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So you wanna build an aging company

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71–80 of 88 posts

Re: So you wanna build an aging company

#71

I wonder how much the prohibition of stem cell research set back anti-aging. I just don't see how you can get humans to live super-long without replacement of parts. It's how every complex thing in the world lasts a long time. Stem cells are literally how we built the parts in the first place so it seems to me to be the first place to look on how to build them a second time.

To my knowledge stem cell research is clicking along just fine, and I can guarantee you that certain other countries (looking at you here China) don't give Shit One about the ethical/religious hangups around it in the West.

From what I've read (and I'd love to be corrected here because I really don't know deeply about this), the progress on actually creating replacement organs and so forth is the case simply because it's really hard to achieve so far. There's too much we just don't know or at least don't know how to make work in applied practice.

Re: So you wanna build an aging company

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

https://youtu.be/cZYNADOHhVY

Oh no, not a CGP Grey video. And a parable, at that!

It's a shame the humans in the story still die of natural causes, otherwise it might actually be relevant to the discourse around the ethics of life extension. The dragon is a metaphor for normal preventative diseases and does not scale well to the demographic crises caused by functional immortality.

Re: So you wanna build an aging company

#73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Alzheimer's treatment levels the playing field by restoring to sufferers something of which they have been bereaved: normal mental function. Even if only a subset of the population has access to it, all they're gaining is normalcy. Moreover, it can plausibly be comped by health insurance, especially in countries with universal healthcare. In a healthy economy, the political class has an incentive to keep workers healthy and productive longer, and to reward them for their service with a comfortable and dignified retirement, by making such medicines available to them.

Conversely, pure life extension creates an exceptional state of existence—no one except those using them has a chance of living a thousand years. The wealthy have a clear-cut motivation not to let these drugs become readily accessible, as it is a competitive advantage that feeds directly into their pecuniary pursuits; they no longer need to worry about:

1. Dynastic management (heirs are unreliable—be your own);

2. Estate taxes (the government wants some of your money—hiding it adequately can be tiresome);

3. Religious threats of punishment after death (if such things matter to them—probably not); or

4. "You can't take it with you," which is perhaps the main reason why billionaire philanthropists exist.

As such, we aren't going to see lobbying efforts to democratize life extension cures—ever. There are real incentives for the rich and powerful to lobby against such a possibility.

Finally, we already know that many proponents of life extension research in the VC space have neo-reactionary sympathies or aspirations; our favorite whipping boy Peter Thiel has contributed directly to the "Dark Enlightenment" movement. These are people who are not hiding their desires to become feudal lords and absolute despots, and not taking them at their word in such matters is the sort of 5D mental gymnastics that belongs on 4chan.

It is much less of a problem if the playing field is level, which is an eventual outcome with conventional quality-of-life efforts like Alzheimer's research. While it is not out of the realm of science fiction possibility that all humanity could someday be blessed with the gift of immortality—as well as fix the planet and somehow keep our population at a replacement level—the nutjobs currently militating for it are about as trustworthy as a Ferengi handshake.

Re: So you wanna build an aging company

#74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> It is a very specific, high-effort kind of ... whack-a-mole, borne entirely from our hubris and our fear of death. Yep. Welcome to like 99% of cutting-edge medicine, stretching back into prehistory. > But we all know who holds the purse strings on these initiatives, and it isn't charitable organizations funded by bereft families. There aren't many ailments that affect rich folks but don't affect any poor folks. I'd…

The ailments peculiar to the rich (gout notwithstanding) are largely ameliorated by functional immortality, but these ameliorations are greatly diminished by universal immortality. Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment and then rethink again whether you want to give these people unlimited time to cosplay as Sauron.

Re: So you wanna build an aging company

#75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://youtu.be/cZYNADOHhVY

Oh no, not a CGP Grey video. And a parable, at that! It's a shame the humans in the story still die of natural causes, otherwise it might actually be relevant to the discourse around the ethics of life extension. The dragon is a metaphor for normal preventative diseases and does not scale well to the demographic crises caused by functional immortality.

The story was specifically written to provoke discussion around the ending of human senescence: https://nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon

Re: So you wanna build an aging company

#76

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.

Aside from being an unpopular opinion, it's also a rather stupid one. I can think of no better way to say it. Virtually every technology currently used by the majority of human beings in the world to make their lives better in some way started as a privilege of the wealthy, but the tendency of a timespan between it going from that to something widely and affordably affordable has historically not only held ground but…

Immortality is not just another technological advancement. It entrenches power permanently and creates a world of slaves who will never escape the grip of their masters. Democracy would permanently die and the rule of law would be whatever the overlords decide. Imagine an immortal Caligula. Do you want Elmo to be your permanent master, for example?

Re: So you wanna build an aging company

#77

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…

Radon, a perfectly natural source of radiation, cause more cancer than all the other nuclear sources combined. Stop it with the nuclear fear mongering!

Re: So you wanna build an aging company

#78

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…

In terms of your first point, I'm not sure I understand how the overall cancer rate being increased by dubious activities on the part of some people implies that efforts to cure cancer on the part of others are "not entirely noble". On the surface, this seems like a non-sequitur -- could you explain your reasoning further?

Re: So you wanna build an aging company

#79
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aging exists because the human body is optimized to survive and reproduce in a resource constrained environment with many threats. Our predecessors eked out just enough calories to survive to the age of 15, when we could begin reproducing. Any traits that made it more likely for us to survive until that point, even if those traits resulted in damage that would eventually accumulate and wear us down after our reproduc…

I don't think "live to 15, have kids, and die" makes sense as a model for humans, even if you're modeling them solely as child generating machines. Humans are a pretty damn care-dependent species. They're not going to defend or feed themselves without years of support, so if they aren't surviving en masse into their 30s and 40s, the next generation is probably going to have a severe die-out. Beyond that there's proba…

Having kids takes a long time, especially when many of them die of infection or malnutrition. So yes, you're absolutely right that evolution "cares" about human beings up until they hit ~40. At that point, human beings enter the selection shadow, when improvements to survivability have a negligible impact on selection. I was eliding this point for clarity but I don't think it really alters my broader argument.

This is all pretty obvious when you look at one of the main diseases of aging, cardiovascular disease. There are natural genetic variations that result in very low free LDL blood levels, which basically prevents artherosclerosis from every developing and which inspired the development of the PCSK-9 inhibitors. However, there's no evolutionary benefit to not dying of cardiac arrest when you're 60, but there are marginal benefits to the liver binding to fewer LDL particles when people are in a starvation environment, so these variations never became widespread.

The grandparent hypothesis is certainly compelling and might explain some marginal improvements in human lifespan relative to e.g. chimps (who live about 10-20 years less than us even in captivity). But if anything, that reinforces my broader point, which is that aging did not develop as some kind of culling agent by evolution and that we should be looking for ways to extend human longevity now that we have the resources to.

Re: So you wanna build an aging company

#80

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. 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.

You have an interesting definition of "self-inflicted". I'd argue that most of the people getting cancer from the effects you mention were not the ones causing it, and presumably plenty of the researchers weren't either. I'm not convinced it's reasonable to abstract entire countries over a number of decades when judging the ethics of something like this

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