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

A Personal Statement from Iain Banks

littlebrown.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 363 posts

Re: A Personal Statement from Iain Banks

#221

Post by afterburner »

Jach wrote: post #162
jellicle wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now, I'm rather skeptical of the whole process myself, but the crynoics guys understand biology 101. Actually, they mostly understand Psychology 101, which is that people are willing to pay unlimited amounts of money for the promise of life after death. SEE ALSO: turning lead into gold.

If they really wanted to scam people, there are far better ways than suckering a couple thousand people out of membership dues, and a couple hundred people out of leaving their $30k - $200k ( hardly unlimited, especially for software developers!) life insurance payout to a family member.

There's always another way to skin a cat, but you get good at one way and keep at it.

Re: A Personal Statement from Iain Banks

#222

Post by mikeash »

nawitus wrote: post #212
mikeash wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Cryopreservation advocates do not claim that the process is proven to be work, they claim that the chance may be small, but it's non-zero." They implicitly claim that not only is the chance non-zero, but that it's large enough to be worth the opportunity cost of actually freezing people. I agree that a non-zero chance seems obvious, but this claim definitely does not, and needs a lot more substantiation than there a…

That's a good point. You can look it this way: life after rewarming can last for hundreds of years, easily a thousand as medical technology will have advanced at that point. People are currently willing to pay $100k in medical bills to extend their life by about one year with 50% chance, which means that the cost is $200k per year. Cryopreservation also costs about $100k (slightly more in real life I guess, I'm round…

> The 1% success rate is rather pessimistic, too.

Where do you get that? From what little I understand, 1% seems highly optimistic, given how destructive the freezing process is at the moment.

Re: A Personal Statement from Iain Banks

#223

Post by reasonattlm »

venus wrote: post #44

This is horrible news. We are all poorer today, all of us. Banks is an inspiration to all who read him - of what could be, what can be, what is to be. Cancer has claimed a terrible toll in my life. Three in my immediate family and counting, the countdown very fast for one of them. And now it seems to have turned its unwelcome gaze to my intellectual treasures. I hate this disease, I despise it so much it's hard to ex…

The 300 was far from useless - it was in fact the vehicle that enabled the Methuselah Foundation to do any of what it did: gain enough social proof and funding to invest in Organovo, boost SENS research far enough to gain funding from Peter Thiel and others, ultimately enabling it to spin off into the SENS Research Foundation, work behind the scenes to make the research community much more accepting of aging research, build a network of sympathetic researchers willing to speak out publicly about human longevity as a goal for science, help the Supercentenarian Research Foundation get started, and of late work on the New Organ initiative.

None of that would have been possible without the 300, and more importantly without people like you and I believing in the goal.

On cancer: there are new ideas and promising signs if you know where to look. I'm not a fan of WILT, but I haven't see anyone mount a good claim that it won't work as advertised, which is to say no cancer, ever:

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2011/10/accumulating-the-...

An effective cancer treatment is all about finding a commonality to cut through the enormous variation in cancer biochemistry, so I watch for signs of that with some interest. The latest possible cancer commonality is CD47, for example:

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2013/03/more-on-cd47-as-a...

There's also the suggestion that maybe we could extract the global cellular mechanism that makes naked mole rats cancer-free, or the different global cellular mechanism that makes blind mole rats cancer-free, and safely introduce one of them into human biology. That's much more speculative, not least for the concern that what works for 20-30 years in a mole rat might not be good for 100 in a human - there are plenty of examples of things working well in rodents but not being all that applicable to people.

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2011/03/revisiting-naked-...

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2012/11/the-mechanism-of-...

But even without this, I think that targeted cell destruction therapies (via nanoparticles, or trained immune cells, or viruses, etc) will evolve into a robust cancer cure for near all cancers caught early enough within the next couple of decades:

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2006/10/cancer-cells-are-...

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2007/01/to-what-degree-is...

Re: A Personal Statement from Iain Banks

#224

Post by afterburner »

nova wrote: post #180
reasonattlm wrote: post #36

Another person that might be cryopreserved [1], but probably won't be, much like the 150,000 who passed in the last day or so [2]. Many sorts of terminal case can actually lead to better quality cryopreservation under present legal restrictions [3], in comparison to the drawn out and uncertain end of aging, precisely because they are more rapid and certain in time. (Or might be plastinated [4] in the alternate histor…

I feel you. The deathism of this thread, on a site read by technically-oriented people, where problably many agree with the computational theory of mind really makes me lose hope in the human kind. It's not thinking that cryonics is not worth it. That's a reasonable position. I'm undecided myself. It's that response, that fighting death is somehow unethical or naive. That Death is Good, Part of the Cosmos, Don't You…

The reason people are uncomfortable with talk of paying for immortality is that it can lead to obscene scenerios potentially thousands of times worse than the 1% debates we are having now. You think accumulation of power is bad when people pass money on to their children, think about how much worse it is if they simply live forever and accumulate it indefinitely. And now imagine what happens if only the top ecehlon gets to live forever, and the less wealthy or simply poor just die.

Immortality is not something our society can simply add to its current socio-economic make-up. Some fundamental changes would have to be made in order for the situation to be at all morally satisfactory and not utterly revolting and depressing. And no doubt any attempted change would take at least 50 years for the wild oscillations to even out.

Re: A Personal Statement from Iain Banks

#225

Post by jtbigwoo »

StavrosK wrote: post #58
xradionut wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Player of Games is one of the few sci-fi books I recommend to readers interested in the genre.

Which Banks book should I start with? I was going to start with the Player of Games after your comment, but it turns out it's part of a series, and Consider Phlebas is the first one. Does it matter?

I'd suggest not starting with the Culture novels. The Algebraist is more accessible because it's not constantly referring to a mysterious super-organization that's driving the plot.

Re: A Personal Statement from Iain Banks

#226

Post by AYBABTME »

engtech wrote: post #157
hyperbovine wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More money is not what is needed here--we already pour tons of money into cancer research. What's needed are new ideas. If you really want to fight cancer, skip the startup and go to graduate school. Computational and mathematical approaches to understanding and fighting cancer are still in their infancy. There is a lot of scope for smart, motivated people to do good.

No, more money is needed. 41% of deaths are due to cancer. It really is one of the biggest problems we have as a species and we should spend more effort on it rather than the things we do spend effort on. But I wholeheartedly agree that rather than trying to be a billg and earn money to fund philanthropy, the world needs more researchers.

If research was better paid, more people would be researchers. So more money is needed.

As much as I'd like to do my share in X, if I can't make a living of it, I won't dedicate my whole life to it. Some will, but many won't.

Re: A Personal Statement from Iain Banks

#227

Post by jacquesm »

mikeash wrote: post #133
VLM wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does anyone know his financial situation, too many authors (two examples, RAW and PKD) seem to end up dying while having to eat dogfood if that, and unable to pay the rent and other bills. Not that its fun to die if you're rich, just that he shouldn't have to eat dogfood in addition to the stress of the disease. If he's in bad financial shape I could easily buy a couple more of his novels in kindle form (not that I n…

Last I heard he is quite well off. He's a relatively obscure/niche author in the US, but enjoys broad popularity in the UK.

> enjoys broad popularity in the UK.

I think he enjoys broad popularity just about everywhere in SF fan circles.

Re: A Personal Statement from Iain Banks

#228

Post by vwinsyee »

michaelochurch wrote: post #207
droithomme wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Salaries in the life sciences are no where near where you think they are. Lots of people with biology degrees are making less than theatre majors. Even if you have the more elaborate title of "biochemist", salaries are around $45k, not the $125k you are expecting to earn. http://www1.salary.com/Biochemist-I-Salary.html Starting salaries are around $35k. If you are working for a non-profit foundation (ie: cancer resea…

See, that's my exact point. I didn't say that they make $125k (that's about average for a half-decent VC-istan programmer) because I knew scientific salaries to be low (I'm surprised to hear that they're that low) and they shouldn't be. Those salaries should be at least 3 times higher. You should make more working on scientific research that helps everyone than you'd make ($100-150k for typical programmers) writing y…

Heh, I really wish salaries in science were at least 3 times higher. Most of my colleagues, including those with many years of experience, have salaries in the 30-40K range, so that average starting salary of 35K seems about right or even slightly high. By the way, this is in Los Angeles, where the cost of living is relatively high. Incidentally, the more highly trained postdocs might even have worse salaries and potentially the worst prospects because the number of available faculty positions have seemed to decrease over the years.

Programmer/analysts do make more, but not nearly as much as they would in VC-istan. The median starting salary for a programmer/analyst at my institution is 50K. Senior programmer/analysts can make as much as a median 116K, but I almost never see people employed at that level despite their capability. More importantly, at least in life science research at a public institution, there's really no guarantee that you'll be kept on past the duration of the grant you're funded from, unless your PI is famous and your lab's rich. Even so, the recent cascade of NIH and NSF cuts are putting pressure on all labs.

Along those lines -- the job insecurity's the worst for junior staff, so I don't really see any good reason for recent grads to continue in public research. Most of my former grad school classmates are now in private pharma or biotech. I'm personally looking to move from life science to the SF tech scene as soon as I graduate this year.

Edit: clarity

Re: A Personal Statement from Iain Banks

#229

Post by dreoe »

AYBABTME wrote: post #226
engtech wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, more money is needed. 41% of deaths are due to cancer. It really is one of the biggest problems we have as a species and we should spend more effort on it rather than the things we do spend effort on. But I wholeheartedly agree that rather than trying to be a billg and earn money to fund philanthropy, the world needs more researchers.

If research was better paid, more people would be researchers. So more money is needed. As much as I'd like to do my share in X, if I can't make a living of it, I won't dedicate my whole life to it. Some will, but many won't.

And if it didn't require 12 hours a week (or some similarly horrible figure) writing grant proposals instead of doing actual research

Re: A Personal Statement from Iain Banks

#230

Post by mikeash »

jacquesm wrote: post #227
mikeash wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last I heard he is quite well off. He's a relatively obscure/niche author in the US, but enjoys broad popularity in the UK.

> enjoys broad popularity in the UK. I think he enjoys broad popularity just about everywhere in SF fan circles.

Perhaps, although he doesn't seem as well known, even among SFists, in the US as some other authors. However, when I say broad popularity in the UK, I mean in the entire literate population, not just SF, as his non-SF books are also highly regarded there, while fairly unknown in the US.

If you go into an American book store, you may find a couple of Banks books in the SF section, if it's a large and intelligent store. In my brief experience trying this, if you do the same in a British book store, you'll generally find his entire bibliography, SF and non.

Post reply on HN