Earlier quoted context omitted.
And that through charisma, you can become more famous than physicists that do better physics than you.
Any examples?
Murray Gell-Mann
Ask HN: Whom do you admire most?
91–100 of 240 posts
Re: Ask HN: Whom do you admire most?
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
Aubrey de Grey? You mean the crazy dude that tells people we're going to live forever without any evidence to support his claims? And Hofstadter, the guy who wrote that really dumb book? (Here I admit that I only read the introduction before being disgusted by his treatment with concept of things which are self referential. It's kind of a noob outlook to find something mind boogling about the fact that a mind can con…
> Aubrey de Grey? You mean the crazy dude that tells people we're going to live forever without any evidence to support his claims? That's not what he claims. You have apparently only heard the soundbites. All the details of his proposals are in his book (check Amazon). After reading it, I happen to think that his engineering approach is brilliant compared to the traditional gerontological approach. Periodically repa…
I saw the Ted talks. Still bullshit.
Re: Ask HN: Whom do you admire most?
#93Jesus, because the world would be a better place if we were more like him.
Hmmm. So imagine tomorrow everyone in the world started acting like Jesus. We all throw away our possessions, and wander around preaching to whoever would listen about being nice to each other. How long before everyone starved?
[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Whom do you admire most?
#94Steve Jobs. (1) He has amazing taste. (2) He did it twice.
Thrice. Twice at Apple, once at Pixar. (I'm counting NeXT as the second time at Apple. Though perhaps they should count separately.)
Re: Ask HN: Whom do you admire most?
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find it a little odd that you think Aubrey de Grey is crazy but Eliezer Yudkowsky isn't, given that EY is a vocal supporter of de Grey's research and claims that we'll live forever for considerably more speculative reasons than any that de Grey asserts. Any explanation of the distinction other than that EY is probably reading this comment and that de Grey probably isn't?
The answer to your query is that I confess a blazing ignorance of EY. Basically, the only people that buy the whole load of nonsense are folks that desperately want to live forever, like my ex (who regularly makes donations to fund longevity research). Aging isn't a disease, because lifespan is something which is subject to evolutionary pressure. Our lifespans are what they are because they evolved to be that way. It…
> Basically, the only people that buy the whole load of nonsense are folks that desperately want to live forever
How about people who just don't think getting sick and frail looks like fun? People who don't want to lose loved ones, who think that 100-200k people dying each day is a tragedy, and who think that we and future generations should have a choice on the matter (you can refuse any therapies that are developed if you want, but shouldn't make the choice for others).
I bet you're not against finding a cure for cancer or malaria. Why would you think it's ridiculous to try to find a cure for the diseases of aging?
Re: Ask HN: Whom do you admire most?
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
Aubrey de Grey? You mean the crazy dude that tells people we're going to live forever without any evidence to support his claims? And Hofstadter, the guy who wrote that really dumb book? (Here I admit that I only read the introduction before being disgusted by his treatment with concept of things which are self referential. It's kind of a noob outlook to find something mind boogling about the fact that a mind can con…
> Aubrey de Grey? You mean the crazy dude that tells people we're going to live forever without any evidence to support his claims? That's not what he claims. You have apparently only heard the soundbites. All the details of his proposals are in his book (check Amazon). After reading it, I happen to think that his engineering approach is brilliant compared to the traditional gerontological approach. Periodically repa…
> I saw the Ted talks. Still bullshit.
Please elaborate.
Why do you think it's bullshit? Why shouldn't it be possible to repair damage that accumulates in our cells? You've offered no clear arguments so far.
Re: Ask HN: Whom do you admire most?
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
The answer to your query is that I confess a blazing ignorance of EY. Basically, the only people that buy the whole load of nonsense are folks that desperately want to live forever, like my ex (who regularly makes donations to fund longevity research). Aging isn't a disease, because lifespan is something which is subject to evolutionary pressure. Our lifespans are what they are because they evolved to be that way. It…
False all around. Aging is a result of evolutionary neglect, not evolutionary pressure. We haven't evolved to live longer because until extremely recent times, only a negligible fraction of us lasted long enough for old age (or menopause) to become an issue. Furthermore, your argument about tarantulas rests on group selection, which is discredited.
That's a semantic argument. But what it means for aging is functionally the same; we're programmed to last a certain amount of time (when there is pressure) and when the pressure runs out... we break down. This is essentially the same as having a programmed break down time.
Secondly, the argument on tarantulas does not rest on group selection at all. For any one male tarantula, he spreads his genes better by living 2 years than living 8. Long living male tarantulas don't do as well, presumably because of some trade-offs between reproduction and lifespan. Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_history_theory
Re: Ask HN: Whom do you admire most?
#98Re: Ask HN: Whom do you admire most?
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
China has continued to become much more free since 1989. The comparison with Russia or the East European states is particular interesting, because China's growth rates have been much better. As for Tienanmen, every single mob revolution in the history of the world has caused far more deaths than the number of people who died at Tienanmen. Imagine how many millions of lives would have been saved if Louis the XVI had a…
Imagine how many millions of lives would be freer and richer if Deng had acted in the same way as Gorbechev, Yeltsin, or even Egon Krenz. Had Louis XVI acted in the same way as Deng, continental Europe may still be under the heel of absolute monarchism today, with all the stupid pointless wars that entails. The French Revolution was a step forward for humanity, no matter how messy it was.
Imagine how many millions of lives would be freer and richer if Deng had acted in the same way as Gorbechev, Yeltsin, or even Egon Krenz.
Gorbechev was fairly similar to Deng. He liberalized the economy and increased freedom of speech, but he did not allow democracy. Yeltsin introduced democracy, and what was the result? A terrible economy, a dramatic rise in suicide rates and alcoholism, and now under Putin, even speech is becoming less free. If only there could have been two Dengs, one for China and one for Russia!
The heel of monarchism? What heel? The fundamental problem of monarchy was not that it was oppressive (it wasn't), but that it wasn't a very good military Schelling point. Were taxes higher under monarchy? Was their less freedom of speech? Were there more wars? No, no, and no. Where do you get your history?
Look at the history of free speech for example. Pretty much every country that has gotten free speech, originally got free speech while under non-democratic government (Britain under the monarchy, France under Louis the XVI, U.S. under British Colonial rule, Germany under Allied military command, Japan under allied military command). Democracy has generally either been neutral or corrosive towards freedom ( the French Revolution, the terrorizing of the loyalists in America http://books.google.com/books?id=SZccAAAAMAAJ&printsec=f... , Nazis, etc ).
And pointless wars? The Wars of the French Revolution killed far, far more than any monarchist war. Not only that, they invented the usage of mass slave armies to fight the war. The French Revolution Wars and the Napoleonic Wars presaged the great Democratic total wars that followed - the Civil War, WWI, and WWII.
Had Louis the XVI put down the mob, the nationalization, conscript armies, and total war may have never been invented. Prussia would have never felt the need to unify to protect themselves against France. It's almost impossible to imagine World War I or World War II without the Wars of the French Revolution.
Re: Ask HN: Whom do you admire most?
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
The answer to your query is that I confess a blazing ignorance of EY. Basically, the only people that buy the whole load of nonsense are folks that desperately want to live forever, like my ex (who regularly makes donations to fund longevity research). Aging isn't a disease, because lifespan is something which is subject to evolutionary pressure. Our lifespans are what they are because they evolved to be that way. It…
> Aging isn't a disease, because lifespan is something which is subject to evolutionary pressure. Our lifespans are what they are because they evolved to be that way. That's incorrect. Our genes don't care if they carry on by reproduction or by living longer in a single individual, but we care. How a body ages after reproductive age is in an evolutionary blind spot. Individuals with mutations that promote longer life…
It's true that individuals that live a little bit longer but have the same end of their reproductive period do no better in the gene pool. However, if it were advantageous to live longer, and those folks had a slightly longer reproductive period, then we would expect the lifespan-while-fertile to increase. Presumably this would also increase the overall lifespan as well, but really that's irrelevant to this discussion.
Yes, we keep accumulating damage. But we have mechanisms to control that damage. And clearly there's not a set limit on it. Tarantulas that only live 2 years are not constrained by cell damage. Cell damage is allowed to happen.