Steve Jobs also talked about "the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything." But I can't be a beginner again and again and again: some day my biases/old-dreams and stale-ideas/past-successes will dominate. No…
Perhaps stagnation is due to experience, perhaps it's due to accumulated, age-related brain damage. I doubt we'll know until people do live hundreds or thousands of years. Surely you can be a beginner again. Pick something you've never done before, and do that. As fledgling as humanity is, humans already have millions of different traditions and areas of study. Just pick one (or many).
You run out of those things shortly after birth. The vast majority of the aspects of everything that you attempt are familiar, and you have already developed habitual approaches to them. Having "never done something before" is shorthand for some experience having some aspect that you have never experienced before, not complete novelty. I'm going to build the strategies of flying a spaceship on the strategies I built learning to drive a car, which were built on the strategies I built learning to walk, which were built on the strategies I built learning to crawl, to manipulate my parents by crying, to identify distinct objects using my eyes, etc...
Eventually, the actually novel part of any new experience becomes vanishingly small. If anything, the ability to enjoy novelty, or to even see things as novel, is increased with our ability to forget. Maybe for a society, the ability to innovate relies on the ability to leave behind a bunch of brains whose plasticity has long been lost due to a lack of mental exercise.
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"Science advances one funeral at a time." - Max Planck "Death is very likely the best single invention of life. It is life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new." - Steve Jobs I know my life is accreting old biases and obstacles. Today and for years to come (I hope) I have more to do, but some day I will become an agent of stagnation instead of advancement. Nobody wants to die. But in the big…
For the vast majority of our history, there had been little to no technological changes. Only difference is that in the last few centuries, there had been technological and scientific changes. What changes? it's certainly isn't that old men die faster so that we embrace newer ideas faster. The old guards probably lived longer on average thanks to medicine.
Now our problem is even having the ability to assimilate enough established knowledge during a lifetime to have a chance of making any novel contribution. The obvious endgame to AI is a dream of being able to assimilate information and innovate indefinitely.