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Anti-Aging Startup Raises $116M With Bezos Backing

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Re: Anti-Aging Startup Raises $116M With Bezos Backing

#221

Post by eli_gottlieb »

Taek wrote: post #171
eli_gottlieb wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Immortality is largely incompatible with evolution and competition. That's an incredibly good argument in favor of immortality. "Evolution" and "competition" are not gods. They do not have any moral authority over us. Our entire civilization has been built on the principle of not subjecting ourselves to Darwinian survival-selection. That aside, you should probably go count ducks in a swamp or do some other ecologica…

> Our entire civilization has been built on the principle of not subjecting ourselves to Darwinian survival-selection. I don't believe it's something you can escape. It largely boils down to the idea of infinite wants vs. finite resources. Bostrom and co. like to talk about how there's enough energy in the universe to power 10^XX human lifetimes, but I strongly don't believe that a human is going to be the ultimate l…

>I strongly don't believe that a human is going to be the ultimate lifeform.

Once again, you sound atrocious at biology. Using terms like "ultimate lifeform" isn't even real biology, it's anime and video game "biology(tm)". Real-world evolution has no teleology built into it: there's no "ultimateness" to reach towards.

>Evolution thus far though has very clearly favored death as the primary means of design.

Evolution doesn't really favor anything, as such. Death happens because the Second Law of Thermodynamics makes even the most robust systems (and life is really robust, actually) break down eventually.

>I guess the other alternative is that we hit an entirely egalitarian society

So to be clear, you think an "egalitarian society" (your words) is even less likely than human immortality, despite the fact that relatively egalitarian human societies have been observed in, say, Sweden, while immortality has not.

Have you considered that you may be Ebeneezer Scrooge?

Re: Anti-Aging Startup Raises $116M With Bezos Backing

#222

Post by eli_gottlieb »

jnicholasp wrote: post #170
eli_gottlieb wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Of all the pain points humans experience, you'd think death lies pretty high on the list. Why are people fighting this? Because nobody ever seems to go around funding peer-reviewed medical science done in well-controlled labs with large sample sizes to study how to fight aging. This is not a problem that a startup company can solve. This is a problem for steady, difficult progress over decades. But people go for the…

How much steady, difficult progress is currently being made? This seems like a thing that is being under-funded and under-researched, and more money, and particularly attention, being given to it is a good thing even if you don't think the particular method is likely to be effective.

>This seems like a thing that is being under-funded and under-researched,

[citation needed]

Re: Anti-Aging Startup Raises $116M With Bezos Backing

#223

Post by slfnflctd »

eagsalazar2 wrote: post #187

Humans should not be immortal like gods until they attain godlike control of their impulse to consume and reproduce. If we get total liberation from nature's constraints (already 90% there), without evolving a corresponding ability to plan and resource long term, it will make the ecological disaster we're already witnessing 1000X worse and we'll likely destroy ourselves anyway. I'm not saying death doesn't suck or th…

As a counterpoint, perhaps when the next generation's crop of CEOs begins this anti-aging therapy, it will occur to them that it's prudent to plan ahead a bit further than the next quarterly profit report.

Right now, your average upper level executive knows they've got maybe 40-50 good years ahead of them before it's game over. In that light, the pervasive mindset of "make as much money as you can as fast as you can, all else be damned" makes some sense, as the cash required to keep them and their loved ones comfortable for life can be realistically obtained in a short time. When you're looking 400+ years in the future, though, that picture changes dramatically. Considering the bigger long-term perspective becomes much more personally, viscerally important.

When I read about projected consequences of climate change, most of the worst ones will be after I'm dead, and it quickly becomes abstract to me. I care, but not nearly as much as I would if I had a reasonable certainty of being stuck here in the middle of all that.

Re: Anti-Aging Startup Raises $116M With Bezos Backing

#224

Post by tim333 »

eagsalazar2 wrote: post #187

Humans should not be immortal like gods until they attain godlike control of their impulse to consume and reproduce. If we get total liberation from nature's constraints (already 90% there), without evolving a corresponding ability to plan and resource long term, it will make the ecological disaster we're already witnessing 1000X worse and we'll likely destroy ourselves anyway. I'm not saying death doesn't suck or th…

On the other hand people breed less as they amuse themselves with the internet, cable and video games. The fertility rate in much of Europe is well below what's needed to keep the population constant.

Re: Anti-Aging Startup Raises $116M With Bezos Backing

#226

Post by rfrey »

hohenheim wrote: post #205
eagsalazar2 wrote: post #187

Humans should not be immortal like gods until they attain godlike control of their impulse to consume and reproduce. If we get total liberation from nature's constraints (already 90% there), without evolving a corresponding ability to plan and resource long term, it will make the ecological disaster we're already witnessing 1000X worse and we'll likely destroy ourselves anyway. I'm not saying death doesn't suck or th…

Not only it is taxing on planet earth I think there is more to it. Assume people of middle ages lived 1000 years longer than they did, I doubt the civilization on earth would have developed as far as it did. To progress we need people to die and the new to born with radical ideas.

People do not develop interests in chronological lockstep with each other. Consider that there may be a pool of people who do not develop interests in mathematics or science until their late 20s, at which point they rationally decide it is too late to make a career of it. Increased longevity would open that pool of creative thought.

A corollary to that: removing time constraints would allow people to engage with a much broader range of experiences in a very deep way, possibly enhancing creativity and cross-fertilization of ideas.

Re: Anti-Aging Startup Raises $116M With Bezos Backing

#227

Post by TeMPOraL »

Taek wrote: post #180
nullc wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've found it helpful to share this with people: http://www.nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html

The article paints death in a very black and white, good-vs-evil picture, but I hold that it's a much more complex mechanism. And I don't mean to suggest that we should accept death or not pursue the escape of death, but most species (with some notable exceptions) who have enjoyed evolutionary success have death hardcoded into their genome. Which suggests to me that over a sufficient timescale (probably dozens to tho…

> Humans may find some way to get optimization cycles that don't involve death, but I hold the opinion that if we don't continuously pursue optimization cycles, we'll eventually be out-competed evolutionary by something that does. We have a huge head start, but in the fable, so did the dragon.

I think we're pretty safe. Evolution works really, really slowly. Even the earliest humans recorded optimized their lives much faster than evolution. That's our advantage - a brain that can do the iterations in abstract, many orders of magnitude faster than nature does in matter.

Re: Anti-Aging Startup Raises $116M With Bezos Backing

#228

Post by TeMPOraL »

BjoernKW wrote: post #188
xixixao wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, no one is trying for immortality. You will still die, just not from standard health decline. Hack, why not at least try and see what happens, going back to normal dying will be easy (depending on the cure, but most likely).

> going back to normal dying will be easy Depending on the solution, normal dying might indeed be impossible. I remember a piece of dystopian fiction (I think it was an Outer Limits episode) where characters couldn't even kill themselves anymore because nanobots would instantly repair any damage. Not that this scenario is extremely likely but there might be ramifications we can't think about yet. Immortality after al…

[Spoiler alert for Black Mirror]

Black Mirror's "White Christmas" covered a similar theme with uploaded consciousness, where the victim obviously couldn't self-terminate in any way.

Re: Anti-Aging Startup Raises $116M With Bezos Backing

#229

Post by TeMPOraL »

nickpinkston wrote: post #85
BjoernKW wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not enough time? Perhaps, but forever is a long time. Quite possibly it's exactly our limited time that has us achieve great things. If you have all the time in the world why bother starting that business or learning that new skill today? Might as well start tomorrow ... I also find it at least a bit disturbing that WoW is so high on that list. Then again, if you have all the time in the world ...

I'm unsure if anyone who thinks "there's just not enough time" is the kind of person who would sit around because of their immortality.

I disagree. I believe that a big reason kids are so good at learning and trying things is that they haven't yet internalized the concept of "not enough time" - there's always shitloads of time; if not today, then tomorrow. If not this summer, then next summer. When you don't have to worry about running out of time, you don't mind blowing it on learning stuff.

Re: Anti-Aging Startup Raises $116M With Bezos Backing

#230

Post by TeMPOraL »

rsync wrote: post #176
a13n wrote: post #56

I'm not a billionaire and I'm not old, but I am so excited about anti-aging. I know Hacker News is super negative, but who doesn't want to live longer?! Of all the pain points humans experience, you'd think death lies pretty high on the list. Why are people fighting this?

"Of all the pain points humans experience, you'd think death lies pretty high on the list. Why are people fighting this?" Imagine a cell in your body that thinks this way. What would you call that cell ? It starts with a "c" ...

Thankfully cells aren't sentient.

Also, the cell you mean is not the one that refuses to die, but one that wants to aggressively reproduce.

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