Anti-aging drug for dogs moves closer to gaining FDA approval

Thanks! Macroexpanded:

Reasonable expectation of effectiveness for large dog lifespan extension - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38447491 - Nov 2023 (186 comments)

Okay, how's this for nuance? There are plenty of news stories about shepherds killing or severely injuring toddlers. Heck, even the POTUS' shepherd has injured and hospitalized multiple people: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-67015811

People make up all kinds of pseudoscience about why pit bulls are involved in so many severe attacks (e.g. the myth of "locking jaws" after a bite - which isn't a thing in any dog breed). The core problem with most of these claims is that "pit bull" is not a breed but actually a number of different breeds and mutts, many of which aren't even related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pit_bull

All of these contribute to statistics involving "pit bulls" (contrast this with German shepherds, which are very narrowly defined) and even then this ignores that people looking for aggressive dogs often want "pit bulls" because of their reputation and make them aggressive (i.e. traumatized) before they eventually end up as rescues in situations where the aggression endangers children.

I don't like dogs, generally, and I don't like most "pit bulls" because of their looks alone, but most of the studies people like to cite uses garbage data that fails to consistently define "pit bulls" (if you look at the methodology the groupings usually rely on what breed the dog is registered as which tells you nothing given that "pit bull" isn't a breed and various mutts will be lumped in as well) on top of being misrepresented by people trying to reaffirm their biases instead of looking at the complex socio-cultural context. Heck, most studies don't even correct for population sizes (i.e. giving statistics about registered dog breeds relative to the number of dogs registered for each breed).

Most of the difference between dog breeds are cosmetic, some are physical, very few are "neurological" but at the end of the day, all dogs are domesticated predators, all dogs can bite and dog bites can be life threatening to humans. All things considered, dog breed is one of the least important factors to whether a given dog poses a threat or not. Yeah, big dogs are more likely to bite in a way that is life threatening and anxious dogs are more likely to bite and abused dogs are more likely to be anxious and dog breeds seen as "aggressive" are more likely to be abused. But given how diverse and hetereogenous the group of dogs classified as "pit bulls" is, any genetic argument is clearly nonsense and just because you can misinterpret studies to reaffirm your biases that doesn't mean you're not just trying to find a simple and easy to reason about explanation to a very complex problem.