thejdizzler
4hr ago
I haven't done any testing myself (which I could because I have access to Western blotting materials), but this is the supplement that I take. You need to take triple the dose they say though: you need at least 10,000 FU to see what they saw in the study, which means 6 tablets not 2. Also more effective if taken with K2, which is unsurprisingly in natto itself.
Yea certainly! I've been very excited about nattokinase recently. This is a compound found in the Japanese fermented soybean dish Natto, that has been shown to reduce plaque by up to 36% in a single year. Been trying to get the parents on it with little success. I myself take it daily.
thejdizzler
8hr ago
We do see people without much plaque who have eaten diets relatively low in fat, especially saturated fat. But this usually means that one's diet is high in protein (which greatly increases cancer risk and kidney failure, although at least the former can be greatly mitigated through DNA-repair), or carbohydrates (which greatly increases the risk of insulin resistance). Now many traditional populations experience none of these three metabolic failure modes. Yet that is (as far as I understand it) usually a result of them being on the edge of starvation most of time, which increases risks for other things like malnutrition which would negatively impact cellular replication.
And likewise, if there was a mechanism for preventing the buildup of plaque in the body, wouldn't that also be impacted by failed cellular replication?
I certainly think it would help, but I'm not sure it would solve things completely. Kids can get T2D and athero, so merely having robust new cells wouldn't fix things completely.
Since there are certainly other animals that have cardiovascular systems that nonetheless live an extremely long time.
Certainly, and I'm by no means arguing that enhanced DNA repair wouldn't help improve lifespans significantly. I just don't believe that this would be the magic bullet, as there are many other things going wrong as one ages. In addition to metabolism there's also the problem of the brain no longer producing new cells at all, which you point out in a comment thread below.
thejdizzler
8hr ago
This fits what I have read and seen of the research as well. There was a poster at a meeting I went to this year in San Diego where they selected flies for long lifespans by only taking offspring after a certain date (usually around 40 days I think). The genes that they found to be modified were all over the genome and didn't point to a single nice answer about aging other than it's something that affects the whole organism through many different pathways.
Nick Lane (one of my favorite biologists these days) has a theory that aging is caused by accumulations of mitochondrial mutations that prevent optimal ATP production. Eventually you get to the point where tissues can't produce enough energy to sustain themselves and then you get multiple organ failure and die. I'm attracted to this model because it means that in order to combat aging you should do a lot of aerobic (easy) exercise and have kids with people who are physically fit. Over time the average human lifespan should increase.
Uhhh that is not the reason. You get build up of atherosclerotic plaque in the circulatory system for reasons we don't really understand fully yet, but has something to do with the activity of immune cells and levels of dietary fat. Over time the plaque blocks the vessel and you get a heart attack. No cell replication involved. I can point to a bunch of other diseases of aging (T2D for example) that have similar mechanisms of action that are metabolic, not replicator dependent. In the case of T2D for example, making the beta cells of the pancreas more robust won't fix the fact that your body doesn't respond to insulin any more. Of course there are things you can do to prevent these diseases (exercise and diet), but those only work up into a point.
There's also the theory of mitochondrial dysfunction causing aging. This one is a DNA-caused problem. Basically mitochondrial genomes accumulate mutations much more rapidly than cellular genomes. Since a large amount of the DNA for mitochondrial proteins is stored in the nucleus, not in the mitochondria, this eventually leads to some serious incompatibilities and dysfunctions in mitochondrial energy production. These eventually become so large that one by one the individual tissues in your body can no longer keep up and you die from multiple organ failure. This could theoretically be fixed by fixing mutated DNA in the mitochondria, but it's not clear to me yet how you could accomplish this, nor what template you would use for repair.
thejdizzler
12hr ago
Ahh I see. It is a lot better than what I'm used to, which is just idle theorizing usually. At least couzens tries to support his ideas with "something". But you're right, it's not very rigorous. Thanks for the explanation.
thejdizzler
12hr ago
My understanding is there is a large metabolic and structural component. Heart disease is still the #1 killer and this is almost entirely due to a break down in how the circulatory system functions. There is a genetic component but ti's not like fixing people's DNA will really help
thejdizzler
1d ago
Mars trilogy is much better than that. Not as moralistic for sure: there are many competing ideologies and it isn’t clear to me which KSR thinks are the right ones.
It does seem his work has degraded a bit over time because I also hated Ministry for the Future (dude if global warming was that easy to solve we would have done it).
thejdizzler
1d ago
This was a really great comment and I think highlights to me why it is so frustrating that science has backed itself into this particular failure mode. Science is supposed to be this system that helps you actually discover truth, and although it doesn't always do so in the most direct fashion (see Kuhn) the truth usually wins out. Scientists with the proper training should be able to apply this epistemic openness to their lives outside of the laboratory, but it seems like the opposite actually occurs. But instead I find many scientists to be incredibly dogmatic and close-minded. Which is what I suppose the system rewards.
thejdizzler
1d ago
The gender question is interesting, especially since the trilogy does seem to be very concerned with sex (the various relationships between the first 100, Hiroko's weird sex cult, the loose sexual relationships between the children in the hidden colony). 2312, a later work with many similarities to the Mars Trilogy, also extensively deals with the trans question, although kind of in a background way (everyone is just implied to be trans because why not). This does make me think a lot less of KSR as a thinker: there's a lot more kowtowing to current thing going on than I would like to think.
thejdizzler
1d ago
The this I refer to is thus: science's inability to think in terms of political solutions and general narrow specialization that leaves them pretty useless at anything the real world. I think this used to be less true in the past, and is probably a result of pedagogical choices that have been made by the university system. Learning another language for example, which used to be the standard for science because not everything was published in English, forces you to realize that there isn't one way of doing things (because different languages make different choices).
I can't really argue with what you said in the first half of your response. However, I would suggest that these problems also are the result of the myopically applied science that I complain about. Global warming was the result of using combustion to make shit and get us places without thinking about the production of greenhouse gases, obesity was the result of food science creating hyperpalitability without thinking about wether it was a good idea, ditto for birth control.
Yep, agreed. It's so fucking dumb and idiotic because it's sacrificing the ability to actually take a scientific approach towards solving problems in the future. Every time I hear this kind of shit from my colleagues I want to shake them: you are burning political capital for short-term gain.
Also see what I wrote above:
At the same time, the training that we get as scientists (or at least the training that I have received) does not create people who are really able to participate in the political process. Gell-Mann amnesia is very real in academia: not just about the hot-button topics like race and gender, but also made-up shit like "learning styles", the efficiency of renewable energy, and a general understanding of politics and human psychology. Combine this with a massive ego because of success in one specific area, and you have the idiot savants that Nassim Taleb likes to harp on who cannot compromise or think outside the box. What Robinson is highlighting with his trilogy about colonizing Mars, perhaps the ultimate scientific endeavor, is that unless this changes, the science is not going to get done properly in the real world.
Inspired by the discussion on science and scientists below, I want to bring up a series of books that I read as a teenager, and recently revisited this year: the Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson.
1. Red Mars
Out of all the books in my childhood, this looms the largest. This book is almost the entire reason for me wanting to go to MIT (become an astronaut so I could bring life to dead planet like Sax), and my interest in political philosophy (so I could figure out who was right between John, Arkady, and Frank). Just as KSR shows Mars here as a canvas that people use to paint their idealized image of society, society that will really truly be constructed by ideology, rather than history, I used this book as a template for my own life trajectory: a way of prescribing meaning to another-wise empty scientific materialism by coopting some elements of ecoism (which I should have always known I liked, but anyway). I also recently discovered that one of my favorite board games, Terraforming Mars is heavily inspired by this book, which was also cool.
It's funny coming back to this and seeing what worked and what didn't. The science fiction elements are very obviously unbelievable. We can barely launch people into space these days, much less send millions of times more mass than we've ever sent to space far out of Earth's gravity well to Mars (I know that most of the delta G is from the surface to LEO but still). Aging won't be cured by simply repairing damaged DNA, and terraforming is likely to be a much slower process than as depicted in the book, if it's even physically possible at all.
The geopolitics is a little bit better. The overpopulation crisis on Earth that drives much of the plot is solving itself right now, but the hegemony of transnational corporations (a big element of the board game too) is happening before our eyes. Knowing a bit more about the other cultures (Arabs and Swiss mainly) depicted in this book also allowed their adaptions to the planet to carry more weight for me.
And of course the personal is still fantastic. The love triangle between John, Frank, and Maya. The enigma of what Frank actually wants out of Mars (even though we get two POV sections from him). The solid dependency of Nadia, the fiery revolutionary fervor of Arkady, and the conflict between desire for death (Ann CLAYbourne) and life (Saxifrage Russel), all were much more interesting to me this time around. And how each of these characters reflects their own emotions on the landscape of Mars (which I know much better because of the game). And perhaps that this reflects my philosophical shift too: away from materialism and towards something more interested in life itself.
2. Green Mars
If Red Mars was the book that made me want to be an astronaut, Green Mars is what made me want to become a biologist. There is just something so magical about turning a dead planet alive (not only through the introduction of plants, but also culture). Maybe what really will follow in the death-throes of rationality is a kind of Viriditas, or worshipping of life, that we see come to life in the green movement in this book.
In terms of plot, this book follows our protagonists from Red Mars (the first hundred) after they have fled underground following the failed revolution of 2061, as well as some of their children: the first natives of Mars. The plot spans the course of 60 years, and is all over the place. One part focuses on Terraforming, another on a political conference to decide the fate of Mars, and still another on the quiet semi-retirement of one of the expedition leaders around the shore of the expanding Hellas Sea.
The characters were hit or miss for me. I really connected with Sax Russell, who is a scientist like myself. Sax is pretty autistically interested in science and the natural world, until a traumatic brain injury causes a radical shift in his personality and he grows interested in other humans. Nirgal, one of the native martians, and Art, a diplomat sent by one of the "good" transnational corporations I also liked reading about, but the female characters (Maya and Ann) were a huge miss for me. I found Maya to be a horrible, self-absorbed person, and found it hard to relate to Ann's obsession with maintaining Mars in a pristine, but dead state.
In terms of themes, a couple things stuck out to me. Firstly, science is political. This is very obvious in the novel, as the terraforming efforts are a scientific endeavor, but also a thorny political problem whose resolution very much depends on scientific feasibility. This is no less true in our world: the debates about global warming, pollution, veganism, etc. are all political as well as scientific questions. By refusing to engage on the level of the political, as if it is somehow beneath them (or worse, like we see below with Terrance Tao, considering social issues "solved") scientists are shooting themselves and their interests in the foot.
Secondly, Robinson wants to highlight the effect that geography has on culture. We get extremely long (and often boring) descriptions of Martian geography to help us place the adaptions that various immigrant cultures are making as they come to Mars. No culture is unchanged, and this is at least partially because of the unique geographical (and other physical) quirks of the planet.
Finally, as some of our characters enter their ~15th decade, Green Mars brings into question the continuity of our identity and its dependence on memory. Are we still the same person that we were 20, 30, 100 years ago? At what point do memories become indistinguishable from facts we could have read in a textbook?
3. Blue Mars
This was my favorite book growing up as a kid, but I found this entry on re-read in the series to be hopelessly fragmented and meandering in its focus. Much of the plot of the book is concerned with the formation of a new government for Mars (a vaguely socialist federation with strict limits on immigration from earth). There's some exploration of colonization of the outer solar system, but it is also hopelessly myopic and bohemian: there's no true political or cultural diversity in any of the colonies that are visited. On a personal level, very few of the first hundred have survived, and the ones that have have basically completed their character arcs. There's some interesting stuff with dealing with memory but other than that I found this book rather forgettable on a personal level.
Conclusions
So why is this culture war? We live in a society that is, for better or worse, driven in large part by scientific progress and research. Many of the big questions of our time: climate change, artificial intelligence, the obesity crisis, the fertility crisis, etc. are not only political, but also scientific questions. To ignore the input of scientists on these issues, like many on this forum want to do, seems incredibly myopic. At the same time, the training that we get as scientists (or at least the training that I have received) does not create people who are really able to participate in the political process. Gell-Mann amnesia is very real in academia: not just about the hot-button topics like race and gender, but also made-up shit like "learning styles", the efficiency of renewable energy, and a general understanding of politics and human psychology. Combine this with a massive ego because of success in one specific area, and you have the idiot savants that Nassim Taleb likes to harp on who cannot compromise or think outside the box. What Robinson is highlighting with his trilogy about colonizing Mars, perhaps the ultimate scientific endeavor, is that unless this changes, the science is not going to get done properly in the real world. As Miguel Unamuno once said, perhaps apocryphally, vencer no es convencer (to defeat is not to convince). The strain of liberal (and perhaps now woke) thought that currently dominates universities is not going to be able to beat the world into submission to its ideas, it has to learn how to participate in the political process and convince people (and perhaps be convinced in turn). Perhaps too this is a lesson that the rationalist community could learn as well, although I think most of you here at TheMotte have absorbed it plenty well.
For me on a personal level this series of books has helped to clarify what a future spiritual belief system might look like for me and the world. I’ve always struggled with the anthropocentrism of Christianity: perhaps something like Viriditas combined with Nietzchian vitalism could expand on the weak points I see in the Christian system.
thejdizzler
1d ago
Yes this does seem to be the case with UCLA. I'm complaining about axing the NSF and reducing the NIH budget.
thejdizzler
1d ago
Cut federal grants for diversity, withhold federal grant money from universities that don't toe the line on controlling the woke issues on campus. This is the stance that the admin took with Harvard and has served to keep Hopkins from acting up too much.
Pair this with maintaining the levels of federal funding support and you get reallocation of funds to less woke universities and less woke academics at woke-er universities putting pressure on their departments to crack down on dissidents. This is what we had here at Hopkins where the pro-Palestinian protests were shut down by the President because he was scared that this would result in a Harvard-like situation.
thejdizzler
1d ago
Dude, chill
thejdizzler
1d ago
Foot is hurting after running too much. Serves me right for trying to cram in the miles when I know (and have known since I was 17) that I do much better when I'm biking and swimming and holding my mileage around 60 a week. I'm just too big (which is probably a crazy statement on this forum) to run 80 miles a week without getting hurt.
thejdizzler
1d ago
What do you mean by bad epistemics exactly?
Thanks for the other article. I am much more the triathlete body type so it makes sense that I'm breaking down every time I do 70+ miles. 60+ loads of cross training worked way better for me: I ran 16:10 off the bike once in a tri and I don't think I could even do that now just running.
thejdizzler
1d ago
Definitely not. Unlike in a lot of other areas of life there is actually quite a bit of transfer between different sports, especially in the endurance world. Alan Cousins actually (surprisingly to me) found that biking was 2/3 as effective as running at increasing running Vo2 max. This is insane and runs contrary to what I had been taught about specificity growing up, but makes sense from what we know about elite training (Cole Hocker who won the gold in the 1500 in Paris apparently bikes a shit ton), and from my own training (I am fastest at running when I supplement with monster bike time). Here's the Couzens post if you're interested: https://alancouzens.com/blog/specificity.html
Maybe not directly relevant to your post, but at least a tangent. Fitness from random things generally does carry over pretty well because it develops your core cardiovascular and muscular systems. There doesn't seem to be an equivalent "core" system with regards to intellectual pursuits so it's not surprising we don't see much transfer there.
thejdizzler
1d ago
Sorry I think my response was a bit confusing because I don't want to pin the blame solely on Trump for this. Universities have played with fire for a long time and somehow seem surprised to be getting burnt. I just lament that the administration seems to be cutting down the tree rather than pruning some of the worst branches. We can punish woke without destroying the research apparatus.
thejdizzler
2d ago
As someone in the sciences (doing my PhD at Hopkins) these cuts have hit us quite hard. The NSF has basically been dismantled, and the NIH funding system has become much more restrictive. To me, none of this makes a whole lot of sense. These grants were pennies on top of the giant stacks of dollars that the military, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security represent. Yes you get a bunch of duds, but a lot of the research funded has an extremely high ROI. I get that Trump wanted to shut down "woke" research, but he could have done that without cutting overall funding (just mandate that the NIH can't fund transgender research, shutdown the diversity grants, etc.).
This is also bad because it explicitly politicizes scientific research. Which I can't really blame the Trump administration for. It was the idiot professors and students who tried to make the department officially pro-Palestine, admit a bunch of diversity PhD students who aren't up to snuff, and antagonize the administration because they thought Trump was a fascist who started this whole thing.
So it seems to me once again a case of Trump punishing the people who tried to screw him over, rather than something that genuinely would be the best move for the country.
Still slogging through Way of Kings. It is getting better as it goes on, but at the same time, it's so god-damn slow. I know Sanderson is relatively popular in the rationalist community and I can sort of see why (the world-building is very unique and interesting, even if not particularly realistic), but man the guy needs an editor, especially for his dialogue.
Reading Capital for philosophy book club. Marx is quite frustrating to read some times because he is smarmily dogmatic (I guess this where the infighting in the Soviet Union has its roots). It has its insights, but I think some of the ways he presents his arguments leave a lot to be desired. For instance, he seems deliberately obtuse about the fact that trade actually can generate real value, and this fact isn't even incompatible with the labor theory of value: the merchant does a fair bit of labor in identifying the market, transporting the goods, etc.
thejdizzler
7d ago
Have you read Children of Men or watched the movie? That’s the kind of society I think we would have this attitude was widespread.
thejdizzler
7d ago
I think this kind of thing actually does affect life right now. There’s a qualitative difference in what life is like in a civilization that is alive, growing, and still believes in itself and what we have now.
Not as far as I can tell. When I was actually eating natto my digestive system felt better if anything. I unfortunately don't enjoy the stuff either, so it's tablets for me.
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