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What Doesn’t Kill Me Makes Me Stronger

joshmitteldorf.scienceblog.com

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Re: What Doesn’t Kill Me Makes Me Stronger

#51

Post by drcomputer »

cnlwsu wrote: post #15

Hormesis as a general concept reeks of me of the "like cures like" of Homeopathy. This is mentioned in the article even. "A little snake venom is a cure to snake venom" is commonly used when explaining homeopathy. There may be some scenarios that exhibit this behavior but it still means your relaying on a fallacy of composition to turn it into something that can be sold as a life style. Why do we have to simplify thi…

> Why do we have to simplify things and try to apply sweeping generalizations? The universe is complex. Things that apply one way to somethings do not apply that way to others.

The same reason we over complicate things. It's hard to select which direction to move in when both directions are ambiguously labeled.

Re: What Doesn’t Kill Me Makes Me Stronger

#52

Post by Multics »

tokenadult wrote: post #46

Searching for articles with the keyword "hormesis" (a word I first learned in the latest book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who is not a person with medical training or experience) on the Science-Based Medicine website is instructive.[1] The concept of "hormesis" is not well thought out enough or well validated enough with careful measurements to be your guide to your personal health practices. There is better health adv…

> Searching for articles with the keyword "hormesis" (a word I first learned in the latest book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who is not a person with medical training or experience) on the Science-Based Medicine website is instructive.

No it's not! 3 out of the 7 links relate to homeopathy, which the article explicitly states is problematic:

'Association with the problematic science of homeopathy. In the early 20th Century, people who promoted homeopathic medicine were prominent supporters of the concepts of hormesis.'

Your stance is based on an argumentum ab auctoritate. How about constructing an argument, rather than spewing meta-trash talk?

> a word I first learned in the latest book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who is not a person with medical training or experience

Ergo, hormesis does not exist? Non sequitur.

> The concept of "hormesis" is not well thought out enough or well validated enough with careful measurements to be your guide to your personal health practices. There is better health advice in some of the earlier comments here.

The only prescription of the article was to eat less & exercise more!

> Thank you to the several commenters who have already politely pointed out factual and logical mistakes in this submission.

Agreed. It's called 'discussion'.

> "Essentially there are two rules here: don't post or upvote crap links, and don't be rude or dumb in comment threads."

I don't see how this quote is relevant.

Re: What Doesn’t Kill Me Makes Me Stronger

#53

Post by kaitai »

omegaham wrote: post #18
michaelochurch wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. Belly fat is stored there because a central location is best for the body (although it was sufficiently rare in our evolutionary ascent to afford 40 pounds of belly fat that our bodies didn't adapt well to it, which is why it's so bad for us). In terms of structural imposition on the body, the backpack is worse.

Incidentally, anyone who's hiked will tell you that the best position for heavy weight is at the very top of the pack. The reason is that this puts most of the weight on your hips rather than your back.

Women seem to prefer weight lower in the pack than men, even if equal height, because of a generally lower center of gravity. I nearly broke my nose carrying a male friend's pack briefly while hiking -- tripped on a tree root and was so unused to the high center of gravity that I smashed my face into the ground. My own pack was heavier (yay food!) but sized and packed very differently.

Re: What Doesn’t Kill Me Makes Me Stronger

#54

Post by sparrish »

jmnicolas wrote: post #21

I had a friend who was telling everybody : "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger ... or paraplegic" and it made him laugh every time. This title made me think of him, I automatically appended "or paraplegic" to the title. RIP M.

What doesn't kill you only delays the inevitable.

Re: What Doesn’t Kill Me Makes Me Stronger

#55

Post by Retra »

exratione wrote: post #43
thret wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Natural selection only molds us up to the point where we procreate and ensure the survival of our offspring. After that (say age 50), we're winging it. Mild stressors that would occur naturally - physical exertion, exposure, hunger; it is perfectly logical that natural selection would favour those who handle these circumstances well.

Counterpoint: the grandmother hypothesis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandmother_hypothesis

Of course, menopause needn't be an adaptation, but a side-effect of some other adaptation. (Even that is pushing it, since it is hard to talk about evolution without using language of agency.) The point is: if you do not have actual information about how and when this evolved, you have nothing to stand on.

Re: What Doesn’t Kill Me Makes Me Stronger

#56

Post by a8da6b0c91d »

cnlwsu wrote: post #15

Hormesis as a general concept reeks of me of the "like cures like" of Homeopathy. This is mentioned in the article even. "A little snake venom is a cure to snake venom" is commonly used when explaining homeopathy. There may be some scenarios that exhibit this behavior but it still means your relaying on a fallacy of composition to turn it into something that can be sold as a life style. Why do we have to simplify thi…

Lab animals protected against stressors live longest of all. You get extremely long life spans in rats kept in sterile environments and fed plenty of very high quality food regularly. Aging is accumulated stress. It is not a genetic program.

“Every stress leaves an indelible scar, and the organism pays for its survival after a stressful situation by becoming a little older.” --Dr. Hans Selye

The pro-hormesis claims I've seen are highly dubious. You constantly see caloric restriction and fasting brought up. It's bunkum. Within a species the animals that eat the most live longest. The restriction idea developed from two misunderstandings: 1) If you restrict feeding early in life the growth of the animal is stunted, and within a species smaller animals live longer. 2) Lab grade animal chow is loaded with mildly toxic things like soy oil and oxidized whey protein, so eating less of it rather than more is preferable.

Re: What Doesn’t Kill Me Makes Me Stronger

#57

Post by pavel_lishin »

ak39 wrote: post #38
thret wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Natural selection only molds us up to the point where we procreate and ensure the survival of our offspring. After that (say age 50), we're winging it. Mild stressors that would occur naturally - physical exertion, exposure, hunger; it is perfectly logical that natural selection would favour those who handle these circumstances well.

I like that ... "winging it" after 50. :-) Made me chuckle. I agree with it. I have a (an emotional) problem with that number though, being acutely aware and sensitive to ageism or age-related relegation of human functions and roles in society. I have a problem with any number for that matter. 50 is too low, and any number will always be too low, the way I see it if you incorporate Dawkins' idea of the Selfish Gene i…

> 50 is too low, and any number will always be too low, the way I see it if you incorporate Dawkins' idea of the Selfish Gene into the mix. I would argue that sticking around "to ensure the survival of our offspring" (as you put it) for the human species is significantly more important than any other species on the planet.

I see what you mean, but with every generation of your offspring, you're less and less vital to their survival - your children and grandchildren can care for your great-grandchildren as well; there's more redundancy there, so no individual is as crucial.

Re: What Doesn’t Kill Me Makes Me Stronger

#58

Post by lkrubner »

I think aging, in vertebrates, is mostly driven by the need to preserve what data has been encoded in the nervous system.

Ask yourself these questions. Would you rather have old bones or young bones? Would you rather have an old cardio-vascular system or a young cardio-vascular system? Would you rather have old muscles or young muscles?

In every case, the answer is "young".

But would you rather have an old nervous system or a young nervous system? The old nervous system is trained, the young one lacks all skills (skills range from the basics, like control of urination and defecation, to knowing how to hunt down an antelope).

Creatures that do not have a trainable nervous system (trees, coral, insects) experience a very different aging process.

Among vertebrates, those creatures that demonstrate negligible senescence (tortoises) also demonstrate a lack of learning. The price of immortality is perpetual immaturity of one's nervous system.

Re: What Doesn’t Kill Me Makes Me Stronger

#59

Post by gweinberg »

geoka9 wrote: post #8
Tossrock wrote: post #3

There are some questionable assertions in this article. eg, "Survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings had lower cancer rates later in life than people of similar age who had not been exposed to radiation " has the ref http://informahealthcare.com/doi/abs/10.1080/095530006010859... which a) has nothing to do with Hiroshima or Nagasaki, and b) found that low dose radiation in fact increased cancer risk (shock!)…

Also: "Walking around with a 40-pound backpack has the opposite effect of carrying an extra 40 pounds of belly fat." Actually walking around with a 40-pound backpack is a bad idea, as compared to carrying the weight at the level of your belly (all other things being equal) because the risk of back damage is much higher.

How about wearing a diver's weight belt? The weight is all at your hips and is more or less equally distributed between front and back.

Re: What Doesn’t Kill Me Makes Me Stronger

#60

Post by scotty79 »

abandonliberty wrote: post #19

A lot of this makes sense in the new deterministic model of aging. It argues that aging is not a collection of mutations, the old/popular model, but instead a programmed outcome of our genes that never experienced selective pressure. We are like a building, but the builders never know when they are done and eventually start doing counterproductive work that destroys us. Kicking in a response to injury or pathogen may…

The only reason why we are here and not rotting are our immune systems. Take it away and we dissolve in matter of days.

Recently research on very old lady showed that all of her immune cells came from just a handful of stem cells.

It made me think that the only reason we live that long is because, that's how long our immune system lives. As we grow old it becomes less and less versatile as stem cells die out and less effective as the most effective randomly die out. Then the old age diseases kick in as there's less and less competence in cleaning up this pile of bio-matter that we are.

Excising and eating a little is not because it almost kills us and therefore it makes us stronger, just because our cleaning crew was optimized for much less food and much more movement.

Stress is not good for you. When you see pair of identical twins you can tell which one lived life of more stress. He/she looks older and by various measurements is older.

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