Bridge to Nowhere

>Most brain tumors form in people without any known risk factors. But some factors may increase your risk for brain tumors, such as:

>Radiation exposure. People who have had radiation to the head are at higher risk for brain tumors. Most often this exposure comes from radiation therapy used to treat another type of cancer, like leukemia during childhood.

>Certain inherited syndromes. People who are born with certain syndromes, such as neurofibromatosis, von Hippel-Lindau disease, Li-Fraumeni syndrome, and tuberous sclerosis, have an increased risk of brain tumors.

>Family history of brain tumors. Most people with brain tumors don’t have a family history of the disease. But in rare cases, tumors can run in families.

>Weak immune system. People who have a weak immune system have a higher risk of developing central nervous system lymphoma. This includes people who have AIDS or who have had an organ transplant.

https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/encyclopedia/content.aspx?con...

This one is really promising:

>A study found that people who walked or ran at least 1.8 MET·h·d had a 42.5% lower risk of fatal brain cancer.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24091993/

The term "paperclip maximizer" is a reference to a thought-experiment explained in this 2014 interview with Nick Bostrom: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/artificial-intelligence-oxfor...

> Suppose we have an AI whose only goal is to make as many paper clips as possible. The AI will realize quickly that it would be much better if there were no humans because humans might decide to switch it off. Because if humans do so, there would be fewer paper clips. Also, human bodies contain a lot of atoms that could be made into paper clips. The future that the AI would be trying to gear towards would be one in which there were a lot of paper clips but no humans..

EDIT: While the article is from 2014, Nick Bostrom's thought-experiment dates back to his 2003 thesis: https://nickbostrom.com/ethics/ai (props to @o11c for the correction)

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Of course, back in 2014 was before LLMs and visual-image-generators were a thing (StyleGan's paper was 2018), but Roko's Basilisk was described in 2010, which would colour people's thoughts of "AI" back then somewhat differently to today:

2014: "AI" means perfect and unbiased reasoning ability, total objectivity (given one's axioms); it will have the ability to outthink its human operator/sysadmin and somehow "escape" onto the Internet, and make a living for itself trading its services for Bitcoin before going-on to do literally anything it wants, like hack Russian nukes to bomb the US, so a paperclip-making AI really could kill us all.

2024: "AI" means using statistical tricks to generate text which contains frequent factual errors, unsound reasoning, and reflects our cultural-biases back at us. A paperclip-making AI will be the next Juicero before running our of VC funding.

That's a bit harsh on the doctors. If you or your loved one have a solid mass in the brain an evening of googling can tell you that it's most likely the end of the road rather sooner than later. There's very little anyone can do to help you feel better or retain illusion of agency over your life

When you are finding this out it's usually because you already have significant symptoms that progress because growing mass puts a pressure on the brain. So Option 3 is increasingly suffer what you are already suffering till death, prompt one in case of fast growing tumor, more distant in case of the slow one. If you want to do anything else the best course of action is to remove what shouldn't be there. You could in theory remove just a small bit just to find out what it is, but it won't help with the symptoms you already have and risks of biopsy are very similar to risks of surgery which will also potentially give you more information. Also the information that biopsy could provide would be most relevant in the worst case so that the surgery is done with large margins which might result with few months longer survival but way worse quality of life.

So a surgery is basically a no brainer in your already terrible situation. If you are super lucky it might turn out that you had in your brain something relatively benign which, after recovery can give you at least years of normal life.

Context: My partner has a large grade 3 glioma and first surgery, radiation and chemotherapy gave her 5 years of completely normal life and the second one after recurrence another year.

Our approach to all of this was that no one really knows how long they specifically are going to live. And that doesn't change with diagnosis. Statistics is just that. Statistics.

Calling such life bridge to nowhere is just a bleak perspective. Same could be said about every life with similar accuracy.

That's not the origin, it was said in 2003 at least: https://nickbostrom.com/ethics/ai

What a harrowing account. Ended up reading all posts in the author's glioblastoma series, starting with the first one from May 2023. Devastating topic, excellent writing. I can only wish strength