
We May Not Have to Age So Fast - prostoalex
https://www.wsj.com/articles/we-may-not-have-to-age-so-fast-11572012999?mod=rsswn
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wbc
Author of the article, David Sinclair, did a podcast w/ Joe Rogan not long ago
in case you want to learn more:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGLL77wYxe8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGLL77wYxe8)

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neonate
[http://archive.is/Y4dnR](http://archive.is/Y4dnR)

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kristopolous
The most exciting thing about dramatic age increase, at least for me, would be
how potentially transformative the wisdom and intellect of society could be.
140 year old Albert Einstein might have been writing an email, right this
second to say, 161 year old Max Planck.

As topics become more sophisticated, the time to competency and insight
increases.

Someone for instance, truly committed to studying the entire corpus of
thoughts on political economy, from the Frankfurt school, Chicago school,
Stockholm school, Austrian school, Keynsianism, Marxian, Monetarism, New
Classical, Public Choice, Georgism, Bachuninism... Each of those are hard and
complicated. A sincere dedicated study of all of them would likely take
decades.

If you had 300 years then not only could you do that, but you could also make
meaningful contributions to the field.

Imagine public policy by people who were able to dedicate 100 years to its
study.

50 or 100 year studies which currently have to be chaperoned across multiple
generations of researchers could be done by a single team.

The accumulated wisdom that manifests itself in the written word would be far
more potent with centuries of accumulations. In a way, genius is a measure of
speed and time, the quickness of ones assimilation of the topic. With enough
time, the plane of genius might be accessible to nearly all.

Other, much longer efforts would be engaged with more frequently. For
instance, The art of computer programming, started 51 years ago, would be one
amongst a much larger number of works of similar breadth, if taking a century
to complete something was feasible for all.

The differences this would manifest would be likely as stark as if someone
from the 18th century descended upon a modern urban metropolis.

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chillacy
Social progress would change slower though. Actually even quoting Max Plank:

> A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and
> making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die,
> and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it

Aka science advances one funeral at a time

~~~
waterhouse
I suspect that, if a scientist in his fifties knew that his cognitive function
would remain at the same level up to at least age 150, he would be a lot more
willing to spend years rethinking things and familiarizing himself with new
and better conceptual approaches. Something similar could probably be said
about programmers that seem attached to old and allegedly inferior tools.

~~~
_sid
Not sure that's how biases work.

~~~
kristopolous
Biases are about the interplay of pressures to perform and reform where the
comfort of the known is more persuasive than the enticement of the new.

There needs to be the luxury of time and the space to fail, two things we
don't have.

The technology of longevity won't fix this problem of culture, sure. But it
would make such a fix a lot more meaningful

~~~
visarga
Basically what you're describing is the tradeoff between exploration and
exploitation. Depending on situation in life and age people tend to lean
towards one or another.

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kristopolous
In more concrete terms, I'm quite persuaded by what I read and see about
emacs, but 20 years of vim keeps bringing me back.

I mean seriously, emacs lisp looks so much more sane than vimscript, I've been
telling myself to switch for 10 years now...

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snvzz
As it's related to the topic: Mandatory reminder that SENS[0] exists.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategies_for_Engineered_Negl...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategies_for_Engineered_Negligible_Senescence)

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hmmmmmmmmmmmmm
How are people reading this article? I only read a paragraph before the site
asked me to subscribe and pay them money. Surely everyone else isn’t doing
that?

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firstfewshells
Try this [https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/we-
may...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/we-may-not-have-
to-age-so-fast-11572012999)

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jakeogh
Death is a huge waste of resources.

If we stopped ageing, how long would we live?
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19937047](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19937047)

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robocat
Living is a huge waste of resources. Dead people don't use any resources.

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LinuxBender
You are both correct. Obviously a factor is specific to each individual, as to
the cost benefit ratio of that person.

Oh, come to think of it, that could be a concern in some countries. Maybe in
say, China, if your social score is not high enough, it might be illegal for
you to extend your life.

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HenryKissinger
DNA has a half life of 521 years. Even if a human could be maintained at a
biological age of ~30 indefinitely, would the natural decay of his DNA not
kill him in the long term?

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earthboundkid
On a long enough timescale, you’d either die in an accident or get depressed
and kill yourself just randomly within a few hundred years.

The oldest wooden houses are only one thousand years old.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirkjub%C3%B8argar%C3%B0ur](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirkjub%C3%B8argar%C3%B0ur)
The human body is way more delicate and less likely to survive.

Even with extreme motivation, no human will see the death of our Sun, let
alone the heat death of the universe.

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nscalf
I can buy the accident thing on a long enough time scale, even though I would
imagine that emergency medicine would improve over time so it would have to be
increasingly more severe of a problem. However, the “get depressed and kill
yourself” argument holds no weight to me. Depression is a common thing, but
such severe depression that you have suicidal tendencies is not in the cards
for most humans.

Humans are extremely flexible, and it really seems like some people don’t have
naturally severe depressive episodes even with strong external tendencies.
Beyond that, I can say that depression is often combated, in some of the less
extreme cases, by recognizing it incoming and developing tools to keep
yourself from spiraling.

I’ve dealt with depression, and have had plenty of external things start a
spiral. After many years of dealing with it, I have learned how to prevent it
from getting overwhelming. I really don’t see the end of an indefinitely life
occurring via suicide, assuming you’re not in isolation or alienated, or some
crazy circumstance.

~~~
ggggtez
This argument doesn't hold water. This assumes that depression is purely
something you must be born with, and you can't get it from environmental
factors.

The thing is, if you really lived for hundreds of years, society would be
radically different. Imagine... You can't get promoted because no one above
you ever retires. You can't get an entry level job, because everyone has 200+
years experience!

People struggle to work the grind until they are 65 already. But you can't
retire, because your death is so far away. You need to keep grinding another
500+ years...

That kind of world would likely have a lot of systemic issues with depression.

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AmericanChopper
I think this misses the bigger picture a little. Given infinite time,
everything that can possibly happen will eventually happen. Presuming that
there are in fact some circumstances under which you would kill yourself, you
only need to consider the likelihood of them occurring. If most other causes
of death have been eliminated, then the only thing that could stop you from
eventually killing yourself would be if you died by some other means before
that happened.

~~~
earthboundkid
Bingo.

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Santosh83
Even if you manage to digitise yourself (which seems to be the fantasy of many
posters here) you're still limited by the ultimate end of the universe.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
Somehow I expect my life to be plenty valuable with its ending around age ~80,
despite the inevitable heat-death of the universe. Existential and emotional
issues are quite different from medical/public health ones, so trying to
substitute the former for the latter comes across as, in a way, _snobby_.

Imagine telling a pair of newlyweds, "oh, may you have long life, good
fortune, and good health, but also some day the sun will burn to cinders and
everything will decay into fundamental particles as entropy overtakes all."
The latter is only even _relevant_ to the former as a way of showing that you
think inhuman universal things are somehow more important than human things.

~~~
Santosh83
I was addressing a few posters on this article who were specifically taking
about 'uploading' themselves into some kind of digital repository as a means
of finally overcoming biological shortcomings of easy mortality. I'm not
saying anything on the value of slowing the ageing process to buy a few more
decades or centuries. That's a different matter. Plus in the ultimate analysis
human beings are no more or less valuable than anything. Yes, that's my
personal view so I don't speak for anyone else.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
I think whether it's a "different matter" is up to, well, those guys who are
gonna do that stuff. To me at least, there's a pretty firm separation between
lifestyle choices, almost no matter how radical and just plain _fucking weird_
, and universal existential theorizing about the cosmos.

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xwdv
Slowing down aging so that we can live 500 years or so would be fantastic for
long term investments.

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ptah
extending life too much could have detrimental effects in terms of evolution
as the gene mutations will take longer meaning we can't adapt fast enough.

~~~
sho
That is absolutely not how evolution works at all. Mutation, such as it is,
occurs at the moment of conception. It's not a very helpful word - "random and
imperfect mix of two data sets" is a better way of thinking about it.

Anyway, evolution is a very confused concept in modern society. None of the
old factors apply any more.

~~~
ptah
yes people with longer lifetimes will put off having children which means
conception events for each generation will have longer time intervals in
between

~~~
sho
Ah, fair enough, I didn't think of that.

It's still a moot point however. There is no meaningful human evolution
anymore in terms of adaptation to anything in nature. Human biological fitness
these days, outside hunter gather societies I suppose, is about beauty or
intelligence and not a whole lot else.

~~~
radford-neal
So, war has now been abolished, so there's no advantage to being healthy
enough to run away from the fighting and survive to reproduce?

And famine is no longer possible? Being small enough to survive on limited
food is no longer of any use? (Or alternatively, being big enough to take
other people's food...)

And a deadly pandemic is now impossible? So a good immune system doesn't give
you any advantage? And an innate tendency to behaviours that reduce the chance
of infection won't help you?

And the big one... Do all the beautiful and intelligent people now have the
same number of children? Or do some have none, and some have ten, for reasons
that may well be genetically influenced?

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sho
Your first three examples are speculative edge cases, to say the least.

But your last is interesting - and touches on something I was going to type
but didn't. Yeah, evolution might be happening there, and not in a good way.
There's evidence that smart couples have less children, because they're busy
with careers. There's evidence that religious people have more children than
non-religious. So yeah, to the extent that evolution is still in play in
modern society - we're probably going backwards.

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ptah
Religions seem to be ideas that know how to propagate well and ensure their
hosts multiply faster too

