As an aside, to spite anti vaxxers I’m on a mission to get every vaccine I can. I want my bloodstream to be like the Library at Alexandria before it burned down.
Taking vaccine is a cost/benefit tradeoff, even if the tradeoff is often lopsided in favor of vaccine.
However, vaccine for incredibly rare or non-existent disease isn't likely worth the tradeoff. Or maybe a particular vaccine is too dangerous or experimental.
Anyway, if the CDC recommend a vaccine for something, it's likely that they had looked into it and decided that the upside is worth more than the risk.
Ignoring the sarcasm, more than 32,000 people are killed and 2 million are injured each year from motor vehicle crashes in the US. It’s no heart disease (600,000+ deaths - leading cause in the US) but for the healthy and young, it’s a leading cause of death/side effects (injury). So in some sense you’re probably right.
I mean driving is easily the most dangerous thing people do on a daily basis. It's the leading cause of death for Americans under 55. You're not really making the point you think you are.
Cars are the worst. Side effects include air pollution, cancer, death of nearby pedestrians, municipal neglect of sidewalks, extreme inefficiency of resources resulting from rolling around a 2000 pound hunk of metal for every 180 pound person that wants get anywhere, sprawling asphalt deserts, weight gain and death. Don't bother contacting anyone if you experience one or more of these symptoms.
Vaccines are also, themselves, not exactly GOOD for you. They're just eliciting an immune response in order to obtain immunological defense at a theoretically/hopefully lower cost than the alternative infection.
Subjecting yourself to immune response, which for some vaccines can have high amount of reactogenicity, is having your body undergo heavy inflammation, a fair amount of tissue damage, etc. The people that just treat vaccines like they're a wheatgrass shot is pretty strange.
I have a rare condition related to insulin resistance and diabetes, blood sugar spikes greatly worsen my health.
Discovered that vaccines spike sugar prety significantly after getting my two shots this year. Won't be getting boosters anytime soon as the side effects were gruesome.
My parents both reported consistent elevated blood sugar levels after getting the Pfizer vaccine. Not sure if it was related or just coincidence, but there seem numerous reports of the same online. It should be temporary though.
They became aware of the issue after a couple months after the second dose. The trouble with anecdotal evidence like this is there's no way to know if that was caused by the vaccine or would have happened anyway.
Other people have reported similar things online. Again one must take it with a grain of salt.
Let's debate the merit of the poster's argument instead of casting labels around. Do you think there's no scope for medical exemptions for vaccine requirements? High blood sugar is dangerous, and the OP specifically said:
> blood sugar spikes greatly worsen my health.
I'm curious what the condition is, and if there's mitigations available or if one vaccine is worse than the other.
It worsens my health by increasing the amount of insulin my body secretes and if pushed too high this can cause type 2 diabetes.
Other side effects include cysts and cystic acne. The amount these occurred after both shots was pretty high and the occurrence was pretty persistent for two months after each shot (AZ with 3 months in-between shot).
While both times I had Covid, before and after the vaccine, my insulin stayed within normal ranges.
So maybe the attenuated virus vaccines can be used for people like me? Or maybe none, if no risk factors like obesity or old age are present as the side effects are also life shortening.
If someone has a demonstrated reaction to the vaccine -- e.g. much worse blood sugar levels -- they can rationally decide that they may not want to get another dose based on an earnest assessment of the risk from not getting dosed vs. the risk of getting dosed.
People with e.g. allergies to polysorbate choosing not to get vaccinated are not "antivaxxers".
I completely agree with you but I think OP is poking fun at the overzealousness of some people accusing others of being anti-vax when the covid vaccines are the only ones those people oppose. Of course there are actual antivaxxers out there who believe in microchips, etc but now even people who have gotten the vaccine but oppose mandates are labelled "antivaxxers" by dictionaries these days: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/anti-vaxxer
I wish we could have a rational discussion around these topics without accusations being fired back and forth in bad faith. It just drives people further into their existing positions and hardens them to criticism.
> I wish we could have a rational discussion around these topics without accusations being fired back and forth in bad faith. It just drives people further into their existing positions and hardens them to criticism.
Well, trying to "poke fun" like this, with Poe's law being what it is, does nothing to bring the temperature down.
Our choices are:
* "Poking fun" is intended and this is likely to provoke people who label others as antivax without adding anything to the discussion.
I would like to be able to discuss vaccines, side effects, contraindications, without hysteria. But that has become impossible.
E.g., I have seen a peer-reviewed report of an RCT indicating that loading up on argenine reduces side effects from COVID spike-protein vaccines, in people who have trouble with those. It seems like an easy choice, because argenine is easy to spike -- just eat lots of nuts -- and is at worst mostly harmless. That seems like something that could be discussed sanely, but even that draws trouble.
Definitely. We have a tremendous amount of risk aversion these days and a culture that has disdain for risk, even calculated abstract risks. What many don't realize is being too risk averse comes with its own risks, it also requires accurate risk assessment so you can make the correct decisions on when to take a risk and not. You could lockup in complete fear akin to analysis paralysis where non-zero risk keeps you from doing anything.
Just skimming the CDC list of common vaccines in use in the US, do most really need vaccines for everything: anthrax, Japanese encephalitis, polio, rabies, smallpox, tetanus, tuberculosis, typhoid fever, and yellow fever? If you're not traveling outside the US and living a fairly normal life, most likely not and some of these have potentially nasty yet rare side effects. If they were given/taken at the scale COVID vaccines were, many would die from such side effect who otherwise would have lived healthy lives, all because they took an unnecessary risk trying to prevent a very low risk. COVID is an exception because of exposure and transmissibiliy, the rare side effects are worth the risk for most people because the chance of getting it and having a life ending result is relatively high.
TB, tetanus, and rabies may be useful vaccines for some professions or life exposures in high risk cases, say veteranarians and healthcare workers, but for the most part, you probably don't need it. If you travel a lot to certain locations and say do missionary type work or whatever, perhaps some others make sense as well. Should every sexually active person take PrEP regularly since HIV is a potential risk to everyone? No, there are populations of risk exposure where it makes sense though. Your dentist only takes x-rays every so often because the x-ray exposure increases risk of various forms of cancer. You could get x-rays more frequently to detect issues that might not be obvious to your dentist but it's pretty low risk, there has been a lot of study into the rate of progression of disease and risk tradeoff to help your dentist determine a reasonable frequency for x-rays vs radiation exposure.
If you start looking at your regular risks, you take many risks across a lot of aspects of life every single day, even in a modestly safe life style, from hopping in a car to picking up takeout at a local resturaunt or even walking down a street. A massive unknown asteroid could be on a collision course with Earth right now that results in mass extinction ending the human race or a gamma ray burst from inside our galaxy could set the atmosphere on fire and radiate us all to death near instantly... they are all non-zero yet incredibly low risk to our understanding probabilisticly. They're so low and some even inactionable that we need to ignore them and/or treat them with low priority and continue on with life.
It's good to have a preventative mindset and take preventative action to try and control and manage risk, but in order to do this effectively, be sure you assess your risks, or have someone knowledgable (like a doctor when it comes to vaccines) lay it out for you so you can make a good decision about what you should or shouldn't do. If you truly can do the assessment yourself then by all means do it but it doesn't hurt to explain your assessment and rationale to someone knowledgeable to make sure you're not overlooking something. It certainly is possible to perform a better risk assessment for yourself than anyone else will be able to because you can know your behaviors and exposures better than anyone else but be careful playing this game.
We are very risk averse of taking vaccines, while they are incredibly safe and barely have any risk associated with them. Probably more harm is done because people are too afraid of taking a vaccine than the opposite (not only looking at covid19 vaccines). The biggest harm done by taking vaccines you don't really need is probably that the money could have been used for something more useful.
> while they are incredibly safe and barely have any risk associated with them
Alternative explanation: nobody knows the risks in details, and side-effects are widely under-reported anyway. Ask any doctor how often they report even serious side effects, you will be very surprised.
Barely have any acute risk. Its almost impossible to find out what happens after long time, say a decade, with the current approach.
> The biggest harm done by taking vaccines you don't really need is probably that the money could have been used for something more useful.
What kind of nonsense is that? Its the same as saying "there is no problem in taking any drug, the worst it can get is lose some money". You can't clamp entire technology as good or wrong. Vaccine as technology obviously has merit. Any particular vaccine may be problematic or not. Think H1N1 and narcolepsy, anthrax vaccine in gulf war etc.
This kind of trash talk is exactly the same as anti-vax talk. I have no sympathy for either clan. As usual, people convert complex topic into binary decision which is madness.
> Its almost impossible to find out what happens after long time, say a decade, with the current approach.
Most vaccines are much older than a decade. We know who gets vaccines; it's in their medical record, if not centralized anywhere. Longitudinal studies aren't impossible. So any random hospital could do a longitudinal retrospective data-collection study on the consequences for their own patients of either having received a given vaccination decades previous or not, no?
> What kind of nonsense is that?
I understood what they meant, and they're right. They're making an incomplete-information decision-theory argument. To rephrase them with more precision:
Selecting a person from the population at random; and taking the category of "vaccines that will confer absolutely no benefits to that person specifically", and selecting a vaccine at random from that category; that person will, with high probability, incur more QALY-risk from paying for the vaccine (because they'll then have fewer dollars to pay for unplanned expenses, which can be quite problematic for the median member of the population), than they will from any iatrogenic illness induced by getting the vaccine itself.
Outlier vaccines do nothing to change this, any more than those few poisoned bottles of aspirin did anything to increase the non-contingent risk profile of taking aspirin. Especially because, like the poisoned aspirin, outlier vaccines aren't on the market for very long compared to safe vaccines.
> study on the consequences for their own patients of either having received a given vaccination decades previous or not, no?
No! If you think its possible to pin point exactly what is the source of the problem with decade of various stressors piling up on anybody you should think again. It basically has infinite confounding variables.
> those few poisoned bottles of aspirin did anything to increase the non-contingent risk profile of taking aspirin.
Please educate more about this - do you know that ibuprofen is result of long time search to replace aspirin due to its toxicity (such as stomach bleeding that you will get sooner or later).
Its insane that people outsource medicine. One should strive to know as much as possible about it, with focus on prevention.
> It basically has infinite confounding variables.
Yes, but: Law of Large Numbers. The great thing about retrospective data-collection studies is that you can potentially get hundreds of thousands of histories as datapoints. With those numbers, basically every confounder washes away, other than the selection effect of "what kind of person frequents this hospital rather than some other hospital." And you can get rid of that confounder, too, if you meta-analyze studies done in hospitals in very different areas.
It makes a truly boring person if everything that is unknown must QUICKLY be asserted to be true or false.
One should actively question all things again and again. Most things we believe to be true are just true because we have no reason to think they are false.
Hell, most here write some code, look at it, it looks fine? Then it doesn't run because there are one or more typos. Note here how the whole thing doesn't work. If you organize your life like that the whole thing wont work.
I so often told people to ask anyway in stead of already "knowing" what someone is going to say. Even if you are 95% certain you are still 100% wrong. If you do life like that you will never find a book you like, a job, a partner, a place to vacation, an interesting new food, a pet, a study. There is no need to bother, you already "know", they are all just going to disappoint you.
God might be real, Trump might be a woman, Aliens might walk the earth, people might be living on mars, someone might have a working antikythera mechanism in their private collection, King Enmen-lu-ana might have ruled for 43,200 years, he might have visited the martians in his Vimana.
Shingles happens decades after getting chickenpox. Conceivably an atennuated (or live) virus immunization could have a similar future issue.
Lots of other possibilities of immunization causes a small but unnoticed inury that later on proves to be fatal, but because of the gap between injury and fatality is very hard to track down.
My son participated in a 'long term' vaccine trial of a slightly different combination of childhood vaccines (if it had been successful in the US, it would have reduced the number of needles by one, but I don't recall the specifics). But long term means they followed up for one year.
It's just not really possible to keep track of participants for very long outside of very small studies. Maybe if one day we have decent medical records, it will be easy to run epidemiological studies and find small effects. But you would need to make the decision on the immunization with the known information; maybe 20-40 years later you might find out that it increased or decreased the likelyhood of some disease in old age.
> If you're not traveling outside the US and living a fairly normal life
Globally, given an at-least-middle-class lifestyle (and any other years than 2020–2021), "not travelling outside [your home country]" is actually rather abnormal. It's mostly an American thing.
I've seen it hypothesized that higher risk-aversion from a media-inculcated culture of fear could be responsible for Americans' unique disinterest in international travel.
If that were true, then "properly calibrating your risk-aversion" as we're talking about here, would potentially result in the average American desiring to travel a lot more — which would then mean that the extra vaccinations would have rather more justification.
> Should every sexually active person take PrEP regularly since HIV is a potential risk to everyone? No, there are populations of risk exposure where it makes sense though.
I mean, if we just had a huge supply of PrEP laying around so that we could afford to be wasteful with it, we could just give it to every sexually-active person for a while to stop transmission, and so effectively eradicate HIV. (Everyone already infected would keep taking it until death, but nobody new would be getting infected, so as soon as all those people passed away, there'd be no more HIV.)
Personally, I'd see it as my duty as a citizen of the world to participate in a program like that. I want to live to see that virus die.
But moreover, doing so would eliminate the risk of anyone ever contracting HIV again; which doesn't just have personal consequences for arbitrary individuals from the population; but also has societal effects (in any country with socialized healthcare), and even cultural effects (in terms of changing the landscape of sexual mores.) Those effects could have net-positive utility that greatly outweighs the personal calculus of "am I more likely to get HIV, or an iatrogenic illness from PrEP." (I don't think anyone's done the true cost-benefit for the societal-level effects. It'd be interesting to see.)
See also: the argument to eliminating homelessness. Where, in that case, the societal-level "economically externalized from the individual" effects (e.g. fewer unpaid ER visits per homeless person) clearly do come out highly net-positive, such that we should strive to do that even if such programs were economically net-negative per homeless person. Thus thinking like "just give every homeless person a house."
> Your dentist only takes x-rays every so often because the x-ray exposure increases risk of various forms of cancer.
X-rays are an outmoded technology, though. If we could make MRI machines cheap enough, dentists could do what they do now with X-rays, by instead taking MRI captures and using a spectrum that highlights the bone-density sections.
In that hypothetical world, there'd be no downside to getting a new MRI every time you visit the dentist.
MRI is much lower resolution than X-ray. Dental researchers are speculating about using MRI for some uses, like implant planning, but the laws of physics are not in favor of reducing the voxel size to match the small features identified with X-rays.
My dentist just upgraded their gear, the tech no longer leaves the room when shooting the image, and I didn't get a lead blanket. Presumably that means the technology improved again and the total X-ray energy went down.
I don't know much about MRI technology, but would you get an improvement in resolution if the whole machine was scaled down (i.e. because it only needs to fit someone's head in it, rather than their whole body)?
There's already head-only MRI machines. Like all MRI machines, they are phenomenally expensive to operate, eat shittons of energy, and only make sense if they're in constant use. But yes, reducing bore size improves resolution.
> I've seen it hypothesized that higher risk-aversion from a media-inculcated culture of fear could be responsible for Americans' unique disinterest in international travel.
I suspect it has more to do with the distance between most of the US and other nations combined with the variety Americans perceive within their own borders. Hawaii and Alaska are very different climatically and to a lesser degree culturally from Iowa. In many other nations national borders are closer and there's no intervening ocean, or perhaps only a narrow, theoretically swimmable strait, separating you from the next nation over.
> Globally, given an at-least-middle-class lifestyle (and any other years than 2020–2021), "not travelling outside [your home country]" is actually rather abnormal. It's mostly an American thing.
Japanese people don't leave Japan much either. And between those two countries we've now called half the developed world "abnormal". It may be just as accurate to say Europe is the outlier, especially when you consider all of humanity and all of civilized history. Also it obviously depends where people travel to, developed or otherwise.
Either way though, the vaccination recommendations in the US (as I'm sure every country) vary depending on whether you plan to travel or not. There isn't a fixed policy for everyone, at least when it comes to recommendations.
> TB, tetanus, and rabies may be useful vaccines for some professions or life exposures in high risk cases,
Not taking away from your main point, but Tetanus is generally recommended once every ten years (or on potential exposure five years from last vaccination). I wouldn't put it in the same category as those other diseases.
We have an infinite library, but the literary criticism section has been carefully curated to remove all criticism of books in this library. The Library of Burges, though, we are happy to criticize unto oblivion.
You have antibodies that will bind to just about anything foreign, including viruses that your body has never seen before, M-type immunoglobulin (IgM). It's the kind of antibodies that responds in the first phases of an infection.
The problem is that IgMs are not very specific. They bind to a lot of things, but they bind poorly. In the library of Alexandria analogy, it's like a book that happens to mention a subject you care about, but only in passing.
Vaccines (and infections) result in your immune system developing IgG. That's the hyper-specific books for the pathogen you care about.
So it's not that the book wasn't at the front. Your immune system has to write the book on the fly, during the fight, using chopped up pieces of pathogen gathered by antigen-presenting cells.
Is there a good resource to learn more about this without a Biology degree? I always assumed the body generated matching snippets at random and the law of large numbers would result in a match eventually.
>Is there a good resource to learn more about this without a Biology degree?
Immunology is complicated. Some people call it the second most complicated system, behind the human brain.
Someone else has mentioned the Kurzgesagt resources, which are great. If you want something more formal, OME is also a great resource I think.
>I always assumed the body generated matching snippets at random and the law of large numbers would result in a match eventually.
Right. Antibodies have a Y shape, where the two tips of the Y are variable, and the base is fixed. The IgM are the completely random snippets that happen to match a wide variety of things. However, because it's chemistry, it's more subtle than match or no match. Think of it like a variable degree of stickiness.
When a pathogen is found, your body is going to iteratively mutate new antibodies and select those that bind the best to the collected antigens, until you have something very specific (= sticks very readily). I'm simplifying a little bit, but that's the process for generating IgGs that I was talking about.
About 3e11 combinations are possible, about 10 billions different antibodies will be generated by a human body (numbers I just sourced from Wikipedia).
The shuffling is done by recombination, which means joining segments of DNA in a random fashion (a similar recombination process is actually used for DNA repair, though with somewhat less randomness!)
There's a lot more to say about all of this, but I don't know how much immunology I can usefully describe in a few HN comments =]
(10 billion (1e9) / 3e11 ~= 3%, for those like me who don't have powers of 10 memorized.)
Does that imply that there's a good chance someone's immune system will just fail to generate any appropriate antibodies against a novel intruder? Or does the "fuzzy matching" aspect mean that exploring a small percentage of the space mean you're very likely to get at least some degree of success?
Glad you found it. A very simple explanation I heard a while back (NPR?) was that the system is able to keep "mugshots" of intruders it has seen and then snip their DNA when there's a match with the mugshot.
I’m with you. I’ve gotten vaccinated for everything my doctor lets me. Japanese Encephalitis? Pshaw. I don’t even know what it is, but good luck with my immune system.
I'm not going to tell you that you're wrong, but I would be more careful than that.
Infections can be the trigger for auto-immune diseases. We're not sure precisely how, but there seems to be a complex combination of genetic and environmental factors.
Your immune system is very much not playing games, it's in the business of reacting on a hair trigger, and doing more damage to foreign bodies than it does to your own body. It has an intricate system to avoid turning against yourself, but the system can fail.
If a B cell that produces auto-antibodies falls through the cracks, it will not die. You now have the problem of being in a permanent fight against your own immune system, with a variety of unfortunate results.
Now that's a lot of scary outcomes, and thankfully those diseases are uncommon. The system almost always works well. But it's a very complex system with ugly failure modes, so I wouldn't encourage you to poke the beast too much.
The risk/benefit calculation depends on where you live and/or plan to travel. I fear I'm beginning to forget what life was like before Covid, but IIRC people used to travel quite a lot.
For example, Japanese encephalitis is rare in Japan, but only because many Japanese people have been vaccinated against it. It's endemic in most other parts of east, southeast, and south Asia. It kills 10K+ people every year, and it spreads through mosquito bites just like malaria. But most travelers only worry about malaria.
This would be like being worried about playing outside and being exposed to germs. Yes, it’s true that every new infection has the possibility of killing you. But, now we have evidence that exposure to diverse mild pathogens actually makes your immune system less dangerous to the self. Otherwise it would be safer to live in a clean room.
I agree you should not try to live in a clean room, and you shouldn't be worried about being exposed to normal amount of germs.
When you say "exposure to diverse mild pathogens actually makes your immune system less dangerous to the self", I suspect you're referring to the hygiene hypothesis that has become part of popular culture.
It's important to know that that hypothesis, nowadays, is about early exposure to benign microbes. Meaning from in utero exposure to early childhood at the latest.
I have seen no evidence that voluntarily exposing yourself to pathogens is a good idea. The point to my post was that you shouldn't understand the immune system like an RPG element that needs training to level up.
Please do get vaccinated for relevant diseases, but I would not go too far in the direction of treating your immune system like a safe thing to play with.
There is strong evidence that young children in congregate daycare have substantially stronger immune systems than children cared for at home who are only exposed to family members.
A lookup of systematic reviews on Cochrane & Epistemonikos paints the opposite picture, with a positive correlation between daycare attendance and respiratory tract disorders or asthma.
You got it:
Roslund, M. I., Puhakka, R., Grönroos, M., Nurminen, N., Oikarinen, S., Gazali, A. M., ... & ADELE research group. (2020). Biodiversity intervention enhances immune regulation and health-associated commensal microbiota among daycare children. Science advances, 6(42), eaba2578.
Thank you! Interesting to see an intervention trial. n=75 is what it is, given the possible confounders (could not control home environment, etc) but I'll be interested to read that in more details =)
I ate dirt as a child. Dirt is natural, healthy, and as long as the shit in it is broken down, pretty much harmless. I have a great immune system to this day. My little brother, who spent his early childhood in the city, is nowhere near as robust, and gets sick frequently.
If you believe that vaccines may have potentially positive effects beyond their original scope, you must also be ready for the opposite, potential negative effects beyond their original scope. If you don't, you are just being brainwashed by big Pharma.
I wish I had the time to make a chrome extension that replaced all usages of "big pharma" with "a thing I don't personally understand but hand-wave away because I refuse to do proper research on my own".
It would make such comments much more meaningful and honest.
Depends on the context. "Big Tech" can mean working for a large, often FAANG company. But there are markedly less conspiracies cooked up about big tech than there are about big pharma.
Said like someone who completely avoid the whole argument by convenience.
Big Pharma is a thing. A consolidated industry with very few major players who have huge regulatory capture. You can either continue being blind to it or realize they have a disproportionate influence in how decisions are taken.
Pharmaseutical companies cannot just place products on the shelf without regulation. And no, they do not have some conspired place in the government rungs that gives them any sort of sway. There were LOADS of pharma companies that were denied the ability to produce a vaccine because they didn't meet the requirements.
And just like your doctors aren't incentivized to misdiagnose you to run more tests and get more money from you, pharma companies are not incentivized to mislead patients and make them think they need 10 shots when 1 will do. There are so, so many independent research groups, including several in the government, that would love to publish findings that pharma companies are misleading people. It does happen, but not often.
That's tribal thinking, "us vs them". You want to spite "them", who ostensibly don't know a thing about vaccine, but you never bothered to learn it yourself
The worse part is that anti-vax can just mean anti-mandate. Spiting in that context doesn’t make any sense since anti-vaxers still believe in effectiveness of vaccines.
I am pretty sure this would lead to more faster aging. Immune system ages itself, and collateral damage it does during fight response is not 0. There is limited amount of resources for stuff, it the only stuff you do is fighting various shit around, the body will probably turn off other non important stuff for immediate survival.
Also, you should think sometimes about aspirin and Spanish fever phenomena.
For people like me who weren’t familiar, aspirin toxicity may have led to the extreme mortality at the peak of the Spanish flu. [0]
> The hypothesis presented herein is that aspirin contributed to the incidence and severity of viral pathology, bacterial infection, and death, because physicians of the day were unaware that the regimens (8.0–31.2 g per day) produce levels associated with hyperventilation and pulmonary edema in 33% and 3% of recipients, respectively.
I opened Wikipedia to see what you mean with the mention of the library, and there I read:
> Despite the widespread modern belief that the Library of Alexandria was burned once and cataclysmically destroyed, the Library actually declined gradually over the course of several centuries.
And yet you still won't be fully protected. Seems to me there's lots of vaxx regret from the double dosed, when they find out about omicron.
I'll check if you post in a few months. Otherwise, thank you for your contribution to science. In the mean time, don't recommend taking up competitive soccer.
Before signing up for this particular vaccine you might want to read up on what inhibition of antiapoptotic & apoptotic pathways means for your health.
Not fully but it’s fair to say. greed plays a role in all human interactions. Organisational failure is a hard thing to pin down. Mix in the banality of evil and strange things can happen. Felix Hoffman the scientist at Bayer who is credited (somewhat disputed now) as discovering heroin and aspirin in the same week. He was just a chemist. The company was just out to make a profit. Crack epidemics in almost every country were the effect. Bit of a long winded way to say it doesn’t have to be black or white and to also that we can’t tell for sure the full effects of anything until well after.
Yeah, why be immuned when you can be invincible. Keep us updated when you gotten all the vax injected. How you plan to deal with recurring one that become ineffective fast like the rabbies vax. You scheduled every couple of weeks? Maybe an online blog and checklist to motivate others to compete who get jabbed the most.
A blog is a great idea, though it probably won't be very interesting. Unless he happens to have adverse reactions (which are rare), there won't be anything to report on except "I still feel fine and I still haven't contracted xyz."
As for the rabies vaccine, I don't think you can just ask for that to be administered -- unless, I suppose, you lie about being bitten by a random animal. As an aside, I have amusing memories of my own rabies vaccine 25 years ago -- a series of injections of thick syrup into my butt.
that sounds pretty cringe to get unnecessarily medical treatments just to spite people. even if its harmless in the end. have you considered just getting the ones you need and not worrying about anti-vaxxers?
You should understand that there's a hard limit of how much of it is usable. Get too much in, something will never again wake up. You can't be all-around immune, that's not how it works. Unless you alter how it works, you won't ever be.
Please don't post generic flamebait to HN, regardless of how right you are or feel you are. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.
Biochemical cascades in just one cell are very complex, and involve very large molecules. They are triggered by changes in solutions of these very large molecules, heat, and immuno cells. Tissue consists of billions of cells. These are "just" chemical reactions which we still haven't come close to getting right, such as the right dose of blood thinners to prevent clots from afib while not causing brain bleeds, or the right dose of statins that reverse artery plaques while not destroying your liver or the right dose of beta blockers that lower blood pressure without diluting your kidneys.
Gene space is extremely large, close to a cosmic scale. At first genes were only thought to play a role in cell division. Then came gene expression and transcription inside and outside the cell, such as protein receptors and secretion. It is very likely genetic mutations do not rely on "just" chemistry and take into account quantum effects. Despite mapping the billions of genes required and structuring them all the right way, you still get unexpected runaway mutations, because genetic molecule outsides do not represent the insides, it's impossible to determine, and impossible to configure.
Genetic molecules may not exhibit quantum behavior. Likely they do regards to genetic mutations. But neurons certainly do, in regards to their chemical and electrical synapses. I have heart disease. 10 months out of the year I'm barely consciousness. However my family members say I'm still in there somewhere. Compare this to my heart disease is cured, but family members fail to recognize me anymore, adamantly agree across the board I'm not me and now won't have anything to do with me. With mice, you can kill them by the thousands until you get one that glows in the dark or has a human ear growing out it's back. You're left with an incredibly large set of genetic and neural data you will never fully understand, never know its complete, and never know if it has been recorded correctly as that one mouse's body decomposes, and then dump it all in someone else's lap and ask for more money and more privileges to do this to everyone in the world.
Science is still very incomplete and what it needs is often directly opposed by the legitimate needs of people, such as not being horribly poisoned. It's still very much trial and error: "Hey, this guy got by with it. Let's try it on someone who's dying. What have we got to loose"? And also opportunity, as in "the Earth will experience an interference pattern of gravity waves as two neutron stars collide in front of a series of black holes acting as a divider. Get the data." Science still involves much hope, as in, even when you lack opportunity, rules of decency still apply.
> A Japanese research team said it developed a vaccine to remove so-called zombie cells that accumulate with age
So it's designed to make humans immortal? Sounds like it's more likely to create zombies than destroy them. I half suspected the article to say that this vaccine was a product of the Umbrella Corporation.
Haha of course it is... Whenever you see an amazing research result you immediately know it's in mice.
If I want to be a bit cynical... In the future we will likely find that these cells serve an important purpose and that we can't just eliminate them. The research needs to be done though!
16 is too young and you won't be able to do a lot of things unless you walk around with paperwork all the time. 24 sounds good but I'd pick 30 cause looking 30 people take you a bit more seriously.
You will be able to relate more with people in their 30swhen you are 50 but look 30 than with people in their 20s.
Of course in this hypothetical scenario if everyone is not aging then it all cahnges.
they’d find other ways to kill each other. that’s not facetious—our egos depend on getting an edge, however microscopic, over others, and when that doesn’t happen, we get angry (that is, desperate and irrational) and do things we shouldn’t. it’s a tale as old as time.
that ‘modern’, ‘developed’ civilizations haven’t devolved this way yet isn’t because we’re all so cultivated now, but because we’ve lived in an unusual period of extended growth and excessive abundance which keeps destructive competition at bay. but infighting (i.e., tribalism) has been rising over the past 50+ years and is threatening to overthrow that period of prosperity and civility.
Speak for your own brain, I didn't make particularly impulsive decisions at that age nor at 40 do I have a problem with the logic behind the conclusions my 16 yo self made (I obviously had less data to draw from which wouldn't be an issue at year 50 of being 16). Just sayin'
Lord of the Flies is such a tired example to hold forth. It's purely fictional and not generally representative of human behaviour. There is even a recorded incident of school boys being stranded on an island and living perfectly peacefully for more than a year https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/the-real-lord-...
Yes, humans can be violent but we are obviously more predisposed to be cooperative otherwise we would have never made it this far as a species. You can't put 10,000 unrelated members of any other species in one place and not expect chaos, with humans it's no problem as long as everyone involved has food in their bellies and the promise of going home after a few hours. That's our real defining trait, getting along with each other, our intelligence wouldn't do a lick of good if we didn't have that.
I started supplementing testosterone for reasons unrelated to hair loss. It has completely stopped and even reversed my thinning on top after just a few months.
observing professional sports, you find that despite physical fitness/attributes having already plateaued in the early-mid twenties, people reach peak athletic performance in our late twenties when our mental facilities have fully matured and we have some modicum of experience.
27-29 is probably exactly the maximizing range, for this reason.
I'm not sure allowing the beginning of deterioration that occurs after around 25 is a good thing in this scenario. The mental maturity is most likely largely a result of experience. I'm sure it has some hormonal impact, but that doesn't automatically mean late 20s is superior if we can maintain the healing capacity of a 18 year old while increasing our experience and therefore ability to process the whole picture.
I guess it comes down to: is the capacity of strategy developed as a result of age, or as a result of experience?
physical deterioration doesn’t really become evident until after/around 30 (the end of the plateau). neural development happens well into our 20s, with a long plateau into our 30s and a gradual decline after that (only becoming substantial around retirement age). growth from experience seems to be substantial into the teens, where it hits an inflection point and starts to decelerate but still climbs, albeit more slowly over time, well into our 40s at least but possibly our whole lifetimes.
we’d still get the most bang for buck if our age was ‘frozen’ in the late 20s because experience would still accumulate regardless, but we’d have maximized the combo of physical and mental growth. it’s only obvious in retrospect how immature we are at 18, both physically and mentally, or even at 25. that’s why sports is such a neat test bed, because it taxes both facilities enough to tease out these otherwise unnoticeable dynamics.
At 35. It's well known that human brain development does not end until past 30. Even before scientifically proven, intellectuals and teachers have observed anecdotes such as that singing only can begun to be mastered around the age 35.
From Lilli Lehmann's How to Sing, page 108 (originally authored in the late 1800s):
"No woman of less than twenty-four years should sing soubrette parts, none of less than twenty-eight years second parts, and none of less than thirty-five years dramatic parts; that is early enough."
But not all senolytics are created equal. They differ in what cells they work on, how powerful they are, and how specific they are (the ratio of senescent to healthy cells they kill).
Here's a quote from the article
> Many of the existing drugs to remove senescent cells are used as anti-cancer agents and may cause negative side effects. Side effects from the new vaccine were fewer, while its efficacy lasted longer, the team said
Imagine the costs of a vaccine that would make you immortal in the US? Surely not everyone would be able to afford it.
But then we could implement an immortality lottery, to give everyone a shot. That could be the devious slogan: “everyone gets a shot”. Devious because not everyone does, of course.
If you win you get the vaccine and live forever, but your friends and family aren’t included.
Death represents a pretty serious destruction of human capital. If people will work forever, then why not let them live forever, much less retraining and less money spent on recruiting. This is only semi-sarcastic;)
Thank you for your application for "Junior Developer". Unfortunately we only take applicants with 100 years of JavaScript experience, 100 years of c++, at least 2M stars on GitHub contributions, and 4 PhDs in machine learning, and 200 StackOverflow points.
Feel free to apply again next time Halley's comet is visible.
Death does allow for new cultural shift in society, imagine if all the politicians lived forever, the space for change would be even more limited than it is now/
Stop being a Luddite. That’s how technology works. First it’s available to only the super rich because it is expensive, then over time with advances and improvement or production it becomes more widely available. It’s cell therapy, it will inevitable end up becoming cheap.
It’s going to be really hard keeping immortality under wraps now. The world is globalized and even under the most pessimistic of timelines it will eventually be open knowledge.
Imagine the financial output in USA extended by immortality. Like the Covid vaccine, it would be free to anyone. A government would be foolish to miss out on the increased financial output of it's citizens.
But of course a vaccine against aging isn't a ticket to immortality. Death comes in all forms, if you vaccinate against aging, another leading cause of death will come along.
"Imagine the costs of a vaccine that would make you immortal in the US? Surely not everyone would be able to afford it"
Why not? Surely that would depend on how much it costs to make, maybe it would be cheap as chips?
Oh, I see you completely subscribe to the customer theory of value, where price is dictated by "how much is it worth to the client?"
In that case it would have to be a subscribtion. Or, once you get the shot, the company ownes you. Come to this of it, the two situations are actually the same.
> The team, including Juntendo University professor Toru Minamino, confirmed that mice administered with the vaccine showed decreases in the zombie cells, medically known as senescent cells, and in areas affected by arterial stiffening.
By now this has become a trope. "Researchers develop new treatment for {UNTREATED_DISEASE}" ... in mice.
Mouse models of human disease are very limited in their predictive ability. There's a lot of research that needs to follow this before there's even a hope of a human trial, let alone vaccine. And the failure rate for treatments at the mouse stage is quite high.
Some of the comments on this thread treat this research paper as the announcement of an an imminent anti-aging vaccine. It's not.
There are many imminent aging therapies in clinical trials though or upcoming. Not saying it will reverse it but it may slow it down and compress the morbidity period. Such therapies include the promising Mayo Clinic trial on using large doses of Fisetin to get rid of senescent cells, or similarly Dasatnib + Quercetin, gene therapy like PGC-1a for maintaining muscle mass in older age, epigenetic reprogramming, mTOR inhibitors like Sirolimus or other rapalogues, etc.
So it’s very likely that some of the advances we see today that are still in clinical stage will hit the market in 5 to 15 years.
Unless they're "participants" in an experiment related to McDonald's, it's probably closer to say they spend their life eating the equivalent of Soylent.
Though 1/3 of my meals are Soylent, so even that doesn't seem entirely terrible.
I didn't interpret the parent comment as arguing against mice models, just that there is a huge gap between finding something that works in mice and then applying it to humans (with tons and tons of false starts), that any pronouncements that imply that human treatments are on the horizon are premature.
I am curious, why are they still using mice and not tiny monkeys? If they are using some animals, why use random mice and not a primate? Any specific reason other than tradition?
Sounds like an opportunity for those living in friendlier jurisdictions. Lab-as-a-service in a warm country with a relaxed legal regime for biomedical studies?
dwonvoting for curiosity is dangerous. If one finds this comment distasteful, it is much more valuable for future readers to explain why, rather than downvote and keep scrolling.
Completely agree that the response is a trope at this point.
I've seen more comment section finger wagging in response to science articles, offering such wisdom as correlation isn't causation, XYZ "isn't a panacea", research into treatments to mitigate or avoid cancer "don't cure cancer", statistical confidence of 95% falls short of absolute proof, and any number of extraneous add-ons that make caricatures of the research and then bat those caricatures down.
It reminds me of this quip from the Onion, back in 2009:
"All that in just six years? Wow, that's so amazing. If you can't tell, I'm being sarcastic. And I'm being sarcastic because I don't understand the significance of the study."
Even the ever exaggerating pop sci article does not mention an increase in lifespan... At face value this seems more like evidence against the senescent cells theory of aging.
This is basic science; early research. Not immediately applicable, and harder for many people to see the benefit, but important. Humans share much fundamental biology with other mammals. Moue tests aren't guaranteed to be directly applicable, but it's what we've got.
> Humans share much fundamental biology with other mammals.
It's like saying a rock and a plant share fundamental atoms with each other. Biology even from one close specie to another is so mindbogglingly unpredictable that we don't have good models. In 2021.
I guess if it does NOT work on mice, it's highly unlikely to work on humans? In this case, it might be good predictor of failure, which can save a lot of money. Just speculating...
Also, if something really bad goes on mice, we can avoid having that happening to humans. Which I would also value a lot.
I mean, it seems to me experimenting on mice might be worth it.
> I guess if it does NOT work on mice, it's highly unlikely to work on humans?
There is virtually no relationship whatsoever between what works in mice and humans. Such headlines are completely ridiculous by now: the track record of applicability is a train wreck.
No, this is wrong. The point is to figure out what chemicals react with living creatures in what way. We're not creating super-mice, we're not making the rats of NIMH, we're blindly fumbling about for one of the septillions of light switches we haven't flipped yet to see what it does.
Figuring these things out is hard.
Humans are good at doing things they've done before, or imitating actions they've seen or heard before, but learning something entirely new is very very difficult. We have more scientists alive and working on problems now than ever before in human history and still the mill of innovation turns slowly.
the first engineered superintelligent mouse will discover that humans have solved all his problems and will make a mouse pharma empire out of their discoveries.
I don’t recommend this, nor have I tried it: Some people experiment with high doses, like 1-2g, within one day, twice a week. Anecdotal reports of scars fading, but also scary effects like hypocoagulation (won’t stop bleeding). Just internet rumors though, I‘d wait for clinical studies.
Doses used in the Mayo Clinic trial was about 1.5g to 2g for humans, 5 days per month, iirc. Also keep in mind that if you are young and healthy you won’t notice much and it’s the kind of treatment like most that are long-term, meaning you can’t do it 3 months and expect results.
From reading that paper, the purpose of senescent cells is to prevent tumor growth. I don't know if I'd want to suppress or eliminate that functionality over a long period of time.
Senescent cells themselves do not exist to prevent tumor growth.
Cells becoming senescent is a mechanism that exists to prevent them from becoming a possible tumor, due to DNA damage.
The problem with senescent cells is that accumulation of them results in tissues not functioning correctly. Eliminating them should make tissues function better.
After all, your own immune system gets rid of senescent cell, but as we age, I believe your immune system is unable to keep up.
The paper says fisetin reduced the number of senescent cells in a sample. It’s not clear if that means the cells were eliminated or if the were prevented from entering a senescent state. Do you know the answer? The former sounds better than the later.
All I can say is that the paper overwhelmingly uses the term "senolytic", which means to "kill off the senescent" (I'm assuming that it refers to senescent cells), as opposed to "senostatic", which means to "delay senescence".
Additionally, the concern brought up by the paper, is that senescent cells are known to be resistant against something called "apoptosis", which is a term to describe "programmed cell death". The goal of the paper is to explore a compound—fisetin—for its senolytic capabilities. Whether it is successful at finding that, I haven't fully read the paper to see if they have identified fisetin as a senolytic, or a senostatic agent.
With that said, however, some of the graphs in the paper does highlight that as fisetin dose increases, not only do senescent cells get depleted, but so do total number of cells. If we were working with a purely senostatic agent, relative to a control, the senescent cells would be much lower, but the overall cell count would be much higher, which is not the case with fisetin. Does this mean that fisetin is a senolytic? Maybe not; it could just indiscriminately target all cells, resulting in fewer cells. Or maybe it is. Who knows.
Or maybe my logic about cell counts regarding senostatic vs senolytic may be entirely wrong.
>Fisetin reduced senescence in a subset of cells in murine and human adipose tissue, demonstrating cell-type specificity.
As someone who works and publishes in a related field, this particular phrasing should be interpreted as meaning that Fisetin is unproven as a senolytic.
GPMNB seems to be expressed in cancer cells. Cancer cells are usually kind of screwed up and senescent. Maybe it's one of those little anti-cancer Rube Goldberg machines like p53 that starts popping off triggering apoptosis when things get weird in the cell.
There's a limit on the number of times a cell can divide(the telomere length), so it seems like a "vaccine" against them would decrease lifespan by reducing the limit by 1.
But it sounds like cells reaching that limit, cause other effects(inflammation, etc.) that are perhaps even worse for lifespan. So this wouldn't be an anti-aging vaccine, but would reduce symptoms of aging.
If this is real, it will be huge, but my suspicions are on high alert. Why only Japan Times, and not "Breaking News! Immortality in humanity's grasp!" taking over the airwaves like O.J. Simpson's car chase?
Sometimes I hit the comments first because at times they’ve been more interesting than the article as topically educated folks weigh in on the content.
>When the team administered the vaccine to mice....
There is something that already exists that's free. Multi day fasting to induce autophagy. It's not pleasant or as convenient as getting a shot/taking pills but it's been perfected over the last couple of million years with no side affects except discomfort. You might also try adding a dose of exercise (more discomfort) and cutting out things like Fructose (20% of the American diet) completely.
The day we escape death will begin the descent into the longest dark age humanity will ever experience.
Death is necessary to allow new ideas and change to be brought into the world. Death is necessary to prevent wealth and power accumulating into fewer hands. Death is necessary for others to enjoy the right to bear and raise children.
EDIT: 2 minutes go by and this comment has already been downvoted 3+ times. At least respond before you downvote.
Maybe in 2A Jesusland death is the only option, but in other parts of the world there are taxes and proportional representation and euthanasia.
Yes, there are problems, but saying that death (and more specifically aging with all of its shitty slow painful consequences) is great (okay, you said necessary), because it somehow "solves" other problems is a logical fallacy.
Plus, "actually" aging is one of the things that causes inequality, because wealthy people live longer thanks to having access to better healthcare, food, lifestyle, etc.
I think parent comment is going along the lines "Altered Carbon" tv series ( and novels ) thread.
For instance, if eternal life could be bought, the first one to buy it could be the richest man in the world. Parent is not happy with the idea of an inmortal ruler.
In the mean time, I would like to stay younger for longer. And older people are still afraid of death, even if they are not healthy.
what I'm trying to say (besides that the Takeshi Kovacs trilogy is aweeeesome!) is that these problems are already here, and are already solvable. regular dictators consolidate their power in a 5-10 years. corporations/memes/ideologies/religions are already immortal. and so on, and so on.
aging and death is basically a disease of the poor. the solution is not more aging/death, but less poverty.
There's the general fear of death that drives a significant portion of human morality. If we can't die, we don't fear risking doing things that would result in our own deaths, or the deaths of others. Suddenly we can inflict a lot more harm and give a lot less of a shit what people think, because what are they gonna do, put me in jail for 1,000 years? I'm just going to live for infinity after that...
Aging is a significant source of perspective. As people age, the way they think about their lives change, the way they approach risk changes. Those changes in both thought process and lifestyle are probably one of the biggest contributors to how human societies work. We have probably never had a human society without aging people, so we don't know what a society without their influence would look like.
If people continue to be born, we would eventually run out of space. At that point you reach a new form of political crisis: do you kill people to make space? Do you shuffle them off the planet in rudimentary space stations? Do wars over resource contention increase? Certainly different "seniority" would lead to new social classes.
Death is a necessary part of evolution. If we eliminate death, we have to alter living people's genomes to respond to biological threats, mix up the gene pool, adapt to new problems and somehow try to predict unexpected ones. All of that is currently science fiction; we have no idea if we would get it right, and could end up basically destroying the species from hubris and ignorance. Nature has a pretty good handle on it.
Cultures should change over time, and people need to change with those cultural changes, but it's basically impossible for individual humans to completely change their entire cultural makeup. Can you imagine if people today lived alongside people from 3,000 years ago? We would end up separated not just by nations, but by epochs. It would just further segregate people and cause tension. The world would be so much more complicated than it is today.
Death is part of a process of cultural natural selection. It creates and changes and influences more than it destroys. Entire peoples are wiped out and new ones emerge, languages die and are born, knowledge is lost and created, practices are abandoned and instantiated. Shakespeare was dramatically influenced by death; it's a major plot point in basically all of his writings. Imagine if death simply didn't exist in his world.
Society won't stay the same if we don't die from age induced problems. Lots of rules and laws will have to change. To say death is only option undercuts the potential for humans to change and become better.
Throughout history there have been plenty of people in power and rule to see the errors of their ways and induce lasting real positive change. Sure there will be growing and transition pains but I for one welcome the impacts that human longevity will bring longer term.
You know, Francisco Franco, the spanish dictator, died of old age. ( He suffered an infection and died )
He was smart and powerful enough to live a long life.
Hmm. Do you mean to imply an external Dorian Gray effect may happen: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Picture_of_Dorian_Gray? Wonder if there would be any other biological intra-cellular or inter-cellular Dorian Gray effects that may happen? Or, if this may really be a new free lunch.
1. Removing senescent cells extends life by 30-40% with huge quality of life improvements in the last 25% of the life (relative to control), in mice. This isn't an elimination of all aging, but quite a valuable thing regardless. Eventually, other causes of aging would kick in and still cause death, without a single senescent cell in your body (e.g. DNA methylation).
2. I believe all governments should create Warpspeed for this approach. At the depths of covid lockdowns, GDP was down 20%. Imagine the massive GDP creation from making every 65+ year old feel 40 again. They'd work, consume, and generally flourish. Even if it's only 10 more years of quality life, this is the greatest good that could be done for humanity. To avoid another 10 years of my parents death is something I'd do a lot for. Economically and ethically, we should prioritize this research above most else.
3. This approach is scientifically sound. Certain aspects of aging cures are approaching engineering levels of work rather than pure science. We simply know that many diseases are caused or amplified by senescent cells. And we have ample evidence that elimination of these cells reverses diseases in complex mammals, as long as you don't remove too many, too quickly. The rest, is the engineering problem of how to remove the right cells at the right cadence.
4. This is the kind of thing biohackers should hack on. Find an aging part of your skin, and attempt to convince your body to kill the senescent cells. If you succeed, you will have benefited humanity, become beautiful, become wealthy, and be remembered forever (is there any other fundamental need humans have, not covered)?
>Economically and ethically, we should prioritize this research above most else.
This research and all similar research (and sentiments like yours, which I strongly agree with) remind me of the classic Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant.[0] It feels as though we are finally on the cusp of learning the shape of the armaments that will one day slay the dragon. And I wish the world could band together the way we attacked COVID to attack this problem.
>the king answered in a broken voice: “Yes, we did it, we killed the dragon today. But damn, why did we start so late? This could have been done five, maybe ten years ago! Millions of people wouldn’t have had to die.”
TLDR: a big dragon (represents aging) kills tens of thousands of people every day, until the people invest in technology to defeat it, and then vaguely wish they'd started the research sooner.
Yes, what will we do without the famous upward mobility of the factory worker?
Seriously though, the majority of humans never see material upward mobility in their lifetimes, and a world without mandatory low-wage jobs per se isn't necessarily a world without upward mobility.
A world without mobility is one without agency...and humanity has been defined by agency. Without it, we might as well not exist, not as humans anyway.
Jobs creating wagon wheels are a limited resource.
As humans are able to automate activities that span the creation of everything we find valuable, from resource collection to manufacture to transportation to design to art, that necessarily limits the economic efficiency of using humans for labor. The last 3 years have demonstrated that creative tasks are highly susceptible to automation, with most artistic automation approaching or exceeding human performance as proofs of concept. The next decades will see an ever decreasing landscape of activities where humans are more effective than software.
Jobs are endeavors defined around the exchange of money for labor. It does not make sense to pay more money for less effective labor - i.e. if I can pay $30k usd for a burger flipper robot, I won't have to pay for 2 full time burger flipper jobs. It makes no sense to hire people for labor that can be automated.
We're a long ways away from being able to automate everything, but the trend is clear. Jobs don't make sense under our current technological path. We either have to eliminate progress in that direction and artificially enforce a human preference job efficiency limit so as to maintain a "sufficient" number of jobs, or start exploring new economic models that let us transition to post-scarcity economics.
We are, however, going to see a time where anything humans can do, machines will do better. Using humans will be inefficient, and companies will be out competed if they don't automate. We can either prepare for that and try to make things fair, or assume new jobs will arise that will make meaningful enterprises available to people through innovation and novel opportunities that haven't yet been conceived. It seems clear to me that the latter is basically invention of make work, and we need to prepare for post scarcity.
We don't need agi. We have Moore's law and "good enough" algorithms to achieve human parity performance. We should figure out a better measure of the value of human time than jobs and employment.
We also have to take care of old people, and the less we have to do that for the period of their lives, the cheaper everything could be because there are less dependents to support. A countries economy is often reflected in their dependent / non-dependent ratio, and the less non-dependents you have, the better economies perform!
(a) In the current economic model jobs are simply not a limited resource. For instance, immigration creates jobs because among other things, you need more resources to sustain more people.
(b) In the future, there will be more humans than jobs anyways thanks to automation and this is a problem we are going to have to face one way or another. Social contract will change, and the economy will need to be refactored commensurately.
They do exist in a limited supply. When a factory closes down and outsources all the jobs in a town, your job goes away.
When a robot starts doing your job, you are not needed anymore for that job. People in ivory towers expect that you should easily retrain and find new jobs that does not happen for the average joe.
When an immigrant is willing to do your job for less money or less safety, you dont get that job unless you are willing to compromise.
Now with all this you are going to have older people not retire then you are reducing the job pool for younger folks.
> Jobs work the same way.
In reality smart politicians can tap into the fear and frustration of average folks when good paying jobs run out and they promise they will bring back jobs, so voters vote for them.
Actually they do. Without naming names, let's assume two populations, A and B.
A-Females are willing to marry B-Males, but B-Females are not willing to marry A-Males. This creates lots of abundance for B-Males and lots of scarcity for A-Makes.
As for jobs, in theory they can always be created a new. But in practice there are 1) very few people who can create jobs 2) external forces that might prevent new jobs from being created
I'm sorry but so many people are waiting for the boomers to die and relinquish control over our lives. I'm not sure we should warp speed this quite yet
This is essentially creating an auto-immune disease in old age - by having the body target it's own cells. It's also not clear how the researchers prevented the immune cells from dying in the Thymus (who's function is specifically to prevent immune cells from being coded to attack cells in the body - it's like a UAT environment).
...but the bigger question would be - If this protein encoded a protein that identified cells which should always be eliminated in old age; why hasn't any mammal evolved to start destroying them?
It's more likely that there is some trade-off which we have not discovered yet.
Evolution doesn’t optimise for length of life, just propagation. A number of species have evolved to have very short life cycles because that enabled greater propagation. Presumably shorter lives generally confer greater adaptability as it increases the opportunity for evolutionary change
Evolution can optimize for longer lifespans if it makes propagation more favorable. It happened in humans — grandparents make us more successful. Except when they run our governments.
Evolution does optimize longevity in at least one way.
Chromosomes have a limited number of telomeres, each time the cell divides the telomeres become shorter. If your cell runs out of telomeres it can't divide anymore. This is one of the primary mechanisms the body balances repair against cancer risk. Current max of human life is about 120. If you don't "solve" the telomere problem you are not going to extend life past 120, though you may have more people live that long and may improve quality of life in later years.
Our species has a good balance that lets us live well past reproduction age, presumably because there is evolutionary pressure (benefit) to having elderly people around to pass on knowledge, help raise grandchildren, etc.
You can do things that extend the telomeres, but that makes cells more likely to reproduce out of control (cancer). This is a very hard "problem" to solve because cell final death is so important in preventing cancer. We are not even close to solving this, it would require revolutionary biological understanding.
Couldn't there be 1:1 replacement of pretty much everything in the human body? Organs, bad/old cells for good/new ones...etc?
Nanobots at some point may be able to essentially destroy bad/old cells, and maybe feed/nourish good cells we want to keep, and when cells can't divide anymore, could those be replaced with ones that could ?
I think back to the movie Bicentennial man, where he made completely real working human / robot interchangeable parts that basically allow for increased life and better health. Sure it's a movie, but we can 3d print organs and things, so it's not outside the realm of possibility...
Think of telomeres like a counter at the DNA level. Each time the cell reproduces, it loses a counter. Eventually it runs out of counters and dies. To extend life you have to add telomeres. And you have to do it in an extremely careful way that still manages to control cancer.
In a sci-fi hypothetical where nanobytes can do arbitrary behaviors, sure, maybe they could intelligently do that. But that's an extremely complex thing.
My point to my original post is really that if anyone hears a "longer life" breakthru that doesn't even mention telomeres, I immediately move on. If they moved the needle on well-being of the elderly a bit, that's great. But nobody's "solving aging" without telomeres.
Telomeres are just the cell's odometer. Sure, rolling it back is good assuming that it extends the lifespan of the cell, but it still has the dents and dings it's picked up along the way from radiation & pollution, free radicals and oxidation.
This seems like part of the puzzle. First repair the damage, then extend the time span, and the more you do this the more opportunities you have to find an optimal solution.
I think the only thing that will actually work is for entirely new bodies to be built and for our minds to be copied over.
It's not immortality but that is probably as close as we will get, and once we can do that then extending our current body's lifespan will be exponentially easier.
Telomerase - an Enzyme found in Gamete and Stem (and Tumor!) Cells can reverse this Telomere shortening. Cycloastragenol derived from Astragalus herb can supposedly activate Telomerase - unfortunately it's very expensive to extract in significant quantities eg TA-65 costs $800 for 90 capsules. I tried it for a while and definitely noticed an effect, better skin, vivid dreams more energy. High cost and some concern over potential for Tumor promotion put me off continuing.
There's doesn't have to be a major (from our perspective) trade-off if historically the benefit under selection was very marginal, probably somewhat more so both because of menopause and historical lifespans often being shorter.
"It's more likely that there is some trade-off which we have not discovered yet."
Clearly some tradeoffs are less relevant today than they were to a tribe of cavemen. Even if grandpa is in great shape, he will have a hard time hunting thay wooley mamoth, and having him around too long will be too many mouths to feed.
Also it's hypothetically possible to give everyone a ripped physique without gym memberships, downside of this would be increased protein consumption.
> why hasn't any mammal evolved to start destroying them?
I think that evolution selects mostly for reproduction and not longevity. You don't have to live very long to have many kids (in like caveman / hunter-gatherer type of context as this is where evolution is basically), you just need to have great genetics. I guess sticking around for a few years after to protect the kids and provide for them is a bonus, but that part may be handled by the tribe too. But there's not much to be gained (from evolutionary point of view) from an individual living up to a 100 years or so.
Voluntary human experimentation is less clear-cut. Having watched the decline of members of my family through their 80s and 90s, some of whom have clearly wanted to die in the last few years, I'd seriously consider taking a risky treatment for senescence at that age. Trading the worst years of your life for medical data and a tiny bit of hope could be a good deal.
I thought it was interesting that no country in the world did challenge vaccination trials despite there being many volunteers. I don’t know if I’d call that refusal red tape exactly but it’s in the neighborhood.
Accelerated FDA approvals (willingness to grant EUAs), fewer blocks around human trials, even just having the FDA respond faster and more definitively would be a huge improvement over their current opaque processes (waiting weeks to even get a response to an email).
Have you ever filed anything with the FDA? I have. The process is (understandably) cumbersome, but it is well described. I certainly don’t think communication is a barrier to drug development.
There are a lot of things that could be tweaked, but at a gross level it’s pretty consistent. In fact the recent, seemingly politicized, accelerated approval of aducanumab certainty caused a lot of turmoil and appears to have been a mistake.
When I was gestating my mother’s colleagues apparently couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t take the miracle drug thalidomide (much less even aspirin). Lucky for me! In general I think the medical side of FDA works reasonably well.
Maybe instead of maximising GDP we should maximise happiness and there's plenty of low hanging fruit. I mean people are still starving to death and dying of preventable diseases...
It’s an interesting idea, but how would you measure happiness? For example coal pollutes, so at first glance maybe coal plants should get a negative happiness index. Then some plants close, and heating costs go up and people get cold because they can’t afford the electric heat in their homes. Are they happier without the coal? Would they be happier with the coal and the pollution? Does this solve the problem in a way that GDP measures can’t?
Happiness is a direct co-relation to GDP. The growth of a civilization is directly as a result of GDP.
For example being in nature brings you happiness. BUT this is only in well developed countries and among people with enough wealth to live comfortably.
Money does not make you happy but it gives you much more opportunity to be happy.
> Happiness is a direct co-relation to GDP. The growth of a civilization is directly as a result of GDP.
That’s actually not correct. By that argument the happiest country should be the United States as it has the largest GDP. However the United States ranks #19 on the World Happiness Report: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/happiest-...
Older people are happier than younger people, pretty much every such survey confirms it. Young people don't appreciate their looks and health when they have it.
There is an endless amount of hate for millennials unfortunately. However, just because an older generation is hating on millennials doesn’t mean that society as a whole doesn’t place a greater value on youth. While this example is anecdotal it kind of drives home some of the problems I feel that we have in society.
“Soya told the TV programme Getsuyou Kara Yofukashi (Sitting Up Late From Monday) that he had wanted to increase his presence on social media and believed people would prefer to see a "younger beautiful woman" rather than an old "uncle".”
> 2. I believe all governments should create Warpspeed for this approach.
It wont be because of Govt but private business or a Uni maybe, you see if everyone lived a US lifestyle we need 4 planet earths, everyone living a UK lifestyle would required 2.5 planet earths, an EU lifestyle 2 planet earths, so do you see the problem if lifespans were increased any more than they currently are? Humans have exceeded the carry capacity of this planet decades ago, which is why some people consider the "boomer" generation to have been the most fortunate to have lived. Our hopes are things like Labgrown meat and other energy saving innovations which can increase Planet Earths carry capacity. Until such time we will have to put up with life as it currently is, with some having a better life than others.
In an ideal world. Even if we achieve longevity with this approach, we can't use it for everyone. People need to die now more so than ever, where would we put them otherwise?
The whole idea behind the current pandemic is that people need to die, via vaccines, or the virus, or the media.
Nah, instead of that it requires winning a dose via lottery, and only 10k people are allowed per year. Ran via blockchain w/ complete transparency and no way to cheat or buy a dose if you're super wealthy.
We are currently at the brink of extinction, ironically by overpopulation. Everyone knew rapid growth is unsustainable, with 7.9 billion people on earth right now, we are causing more: Carbon emissions, global warming, pollution, environmental damage, ozone depletion etc.
Soon we won't have a planet to live in. I am sure mother nature will find more subtle but beautiful way to eradicate us.
But, hopefully we leave this small planet and explore other planets in near future.
I know it bad, but whenever I see a kid, I automatically think here's another person on this crowded plant we are ruining.
(And yes, I know the whole economic system might rely on having more kids, but maybe if there was a life extender adults could work more? Don't feel like a debate.)
> Even if it's only 10 more years of quality life, this is the greatest good that could be done for humanity
Why would that be your conclusion? It's 10 more years of life. It's not 10 more years of better life. It's a little more of the same.
That 10 years is "experienced" as only a short increase in local time. Whereas before 33% of your life would have been 28 years old, afterwards 33% of your life would be at 31 years old. So life events would happen a couple years sooner or later but you wouldn't feel the difference.
It's not like world hunger would end. In fact we would need more food, because more humans would be alive at any point, because people are dying later. The senior citizen voting block would increase, expanding the lobbying power of senior citizens, which has a disproportionate unfair effect on the young. Which will get interesting as time goes on seeing as the birth rate has been declining steadily.
It also means your retirement would not last long enough anymore, meaning you would either have to work longer or harder or save more in order to retire. Social security dates would also have to change, and paycheck contributions may even have to increase. But corporations won't want to increase wages (as they never want to) so your money won't go as far in retirement, and inflation would act on it over a longer time, reducing it further than before. And since it would be a voluntary vaccine, as we have seen from the COVID-19 insanity, just having a life-saving vaccine available is no guarantee people will take it. So there would be controversy over whether to extend social security, and some significant amount of the population is going to get screwed over.
Finally, as the wealthy will live even longer, more wealth will get tied up in private ownership for longer, extending the wealth gap. Copyright would also take even longer to expire as it's based on how long since the creator died. There's tons of other random ways that arbitrarily extending the life of a portion of the population will not immediately lead to the greatest good that could be done for humanity.
Call me crazy, but I think we could do much more good for humanity today than just making it take longer for them to die.
Also, stagnation as the ruling class, politicians, CxOs, artists, singers, authors, researchers and professors have longer to propagate their outdated mindsets. Paraphrasing Planck, "Science progresses one funeral at a time". Death makes room for the new.
>Imagine the massive GDP creation from making every 65+ year old feel 40 again. They'd work, consume, and generally flourish.
Yet another opportunity for boomers to fuck over their kids' generation by squeezing them out of the workforce again, and the lingering around longer than ever before, creating an unprecedented drain on social services that their children will have to pay for. Can't wait!
Great but the jump to the gov side really have a lot of nasty question. Who pay for the extra age? When you got to 65 now or to be is this extension good or bad for you and for those youngster 20-30 waiting for you to go.
It is social, political and psychological major changes. Revolution may be. Good luck.
Your view is too optimistic. We have all our financial problems now because baby boomers have been racking up unfunded liabilities and competing with millennials for the same jobs in the age of automation.
> Imagine the massive GDP creation from making every 65+ year old feel 40 again.
Come on. It's like more than half a century ago some economists predict because of the improvement of technology and the overall production, most people only need to work 4 hours per day.
aaand now we have a lot of people working 12 hours a day over the wire already. GDP is the millstone that when it's bigger it grinds more soul - because things are operated in scale as technology develops, individuals can only grab every opportunity they have, in order to participate in the economy, even when the opportunity is outstraight abusive.
There will be new jobs but new jobs are either rockstar economies like being social media celebrities, or bullshit jobs that people have to scratch their head and come up with overpriced bullshit products from nothing and marketing those as the best thing ever.
It's not unlikely we ended up working 16 hours a day pointlessly in the so-called metaverse half a century from now on.
Ok, but say the vaccine makes your 65 year old body feel like your 40 year old body, and you would only have to work for a few years to pay for it, say its 3 years salary a dose, and then you would get to be retired again as 68 with a 43 year old body to actually go and enjoy life with.
Go be cynical in the corner. Maybe your life hasn’t panned out all that well but stop injecting your pessimism into everything so the rest of us can have nice things.
This strikes me as similar to arguing that we shouldn’t give money to panhandlers because they’ll only go spend it on drugs.
Yes, we as a society have historically made poor decisions about what to do with productivity and lifespan increases. Let’s work on making better choices _and_ enhance our lifespans.
I'm not saying that we should stop making progress - creating new technologies that benefit the world is no doubt a great thing.
It's just the stress on GDP which makes me feel alarmed - historically speaking, things like GDP are always excuses to convince people they're goals worth following before we improve things like inequality or the quality of life. Do people now generally feel happier than half a century ago since GDP has drastically increased? Or the mental health of a large fraction of us was deteriorating all along over the decades?
It almost feels lies like "let us focus on delivering the features first, we'll get back to the technical debt once we have time" in some organizations - there are always new features, and always room for development, other things are always overlooked or keep bare minimum.
Back to the specific topic of increasing lifespan. Inequality is a problem much harder to solve than the technology itself. If we don't solve it carefully, it's very likely to be more harmful than helpful to the world. The right to live and the right to reproduction are the two most sensitive things to creatures - fundamentally it's much more risky than inventing the Internet or plastic surgery.
I can't help but think what I saw in the hospital - people with cancer and with no money giveaway their painkiller to drug dealers in exchange for some dirty motel nearby. Meanwhile, I know there are old, important figures who live in the hospital and spend several years of the average person's income per day, taking up a large fraction of scarce medical resources, equipment, and wards, just because they're old (many of them have no serious problems, just in case) and "important".
Think about the ancient tyrant who spent a lot, searching for immortality elixir died from poisoning. He became a laughing stock because the elixir didn't work, but it wouldn't be so funny if the elixir works. Nowadays, rich people can already fight cancer much better than poor people. Just imagine, how it feels when you know the first 0.1% of powerful figures you know (name the first 3 at least), are going to live for the next 500 years, but not everybody else?
Senescent cells are not permanent. They have a lifetime of days to weeks, and then they turn over and new cells become senescent. Also, there have been a number of trials of senolytic drugs, in Alzheimer's and in arthritis. Neither of them have had an effect. The senescence theory of aging is visually compelling but lacking in evidence in humans.
- the GP haven't said "fuck climate change", you did. There is no contradiction there, we can try and solve more than one issue at once.
- climate change objectively speaking kills way less people than ageing and will continue to kill less for the foreseeable future. You grandma (or grand-grandma) wasn't killed by climate change, neither will you.
- I don't know about you, but my life is not full of suffering, climate change or not, and I would prefer it to be longer and healthier. If yours is, I suggest looking at reasons other than climate change.
- We have to retrain every generation of scientists and engineers before they can contribute to solutions for any problem, climate change included. Increasing the amount of output per trainee by half goes a VERY long way towards solving our issues including climate change.
So, you are fixating on "healthy" and "long" life and you are SO afraid of death that the idea of aging cure seems to be attractive. Delusion, greed, and aversion are classic poisons that are the root cause of all human suffering.
When I was your age I too wished that such medical breakthroughs would help me live a little longer. As I got to my mid 30s I started wishing that it'll hopefully help my parents live a little longer and enjoy their time with grandkids.
I feel like one of the problems with anti-aging tech is that even if you can stop aging for yourself, the people you love or care about will still grow old all around you, and wither and die. Then you realize the real goal is not really to stop aging, it’s to stop all change, to freeze the world in a state of familiar comfort for as long as you can, to waste days laying out under a tree on a sunny day, guilt free, knowing that no time is being wasted, and that there is absolutely still time for everything in this world.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 90.9 ms ] threadAs an aside, to spite anti vaxxers I’m on a mission to get every vaccine I can. I want my bloodstream to be like the Library at Alexandria before it burned down.
Vaccines could potentially trigger some dangerous side effects, however rare it is.
However, vaccine for incredibly rare or non-existent disease isn't likely worth the tradeoff. Or maybe a particular vaccine is too dangerous or experimental.
Anyway, if the CDC recommend a vaccine for something, it's likely that they had looked into it and decided that the upside is worth more than the risk.
1. You can become invalid
2. You can kill buss of kids
3. You can go to jail
4. It can be very hard on your finance
5. You can have your car stolen
6. You can lose your nerves
7. There are bunch of diseases involved due to gasses
etc...
Basically, every single person I know had some problem with the car. Probably the best not to have them.
I found it highly pleasurable.
Subjecting yourself to immune response, which for some vaccines can have high amount of reactogenicity, is having your body undergo heavy inflammation, a fair amount of tissue damage, etc. The people that just treat vaccines like they're a wheatgrass shot is pretty strange.
Discovered that vaccines spike sugar prety significantly after getting my two shots this year. Won't be getting boosters anytime soon as the side effects were gruesome.
For most people this is not really harmful but for people with blood glucose problems it can cause severe issues.
Other people have reported similar things online. Again one must take it with a grain of salt.
> blood sugar spikes greatly worsen my health.
I'm curious what the condition is, and if there's mitigations available or if one vaccine is worse than the other.
Other side effects include cysts and cystic acne. The amount these occurred after both shots was pretty high and the occurrence was pretty persistent for two months after each shot (AZ with 3 months in-between shot).
While both times I had Covid, before and after the vaccine, my insulin stayed within normal ranges. So maybe the attenuated virus vaccines can be used for people like me? Or maybe none, if no risk factors like obesity or old age are present as the side effects are also life shortening.
People with e.g. allergies to polysorbate choosing not to get vaccinated are not "antivaxxers".
I wish we could have a rational discussion around these topics without accusations being fired back and forth in bad faith. It just drives people further into their existing positions and hardens them to criticism.
Well, trying to "poke fun" like this, with Poe's law being what it is, does nothing to bring the temperature down.
Our choices are:
* "Poking fun" is intended and this is likely to provoke people who label others as antivax without adding anything to the discussion.
* or this is sincere.
Neither is a great look.
E.g., I have seen a peer-reviewed report of an RCT indicating that loading up on argenine reduces side effects from COVID spike-protein vaccines, in people who have trouble with those. It seems like an easy choice, because argenine is easy to spike -- just eat lots of nuts -- and is at worst mostly harmless. That seems like something that could be discussed sanely, but even that draws trouble.
Just skimming the CDC list of common vaccines in use in the US, do most really need vaccines for everything: anthrax, Japanese encephalitis, polio, rabies, smallpox, tetanus, tuberculosis, typhoid fever, and yellow fever? If you're not traveling outside the US and living a fairly normal life, most likely not and some of these have potentially nasty yet rare side effects. If they were given/taken at the scale COVID vaccines were, many would die from such side effect who otherwise would have lived healthy lives, all because they took an unnecessary risk trying to prevent a very low risk. COVID is an exception because of exposure and transmissibiliy, the rare side effects are worth the risk for most people because the chance of getting it and having a life ending result is relatively high.
TB, tetanus, and rabies may be useful vaccines for some professions or life exposures in high risk cases, say veteranarians and healthcare workers, but for the most part, you probably don't need it. If you travel a lot to certain locations and say do missionary type work or whatever, perhaps some others make sense as well. Should every sexually active person take PrEP regularly since HIV is a potential risk to everyone? No, there are populations of risk exposure where it makes sense though. Your dentist only takes x-rays every so often because the x-ray exposure increases risk of various forms of cancer. You could get x-rays more frequently to detect issues that might not be obvious to your dentist but it's pretty low risk, there has been a lot of study into the rate of progression of disease and risk tradeoff to help your dentist determine a reasonable frequency for x-rays vs radiation exposure.
If you start looking at your regular risks, you take many risks across a lot of aspects of life every single day, even in a modestly safe life style, from hopping in a car to picking up takeout at a local resturaunt or even walking down a street. A massive unknown asteroid could be on a collision course with Earth right now that results in mass extinction ending the human race or a gamma ray burst from inside our galaxy could set the atmosphere on fire and radiate us all to death near instantly... they are all non-zero yet incredibly low risk to our understanding probabilisticly. They're so low and some even inactionable that we need to ignore them and/or treat them with low priority and continue on with life.
It's good to have a preventative mindset and take preventative action to try and control and manage risk, but in order to do this effectively, be sure you assess your risks, or have someone knowledgable (like a doctor when it comes to vaccines) lay it out for you so you can make a good decision about what you should or shouldn't do. If you truly can do the assessment yourself then by all means do it but it doesn't hurt to explain your assessment and rationale to someone knowledgeable to make sure you're not overlooking something. It certainly is possible to perform a better risk assessment for yourself than anyone else will be able to because you can know your behaviors and exposures better than anyone else but be careful playing this game.
Alternative explanation: nobody knows the risks in details, and side-effects are widely under-reported anyway. Ask any doctor how often they report even serious side effects, you will be very surprised.
> The biggest harm done by taking vaccines you don't really need is probably that the money could have been used for something more useful.
What kind of nonsense is that? Its the same as saying "there is no problem in taking any drug, the worst it can get is lose some money". You can't clamp entire technology as good or wrong. Vaccine as technology obviously has merit. Any particular vaccine may be problematic or not. Think H1N1 and narcolepsy, anthrax vaccine in gulf war etc.
This kind of trash talk is exactly the same as anti-vax talk. I have no sympathy for either clan. As usual, people convert complex topic into binary decision which is madness.
Most vaccines are much older than a decade. We know who gets vaccines; it's in their medical record, if not centralized anywhere. Longitudinal studies aren't impossible. So any random hospital could do a longitudinal retrospective data-collection study on the consequences for their own patients of either having received a given vaccination decades previous or not, no?
> What kind of nonsense is that?
I understood what they meant, and they're right. They're making an incomplete-information decision-theory argument. To rephrase them with more precision:
Selecting a person from the population at random; and taking the category of "vaccines that will confer absolutely no benefits to that person specifically", and selecting a vaccine at random from that category; that person will, with high probability, incur more QALY-risk from paying for the vaccine (because they'll then have fewer dollars to pay for unplanned expenses, which can be quite problematic for the median member of the population), than they will from any iatrogenic illness induced by getting the vaccine itself.
Outlier vaccines do nothing to change this, any more than those few poisoned bottles of aspirin did anything to increase the non-contingent risk profile of taking aspirin. Especially because, like the poisoned aspirin, outlier vaccines aren't on the market for very long compared to safe vaccines.
No! If you think its possible to pin point exactly what is the source of the problem with decade of various stressors piling up on anybody you should think again. It basically has infinite confounding variables.
> those few poisoned bottles of aspirin did anything to increase the non-contingent risk profile of taking aspirin.
Please educate more about this - do you know that ibuprofen is result of long time search to replace aspirin due to its toxicity (such as stomach bleeding that you will get sooner or later).
Its insane that people outsource medicine. One should strive to know as much as possible about it, with focus on prevention.
Yes, but: Law of Large Numbers. The great thing about retrospective data-collection studies is that you can potentially get hundreds of thousands of histories as datapoints. With those numbers, basically every confounder washes away, other than the selection effect of "what kind of person frequents this hospital rather than some other hospital." And you can get rid of that confounder, too, if you meta-analyze studies done in hospitals in very different areas.
One should actively question all things again and again. Most things we believe to be true are just true because we have no reason to think they are false.
Hell, most here write some code, look at it, it looks fine? Then it doesn't run because there are one or more typos. Note here how the whole thing doesn't work. If you organize your life like that the whole thing wont work.
I so often told people to ask anyway in stead of already "knowing" what someone is going to say. Even if you are 95% certain you are still 100% wrong. If you do life like that you will never find a book you like, a job, a partner, a place to vacation, an interesting new food, a pet, a study. There is no need to bother, you already "know", they are all just going to disappoint you.
God might be real, Trump might be a woman, Aliens might walk the earth, people might be living on mars, someone might have a working antikythera mechanism in their private collection, King Enmen-lu-ana might have ruled for 43,200 years, he might have visited the martians in his Vimana.
What would I know about it?
Lots of other possibilities of immunization causes a small but unnoticed inury that later on proves to be fatal, but because of the gap between injury and fatality is very hard to track down.
My son participated in a 'long term' vaccine trial of a slightly different combination of childhood vaccines (if it had been successful in the US, it would have reduced the number of needles by one, but I don't recall the specifics). But long term means they followed up for one year.
It's just not really possible to keep track of participants for very long outside of very small studies. Maybe if one day we have decent medical records, it will be easy to run epidemiological studies and find small effects. But you would need to make the decision on the immunization with the known information; maybe 20-40 years later you might find out that it increased or decreased the likelyhood of some disease in old age.
They likely laid all the groundwork for you in term of cost/benefit.
But there's no point in blindly taking vaccines for the sake of taking vaccines and increasing your risk of becoming part of the fatality statistics.
> If you're not traveling outside the US and living a fairly normal life
Globally, given an at-least-middle-class lifestyle (and any other years than 2020–2021), "not travelling outside [your home country]" is actually rather abnormal. It's mostly an American thing.
I've seen it hypothesized that higher risk-aversion from a media-inculcated culture of fear could be responsible for Americans' unique disinterest in international travel.
If that were true, then "properly calibrating your risk-aversion" as we're talking about here, would potentially result in the average American desiring to travel a lot more — which would then mean that the extra vaccinations would have rather more justification.
> Should every sexually active person take PrEP regularly since HIV is a potential risk to everyone? No, there are populations of risk exposure where it makes sense though.
I mean, if we just had a huge supply of PrEP laying around so that we could afford to be wasteful with it, we could just give it to every sexually-active person for a while to stop transmission, and so effectively eradicate HIV. (Everyone already infected would keep taking it until death, but nobody new would be getting infected, so as soon as all those people passed away, there'd be no more HIV.)
Personally, I'd see it as my duty as a citizen of the world to participate in a program like that. I want to live to see that virus die.
But moreover, doing so would eliminate the risk of anyone ever contracting HIV again; which doesn't just have personal consequences for arbitrary individuals from the population; but also has societal effects (in any country with socialized healthcare), and even cultural effects (in terms of changing the landscape of sexual mores.) Those effects could have net-positive utility that greatly outweighs the personal calculus of "am I more likely to get HIV, or an iatrogenic illness from PrEP." (I don't think anyone's done the true cost-benefit for the societal-level effects. It'd be interesting to see.)
See also: the argument to eliminating homelessness. Where, in that case, the societal-level "economically externalized from the individual" effects (e.g. fewer unpaid ER visits per homeless person) clearly do come out highly net-positive, such that we should strive to do that even if such programs were economically net-negative per homeless person. Thus thinking like "just give every homeless person a house."
> Your dentist only takes x-rays every so often because the x-ray exposure increases risk of various forms of cancer.
X-rays are an outmoded technology, though. If we could make MRI machines cheap enough, dentists could do what they do now with X-rays, by instead taking MRI captures and using a spectrum that highlights the bone-density sections.
In that hypothetical world, there'd be no downside to getting a new MRI every time you visit the dentist.
My dentist just upgraded their gear, the tech no longer leaves the room when shooting the image, and I didn't get a lead blanket. Presumably that means the technology improved again and the total X-ray energy went down.
I suspect it has more to do with the distance between most of the US and other nations combined with the variety Americans perceive within their own borders. Hawaii and Alaska are very different climatically and to a lesser degree culturally from Iowa. In many other nations national borders are closer and there's no intervening ocean, or perhaps only a narrow, theoretically swimmable strait, separating you from the next nation over.
Japanese people don't leave Japan much either. And between those two countries we've now called half the developed world "abnormal". It may be just as accurate to say Europe is the outlier, especially when you consider all of humanity and all of civilized history. Also it obviously depends where people travel to, developed or otherwise.
Either way though, the vaccination recommendations in the US (as I'm sure every country) vary depending on whether you plan to travel or not. There isn't a fixed policy for everyone, at least when it comes to recommendations.
Not taking away from your main point, but Tetanus is generally recommended once every ten years (or on potential exposure five years from last vaccination). I wouldn't put it in the same category as those other diseases.
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/hcp/vis/vis-statements/td.html
What vaccines do is move some books to the front of the building, so your dentritic cells don't have to spend a few days finding them.
You want the right books at the front. A mission to move all the books to the front is perhaps misguided.
The problem is that IgMs are not very specific. They bind to a lot of things, but they bind poorly. In the library of Alexandria analogy, it's like a book that happens to mention a subject you care about, but only in passing.
Vaccines (and infections) result in your immune system developing IgG. That's the hyper-specific books for the pathogen you care about.
So it's not that the book wasn't at the front. Your immune system has to write the book on the fly, during the fight, using chopped up pieces of pathogen gathered by antigen-presenting cells.
Someone else has mentioned the Kurzgesagt resources, which are great. If you want something more formal, OME is also a great resource I think.
https://onlinemeded.org/spa/immunology
>I always assumed the body generated matching snippets at random and the law of large numbers would result in a match eventually.
Right. Antibodies have a Y shape, where the two tips of the Y are variable, and the base is fixed. The IgM are the completely random snippets that happen to match a wide variety of things. However, because it's chemistry, it's more subtle than match or no match. Think of it like a variable degree of stickiness.
When a pathogen is found, your body is going to iteratively mutate new antibodies and select those that bind the best to the collected antigens, until you have something very specific (= sticks very readily). I'm simplifying a little bit, but that's the process for generating IgGs that I was talking about.
The shuffling is done by recombination, which means joining segments of DNA in a random fashion (a similar recombination process is actually used for DNA repair, though with somewhat less randomness!)
There's a lot more to say about all of this, but I don't know how much immunology I can usefully describe in a few HN comments =]
Does that imply that there's a good chance someone's immune system will just fail to generate any appropriate antibodies against a novel intruder? Or does the "fuzzy matching" aspect mean that exploring a small percentage of the space mean you're very likely to get at least some degree of success?
https://www.amazon.com/-/es/gp/aw/d/0593241312/ref=tmm_hrd_s...
Pretty cool illustrations too.
Listening now, thanks!
Is that actually how it works in any sense?
It’s like getting a superpower in a video game!
And, vaccines have general positive effects of health: https://ec.europa.eu/research-and-innovation/en/horizon-maga...
Infections can be the trigger for auto-immune diseases. We're not sure precisely how, but there seems to be a complex combination of genetic and environmental factors.
Your immune system is very much not playing games, it's in the business of reacting on a hair trigger, and doing more damage to foreign bodies than it does to your own body. It has an intricate system to avoid turning against yourself, but the system can fail.
If a B cell that produces auto-antibodies falls through the cracks, it will not die. You now have the problem of being in a permanent fight against your own immune system, with a variety of unfortunate results.
Now that's a lot of scary outcomes, and thankfully those diseases are uncommon. The system almost always works well. But it's a very complex system with ugly failure modes, so I wouldn't encourage you to poke the beast too much.
For example, Japanese encephalitis is rare in Japan, but only because many Japanese people have been vaccinated against it. It's endemic in most other parts of east, southeast, and south Asia. It kills 10K+ people every year, and it spreads through mosquito bites just like malaria. But most travelers only worry about malaria.
When you say "exposure to diverse mild pathogens actually makes your immune system less dangerous to the self", I suspect you're referring to the hygiene hypothesis that has become part of popular culture.
It's important to know that that hypothesis, nowadays, is about early exposure to benign microbes. Meaning from in utero exposure to early childhood at the latest.
I have seen no evidence that voluntarily exposing yourself to pathogens is a good idea. The point to my post was that you shouldn't understand the immune system like an RPG element that needs training to level up.
Please do get vaccinated for relevant diseases, but I would not go too far in the direction of treating your immune system like a safe thing to play with.
A lookup of systematic reviews on Cochrane & Epistemonikos paints the opposite picture, with a positive correlation between daycare attendance and respiratory tract disorders or asthma.
Just some anecdotal early-exposure advocacy.
If you believe that vaccines may have potentially positive effects beyond their original scope, you must also be ready for the opposite, potential negative effects beyond their original scope. If you don't, you are just being brainwashed by big Pharma.
It would make such comments much more meaningful and honest.
Big Pharma is a thing. A consolidated industry with very few major players who have huge regulatory capture. You can either continue being blind to it or realize they have a disproportionate influence in how decisions are taken.
And just like your doctors aren't incentivized to misdiagnose you to run more tests and get more money from you, pharma companies are not incentivized to mislead patients and make them think they need 10 shots when 1 will do. There are so, so many independent research groups, including several in the government, that would love to publish findings that pharma companies are misleading people. It does happen, but not often.
It’s more like rare candy in Pokémon, which isn’t as good as naturally leveling up your Pokémon.
Also, you should think sometimes about aspirin and Spanish fever phenomena.
> The hypothesis presented herein is that aspirin contributed to the incidence and severity of viral pathology, bacterial infection, and death, because physicians of the day were unaware that the regimens (8.0–31.2 g per day) produce levels associated with hyperventilation and pulmonary edema in 33% and 3% of recipients, respectively.
[0] https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/49/9/1405/301441
5% death in military vs 1% in sanitoriums which used heat therapy. Its amazing what modern medicine did back then, and you know... history repeats.
> Despite the widespread modern belief that the Library of Alexandria was burned once and cataclysmically destroyed, the Library actually declined gradually over the course of several centuries.
I'll check if you post in a few months. Otherwise, thank you for your contribution to science. In the mean time, don't recommend taking up competitive soccer.
As for the rabies vaccine, I don't think you can just ask for that to be administered -- unless, I suppose, you lie about being bitten by a random animal. As an aside, I have amusing memories of my own rabies vaccine 25 years ago -- a series of injections of thick syrup into my butt.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Gene space is extremely large, close to a cosmic scale. At first genes were only thought to play a role in cell division. Then came gene expression and transcription inside and outside the cell, such as protein receptors and secretion. It is very likely genetic mutations do not rely on "just" chemistry and take into account quantum effects. Despite mapping the billions of genes required and structuring them all the right way, you still get unexpected runaway mutations, because genetic molecule outsides do not represent the insides, it's impossible to determine, and impossible to configure.
Genetic molecules may not exhibit quantum behavior. Likely they do regards to genetic mutations. But neurons certainly do, in regards to their chemical and electrical synapses. I have heart disease. 10 months out of the year I'm barely consciousness. However my family members say I'm still in there somewhere. Compare this to my heart disease is cured, but family members fail to recognize me anymore, adamantly agree across the board I'm not me and now won't have anything to do with me. With mice, you can kill them by the thousands until you get one that glows in the dark or has a human ear growing out it's back. You're left with an incredibly large set of genetic and neural data you will never fully understand, never know its complete, and never know if it has been recorded correctly as that one mouse's body decomposes, and then dump it all in someone else's lap and ask for more money and more privileges to do this to everyone in the world.
Science is still very incomplete and what it needs is often directly opposed by the legitimate needs of people, such as not being horribly poisoned. It's still very much trial and error: "Hey, this guy got by with it. Let's try it on someone who's dying. What have we got to loose"? And also opportunity, as in "the Earth will experience an interference pattern of gravity waves as two neutron stars collide in front of a series of black holes acting as a divider. Get the data." Science still involves much hope, as in, even when you lack opportunity, rules of decency still apply.
So it's designed to make humans immortal? Sounds like it's more likely to create zombies than destroy them. I half suspected the article to say that this vaccine was a product of the Umbrella Corporation.
It will probably be incredibly cheap to make and administer, but not a silver bullet.
If I want to be a bit cynical... In the future we will likely find that these cells serve an important purpose and that we can't just eliminate them. The research needs to be done though!
I wonder what immortal oligarchs would even do…
that ‘modern’, ‘developed’ civilizations haven’t devolved this way yet isn’t because we’re all so cultivated now, but because we’ve lived in an unusual period of extended growth and excessive abundance which keeps destructive competition at bay. but infighting (i.e., tribalism) has been rising over the past 50+ years and is threatening to overthrow that period of prosperity and civility.
Yes, humans can be violent but we are obviously more predisposed to be cooperative otherwise we would have never made it this far as a species. You can't put 10,000 unrelated members of any other species in one place and not expect chaos, with humans it's no problem as long as everyone involved has food in their bellies and the promise of going home after a few hours. That's our real defining trait, getting along with each other, our intelligence wouldn't do a lick of good if we didn't have that.
27-29 is probably exactly the maximizing range, for this reason.
I guess it comes down to: is the capacity of strategy developed as a result of age, or as a result of experience?
we’d still get the most bang for buck if our age was ‘frozen’ in the late 20s because experience would still accumulate regardless, but we’d have maximized the combo of physical and mental growth. it’s only obvious in retrospect how immature we are at 18, both physically and mentally, or even at 25. that’s why sports is such a neat test bed, because it taxes both facilities enough to tease out these otherwise unnoticeable dynamics.
From Lilli Lehmann's How to Sing, page 108 (originally authored in the late 1800s):
"No woman of less than twenty-four years should sing soubrette parts, none of less than twenty-eight years second parts, and none of less than thirty-five years dramatic parts; that is early enough."
But not all senolytics are created equal. They differ in what cells they work on, how powerful they are, and how specific they are (the ratio of senescent to healthy cells they kill).
Here's a quote from the article
> Many of the existing drugs to remove senescent cells are used as anti-cancer agents and may cause negative side effects. Side effects from the new vaccine were fewer, while its efficacy lasted longer, the team said
But then we could implement an immortality lottery, to give everyone a shot. That could be the devious slogan: “everyone gets a shot”. Devious because not everyone does, of course.
If you win you get the vaccine and live forever, but your friends and family aren’t included.
Feel free to apply again next time Halley's comet is visible.
You forgot to mention Excel and Word.
Or we will end up an immortal ruling class cartel...
But of course a vaccine against aging isn't a ticket to immortality. Death comes in all forms, if you vaccinate against aging, another leading cause of death will come along.
Why not? Surely that would depend on how much it costs to make, maybe it would be cheap as chips?
Oh, I see you completely subscribe to the customer theory of value, where price is dictated by "how much is it worth to the client?"
In that case it would have to be a subscribtion. Or, once you get the shot, the company ownes you. Come to this of it, the two situations are actually the same.
By now this has become a trope. "Researchers develop new treatment for {UNTREATED_DISEASE}" ... in mice.
Mouse models of human disease are very limited in their predictive ability. There's a lot of research that needs to follow this before there's even a hope of a human trial, let alone vaccine. And the failure rate for treatments at the mouse stage is quite high.
Some of the comments on this thread treat this research paper as the announcement of an an imminent anti-aging vaccine. It's not.
So it’s very likely that some of the advances we see today that are still in clinical stage will hit the market in 5 to 15 years.
Edit: typo
https://www.science.org/content/article/how-many-mice-and-ra...
I don't want to think about what the others go through when things go wrong, though...
Though 1/3 of my meals are Soylent, so even that doesn't seem entirely terrible.
Mice on MDMA for example could easily be having the best time that any mouse has ever had.
Hmm
I get what you’re saying but it’s safe to assume that this concept is already baked into almost everyone’s discussion on matters like this.
Experiments on humans happen very frequently. They're called "clinical trials".
It will be interesting to know how long can we extend that live of mice. I guess that before immortal human beings we should achieve mice immortality.
I've seen more comment section finger wagging in response to science articles, offering such wisdom as correlation isn't causation, XYZ "isn't a panacea", research into treatments to mitigate or avoid cancer "don't cure cancer", statistical confidence of 95% falls short of absolute proof, and any number of extraneous add-ons that make caricatures of the research and then bat those caricatures down.
It reminds me of this quip from the Onion, back in 2009:
"All that in just six years? Wow, that's so amazing. If you can't tell, I'm being sarcastic. And I'm being sarcastic because I don't understand the significance of the study."
https://www.theonion.com/cow-genome-outlined-1819560275
It's like saying a rock and a plant share fundamental atoms with each other. Biology even from one close specie to another is so mindbogglingly unpredictable that we don't have good models. In 2021.
Also, if something really bad goes on mice, we can avoid having that happening to humans. Which I would also value a lot.
I mean, it seems to me experimenting on mice might be worth it.
There is virtually no relationship whatsoever between what works in mice and humans. Such headlines are completely ridiculous by now: the track record of applicability is a train wreck.
Figuring these things out is hard.
Humans are good at doing things they've done before, or imitating actions they've seen or heard before, but learning something entirely new is very very difficult. We have more scientists alive and working on problems now than ever before in human history and still the mill of innovation turns slowly.
And a twitter account:
https://twitter.com/justsaysinmice
https://jamesheathers.medium.com/in-mice-explained-77b61b598...
Cells becoming senescent is a mechanism that exists to prevent them from becoming a possible tumor, due to DNA damage.
The problem with senescent cells is that accumulation of them results in tissues not functioning correctly. Eliminating them should make tissues function better.
After all, your own immune system gets rid of senescent cell, but as we age, I believe your immune system is unable to keep up.
All I can say is that the paper overwhelmingly uses the term "senolytic", which means to "kill off the senescent" (I'm assuming that it refers to senescent cells), as opposed to "senostatic", which means to "delay senescence".
Additionally, the concern brought up by the paper, is that senescent cells are known to be resistant against something called "apoptosis", which is a term to describe "programmed cell death". The goal of the paper is to explore a compound—fisetin—for its senolytic capabilities. Whether it is successful at finding that, I haven't fully read the paper to see if they have identified fisetin as a senolytic, or a senostatic agent.
With that said, however, some of the graphs in the paper does highlight that as fisetin dose increases, not only do senescent cells get depleted, but so do total number of cells. If we were working with a purely senostatic agent, relative to a control, the senescent cells would be much lower, but the overall cell count would be much higher, which is not the case with fisetin. Does this mean that fisetin is a senolytic? Maybe not; it could just indiscriminately target all cells, resulting in fewer cells. Or maybe it is. Who knows.
Or maybe my logic about cell counts regarding senostatic vs senolytic may be entirely wrong.
Whatever it is, I haven't read the whole paper.
As someone who works and publishes in a related field, this particular phrasing should be interpreted as meaning that Fisetin is unproven as a senolytic.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s43587-021-00151-2
Can't get to the paper using all the usual tricks, so it's hard to say what exactly they're immunising with, which could answer a lot of my questions.
But it sounds like cells reaching that limit, cause other effects(inflammation, etc.) that are perhaps even worse for lifespan. So this wouldn't be an anti-aging vaccine, but would reduce symptoms of aging.
What happened?
[0] https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-12-grape-seed-lifespan-m... .
There is something that already exists that's free. Multi day fasting to induce autophagy. It's not pleasant or as convenient as getting a shot/taking pills but it's been perfected over the last couple of million years with no side affects except discomfort. You might also try adding a dose of exercise (more discomfort) and cutting out things like Fructose (20% of the American diet) completely.
Death is necessary to allow new ideas and change to be brought into the world. Death is necessary to prevent wealth and power accumulating into fewer hands. Death is necessary for others to enjoy the right to bear and raise children.
EDIT: 2 minutes go by and this comment has already been downvoted 3+ times. At least respond before you downvote.
Maybe in 2A Jesusland death is the only option, but in other parts of the world there are taxes and proportional representation and euthanasia.
Yes, there are problems, but saying that death (and more specifically aging with all of its shitty slow painful consequences) is great (okay, you said necessary), because it somehow "solves" other problems is a logical fallacy.
Plus, "actually" aging is one of the things that causes inequality, because wealthy people live longer thanks to having access to better healthcare, food, lifestyle, etc.
For instance, if eternal life could be bought, the first one to buy it could be the richest man in the world. Parent is not happy with the idea of an inmortal ruler.
In the mean time, I would like to stay younger for longer. And older people are still afraid of death, even if they are not healthy.
term limits.
what I'm trying to say (besides that the Takeshi Kovacs trilogy is aweeeesome!) is that these problems are already here, and are already solvable. regular dictators consolidate their power in a 5-10 years. corporations/memes/ideologies/religions are already immortal. and so on, and so on.
aging and death is basically a disease of the poor. the solution is not more aging/death, but less poverty.
There's the general fear of death that drives a significant portion of human morality. If we can't die, we don't fear risking doing things that would result in our own deaths, or the deaths of others. Suddenly we can inflict a lot more harm and give a lot less of a shit what people think, because what are they gonna do, put me in jail for 1,000 years? I'm just going to live for infinity after that...
Aging is a significant source of perspective. As people age, the way they think about their lives change, the way they approach risk changes. Those changes in both thought process and lifestyle are probably one of the biggest contributors to how human societies work. We have probably never had a human society without aging people, so we don't know what a society without their influence would look like.
If people continue to be born, we would eventually run out of space. At that point you reach a new form of political crisis: do you kill people to make space? Do you shuffle them off the planet in rudimentary space stations? Do wars over resource contention increase? Certainly different "seniority" would lead to new social classes.
Death is a necessary part of evolution. If we eliminate death, we have to alter living people's genomes to respond to biological threats, mix up the gene pool, adapt to new problems and somehow try to predict unexpected ones. All of that is currently science fiction; we have no idea if we would get it right, and could end up basically destroying the species from hubris and ignorance. Nature has a pretty good handle on it.
Cultures should change over time, and people need to change with those cultural changes, but it's basically impossible for individual humans to completely change their entire cultural makeup. Can you imagine if people today lived alongside people from 3,000 years ago? We would end up separated not just by nations, but by epochs. It would just further segregate people and cause tension. The world would be so much more complicated than it is today.
Death is part of a process of cultural natural selection. It creates and changes and influences more than it destroys. Entire peoples are wiped out and new ones emerge, languages die and are born, knowledge is lost and created, practices are abandoned and instantiated. Shakespeare was dramatically influenced by death; it's a major plot point in basically all of his writings. Imagine if death simply didn't exist in his world.
Throughout history there have been plenty of people in power and rule to see the errors of their ways and induce lasting real positive change. Sure there will be growing and transition pains but I for one welcome the impacts that human longevity will bring longer term.
2. I believe all governments should create Warpspeed for this approach. At the depths of covid lockdowns, GDP was down 20%. Imagine the massive GDP creation from making every 65+ year old feel 40 again. They'd work, consume, and generally flourish. Even if it's only 10 more years of quality life, this is the greatest good that could be done for humanity. To avoid another 10 years of my parents death is something I'd do a lot for. Economically and ethically, we should prioritize this research above most else.
3. This approach is scientifically sound. Certain aspects of aging cures are approaching engineering levels of work rather than pure science. We simply know that many diseases are caused or amplified by senescent cells. And we have ample evidence that elimination of these cells reverses diseases in complex mammals, as long as you don't remove too many, too quickly. The rest, is the engineering problem of how to remove the right cells at the right cadence.
4. This is the kind of thing biohackers should hack on. Find an aging part of your skin, and attempt to convince your body to kill the senescent cells. If you succeed, you will have benefited humanity, become beautiful, become wealthy, and be remembered forever (is there any other fundamental need humans have, not covered)?
Let the race begin!
This research and all similar research (and sentiments like yours, which I strongly agree with) remind me of the classic Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant.[0] It feels as though we are finally on the cusp of learning the shape of the armaments that will one day slay the dragon. And I wish the world could band together the way we attacked COVID to attack this problem.
>the king answered in a broken voice: “Yes, we did it, we killed the dragon today. But damn, why did we start so late? This could have been done five, maybe ten years ago! Millions of people wouldn’t have had to die.”
[0]https://www.nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html
TLDR: a big dragon (represents aging) kills tens of thousands of people every day, until the people invest in technology to defeat it, and then vaguely wish they'd started the research sooner.
So less jobs for young people.
And they're going away anyway soon enough, as automation develops.
Seriously though, the majority of humans never see material upward mobility in their lifetimes, and a world without mandatory low-wage jobs per se isn't necessarily a world without upward mobility.
As humans are able to automate activities that span the creation of everything we find valuable, from resource collection to manufacture to transportation to design to art, that necessarily limits the economic efficiency of using humans for labor. The last 3 years have demonstrated that creative tasks are highly susceptible to automation, with most artistic automation approaching or exceeding human performance as proofs of concept. The next decades will see an ever decreasing landscape of activities where humans are more effective than software.
Jobs are endeavors defined around the exchange of money for labor. It does not make sense to pay more money for less effective labor - i.e. if I can pay $30k usd for a burger flipper robot, I won't have to pay for 2 full time burger flipper jobs. It makes no sense to hire people for labor that can be automated.
We're a long ways away from being able to automate everything, but the trend is clear. Jobs don't make sense under our current technological path. We either have to eliminate progress in that direction and artificially enforce a human preference job efficiency limit so as to maintain a "sufficient" number of jobs, or start exploring new economic models that let us transition to post-scarcity economics.
We are, however, going to see a time where anything humans can do, machines will do better. Using humans will be inefficient, and companies will be out competed if they don't automate. We can either prepare for that and try to make things fair, or assume new jobs will arise that will make meaningful enterprises available to people through innovation and novel opportunities that haven't yet been conceived. It seems clear to me that the latter is basically invention of make work, and we need to prepare for post scarcity.
We don't need agi. We have Moore's law and "good enough" algorithms to achieve human parity performance. We should figure out a better measure of the value of human time than jobs and employment.
Walter Reuther: Henry, how are you going to get them to buy your cars?
They can live in their parent's basement! ( rule for parent =we make you young, in turn you house your brat in the basement)
By seriously, raylad's and cblconfederate's comment are very pertinent.
(b) In the future, there will be more humans than jobs anyways thanks to automation and this is a problem we are going to have to face one way or another. Social contract will change, and the economy will need to be refactored commensurately.
They're not "things" that exist in a limited supply.
You can think of them as relationships between people.
When population increases, no one worries that society will "run out" of friendships or marriages. Jobs work the same way.
They do exist in a limited supply. When a factory closes down and outsources all the jobs in a town, your job goes away.
When a robot starts doing your job, you are not needed anymore for that job. People in ivory towers expect that you should easily retrain and find new jobs that does not happen for the average joe.
When an immigrant is willing to do your job for less money or less safety, you dont get that job unless you are willing to compromise.
Now with all this you are going to have older people not retire then you are reducing the job pool for younger folks.
> Jobs work the same way.
In reality smart politicians can tap into the fear and frustration of average folks when good paying jobs run out and they promise they will bring back jobs, so voters vote for them.
I should have said "fixed number".
The US population is now twice as big as 1955. If the number of jobs had stayed fixed since then, unemployment would now be at least 50%.
This is clearly not true, which disproves the "fixed number of jobs" theory.
Not sure why you are disproving your own theory.
Perhaps you just missed the point I am trying to make.
A-Females are willing to marry B-Males, but B-Females are not willing to marry A-Males. This creates lots of abundance for B-Males and lots of scarcity for A-Makes.
As for jobs, in theory they can always be created a new. But in practice there are 1) very few people who can create jobs 2) external forces that might prevent new jobs from being created
My point is only that if the population increases, that percentage will stay the same. The number of marriages will increase proportionally.
> in practice there are 1) very few people who can create jobs 2) external forces that might prevent new jobs from being created
If that's true where do all the current jobs come from? How come almost everyone can get a job?
...but the bigger question would be - If this protein encoded a protein that identified cells which should always be eliminated in old age; why hasn't any mammal evolved to start destroying them?
It's more likely that there is some trade-off which we have not discovered yet.
Evolution doesn’t optimise for length of life, just propagation. A number of species have evolved to have very short life cycles because that enabled greater propagation. Presumably shorter lives generally confer greater adaptability as it increases the opportunity for evolutionary change
Chromosomes have a limited number of telomeres, each time the cell divides the telomeres become shorter. If your cell runs out of telomeres it can't divide anymore. This is one of the primary mechanisms the body balances repair against cancer risk. Current max of human life is about 120. If you don't "solve" the telomere problem you are not going to extend life past 120, though you may have more people live that long and may improve quality of life in later years.
Our species has a good balance that lets us live well past reproduction age, presumably because there is evolutionary pressure (benefit) to having elderly people around to pass on knowledge, help raise grandchildren, etc.
You can do things that extend the telomeres, but that makes cells more likely to reproduce out of control (cancer). This is a very hard "problem" to solve because cell final death is so important in preventing cancer. We are not even close to solving this, it would require revolutionary biological understanding.
Nanobots at some point may be able to essentially destroy bad/old cells, and maybe feed/nourish good cells we want to keep, and when cells can't divide anymore, could those be replaced with ones that could ?
I think back to the movie Bicentennial man, where he made completely real working human / robot interchangeable parts that basically allow for increased life and better health. Sure it's a movie, but we can 3d print organs and things, so it's not outside the realm of possibility...
In a sci-fi hypothetical where nanobytes can do arbitrary behaviors, sure, maybe they could intelligently do that. But that's an extremely complex thing.
My point to my original post is really that if anyone hears a "longer life" breakthru that doesn't even mention telomeres, I immediately move on. If they moved the needle on well-being of the elderly a bit, that's great. But nobody's "solving aging" without telomeres.
This seems like part of the puzzle. First repair the damage, then extend the time span, and the more you do this the more opportunities you have to find an optimal solution.
I think the only thing that will actually work is for entirely new bodies to be built and for our minds to be copied over.
It's not immortality but that is probably as close as we will get, and once we can do that then extending our current body's lifespan will be exponentially easier.
Clearly some tradeoffs are less relevant today than they were to a tribe of cavemen. Even if grandpa is in great shape, he will have a hard time hunting thay wooley mamoth, and having him around too long will be too many mouths to feed.
Also it's hypothetically possible to give everyone a ripped physique without gym memberships, downside of this would be increased protein consumption.
I think that evolution selects mostly for reproduction and not longevity. You don't have to live very long to have many kids (in like caveman / hunter-gatherer type of context as this is where evolution is basically), you just need to have great genetics. I guess sticking around for a few years after to protect the kids and provide for them is a bonus, but that part may be handled by the tribe too. But there's not much to be gained (from evolutionary point of view) from an individual living up to a 100 years or so.
What would that mean in practice?
Human experimentation is limited and carefully managed for very good reasons. Killing people to extend other people's lives is not a good tradeoff.
Not to mention... funding.
There are a lot of things that could be tweaked, but at a gross level it’s pretty consistent. In fact the recent, seemingly politicized, accelerated approval of aducanumab certainty caused a lot of turmoil and appears to have been a mistake.
When I was gestating my mother’s colleagues apparently couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t take the miracle drug thalidomide (much less even aspirin). Lucky for me! In general I think the medical side of FDA works reasonably well.
This (the measuring, at least) is mostly a solved problem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Happiness_Report
I disagree. I’m familiar with the world happiness report. I don’t think that would be an adequate measurement to replace GDP with.
For example being in nature brings you happiness. BUT this is only in well developed countries and among people with enough wealth to live comfortably.
Money does not make you happy but it gives you much more opportunity to be happy.
That’s actually not correct. By that argument the happiest country should be the United States as it has the largest GDP. However the United States ranks #19 on the World Happiness Report: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/happiest-...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-vs-happiness
Chart above clearly shows that mostly increase in GDP results in higher life satisfaction.
That chart clearly shows a handful of countries happier than the US with less GDP per capita…
I would be genuinely surprised if older people are happier than younger people.
Does it really? The derision of millenials seems never ending, along with 'kids these days' and 'back in my days'.
“Soya told the TV programme Getsuyou Kara Yofukashi (Sitting Up Late From Monday) that he had wanted to increase his presence on social media and believed people would prefer to see a "younger beautiful woman" rather than an old "uncle".”
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-56447357
Almost all advances of civilisation are created through unhappiness about something. Would a state of total happiness stop creativity?
The whole idea behind the current pandemic is that people need to die, via vaccines, or the virus, or the media.
Your way is depressing and dystopian AF.
Soon we won't have a planet to live in. I am sure mother nature will find more subtle but beautiful way to eradicate us.
But, hopefully we leave this small planet and explore other planets in near future.
Missing /s?
Nature's remedies are more normally quite blunt and brutal.
I know it bad, but whenever I see a kid, I automatically think here's another person on this crowded plant we are ruining.
(And yes, I know the whole economic system might rely on having more kids, but maybe if there was a life extender adults could work more? Don't feel like a debate.)
Obviously it should only be used by the poor, so they have longer to find happiness. Someone has to blow the horn and push the wheelbarrows.
Why would that be your conclusion? It's 10 more years of life. It's not 10 more years of better life. It's a little more of the same.
That 10 years is "experienced" as only a short increase in local time. Whereas before 33% of your life would have been 28 years old, afterwards 33% of your life would be at 31 years old. So life events would happen a couple years sooner or later but you wouldn't feel the difference.
It's not like world hunger would end. In fact we would need more food, because more humans would be alive at any point, because people are dying later. The senior citizen voting block would increase, expanding the lobbying power of senior citizens, which has a disproportionate unfair effect on the young. Which will get interesting as time goes on seeing as the birth rate has been declining steadily.
It also means your retirement would not last long enough anymore, meaning you would either have to work longer or harder or save more in order to retire. Social security dates would also have to change, and paycheck contributions may even have to increase. But corporations won't want to increase wages (as they never want to) so your money won't go as far in retirement, and inflation would act on it over a longer time, reducing it further than before. And since it would be a voluntary vaccine, as we have seen from the COVID-19 insanity, just having a life-saving vaccine available is no guarantee people will take it. So there would be controversy over whether to extend social security, and some significant amount of the population is going to get screwed over.
Finally, as the wealthy will live even longer, more wealth will get tied up in private ownership for longer, extending the wealth gap. Copyright would also take even longer to expire as it's based on how long since the creator died. There's tons of other random ways that arbitrarily extending the life of a portion of the population will not immediately lead to the greatest good that could be done for humanity.
Call me crazy, but I think we could do much more good for humanity today than just making it take longer for them to die.
Yet another opportunity for boomers to fuck over their kids' generation by squeezing them out of the workforce again, and the lingering around longer than ever before, creating an unprecedented drain on social services that their children will have to pay for. Can't wait!
It is social, political and psychological major changes. Revolution may be. Good luck.
Come on. It's like more than half a century ago some economists predict because of the improvement of technology and the overall production, most people only need to work 4 hours per day.
aaand now we have a lot of people working 12 hours a day over the wire already. GDP is the millstone that when it's bigger it grinds more soul - because things are operated in scale as technology develops, individuals can only grab every opportunity they have, in order to participate in the economy, even when the opportunity is outstraight abusive.
There will be new jobs but new jobs are either rockstar economies like being social media celebrities, or bullshit jobs that people have to scratch their head and come up with overpriced bullshit products from nothing and marketing those as the best thing ever.
It's not unlikely we ended up working 16 hours a day pointlessly in the so-called metaverse half a century from now on.
And what for? If I retire, I want to enjoy it… the last thing I want is to go back to work
That would be worthwhile, right?
Yes, we as a society have historically made poor decisions about what to do with productivity and lifespan increases. Let’s work on making better choices _and_ enhance our lifespans.
It's just the stress on GDP which makes me feel alarmed - historically speaking, things like GDP are always excuses to convince people they're goals worth following before we improve things like inequality or the quality of life. Do people now generally feel happier than half a century ago since GDP has drastically increased? Or the mental health of a large fraction of us was deteriorating all along over the decades?
It almost feels lies like "let us focus on delivering the features first, we'll get back to the technical debt once we have time" in some organizations - there are always new features, and always room for development, other things are always overlooked or keep bare minimum.
Back to the specific topic of increasing lifespan. Inequality is a problem much harder to solve than the technology itself. If we don't solve it carefully, it's very likely to be more harmful than helpful to the world. The right to live and the right to reproduction are the two most sensitive things to creatures - fundamentally it's much more risky than inventing the Internet or plastic surgery.
I can't help but think what I saw in the hospital - people with cancer and with no money giveaway their painkiller to drug dealers in exchange for some dirty motel nearby. Meanwhile, I know there are old, important figures who live in the hospital and spend several years of the average person's income per day, taking up a large fraction of scarce medical resources, equipment, and wards, just because they're old (many of them have no serious problems, just in case) and "important".
Think about the ancient tyrant who spent a lot, searching for immortality elixir died from poisoning. He became a laughing stock because the elixir didn't work, but it wouldn't be so funny if the elixir works. Nowadays, rich people can already fight cancer much better than poor people. Just imagine, how it feels when you know the first 0.1% of powerful figures you know (name the first 3 at least), are going to live for the next 500 years, but not everybody else?
Sure, f*ck climate change, let's just live and suffer longer
- the GP haven't said "fuck climate change", you did. There is no contradiction there, we can try and solve more than one issue at once.
- climate change objectively speaking kills way less people than ageing and will continue to kill less for the foreseeable future. You grandma (or grand-grandma) wasn't killed by climate change, neither will you.
- I don't know about you, but my life is not full of suffering, climate change or not, and I would prefer it to be longer and healthier. If yours is, I suggest looking at reasons other than climate change.
- We have to retrain every generation of scientists and engineers before they can contribute to solutions for any problem, climate change included. Increasing the amount of output per trainee by half goes a VERY long way towards solving our issues including climate change.
So, you are fixating on "healthy" and "long" life and you are SO afraid of death that the idea of aging cure seems to be attractive. Delusion, greed, and aversion are classic poisons that are the root cause of all human suffering.