I hope they undertake work in Geriatrics. According to several articles I've read on NYTimes and other places, Geriatricians is sort of a dying specialization within the medical field.
I've always been confused by Calico as a company. Are they part of Google or an independent company funded by Google. They seem to be sharing office space at one of Google offices and there are obvious ties but is working for Calico independent i.e. none of the Google benefits and perks or is it suppose to be a division of Google
It's a boondoggle in the making. Solving ageing is hard, and it's going to require fresh ideas, not throwing insane amounts of money at the same old, same old.
The Scumbag 2nd law of thermodynamics is a really harsh mistress (Solved ageing? Die of cancer anyway etc.).
But hey, the digerati elite are showing touches of grey and most of them wouldn't have any better use for their money anyway once they've got the mansion, the yacht, the jet, and the mistress(es) half their age.
We got good at preventing and treating heart attacks and stroke. People lived longer and they got cancer. We got really good at treating cancer and now people get dementia illnesses.
What happens when we get good at treating dementia?
(Obviously, "good at treating" is with respect to what went before, not where we want to be.)
A life expectancy of 80 or 90 where you are active until the last six months of your life is a win compared to keeling over at 55 from a stroke or heart attack. The fact that life expectancy is not 100 or 1,000 doesn't mean that it's not worth investing in improving quality of life and life expectancy.
What happens when we get good at treating dementia is that your children will be able to have intelligent conversations with their great great grandparents (or you will be able to have intelligent conversations with your great great grandchildren).
No I'm suggesting that the body is a complex system and if you solve one component of the problem, another component ultimately fails until you run out of components (hint, just like software)
Every time a cell divides, it has a chance of turning malignant. Live long enough and one of those cells will win the cancer lottery and take you down if you don't catch it in time. Many forms of cancer are symptom-free long enough for this to happen (pancreatic for example) and we do not yet have the technology to easily detect this until it's late in the game.
And that's just one way to go. Then there are aneurisms and all sorts of other odd bodily defects that will eventually manifest.
Ageing is tough. That said, eat right, exercise, and get enough sleep, and you'll stand the best chance to max out your time clock.
Yeah, if man were meant to fly... Every generation has a few people like you.
Anyway, some people like to work on tough problems. No one said it's going to be easy or that progress won't come slowly. There are 7 billion people on the planet. If you can help with early detection of pancreatic cancer, for example, you will impact many lives.
It's true that on a long enough time line we will all inevitable get cancer or some degenerative disease, fine. But does that mean that we should just give up and not attempt to further prolong life? More importantly, curing some prolific diseases like dementia, arthritis, and osteoporosis could dramatically improve not just quantity of life but quality of life as well.
Given a shower and an infinite lifespan (no death from aging), you will eventually trip and die in the shower. Given enough time and a set of possible events, all of those events will unfold eventually. So I don't see what's so damning about the inevitable cancer, since you seem to hint at that we might get the technology to easily detect them in time eventually.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics only applies to closed systems. We have a giant nuclear star nearby bathing us in untold amounts of energy -- certainly enough to stave off disorder for a long, long time.
I actually think that IBM just did more to fight aging than any aging science can do in the foreseeable future. Biological cells are "designed" for failure, they can not live forever (except in some simplest forms). What would happen eventually, I think, is this: biological aging research will progress until some practical limit and we will live until like 150 years or something, then we will dump backup to some future S3 and restore from there to ever advancing neuro-chips. So if I were Larry I'd invest billions into neurophysiology, developing means to actually do this backup. The first restore would be to device the size of the Google datacenter, drawing megawatts of energy and with the run rate of $10.000/hour. That's okay, we've been there before and we'll fix it rather quickly.
What's really interesting is what would happen next: let's say I died, my last backup was restored into some device and it costs a mere $5000/month to support. Of course I need to work to earn these money. I don't need sleep, I don't feel tired, I'm directly connected to the Internet (I don't need to type into Google, I _know_ everything Google knows) and I have 250 years of experience developing, hm, C++ applications for, hmmm, Windows. Now, what are the chances for a mortal, organic fresh grad to get a job (even if he can connect to Google directly too)?
First, I have been to a conference a year ago when the researcher claimed to have restored senescent cells back to a "young" state. This kind of things completely bypasses any "programmed to die" scheme, and gives hope for actual biological immortality.
Second, I call the future you outlined a "Hansonian dystopia", with rich people running at a faster rate than poorer people, and mass duplication/murder in the name of productivity. I'd rather avoid those drawbacks.
Third, if we ever get to full blown mind uploading, we will probably have de-novo AI to contend with, and the intelligence explosion that it will likely imply. At this point, we can throw out just everything we know about economics and politics, and pray the AI is programmed for our own good (lest it turns Skynet and kills us all in 5 seconds —if we're lucky).
Oh, and one last thing: backup is already an option right now: it's called cryonics. It's not exactly reliable (no one has been revived yet), but that's a genuine cause for hope (unlike joining your hands and look up the sky).
1. I remember that research, but it deals only with "programmed self-destruction". To completely fix the mortality problem we'd need to redesign the human organism from the ground up, which might not be feasible. Kind of "second system syndrome".
2. Right, having attained technological immortality, rich people could completely isolate themselves from the poor, getting richer and richer (in the broad sense of the word - more experienced, more advanced in studies, etc) and poor would lose even the theoretical path into this "rich bubble". You can't "rather avoid the drawbacks" by stopping progress, you'll have to use the progress to avoid drawbacks, but I do not see how.
Cryonics is not a backup. Backup implies working restore procedure. Cryonics is like removing platters from the hard drive with a screwdriver and putting them into file cabinet somewhere in someone's basement, hoping that they would be just okay. Yeah, possible.
2. Friendly AI seems to be a solution. Depends what will happen. Either we will have an intelligence explosion, and the "winner takes all" scenario that it implies —in which case all we have to do is ensure the first AI is Friendly —yeah, piece of cake… Or, we won't have intelligence explosion, and I don't see how to avoid the Hansonian outcome either.
(Those interested in guessing what is more likely to happen may be interested by the Yudkowsky-Hanson debate.)
Cryonics: agreed. I wouldn't bet my life on it if I could help it. Cryonicists often say that cryonics is the second worst thing that can happen to you (just after certain death).
Why? Because IBM's so-called "neuro-chips" are actually just specialized hardware for running Spiking Neural Networks, AFAICT. They have jack-all to do with brain uploading.
And, as a matter of fact, the modern desktop PC still isn't a world-dominating artificial general intelligence. Because the two things have nothing to do with each-other. No amount of advancement in hardware, quality or quantity, will turn artificial neural networks into the phlebotinum from Charles Stross novels.
so if Calico is independent company funded by Google then what would Google gain by it? I mean how does this relate to Google's mission to "organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful."
Is it a long term strategy to increase the age of humanity so they search more, use more of android, and earn Google more revenue because their search business is saturating? or is there a truly altruistic motive behind funding Calico? Seeing on their website an executive with title VP of Business Development seems interesting and just wonder how would he benefit Google through Calico's business.
First, I would guess that part of the reason Calico is a separate company instead of just a team within Google is that they don't fit within Google's central mission. Second,I don't know if there really needs to be an altruistic motive; is Larry's concern for his own health and the health of those he cares about not enough?
People died to make room for Larry. For him to try and cheat the system when it's his turn is the ultimate act of disrespect. So no, that isn't good enough.
They probably wouldn't have chosen to do so if they had a choice. Larry, and others working on this problem, want to give people a choice in the matter.
Don't you think that many of the world's problems: global warming, pollution, war, and so on, might be pursued a little more energetically if people knew they were going to be around for 500 years rather than 80?
I'm extremely interested in understanding your perspective. See, I not only publicly support this, but as an aging researcher, I spend my days, nights, and weekends (right now, in fact) working towards this goal.
I do so because I believe that, in a world full of Bad Things, death is pretty unambiguously the worst of them. Every time someone dies, a wealth of unique life experience and personality is lost, permanently. Forget Larry, I don't want to see my friends, family, and neighbors die. I don't know you at all, but I don't want you to die. And yes, I don't want to die myself either.
If you think that extending life is selfish and wrong, then to be logically consistent, wouldn't the Red Cross and hospitals and so on be evil organizations? What principle could we possibly use to establish when someone's life has been "too long"?
> Every time someone dies, a wealth of unique life experience and personality is lost, permanently.
- Every time a person dies, their life is passed on through those they have connected with and influenced. Their influence on the world does not end, only their opportunity to see its effect. And most importantly, gives room for someone to do even more with what they have accomplished.
> death is pretty unambiguously the worst of them.
- Death may be better described as one of the scariest of them. When you are dead you feel no pain. You don't even know you are dead. Certainly, we miss those in our life who have passed away, but they live on in our hearts and dreams for the remainder of our lives.
> I don't know you at all, but I don't want you to die. And yes, I don't want to die myself either.
- I'm sure most people don't want to die. That's part of what makes life so important. What makes us try to make every moment count. There is so much life someone can live in 65 years. Do we really need more?
> What principle could we possibly use to establish when someone's life has been "too long"?
- When you start to try and reverse or disable aging as opposed to attempting to cure disease.
I don't want to invalidate your work, but are you sure we really need this as a society? Or maybe we instead need to focus on making the time we have better for everyone?
I think this deals with your main premise of the nebulous 'room'.
From the paper Demographic Consequences of Defeating Aging.
'Moreover, if some members of society reject to use new anti-aging technologies for some religious or any other reasons (inconvenience, non-compliance, fear of side effects, costs, etc.), then the total population size may even decrease over time. Thus, even in the case of the most radical life extension scenario, population growth could be relatively slow and may not necessarily lead to overpopulation. Therefore, the real concerns should be placed not on the threat of catastrophic population consequences (overpopulation), but rather on such potential obstacles to a success of biomedical war on aging, as scientific, organizational, and financial limitations.'
- I'm sure most people don't want to die. That's part of what makes life so important. What makes us try to make every moment count. There is so much life someone can live in 65 years. Do we really need more?
"640K ought to be enough for anybody." -Bill Gates
Just like when people found better uses for space, people will find better uses for longer lifelines, given the opportunity. Considering how quickly we advance, how much more informed we are, how much more control we have over our lives, and how much increasingly more there is to do in the world for everyone, it makes sense now more than ever.
Other technologies can furthermore make this even more convenient, and possibly even eliminate the trade-off of having less children. The dynamics currently in place were intended for a different world, and the one of today is changing very rapidly.
>There is so much life someone can live in 65 years. Do we really need more?
And yet so very little life we actually do live in our limited time! Most of our time on this Earth is spent in drudgery just trying to stay alive.
>Or maybe we instead need to focus on making the time we have better for everyone?
We ought to be doing both. Anti-aging treatments ought to be available universally, for absolutely everyone, just like all other health-care that saves your life.
We also ought to be getting rid of things like poverty, that kill people a bit more slowly and make them live in misery in the meantime. And toil, too, while we're at it: it's simply got to go.
Unfortunately, our society seems to take no account whatsoever of ought, so anti-aging didn't happen until some billionaire decided he liked transhumanist scifi novels.
To be fair, people have been working on this problem for decades. It is only in the last 1-2 decades, though, that really large datasets (genetic and otherwise) have been available to turn understanding aging from a hard experimental problem into more of a data analysis problem (experiments will obviously still be needed). I think this new availability of biomedical "big data" is what is drawing in a lot of CS-type people recently.
Just like AI, people have been trying for a long time. It's just a damn hard problem.
There's a great diversity in lifespan among organisms, which is a good clue, but the number of organisms that actually show no senescence is quite small, and they are all very distant from humans evolutionarily.
Those few have been studied heavily in aging, but trying to extrapolate differences in these organisms to humans is very challenging because they have totally different anatomies, genomes, and sets of proteins. Plus, lifespan is very multifactorial; for example, you can "extend lifespan" in many species by inhibiting cancer, but that isn't really stopping aging per se.
It's hard for many reasons, but I think the most important one is that we have no good mathematical or experimental tools for understanding and predicting how a given perturbation (drug, diet, etc) will affect a hugely complex network of 25K+ transcripts. Or how those transcripts affect each other causally. In a variety of tissues. And genetic backgrounds. And in the context of longer-term changes like epigenetic changes and DNA mutation.
Another huge problem is that lifespan studies take, well, lifetimes. So we usually do them in organisms like worms and flies, which are very different from humans.
Almost everything related to getting "serious" mesospheric effects in biological systems is a hard problem. Animal bodies really are that complex.
On the other hand, it can still tick me off how aging and anti-aging are, in much of the world, simply not considered medical issues worthy of research at all.
It raises a lot of social and religious implications many would rather not think about.
But we have learned to deal with it. Instead of saying you're studying aging, you say you're studying "age-associated disease X" (which works for almost any X) and the effects of age on X. Or you say, "rising health care costs are a huge problem, and the bulk of costs are in the elderly. Therefore, we want to find ways to reduce age-associated morbidity and thereby lower costs."
>Or you say, "rising health care costs are a huge problem, and the bulk of costs are in the elderly. Therefore, we want to find ways to reduce age-associated morbidity and thereby lower costs."
I honestly hadn't thought that this isn't a genuine good argument in favor of anti-aging research.
>There is so much life someone can live in 65 years. Do we really need more?
Can't you just replace 65 with 55 and say the same thing? 55 with 45? 45 with 35?
Conversely, if I can live through so much life in 65 years, couldn't I live through more in 75? 85? 95? Given n years of healthy, productive life, at what point does the n+1th year of healthy productive life give you a negative marginal value?
First, there's no way you could offend me by anything you say. You've already done me a great service by explaining your views. I've met people with similar views before, but usually they're reluctant to describe them at length.
I agree that traces of people remain after their death -- genetically, in their children, and in the memories of those who knew them. But those traces fade quickly, and for all but the most famous, virtually disappear in a few centuries. And surely you agree that a memory is a poor substitute for a person -- I'd rather be able to talk to my dad or neighbor than have even the fondest memories of them.
We both seem to agree that improving the quality of people's lives, as well as the quantity, is extremely important. Aging is far from the only problem society faces. Tackling inequality/poverty, political dysfunction, war, ignorance, and other problems are also extremely important goals, and I greatly respect people who work on them. I also recognize that curing aging will introduce new societal problems even as it solves others (e.g., rising health care costs).
I think where we differ is that I think these other problems can be solved as well, and I believe that curing aging will, on balance help society more than it harms it. Consider how our scientific progress is retarded when our best scientists die or lose their mental acuity later in life. I've already alluded to the fact that people seem to ignore problems ranging from global warming to the national debt because "I'll be dead before it becomes a problem."
I have several responses to your concern that if people stop aging, we won't have room for future generations. First, it is well known that wealthier people and countries have a lower birth rate, so by solving poverty, the birth rate will decrease. Second, even if people don't age, they can still die from accidents or disease. Also, I think eventually humanity will expand to the stars, although we are far from it now.
Massive societal change is coming, from many sources, whether or not aging is solved (although I make no claims about when). Technology is going to put many people out of work. AI will eventually be created. Methods will be developed to improve human intelligence, enhancing technological development but increasing wealth inequality. Even if none of these developments occur, there is still an increasing centralization of wealth and power in developed countries.
It is hard to know how curing aging would interact with these trends, except to say that I think people would be more circumspect about societal decisions if they knew they would have to bear the long-term consequences. I think the demand for religion would decrease, which would have positive effects on geopolitical stability. Living longer would also give people more time to get educated, which would help with the electoral ignorance that is at the root of so many problems in the US.
Finally, your proposed principle for determining the "correct" lifespan is not a new one:
> When you start to try and reverse or disable aging as opposed to attempting to cure disease.
The NIH takes a similar view. The problem is that almost all major diseases (diabetes, heart disease, neurodegenerative disease, to some extent cancer) are all diseases of aging. Young people don't (usually) get them. It may well be that to "cure" these diseases, we will have to solve the underlying problem -- that is, aging.
Also, consider that it is just genetic happenstance that our species max lifespan happens to be 120. Why should it not be 15 or 60 or 240? Letting evolution decide our lifespan is certainly the simplest method, but it seems fairly arbitrary.
Those are valid points. I'll only address one point below, because I see a lot of your reasoning as being that all technological advancement is a net good, which I feel is often the divide between those who are for and against anti-aging.
As for passing on to others. Its not memories or genetics. It's inertia. As we go through life we set other things in motion. Our interactions with each other and the world around us causes changes in direction and speed. Everything we do sets something else into motion, infinitely unique from what would have happened without us. No matter how small the action.
I watched that attitude over the years (people saying that death is "good"), and I think the reason is people believe death is inevitable. After all, this is how it has always been, and to them, dreaming about immortality is pointless and counterproductive. It's much easier just to find reasons why dying is "good for you".
Luckily, there are also people like you, who choose to do something about it. Personally, I work on AI, so that hopefully IBM Watson in 2050 will be able to help us cure aging.
There are many people who think that way too, but I think fred_durst seems to genuinely be more concerned about the effects on society.
When I was considering careers, I concluded that there are 3 world-changing scientific problems: aging, neuroscience (understanding the brain and cognitive enhancement), and AI. Interestingly, they're all intertwined.
Best of luck. Personally I think AI will come before a cure for aging. In some ways, I view my work as a fallback, in case AI doesn't come fast enough.
No. Not at all. In fact things like pollution and war will likely get a lot worse. I'm shocked people can even publicly admit they support this type of selfish behavior.
Why do you think, that there have to be future generations after aging is solved? And why do you think that humans will always be limited to living on earth?
Planet Earth is our home and will be. I would like to see we spend our resources to control pollution, contain global warming and save species from being endangered first before looking to outer space for help.
And yeah future generations will be looking at us how we act because they definitely would prefer living here imo.
well this suggested advantage is based on assumption that the life-extension benefit will be applicable to only Google employees which does not seem valid because Calico is an independent company and not part of Google so in theory, even their competitors can take medicines developed by Calico.
Disappointingly, but expectedly, the stub website for Calico further reinforces the point that they are not likely to soon take any path that will produce meaningful results for human longevity. They are following the Longevity Dividend [0] approach in essence, which at the high level aims to increase understanding of the intersection of genetics, metabolism, and aging to produce ways to slow aging gently. Ambition here is to aim for an increase of 7 years of life expectancy over the next two decades, a figure given a couple of times by Jay Olshansky. Examples of research include work on sirtuins, that has consumed a billion dollars and produced nothing of use, and other attempts to produce caloric restriction mimetic drugs. The near future in the Longevity Dividend vision is basically more of the same: vastly expensive attempts to alter the operation of metabolism in order to slow down aging.
Genetics is hot, and it is easy to raise funds for nowadays. See the launch of Venter's Human Longevity Inc, for example. But I see this in connection with work on longevity as looking for the keys under the lamp, because that is where the light is, not because it is where you are likely to obtain results. The comparative genetics of human longevity should be irrelevant to work on aging: we all age because of the occurrence of the same forms of cellular and molecular damage. Outside of rare mutations, genetics has nothing to do with that - the same damage happens to everyone. The target should be repair of that damage, not trying to expensively slightly slow the pace at which it arrives.
That the metabolic manipulation approach to treating aging has such popularity despite the lack of results is a mystery. The other way, the repair approach, has the same lack of results - but that is because next to no money is heading in that direction. We have the early demonstration that targeted removal of senescent cells extends life in accelerated aging mice [1], for example, and ample reason to believe it is beneficial for ordinary individuals, but it took philanthropic funding to move that research forward at all. Institutions want to see standard issue drug development and manipulation of metabolism because it is the mainstream of medicine and the expected thing: the round peg for the round hole of regulation. This has nothing at all to do with whether it is the best path forward.
This all further points to the fact that if we want to see meaningful results in longevity science, measured in years of health gained for people who are already old, then we need to produce results that demonstrate the futility of the mainstream path taken by Google, the sirtuin researchers, and Human Longevity Inc, etc, and deonstrate that repair approaches can do far more for far less money. The senescent cell targeting is probably the closest work to that point.
Based on what I've seen of Calico to date, I'm expecting it to be a more publicized version of the Ellison Medical Foundation as an initiative: an extension of work already taking place at the NIA and in companies like Human Longevity Inc, and something that fails to step outside that box. It will produce general benefits in terms of data and knowledge, and absolutely fail to meaningfully extend human life. This will continue until someone changes the approach to this work to focus on repair of the causes of aging [2] rather than metabolic tinkering to slow aging. The latter is a slow road to marginal end results that can do next to nothing to help the people who grew old waiting for them to arrive.
I work in aging, and I think both avenues -- understanding the genetic bases of longevity, and working on repairing damage or other interventions -- need to be pursued in parallel.
Yes, genetics is hot, but also necessary to find the molecular drivers of the aging process. Despite what de Grey and others might have us believe, it is very far from clear what age-associated molecular changes qualify as "damage". Which changes are causal and which are compensatory? Are the widespread changes in DNA methylation and other epigenomic markers that occur with age "damage"? AFAIK, no one knows.
Even when it is clear that a molecular change can probably be considered "damage" (loss of telomeres, DNA damage, protein aggregation), it is still unclear which kinds of damage actually need to be reversed to promote longevity.
I think it is silly to see SENS and Calico et al as if they were in competition. We are all working towards the same goal, and anyone who claims to know for certain which avenue will ultimately attain our common goal of achieving increased longevity is selling you a load.
EDIT: My personal opinion about the difficulty of funding the SENS program (which I'll take your word for; I don't know anything about their funding sources or situation), is the extravagant claims that have been made. Reviewers don't like those. A lot of scientists have very ambitious and grand goals, but one of the secrets to grant-writing is to frame your goals as ambitious enough to be interesting, but limited enough to be attainable in the 3-5 year scope of a grant. And "unlimited human lifespan" is just a tad too ambitious.
And here I thought my comments represented the ugly side of hacker news.
I personally thought the above comment provided detail and references as to why this a tough nut to crack as well as what the current promising approaches may be.
And yes, the company should be given time to prove itself.
But given that they are well-funded, and that their public face is their web site, I would think (and maybe I'm crazy) that they could provide something more interesting than a bunch of vanilla executive bios. This is an amazing area of research and this is the best they can show for it? Not impressed (so far).
Yes, it could be seen as "If Calico hasn't even invested the time and energy necessary to build a decent and informative web presence, they're obviously not serious about what they're doing."
... but it could also be seen as "If Calico hasn't been concerned about their website, maybe that's because they're concerned about other things and have made the decision that the benefit they'd get from a website isn't worth the administrative overhead."
Given that a fanboy is an uncritical true believer and a shill is paid to claim an opinion that they otherwise do not hold, the two terms would seem to be largely incompatible.
The content is vacuous, he vaguely dismisses any and every competing longevity research project in favour of SENS, which he has doggedly promoted throughout HN for some time.
I'm a comp. bio. PhD student so don't think this isn't a topic of interest to me, but the answer to every age related topic just isn't "here's a link to some sens promotional material". SENS has some fringe ideas and was mostly rejected by scientists as silly and founded by a charlatan, now Peter Thiel has shown an interest it's got a kind of misappropriated authenticity among those with no scientific background.
I would rather say SENS is on the edge of the mainstream. de Grey attended and SENS partially sponsored the last major aging conference this year (AGE in San Antonio). If SENS were truly a fringe organization, the conference organizers wouldn't have allowed it. SENS did start out a decade ago by making very extreme statements, but they have moderated their tone significantly since then.
It's fair to say OP is a SENS enthusiast. But, as a fellow researcher, you know that there are always differences of opinion about what avenues will be more or less fruitful in a field. That's OK, time will tell.
Personally, I'm not certain whether SENS' fundamental position -- that we should focus on engineering solutions to damage rather than identifying causes -- is correct, but it seems at least a coherent argument. Suppose OP is right: that we are wasting too much money on one rather than another. It would be a real problem, with real consequences: lives lost, and so on. Worth debating, at least.
I downvoted because an enthusiasm for SENS is irrelevant to the accuracy or otherwise of the points made, and commenting on it doesn't add to the conversation.
I've enquired about a link between him and SENS in the past and also received a few quick downvotes, possibly HNers don't like the tone (fair enough) but I'd suggest it's possible he is using multiple accounts.
Okay how about I'll send you a contract to transfer all of your property to me and then you'll be free to spend the rest of your life in the Amazon rainforest. If you get malaria, don't worry, it's natural. Just learn to leave things be.
>How about transcending our own desires to control nature. Maybe learning to leave things be? That would be a real feat.
That's actually not a feat at all. There's no grander harmony of nature that needs to be preserved by killing people off at a fixed age. Hell, there never was: we evolved, suffered an ice age, drove the large land mammals to extinction, and emerged from an ice age, all before even inventing writing or agriculture.
No it isn't, otherwise you wouldn't get things like hydra or the immortal jellyfish. Even lobsters appear to die through predation rather than through aging.
Your comment could apply equally to any medical research; do you believe any medical research is a good idea? If so, how do you decide where to draw the line?
This isn't reddit. Sarcastic one liners and an expectation of downvotes make for bad comments here. You've been here long enough on the site that you should know this.
I understand your point on the original post (not the original poster btw) but I wish people wouldn't say "this isn't reddit" so much.
Of course it isn't. It isn't slashdot either. Just make the point without unnecessary references. Or at minimum use an original reference rather than one I see appearing every 5 pages on HN. Or better still how about just a silent downvote rather than appearing a content prune?
I don't think theres much point to anti-aging if we can't understand what it even means for the brain to age.
As children, we have billions of neurons more than we do when we reach adulthood and everyday after that we loose something like 10k neurons a day.
Which is a scare because as people age, they become more rigid in general perspectives and beliefs. Its already hard enough bringing about change such as accepting gay people into our society and avoiding wars waged by old bitter people.
Please, this stupid stereotype has to die. People of all ages can be stupid and ignorant and pigheaded and whatever negative you want to throw out. If you read history this has always been the case. But the worst idiocy is thinking whatever age you are is superior to any other. You can find "proofs" by looking at some narrow slice of any age group to demonstrate whatever you think is true and I can show exactly the opposite with another. There is no way to lump an entire grouping of people and say they are all the same, young or old or whatever. I'm sorry people's attitudes aren't boolean they are floating point.
You've seriously misunderstood what I was saying. Its not a matter of stupidity, its a matter or rigidity.
As you mature, specially through puberty, you experiment with many different personalities. You gauge your environment and try to figure out the type of person that will be most successful in your environment. All of these personalities are represented by competing neural networks especially in your prefrontal cortex.
But obviously exploring different personalities, characteristics, ambitions, and developing different interests has to slowly be focused and narrowed into something that you can pursue with full confidence. Biologically, this is one of the reasons that when you loose a neuron you don't ever get it back. And the growing age till just after puberty is the fasted period in which your brain sheds neurons that pertain to competing networks that don't pan out as well. There after, neuronal loss averages out to a steady constant but a rate which contributes to a fairly significant loss of the number of neurons for todays life expectancy.
Now if it wasn't already immediately obvious to you, the number of neurons is very directly correlated with intelligence. It isn't the only factor but it definitely is a hugely important factor in terms of capacity of intelligence.
> But the worst idiocy is thinking whatever age you are is superior to any other.
I must say, that perhaps an even worse idiocy is when someone quickly reads something and responds brashly without actually bothering to think.
It isn't a matter of superiority. Its a matter of evolution. Certain advantages rest with certain age groups. Yes is a fact that the capacity for a young adult absorb completely new material is very likely higher than someone of a much older senior. However, a much older senior has the advantage of experience which allows him her to gauge new material as something worth wasting time over.
But as cultures evolve, as philosophies change, age (and by "age" I hope I've already made clear that I'm referring to effects of age on total neuronal loss) makes it difficult to change at the same pace. Do you think its just chance that a younger person brought up with the same strong cultural exposure as his/her equivalent senior end up having much easier time accepting new cultures, ideas, peoples?
Just because you believe "people of all ages can be stupid and ignorant and pigheaded and whatever negative you want to throw out" doesn't address the serious problem of needing to understand how the brain ages. Its biological fact that neuronal cells, unlike other cells in your body, ARE NOT replaced by new neurons (though there is some evidence of very slow neurgensis in various parts of the brain). And its important for you to understand why that is because its servers a very important function. Biology didn't anticipate such long life expectancy on its discourse of evolution.
> I'm sorry people's attitudes aren't boolean they are floating point.
"Geriatrics is one of the lower-paid medical specialties, in part because virtually all its patients are on Medicare, which pays doctors less than commercial insurers." Source: http://newoldage.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/09/even-fewer-ger...