Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you really saying that you'd prefer to DIE in order to incent yourself to do exciting things sooner? Erm. Well, I guess that's one set of preferences.
There's a classic A Softer World comic that's been turned into a t-shirt that says "I would rather die screaming than live forever." There are downsides to the kind of extreme prudence that planning to be around for centuries would imply. Also, there's a fantastic novel from Bruce Sterling called Holy Fire that is devoted to exploring the tension between living to continue living and living in the moment.
Anti-ageing compound set for human trials after turning clock back for mice
151–160 of 243 posts
Re: Anti-ageing compound set for human trials after turning clock back for mice
#152I wonder why the study has nothing to say about the longevity of the treated mice compared to controls. Maybe it costs too much for experimenting with extended effects and maybe they want something for their next paper.
The biggest problem of course is sociological with only the top tiny% able to afford it. The psychological divide between have and have not will grow in ways completely unacceptable to the (100-tiny)% and could stimulate revolutionary tendencies among the masses to even things out. The top tiny% really should be considering pouring lots of their money into making the treatment cheap enough to not create a divide so intolerable that it will perish under its own weight.
Re: Anti-ageing compound set for human trials after turning clock back for mice
#153From Aubrey De Grey: Short answer is it’s not all that big a deal in biomedical terms. It’s a great discovery in terms of understanding mitochondria, and it provides a new way to rejuvenate mito function, but it doesn’t tell us that rejuvenating mito function in isolation in an otherwise still-old animal is a good idea -- and there have for many years been other ways to rejuvenate mito function which have not led to…
Aubrey De Grey is younger than I am, but he looks old and haggard, much older than I look (and much older than my younger sister who is almost exactly his age looks). I don't know why people take anti-aging advice from Aubrey De Grey. His advice has meager uptake or support in reliable sources on human medicine. AFTER EDIT: I see the first reaction to this comment was a silent downvote, which evokes my desire to lear…
Since you asked so politely, I'll attempt, albeit somewhat hesitantly, to offer some feedback.
So looking back on my encounters with Aubrey, I can only say he seems perfectly content appearing old and wise. In fact he's well known to be anti-interventionist (for the meantime) and does not endorse supplementation or other strategies other than basic obvious health advice (eat well, exercise). This is in contrast to his friend Ray Kurzweil, who on the other end of the spectrum is ingesting 100+ pills daily.[1]
In terms of the HN reaction, I too admit at first, to an immediate emotional desire to downvote. On the one hand, I respect your breadth of knowledge and am grateful to your usually educational summations, but on this occasion, the dismissal seems shallow. The sense one gets, is that you're not really taking him seriously as a biomedical gerontologist, as a researcher studying senescence for the last 20 years. Instead it feels (at least to me) like a dismissal more slightly more appropriate, to a salesman peddling snakeoil.
So lastly, and perhaps most importantly, setting aside emotion, the dismissal was logically flawed. If a researcher produces findings and chooses not to follow them (by your implication the reason for his old and haggard appearance), it has little bearing on the validity of said findings. There may be many good (and not so good) reasons for not following the immediate implications of ones own research: Akrasia[2], lazyness, "wait and see". For example, theoretical research (eg murine models -- such as FTA) occurs long before a drug, has passed all the relevant safety tests in humans, and enters the market.
hth
[1] http://bigthink.com/videos/the-top-3-supplements-for-survivi...
Re: Anti-ageing compound set for human trials after turning clock back for mice
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
“Personally, I’ve been hearing all my life about the Serious Philosophical Issues posed by life extension, and my attitude has always been that I’m willing to grapple with those issues for as many centuries as it takes.” -Patrick Hayden
It's funny, I have a friend who is a full-time professional philosopher (teaches at a university) and you would not believe the amount of earnest essay writing there was in the philosophy community about Miley Cyrus's performance at the VMAs (something I've not actually seen myself). All sorts of theories about Freud and Hegel and this and that. Look Philos, I said to him, she got up on stage and did a little dance a…
I'm full steam ahead myself. I am fascinated by the idea of Open Aging.
But anti-intellectualism is not cool. Saying "she did a little dance and that's all there is to it" or even "she's just being young" is more obnoxious than the fact that she did it.
There are cultural analyses to be made, if not merely to gain an understanding of how activities like this will affect culture and influence opinion.
Cultural nihilism and cultural solipsism are less sophisticated than cultural relativism, and these probably do more harm than good. No one should really critique from cultural apathy — I mean, just, why? "I don't care, so you shouldn't either"? Really? That's just picking your nose at the Weird Kids table.
Re: Anti-ageing compound set for human trials after turning clock back for mice
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
Personally, I probably do riskier things when I do feel old. Tick... tick... tick....
It's not the feeling old, it's the realization that you have, in fact, spent the first half of your life not doing the things you wanted to do. And then the realization that you better get a move on if you want to get them done. Motorcycles, Porsches, divorce + remarriage to a much younger woman, angel investing. You know, the mid-life crisis.
I always picture some poor guy who spends decades dreaming of the day he can buy a fancy sports car. Finally he can afford it, he buys the car he's wanted since he was 15, and people say "hey look, he's having a midlife crisis."
Re: Anti-ageing compound set for human trials after turning clock back for mice
#156>researchers confident that side-effects will be minimal due to the fact the compound is naturally occurring. There are a lot of naturally occurring poisons too. I'm curious, how does the substance being naturally occurring have anything to do with the side-effects?
They mean it's naturally occurring in the human body. And I'm not sure but I think they're not boosting it much beyond natural youthful levels.
Re: Anti-ageing compound set for human trials after turning clock back for mice
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would just point out that most of modern philosophy is not really like this. I think most people think philosophers spend there time arguing about ethics, when this is only one tiny part of philosophy. A good chunk of the current discussion in philosophy of science, for example, centers around epistemology to varying degrees as it relates to current discoveries in genetics and neuroscience. The top philosophers in…
If I wanted to learn the parts of philosophy that apply to machine learning, and how they apply, where should I look?
Not the OP, but I have some interest in this too. Knowledge Engineering is so closely linked it's an obvious place to start (but in some ways Linguistics is even more interesting - and useful). But for Knowledge Engineering (from the philospipical side), start with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology
Useful bits:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth#Semantic_theory_of_truth
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliabilism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_priori_and_a_posteriori
Then go the other way (Assuming you know relational database theory):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Description_Framework#...
You'll find the two concepts meet somewhere around
Re: Anti-ageing compound set for human trials after turning clock back for mice
#158Researchers injected a chemical called nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide, or NAD, which reduces in the body as we age. The addition of this compound led to the radical reversal in the ageing of the mice. While this is pretty cool, it seems that the most immediate effect would be a higher availability of adenosine triphosphate (ATP), meaning more energy "currency" for the body's machinery to work with [1] [2] (someone…
Ageing is a genetic disease. It has to be cured. We evolved to adapt to specific environment. Now that we are changing this environment we must change ourselves as well. Everyone should be given an option to die but it should be just one of a few options.
Not as long as religious fanatics, anti gay (shame on you, Uganda), anti abortion and other zealots, dumbasses who have 10 kids and nothing to feed them with and other kinds of people still exist.
Then again, I'm all for it if we can colonize space sooner...
Re: Anti-ageing compound set for human trials after turning clock back for mice
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
“Personally, I’ve been hearing all my life about the Serious Philosophical Issues posed by life extension, and my attitude has always been that I’m willing to grapple with those issues for as many centuries as it takes.” -Patrick Hayden
It's funny, I have a friend who is a full-time professional philosopher (teaches at a university) and you would not believe the amount of earnest essay writing there was in the philosophy community about Miley Cyrus's performance at the VMAs (something I've not actually seen myself). All sorts of theories about Freud and Hegel and this and that. Look Philos, I said to him, she got up on stage and did a little dance a…
Agree. someone who would have 100 years of experience in any matter would be invaluable. theres a lot to gain rather than to lose.
Re: Anti-ageing compound set for human trials after turning clock back for mice
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
Aubrey De Grey is younger than I am, but he looks old and haggard, much older than I look (and much older than my younger sister who is almost exactly his age looks). I don't know why people take anti-aging advice from Aubrey De Grey. His advice has meager uptake or support in reliable sources on human medicine. AFTER EDIT: I see the first reaction to this comment was a silent downvote, which evokes my desire to lear…
Feedback? Sure. You're doing the "appeal to surface appearance" argument. Not sure, but I don't recall that argument from Critical Thinking 101.
I will acknowledge that the article about him on Wikipedia has a talk page
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Aubrey_de_Grey
like few other biography of living person (BLP) articles I have seen in years of editing Wikipedia. Wow.