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So you wanna build an aging company

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Re: So you wanna build an aging company

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't this be an anti-aging company? Aging is bad and not aging is good.

Is aging bad though? Seems like natures way of helping humanity evolve. As individuals it may seem bad. As a species, keeping old ideas in the form of ossified biology around seems like a bad idea. For example: see 70-80 year old politicians ageist assault on future generations. Physics is ageist and its march towards entropy unstoppable. Anti-aging is just more first worlders who can ignore externalities thanks to f…

Death is a natural sweeper that allows progress, evolution, rapid change and adjustment to new situations. The opposite brings, well, the opposite.

The life well lived is a life thats easy to let go, regardless of your beliefs. The more people messed up the more they desperately cling to it (I know its vastly more complex, but this is the core of what I see around).

I am not claiming we shouldn't be trying to make lives better, or longer. But immortality will be humanity's doom - there is endless row of puttin' and trumps and hitlers and stalins and maos in every single generation, and the only real working solution is inevitable death, none of them went or will let go power on their own from the bottom of their good hearts. That is unavoidable since it comes from base character of humans, whether we like it or not.

I'd say we should shoot on sight all researchers and VCs pouring time and money into directly immortality, that's much safer bet than some immortality bringing long term prosperity for mankind.

Re: So you wanna build an aging company

#42
post #36

Unpopular opinion: Any medical intervention that delays or defeats the aging process will disproportionately benefit the wealthy, and is therefore unethical. The last thing a healthy democracy needs is millennium-old acolytes of Peter Thiel pulling the strings from the shadows.

Virtually every single advancement in science, engineering, and technology disproportionately benefits the wealthy, because they already own everything. That's a great reason to fight against the massive imbalance of wealth distribution, but a terrible reason to halt all human progress.

Hang on there a moment—you missed a few things:

1. Life-extension research, which is what I take umbrage with, is not "all human progress." It is a very specific, high-effort kind of gene therapy whack-a-mole, borne entirely from our hubris and our fear of death.

2. Perhaps I wasn't clear enough, but research for _aging gracefully_ is fine by me. I genuinely hope we beat Alzheimer's. But we all know who holds the purse strings on these initiatives, and it isn't charitable organizations funded by bereft families.

3. Unlike other technological advantages, life extension is a _multiplier_ for inequality. The Undead pay no estate tax. The Undead never change their minds. The Undead never have to give up their bought-and-paid-for seats in Congress.

Death is the ultimate Chesterton's Fence.

Re: So you wanna build an aging company

#43
post #19

Unpopular opinion: Any medical intervention that delays or defeats the aging process will disproportionately benefit the wealthy, and is therefore unethical. The last thing a healthy democracy needs is millennium-old acolytes of Peter Thiel pulling the strings from the shadows.

That sounds similar the prevailing criticism of biotech companies: their primary concern is to develop treatments for the rich or, at a very minimum, common (and often trivial) conditions in first world nations. In other words, for people who can afford to pay. The only real difference in the latter case is that wealthy nations are pulling the strings.

Yes, which is why we need to protect publicly-funded biomedical research—grant review tends to be more sober and less selfish than investment capital.

Re: So you wanna build an aging company

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither. It is the prevention of high sugar to prevent steady organ damage. For those with diabetes, there is no way to reverse it. They just have to reduce their intake. And all organs will continue to be steadily damaged over time.

Interesting recent news about diabetes! Type 1 has been reversed through pancreas and islet transplants, recently in at least one individual by stem cell transplants, now he makes his own insulin. For some type 2 individuals diagnosed early enough, blood sugar can be managed through diet and exercise, and insulin response can be normalized back to typical levels. This seems to work best when caught early, and when th…

I know a lot of people that manage their diabetes just with keto/carnivore diet and moderate activity. That said, it's not easy and doesn't address a lot of the underlying issues that bring people to overeat to begin with... Overcoming the hormones once you're there and even maintaining are really hard.

Re: So you wanna build an aging company

#45

I think there's a fundamental disconnect here: the article says that you should be focusing on strategies that, for the most part, make aging more dignified. The goal shouldn't be even curing cancer. And maybe that's right. But the reason billions of dollars are poured by SFBA VCs into aging research is probably just that they're getting older, they don't want to die, and they figure that they can put some of their m…

It isn't right. Curing cancer is a noble pursuit. And researchers on planet earth aren't a monolith. Even "longevity" research can take vastly different shapes across the labs driving towards it. The mess of research towards a goal is kinda the point; nobody knows where the universe hid the nuggets of world-bending discoveries. It's not quite pray and spray; but the shapes are diverse and irregular by design . Cancer…

Here is the hottest of takes for you: curing cancer is not, in practice, entirely noble.

1. It is partially self-inflicted. Fallout from nuclear incidents, particularly in the US (testing in Nevada) and northern Europe (Chernobyl), is still a measurable contributor to cancer rates. Its prominence in medicine after the middle of the 20th century reflects these self-inflicted injuries from the Cold War. Likewise there are numerous cases of regulatory capture and corporate dishonesty resulting in cohorts who have suffered from carcinogenic chemicals like nicotine, glyphosate, and teflon. Nevertheless, heart disease has now overtaken it as the leading cause of death in the US. The further away you get from the US, the rarer it is as a cause of death.

2. The label is nearly meaningless in public funding. So much money has been poured into cancer research that other lines of biology have adapted by contorting their mission statements into tangentially cancer-related programs. Want to study how neurons develop in nematodes? Too bad—there's no money for that. But make up some BS about how it's a model organism for studying the spread of neuroblastomas, and you've successfully perverted the grant process into supporting research that the bean-counters tried to starve. This verges on fraud, even though no one wants to talk about it because the starved areas of research are usually areas of fundamental science that are highly regarded by other biologists.

3. The sheer abundance of charitable organizations handing out money to cancer-related causes results in a lot of science, much of it low-quality or poorly-vetted. In grad school I had an entire seminar class that consisted of, "here's a novel ML method applying SVMs to detecting disease; let's talk about it" and at least half of the randomly-selected papers promising significant results had blatant reproducibility problems like overfitting or bad methodology. These papers are easily published because they can be shat out in some generalist journal that tangentially touches on the relevant subject but does not have the editorial expertise to analyze the math involved. Retraction counts always follow hot topics, and the gross intersection of emotionally-motivated funders, siloed reviewers, and fame-chasing has ensured cancer research regularly produces too much low-end material to ever hope to check it all for reproducibility.

Re: So you wanna build an aging company

#46
post #15

Unpopular opinion: Any medical intervention that delays or defeats the aging process will disproportionately benefit the wealthy, and is therefore unethical. The last thing a healthy democracy needs is millennium-old acolytes of Peter Thiel pulling the strings from the shadows.

This isn't an unpopular opinion. I would argue this is the mainstream argument. I think all medical advances benefit the wealthy first and then becomes more affordable over time. The term "aging" seems to trigger a lot of people and lead to philosophizing over the importance and morality of death. They are important topics to discuss, but I also think it is worthwhile to also hear out the optimist perspectives rather…

It's certainly not the mainstream position here on HN, according to this informal study of provoking commenters with incendiary remarks...

It's true that there are many age-associated diseases that are morally trivial to oppose: a good society should want to minimize preventable suffering. However, dementia, cancer, and cardiovascular research programs already exist, both privately and publicly funded, and these initiatives have existed for many decades without needing to be labeled "aging" research. So let's be clear and refer to these initiatives as life extension rather than anti-aging, because that is the actual goal.

The best optimist narrative I can come up with is as follows: without the looming fear of death over our heads, humanity will be liberated from (a) the grief of losing loved ones, (b) the suffering of old age, and (c) the capacity lost when someone dies. In particular, (c) might mean that geniuses stay productive forever. A little more fancifully, it is sometimes suggested that the value of a human life approaches infinity as human lifespans approach infinity, so the fear of violent death would effectively prevent all violent conflict.

There is then often an emotional appeal about how much more time we would be afforded for exploring the universe and undergoing personal growth; at this point of the conversation you can really tell that the person trying to sell you on the anti-aging agenda is from California, and has tried LSD (or at least pot), and maybe knows a thing or two about Buddhism and Star Trek. (Perhaps they're even fans of Iain M. Banks?) Just think of all the good someone like the Dalai Lama could do if he could literally meditate for centuries, achieving ultimate enlightenment! What if Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams never died? How can you afford to say no?!

The answer to this all comes to us from a lesser-known member of the _literati_ of the 20th century, an obscure writer called Charlie Chaplin:

> To those who can hear me, I say - do not despair

> The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed - the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress

> The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people

> And so long as men die, liberty will never perish

In the optimist's world, where everyone gets to live forever, we do not get to pick and choose who attains that status. Josef Stalin, Fidel Castro, and Francisco Franco all died of old age while actively maintaining regimes that actively harmed their people. On the balance, any one individual can do more harm than good.

...And this is not even discussing the problem of population dynamics—how do we maintain balanced numbers? What kind of work will still need to be done? If people stopped aging suddenly, would there be people trapped in shitty jobs for centuries? (Some of this also applies to mind-uploading.)

If the reaction is, "but surely we can advance robotics to achieve fully-automated luxury gay space communism like Iain M. Banks wanted," then let's do that first, before we let a handful of grossly wealthy private equity goons forge the Rings of Power for themselves. There's no rush, right? Right?

Re: So you wanna build an aging company

#47
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't an unpopular opinion. I would argue this is the mainstream argument. I think all medical advances benefit the wealthy first and then becomes more affordable over time. The term "aging" seems to trigger a lot of people and lead to philosophizing over the importance and morality of death. They are important topics to discuss, but I also think it is worthwhile to also hear out the optimist perspectives rather…

It's certainly not the mainstream position here on HN, according to this informal study of provoking commenters with incendiary remarks... It's true that there are many age-associated diseases that are morally trivial to oppose: a good society should want to minimize preventable suffering. However, dementia, cancer, and cardiovascular research programs already exist, both privately and publicly funded, and these init…

It might not be the mainstream on HN, but most popular polls I've seen show similar trends of a lesser proportion of people wanting to live longer, citing the same societal collapse concerns. In any case, whether something is espoused by the majority or the minority doesn't really add much weight.

I don't think there is an "anti-aging agenda". Not everything needs to be seen through the lens of an ideological movement. But I do think that there is an unhealthy persistent cynicism underneath the current popular culture. This cynicism makes people not want to be optimistic/idealistic in fear of being wrong or looking naive. I am not suggesting we should all tint our lenses rose colored, but I do think allowing people to expand their optimistic ceiling is warranted; especially when it is so easy to imagine a dystopic future currently.

Nonetheless, I thoroughly enjoyed your sardonic reply.

Re: So you wanna build an aging company

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't right. Curing cancer is a noble pursuit. And researchers on planet earth aren't a monolith. Even "longevity" research can take vastly different shapes across the labs driving towards it. The mess of research towards a goal is kinda the point; nobody knows where the universe hid the nuggets of world-bending discoveries. It's not quite pray and spray; but the shapes are diverse and irregular by design . Cancer…

Here is the hottest of takes for you: curing cancer is not, in practice, entirely noble. 1. It is partially self-inflicted. Fallout from nuclear incidents, particularly in the US (testing in Nevada) and northern Europe (Chernobyl), is still a measurable contributor to cancer rates. Its prominence in medicine after the middle of the 20th century reflects these self-inflicted injuries from the Cold War. Likewise there…

> It is partially self-inflicted. Fallout from nuclear incidents, particularly in the US (testing in Nevada) and northern Europe (Chernobyl), is still a measurable contributor to cancer rates.

Other industrial/chemical exposures yes, but this almost certainly isn't it. Outside of specific significant exposures, estimating cancer rates from radiation exposure is just statistical garbage. Anything at the low exposure end relies on the bottom of the linear no-threshold (LNT) model where the model is known to be wrong. (LNT is useful for public policy - you should seek to minimize the exposure from any industrial processes and materials to zero - but it is bad for public health in telling people that any exposure increases their cancer risk.)

Re: So you wanna build an aging company

#49

The headline is confusing. This is not about a company that's becoming older. It's about a building a biotech company that treats the symptoms and causes of aging.

Wouldn't this be an anti-aging company? Aging is bad and not aging is good.

Anti-aging would be an attempt at reversing it, rather than still going "yep, this happens" but making it a nicer ride before you're forced to get off.

Re: So you wanna build an aging company

#50
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Virtually every single advancement in science, engineering, and technology disproportionately benefits the wealthy, because they already own everything. That's a great reason to fight against the massive imbalance of wealth distribution, but a terrible reason to halt all human progress.

Hang on there a moment—you missed a few things: 1. Life-extension research, which is what I take umbrage with, is not "all human progress." It is a very specific, high-effort kind of gene therapy whack-a-mole, borne entirely from our hubris and our fear of death. 2. Perhaps I wasn't clear enough, but research for _aging gracefully_ is fine by me. I genuinely hope we beat Alzheimer's. But we all know who holds the pur…

I genuinely hope we beat Alzheimer's.

Wouldn't a treatment for Alzheimer's be more accessible to the wealthy than the poor, making it unethical by your definition? Isn't it good that evil rich people often lose their cognitive capabilities thus limiting the harm they can do?

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