Why aren't the oldest living people getting any older? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why aren't the oldest living people getting any older?

#81

Post by drzaiusapelord » Tue, Jul 26, 2011, 8:37 PM UTC

wazoox wrote: post #50

w1ntermute wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say there's little value in trying to fix what's broken to the core. Research should focus on ways to extract one's consciousness from the body and place it in an artificially designed shell (a Ghost in the Shell, one might say).

I'd argue that the common view that our mind is somehow independent from our body is probably wrong, and a judeo-christian falsity. Our mind is a real-time, continuous creation of our brain AND our whole body. I don't think that a brain in a vat could be anything but either a vegetable or a psychopath; and that the "ghost in the shell" (or the mind dump neuromancer-style) is anything more than a pleasant, impossible…

Well put. I often make this argument. Just imagine all the hormones and processes that must happen outside the head just to keep you sane or at the very least conscious and remotely functional.

The brain upload hypothesis seems a bit naive. I could see a synthetic body hypothesis. Imagine if we could reproduce all these organs via some method and move the brain or the head to a new host. But turning this stuff into software? Very implausible

Longevity research is probably the way to go. I imagine that's the first baby step in creating synthetic hosts anyway.

Re: Why aren't the oldest living people getting any older?

#82

Post by ez77 » Tue, Jul 26, 2011, 8:39 PM UTC

Udo wrote: post #77

ez77 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if we ever want to move on from this weird intermediary half-state between nature and intellect I don't know if I follow correctly. Do you feel that solving the life extension puzzle is tantamount to intellectual nirvana? I'd say there is still plenty more to talk about (say [1] and [2], for example), and arguably deeper from a strictly intellectual viewpoint. In fact, I'd say that the fact that I happen to be mortal…

> Do you feel that solving the life extension puzzle is tantamount to intellectual nirvana? Not at all. I'm talking about biological reality. Right now we're not really a part of nature anymore but we're not yet independently functioning entities either. By developing intellect and the deeper consciousness that goes with it, we stopped being a mere collection of genes. In fact, in quite a few respects our genes and o…

I enjoyed your reply! I wish I could even begin to define a clear position on issues much simpler than the value of a human mind. I'm fairly Platonist even beyond math, so to me any mind is ultimately a more or less gifted spectator, and hence dispensable. That said, I would gladly agree to extend this modest mind's life span indefinitely.

On the other hand, I have my serious doubts about the psychological resilience of human beings under indefinite life extension, even if carried out flawlessly (big if). I would gladly pay a chunk, more than on anything of this kind, to travel in time and see how this would play out.

Re: Why aren't the oldest living people getting any older?

#83

Post by drzaiusapelord » Tue, Jul 26, 2011, 8:41 PM UTC

tokenadult wrote: post #59

jinushaun wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a great TED talk a few years ago on this. We have the technnology and know-how to significantly increase life expectancy and to do research to make it even better, but why don't we? Curing cancer and Alzheimer's is not the same thing. Why don't we explicitly research life extension? The speaker brought up several philosophical, political and economic reasons why society has chosen to ignore the problem. There…

We have the technnology and know-how to significantly increase life expectancy and to do research to make it even better For what value of "significantly"? And at what cost, in a world in which many people live on five dollars a day or less?

I'm not sure why that makes any difference. The level of medical care I can get (and have gotten) as a middle class American blows away what these people can get now. The disparity is so huge that adding 100 years to my life barely makes a dent in the disparity.

Re: Why aren't the oldest living people getting any older?

#84

Post by shabble » Tue, Jul 26, 2011, 10:03 PM UTC

sebkomianos wrote: post #64

glimcat wrote: post #5

Because when you mix a lot of random variables together, the variance tends to decrease.

This is very interesting, can you point me/us to any explanations about it?

I'd guess at the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_limit_theorem - Combined distributions tend towards Gaussian (bell-curve)

Re: Why aren't the oldest living people getting any older?

#85

Post by jacques_chester » Wed, Jul 27, 2011, 2:23 AM UTC

michaeldhopkins wrote: post #68

jacques_chester wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or the waters are literal; and it represents that the Bible was written by a pre-modern people with nothing more than their imagination to guide them. I think Plato would have been embarrassed to be caught anywhere near Genesis.

I assume you are saying that we should just believe whatever we like about old documents. I don't think that is a good idea. It's better to determine what the writers meant by conducting a careful linguistic study based on other texts, archeology and historical accounts written by people who seem to have had access to evidence that is now lost. "Plato meets Moses" speculation is just fun, though. Since Plato was a mo…

> I assume you are saying that we should just believe whatever we like about old documents.

I'm assuming that we apply Ockham's Razor. That it's a collection of myths predating science is easier to uphold than the idea that every single Biblical author was steeped in magical realism.

Most of the genius in the Bible comes from outside of it: from the critics and commentators. In a way it's a triumph of brilliant minds over mediocre source material. But now we don't need to apply genius to myths, we can apply them to the real world. I rather prefer that.

Re: Why aren't the oldest living people getting any older?

#86

Post by Retric » Wed, Jul 27, 2011, 3:49 AM UTC

wazoox wrote: post #51

Retric wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not strictly true, you are more likely to die at age 2 than 10. And even if you have a ~50% chance of dieing at 100 there are people who make it to 120 or so.

> there are people who make it to 120 or so. About one in 45 billions. How many people in history did reliably make it to 120? exactly one, Jeanne Calment. One other did it to 119, and that's about it.

The idea that we had accurate birth records for every single person in human history that reached 120 seems dubious.

Re: Why aren't the oldest living people getting any older?

#87

Post by bumbledraven » Wed, Jul 27, 2011, 4:35 AM UTC

tokenadult wrote: post #61

The submitted article reminds me of a science fiction story I read as a child, "Hunting Lodge" by Randall Garrett, in the anthology Men and Machines edited by Robert Silverberg. http://books.google.com/books?id=3PSTqQrrzjEC&pg=PA141&#... The premise of the story is that an effective life extension treatment has been found, and it is so expensive that only the politically powerful can have access to it. The protagonis…

Are you sure that people who are as high on the social power and influence scale as HN readers will have access to the [life extension] treatment?

Magic 8-ball says: "it is likely". Typically, new technologies are at first available only to the rich and powerful, but eventually they become cheaper and more widely available. Consider cell phones, televisions, and the internet. Today, the poorest person with an internet connection has access to information on a scale which far surpasses anything available to even the kings of old.

Re: Why aren't the oldest living people getting any older?

#88

Post by derleth » Wed, Jul 27, 2011, 5:44 AM UTC

api wrote: post #32

Udo wrote: post #21

It's important to make a distinction medically between pushing as many as people as possible towards the high-age end of that curve on one hand and scaling the entire X axis on the other. The first one is what we're currently doing with modern medicine, and it boils down to debugging the most common causes of premature death. The second one is completely separate from this and way harder to tackle because it involves…

We now know that human biochemistry is the result of an evolutionary process which when faced with a problem consistently comes up with the worst possible solution that is still workable. It's 3 billion years worth of crufty spaghetti code, literally. As someone educated in theoretical biology and learning theory, I object to this kind of characterization of the evolutionary process. There is no evidence for a superi…

First, for those unaware:

https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2011/05/28/the-long...

That is the kind of thing we mean when we say evolution doesn't find the best solutions all the time. The horrible job evolution did with the human eye is another example.

Now:

> There is no evidence for a superior magical learning algorithm that would have done better

I think the point is that it's difficult to imagine anything doing worse.

Re: Why aren't the oldest living people getting any older?

#89

Post by wazoox » Wed, Jul 27, 2011, 7:55 PM UTC

Retric wrote: post #86

wazoox wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there are people who make it to 120 or so. About one in 45 billions. How many people in history did reliably make it to 120? exactly one, Jeanne Calment. One other did it to 119, and that's about it.

The idea that we had accurate birth records for every single person in human history that reached 120 seems dubious.

That doesn't change the fact that we have enough data to know you're more likely to win the national lottery than making it to 120. And you're probably more likely to fly by flapping your arms than making it to 130.

Re: Why aren't the oldest living people getting any older?

#90

Post by Retric » Thu, Jul 28, 2011, 3:35 AM UTC

wazoox wrote: post #89

Retric wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that we had accurate birth records for every single person in human history that reached 120 seems dubious.

That doesn't change the fact that we have enough data to know you're more likely to win the national lottery than making it to 120. And you're probably more likely to fly by flapping your arms than making it to 130.

I am not going to argue that living that long is anything but the tail end of a huge bell curve. My point is simply there is no need to extrapolate when there are some actual numbers to work with. And when you look at the numbers you find that just like IQ the bell curve for lifespan is a little fatter at the tip than you might expect. At the same time there is a dip in rates of deaths ~10 so you are more likely to die at 1 than 21.