Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The economic value of targeting aging

nature.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 162 posts

Re: The economic value of targeting aging

#51

Post by godelski »

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #31
mkoubaa wrote: post #3

The average age of university presidents and members of Congress in the USA is in the 70s. At the risk of sounding callous can we fix our gerontoctratic system and then fix aging?

Imagine being fresh out of school, competing in the job market against a huge pool of people who have been working for a century. Now that I think of it, though, what's the difference between a gerontocracy and hiring the most experienced senior candidates? Is it just government vs private sector?

Imagine going to school for 50 years? You're still a child at 100? Imagine being able to use compounding interest for a hundred years before you start work. I do not think we can approach this world with our current perceptions.

Re: The economic value of targeting aging

#53

Post by giantg2 »

epicureanideal wrote: post #41
giantg2 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the same person, but it used to excite me when I was younger. Now I realize that life is mostly full of bullshit outside our control. I hate my job, so why would I want to live significantly longer when it means working longer? Political and cultural changes could be difficult to handle too.

I sometimes have similar thoughts, but then I wonder, if I were to live to 300, maybe some of the bullshit would go away some time in my 100s and everything might be more enjoyable? Let's hope we don't need to deal with critical race theory / unconscious bias trainings at work and open derogatory statements against non-minorities for more than another 5-10 years, for example... I have to say it's making work a lot le…

If other people are living to 300 too, then I would think it's likely they will bring their bullshit with them, right? I feel like dying isn't just about making physical space for then next generation but also allowing space for cultural changes.

Re: The economic value of targeting aging

#54

Post by spywaregorilla »

majormajor wrote: post #39
wgolsen wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite response to this and related objections to ending aging (such as “what about the dictators”): imagine a scenario where humans did not age, but still had the problems of “gerontocracy” and dictatorships. Would you propose subjecting the whole of humanity to debilitating degenerative diseases and ultimately death to solve these societal problems? I picked this up from Ageless by Andrew Steele, a highly reco…

I think "those people would be assasinated more frequently than they are today" is a much more plausible outcome than "subject all of humanity to debilitating degenerative diseases." At the country-level scale, that certainly sounds better than everyone aging and dying. But what would individuals do on a smaller scale? Would this also incentive a lot more violent death among the rest of the population too, to change…

If you live forever, committing crimes seems like it carries a larger risk. Including a much higher risk of actually being murdered, in prison.

Re: The economic value of targeting aging

#55

Post by throwkeep »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #17

It’s obvious that healthy people that live shorter are better for the ‘economy’ but clearly humanity doesn’t live to optimize for the economy. If we did, we would be fighting obesity with 10x the seriousness of how we fight COVID.

It's strange. Obesity is our biggest preventable health problem, and it gets almost no attention in the media or by public officials. We heard endlessly from health officials and news media personalities to wash our hands, stay indoors, wear a mask, get vaccinated, but nothing about eating healthier, eating less, exercising more?

"Obesity steals more years than diabetes, tobacco, high blood pressure and high cholesterol -- the other top preventable health problems that cut Americans' lives short, according to researchers who analyzed 2014 data."

https://www.webmd.com/diabetes/news/20170424/the-top-5-condi...

"Obesity is associated with nearly 1 in 5 US deaths, according to a study published online August 15 in the American Journal of Public Health."

https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/809516

It should also be part of the climate change discussion:

"Overall, being obese is associated with about 20% more greenhouse gas emissions (carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide) than being a normal weight"

https://www.webmd.com/diet/obesity/news/20191220/growing-obe...

Re: The economic value of targeting aging

#56

Post by jjoonathan »

inglor_cz wrote: post #37
ben_w wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect gerontocracy would be a distinct without a difference after someone invents any real fountain-of-youth category of tech (mind uploading included), in much the same way that land ownership went from being a requirement for voting to merely one of many ways to hold wealth as the USA went from an agrarian to an industrial society. Big difference going from 50 to 70; proportionally less going from 600 to 700, e…

"land ownership" A distracting thought: isn't it striking how "real property ownership" has returned as a marker of better societal status? A mere 50-60 years ago, even working class could own (arguably not very nice) dwellings in coastal California etc. The same development can be seen in Europe. If I had to choose, I'd rather be an owner of 3-4 nice pieces of real estate than a highly qualified professional. This i…

You know that Simpson's episode where Bart lines up a bunch of megaphones so that the amplified output of each one goes into the input of the next? Obviously in the real world the sound would saturate. Exponential amplification would stop after one or two megaphones as a few tones would "win" and suppress the others. The joke is that in the cartoon world it keeps on going and turns into a sonic tidal wave and we all laugh at the idea of ten megaphones producing a sonic tidal wave.

Yet when we design an economic system by the exact same principle, people wonder why we get ten shrieking megaphones instead of a magical tidal wave.

Re: The economic value of targeting aging

#57

Post by willwashburn »

It seems that their calculations use metformin. At what age should we start using it for health-span extension? I'm already using it to avoid glucose spikes, even though I'm not even prediabetic, but I'm curious if it's known how powerful is the health-span effect is younger humans.

Re: The economic value of targeting aging

#58

Post by kiba »

giantg2 wrote: post #47
wgolsen wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite response to this and related objections to ending aging (such as “what about the dictators”): imagine a scenario where humans did not age, but still had the problems of “gerontocracy” and dictatorships. Would you propose subjecting the whole of humanity to debilitating degenerative diseases and ultimately death to solve these societal problems? I picked this up from Ageless by Andrew Steele, a highly reco…

This seems like a loaded question. How would the people in power allow someone else to make that decision? If the issue still exists and there are no alternatives (implied by it still existing), then what would the eventual answer be? It seems that the power dynamics would not allow for artificial control and thus, some natural control for which the people in power have little influence over would be necessary. I kin…

I kind of like somthing along the same lines as the idea intended in Altered Carbon - everyone gets 100 years of generally healthy life, but then everyone dies at 100. Not realistic at all, but seems highly equitable.

OK. Do you want to die? I don't want to die.

Life is already inequitable as it is. The rich live a little bit longer. The pleb dies short and miserable life.

At the very least, everyone should be able to live as long as they like.

Any artificial constraints will be evaded or manipulated at some point, even in the name of what's best for humanity (ie what if Davinci or Einstien were still alive; eventually the people in power would say I'm president, so presidents should live forever too, etc).

There's also no absolute law of politics that dictators rule forever or indefinitely if they also happen to be immortal.

Regardless, the bigger issue would be overpopulation.

No, the problem is ecological disaster.

There's so much energy coming from the sun that humanity can't even begin to harvest a fraction of it, but we cannot scale to the sun because doing so will poison the Earth.

Re: The economic value of targeting aging

#59

Post by ohazi »

Ericson2314 wrote: post #49
ohazi wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no cohesive "humanity" with any sort of desire or ability to optimize for "the economy." Individuals optimize for their own (often short-term) economic benefit. That's it. The corporate overlords at ACME don't care about fighting obesity, because there are more than enough non-obese workers for them to exploit, and they don't want to cannibalize their highly profitable line of products that obese people need…

> Individuals optimize for their own (often short-term) economic benefit. That's it. Don't go to too far with this sort of atomistic analysis. Large firms are better at enforcing coordination than "society at-large" or other groupings. The fact that at different scales the coordination is markedly different has a huge affect. We're not an "economy of households" as the orthodox macro might have one model.

> Large firms are better at enforcing coordination than "society at-large" or other groupings.

The "large firms" that I'm familiar with are cesspools of political infighting, gamesmanship, and backstabbing. People in positions of power at these firms use their influence to achieve their own goals, often at the expense of the firm and its employees.

The counterexamples to this are so singularly rare that they are the exception that proves the rule.

Re: The economic value of targeting aging

#60

Post by maerF0x0 »

wpasc wrote: post #28
maerF0x0 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back when I was _really_ into longevity stuff, aubrey de gret etc... I seem to recall that even if we removed all forms of aging people would have an expected lifespan of roughly 1000 years due to trauma death (eg: getting hit by a bus) . So that could serve as a rough rule of thumb for how to think about risk/reward on increasing health in later years. That is it generally has a good EROI for how safe (accident wise…

If you don't mind me asking (off-topic), are you less into longevity stuff now? if yes, what made you less into it/possibly more skeptical of it?

Presently I am less into it because I realized a few things

1. A lot of the things are either very expensive or very difficult. Ex: the probiotics david sinclar takes is like hundreds of dollars, NAD/NMN are expensive etc. Other things are difficult for my current life like getting access to heat exposure therapy (very hot dry sauna) or fasting protocols. Inside tracker with inner age is like $600 each time?

Also I realized that if I donated to methuselah foundation, I'm investing money into the future for others' treatments I'm unlikely to be able to afford myself (or marginally worse, I would have been able to afford, but I donated $$$ over time such that I marginally no longer could..)

2. There was little point looking at the extreme ends of longevity because I was missing major first steps like dropping my BMI from 31 to 23.

Post reply on HN