Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a catch-all dismissal that you could make about any medical innovation throughout history. There are a lot of things we can fix, and we’ve had a lot of success so far in doing so.
It’s not. We never fix anything in medicine: We treat and prevent. Removing the appendix prevents or treats acute appendicitis, but it also has a tradeoff in terms of removing a gut biome reservoir. This isn’t me dismissing the incredible improvements to our way of life modern medicine has brought. In essence it’s given everyone access to the same potential standard of living as was reserved for kings and nobility in…
New research reveals longevity gains slowing, life expectancy of 100 unlikely
441–450 of 535 posts
Re: New research reveals longevity gains slowing, life expectancy of 100 unlikely
#442Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why not? What is not scalable about it, specifically ? I mean, sure, it doesn't scale as well as a magic pill as a business . But is certainly is O(n) with the number of people involved.
The kind of solution that scales as "O(n) effect with the number of people involved", but isn't broadly implemented? It's usually at least O(n log n) on the effort required to actually involve those people. This vital input is the source of piss poor scaling in practice. Why? Because there's a massive variation in people. Everyone who finds it "very easy" to as much as "sleep well, eat well and exercise" already does…
A healthy lifestyle must be earned. It is a constant struggle against the fastfood industry.
Soon you'll see Coca-cola or Nestlé [0] selling both very unhealthy quasi-addictive food and drinks to kids and magic pills that cure obesity. Sounds scalable enough ?
[0] https://www.nestle.com/brands/healthcare-nutrition/medical-n...
Re: New research reveals longevity gains slowing, life expectancy of 100 unlikely
#443Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let's use "time travel" for `$X` and see if we come to a useful forecast: Sure, one could hope that someday we'll have enough major breakthroughs to achieve either one. But "maybe we'll discover something we don't currently know or understand and it will change everything and we will go back in time" isn't a very promising or useful forecast if your aim is fixing a current problem. You could perform the same exercise…
This analogy does not seem to be very strong. No one is making any progress on time travel, which may well be totally physically impossible. On the other hand, our knowledge of mechanisms of aging has been growing fairly rapidly in the last decade or so, and if history is any teacher, such a growing heap of discoveries usually produces some concrete applications sooner or later. We can already rejuvenate individual c…
On the other hand, people have been claiming "breakthroughs" in all 3, so if that is what you want to hope for, that's cool. It just doesn't factor into our forecasts for any of the 3.
Re: New research reveals longevity gains slowing, life expectancy of 100 unlikely
#444Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Science and evidence have been used as political tools for a while... and it has started becoming clear to more and more people. Yeah, they noticed when their lives kept getting longer and longer thanks to science and evidence-backed policy.
I can understand the sarcasm and respect your take Science has helped reduce mortality at birth and manage or even eliminate a lot of diseases like malaria, HIV, small pox, polio and many more. Also for burns, broken bones and accidents. And continues to. I advocate vaccines. I myself took the Anti Covid shot 3 times. And use medicines and supplements regularly. There’s another side to it though. At what point do I j…
Re: New research reveals longevity gains slowing, life expectancy of 100 unlikely
#445I think it’s fine. When I get older I’m more intrigued whether there is an afterlife, whatever it is.
When you have general anesthesia, you experience nothing, not even the vague sense of time passing like when sleeping, it's just an edit in time. You basically don't exist when you're under general anesthesia. If a little propofol in my brain can make me not exist, I'm pretty sure when I don't even have a brain I will definitely not exist.
Re: New research reveals longevity gains slowing, life expectancy of 100 unlikely
#446Earlier quoted context omitted.
Radical life extension within our lifetimes has become secular religion substitute. It’s driven more by hope and faith than by scientific fact. While a lifespan has no limits in theory if technology is advanced enough, the belief that it can be achieved by a living person is based on hope rather than evidence. - Possible in our lifetime. - Affordable to the faithful. You remove these two, and the faithful lose their…
What theory says that human lifespan has no limits with technology assistance? Anything involving replacing biological systems with artificial ones is not really extending human lifespan, it’s replacing human life with something else.
Re: New research reveals longevity gains slowing, life expectancy of 100 unlikely
#447Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There are lots of ways for you to end your life. You do not have to involve government or society. You do not require sanction or assistance. By the time you think suicide is the better option, you are often already in a managed and locked down environment in which it is difficult to impossible to commit suicide in an acceptable manner. Believe me I know it.
"Suicide in an acceptable manner" sounds as like an oxymoron. Why would you care that it's "acceptable" by society which you will no longer take part of ? If your concern is pain, then perhaps that is your mind telling you NOT to end your life and seek therapy instead. Assisted suicide only makes sense in situations where the person is in extreme chronic pain and no palliative care or treatment can be provided, which…
Re: New research reveals longevity gains slowing, life expectancy of 100 unlikely
#448Earlier quoted context omitted.
100% I often say to people that the reason for the UK’s loss of culture is not immigration but the fact that we, as British people, stopped being British in pursuit of the ‘American dream’. Somewhere along the line we stopped looking to our own previous generations (which include European nations as, you know, we’re Europeans) for cultural identity and started following Hollywood as our cultural oracle. Generations o…
Not a single British person I know has ever pursued the "American dream". In fact all of them have historically been far more negative towards America than I have, myself being Norwegian. The UK is large, so maybe either of us are just looking into a small bubble not representative of the whole, but the times I've visited the UK in the past, I didn't see much of what you seem to describe. Perhaps in the very center o…
Re: New research reveals longevity gains slowing, life expectancy of 100 unlikely
#449Earlier quoted context omitted.
Huh? The problem in Europe is not immigration, the problem is there being no European country with a vision of the future for immigrants to buy into. Aesthetic Traditions ≠ Culture. Traditions are just one aspect, but as Nietzsche wrote about the death of God, traditions are not a substitute for values. America for hundreds of years has offered a shared vision of the future and values to immigrants of every backgroun…
Do we really have to read again and again the same fantasies the far right spew out continuously here in France on Hacker News? It’s so easy to factually disprove, it’s kind of boring. I will keep it short because I value my time but here some things you might want to ponder: - America integration doesn’t exist. The American strategy has always been leave people alone to keep living in their own culture. There is no…
First, the idea there is no American integration is just funny, given millions of your countrymen moved to the US just 2-3 generations ago and yet French identity is essentially non-existent in the US.
In fact, there's more ethnically french people in America than in Canada, and yet Canada has very strong french cultural identity by comparison.
Second, I wasn't arguing against immigration and am not "far-right" (I'm absolutely pro-immigration), just explaining why Europe will never be able to do it en masse like the USA used to (they can't do it as much anymore either).
The reality: Socialist policy makes immigration an impossibility. The more socialist a country, the more aggressive its stance against immigration becomes. This is not a coincidence but a direct causal relationship.
People don't want to pay for random 2nd/3rd-world immigrants to suddenly get free healthcare, education and pension. It's that simple.
It's no secret that after America built its welfare state in the 1930s, this led to a dramatic shift to a closed immigration policy. And as the welfare state in the US has grown (from 25% of GDP in the 1950s to 35% today), the anti-immigrant sentiment just keeps rising.
European countries are no different, having grown their socialist welfare states dramatically over the past 60 years (from 25-ish% to 50% of GDP today). And thus, you get increasingly aggressive anti-immigrant backlash when times get tough.
The irony of the modern leftist is they don't understand the impossibility of their supposed beliefs. You cannot be both pro-immigration and pro-socialism. They are oil and water.
Either you believe immigration is a good force in the world, and thus want libertarian capitalist policy like the US pre-1930s. Or you want socialism, which leads to closed borders, and only pretend to like immigration to make people think you're a good person at parties.
Re: New research reveals longevity gains slowing, life expectancy of 100 unlikely
#450I was walking on the street the other day. It was fine summer, and I saw so many elderly walking outside. All of them were using one type of aid or another; some even had a social worker at their side. As I saw them, I was thinking that my 63% marginal tax was paying for it, while I part with 25% of my income after taxes to pay my mom’s pension. That monetary cost is nothing, I would gladly pay it for the rest of my…
should be
"immigration or automation are the only things that can replenish their workforce."