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Longevity FAQ: A beginner's guide to longevity research

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Re: Longevity FAQ: A beginner's guide to longevity research

#31

Post by bitwize »

bsedlm wrote: post #9
DantesKite wrote: post #2

Peter Thiel once said something along the lines that nobody is against aging research, because in practice what you’re solving for are problems everybody wants cures for, like Alzheimer’s, cancer, Parkinson’s, etc. I often think about that quote because aging is such an intractably hard problem, we’ve sort of collectively rationalized it as something “good”. You see it in many religious traditions. In the zeitgeist.…

you'd say I'm rationalizing it, but I do not believe that death is a problem to be solved As I take it, that line of thought (that death is just a problem to be solved and that immortality is something to strive for) leads to solving death just before going on to "solve" childhood. Why do we have to be born ignorant of the world and must "waste" some 20 years learning about it (possibly more) before we can go on to b…

I don't think it's a problem we can solve. If we ever solve aging we'll get up to so much other malarkey that we're bound to die some other way, and not much later than if we'd died of old age.

Personally, I'd rather enjoy old age and go out suddenly than spend the last 20 or 30 so years of my life slowly crumbling to death, so addressing the diseases of aging is a worthwhile endeavor.

Re: Longevity FAQ: A beginner's guide to longevity research

#32

Post by galangalalgol »

moonchrome wrote: post #24
Terry_Roll wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It cant be solved yet as there isnt enough resources to go round for everyone. https://www.overshootday.org/how-many-earths-or-countries-do... https://www.overshootday.org/content/uploads/2022/01/How_man...

This kind of nonsense reasoning had people predicting civilization end within 15 or 30 - back in the 70s... Resources aren't a fixed notion, crude oil was worthless and toxic before we learned how to refine it and suddenly it's a critical resource. Natural ecosystems are considered vital today, but if we were to come up with artificial biospheres we would be looking back at the days people got infected by malaria and…

I agree to an extent, but the matter involved on this planet is finite, the added entropy it can handle is finite. Our power consumption is growing exponentially and that has to stop at some point or we will just cook. We will find new resources like clean fusion energy, but that won't let us sink more heat. We worried about food back in the 70s but then we got better at agriculture, except it isn't sustainable what we do to boost the yields, the soil is getting used up. We can do better, but there are simply limits, and with no deaths we will find them much sooner. We will have to expand off earth, which is another seemingly impossible problem, or stop our growth, which isn't technologically difficult, but apparently socially impossible.

Re: Longevity FAQ: A beginner's guide to longevity research

#34

Post by cyber_kinetist »

bsedlm wrote: post #9
DantesKite wrote: post #2

Peter Thiel once said something along the lines that nobody is against aging research, because in practice what you’re solving for are problems everybody wants cures for, like Alzheimer’s, cancer, Parkinson’s, etc. I often think about that quote because aging is such an intractably hard problem, we’ve sort of collectively rationalized it as something “good”. You see it in many religious traditions. In the zeitgeist.…

you'd say I'm rationalizing it, but I do not believe that death is a problem to be solved As I take it, that line of thought (that death is just a problem to be solved and that immortality is something to strive for) leads to solving death just before going on to "solve" childhood. Why do we have to be born ignorant of the world and must "waste" some 20 years learning about it (possibly more) before we can go on to b…

Perhaps have you read Baudrillard (specifically, Symbollic Exchange and Death)?

He talks precisely about this problem: that by rejecting death and segregating it from life, we end up immortalizing death and suffer from this distinction. And this ontological paradox ultimately encompasses every aspect of Western society: not only how we treat the dead (rise of suicides and euthanasia, and our reaction to it), and soon-to-be-dead (the elderly abandoned in nursing houses), but also the functions of Capital and labour, the breaking down of social democracy, the ever-increasing opposition between the State and terrorism, and the eventual rise of fascism (the perverse aestheticization of death).

All of this is quite complex and I can't do justice here in this single comment, but I highly recommend it if you haven't read it. (I personally think this is Baudrillard's magnum opus, whereas most people only remember him for the book Simulacra and Simulation and the concept of hyper-reality.)

Re: Longevity FAQ: A beginner's guide to longevity research

#35

Post by glenstein »

Majestic121 wrote: post #17
bsedlm wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you'd say I'm rationalizing it, but I do not believe that death is a problem to be solved As I take it, that line of thought (that death is just a problem to be solved and that immortality is something to strive for) leads to solving death just before going on to "solve" childhood. Why do we have to be born ignorant of the world and must "waste" some 20 years learning about it (possibly more) before we can go on to b…

That's a lot of words, but I still don't see a justification why death (I.e. the end of life) is not a problem for people that do not want to stop living (most people).

Yeah, I was confused as well. I think the argument is that it's a slippery slope to a different thing, and since the different thing is bad, solving for death is bad too.

I don't think that runs.

Re: Longevity FAQ: A beginner's guide to longevity research

#36

Post by anthony88 »

hericium wrote: post #23
DantesKite wrote: post #2

Peter Thiel once said something along the lines that nobody is against aging research, because in practice what you’re solving for are problems everybody wants cures for, like Alzheimer’s, cancer, Parkinson’s, etc. I often think about that quote because aging is such an intractably hard problem, we’ve sort of collectively rationalized it as something “good”. You see it in many religious traditions. In the zeitgeist.…

I like how aging is explained in "Lifespan: Why we age and why we don't have to"[1]: cells are analog holders of information and just like analog tapes, each copy holds data of slightly lesser quality. After a number of copies, cells become less performant in their job and eventually some lose enough information that new copies cannot function properly enough to survive and/or not mutate. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org…

But if you look further at David Sinclair's videos on YouTube, the aging problem is not the lost of information but mostly the lost of capability to read/interpret the information. The cell then doesn't operate as it should. He's working now on ways to "polishing the CD" so information can be read as in young cells.

Re: Longevity FAQ: A beginner's guide to longevity research

#37

Post by feviskus »

jacquesm wrote: post #19
feviskus wrote: post #10

use verteporfin in combination with wounding. it works, even for hair loss. thank me later.

From your previous comment: " Feeling very depressed as a 23 year old with agressive hair loss. Tried (and still trying) everything there is, but nothing worked yet (1.5 years into min/dut)." I think I'm going to pass on medical advice from you.

You can keep stigmatizing depression or balding, luckily Im no more in a position such that statements like yours would affect me adversely. It took 4 months and a bit of experimenting, but vert was able to change it, I just want to raise awareness.

You can read up on "Verteporfin", the patent for cell regeneration (thru "controlled wounding") is already filed by Stanford, pending approval.

Re: Longevity FAQ: A beginner's guide to longevity research

#38

Post by jacquesm »

feviskus wrote: post #37
jacquesm wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From your previous comment: " Feeling very depressed as a 23 year old with agressive hair loss. Tried (and still trying) everything there is, but nothing worked yet (1.5 years into min/dut)." I think I'm going to pass on medical advice from you.

You can keep stigmatizing depression or balding, luckily Im no more in a position such that statements like yours would affect me adversely. It took 4 months and a bit of experimenting, but vert was able to change it, I just want to raise awareness. You can read up on "Verteporfin", the patent for cell regeneration (thru "controlled wounding") is already filed by Stanford, pending approval.

I'm not stigmatizing anything.

Re: Longevity FAQ: A beginner's guide to longevity research

#40

Post by feviskus »

jacquesm wrote: post #38
feviskus wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can keep stigmatizing depression or balding, luckily Im no more in a position such that statements like yours would affect me adversely. It took 4 months and a bit of experimenting, but vert was able to change it, I just want to raise awareness. You can read up on "Verteporfin", the patent for cell regeneration (thru "controlled wounding") is already filed by Stanford, pending approval.

I'm not stigmatizing anything.

Then please stop (mis)judging people just because they experienced a depressive episode in their life - this is exactly what that sentence meant, even if not your intent.
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