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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   35262 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

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Life Extension is Mostly Fake (So Far)

With modern technology, humans are very limited in being able to control how long we live. Beyond avoiding obvious own goals such as smoking or becoming obese, there's really not much one can do to dramatically increase his lifespan. Only about 2% of people will live to 100, and it's mostly down to genetics.

One naive belief that some life extension advocates have is that life expectancy will increase linearly over time. This has not been happening. From 1900–2000, life expectancy in the U.S. increased from roughly 50 to 78. But since then, the number has barely budged. Most of the dramatic increase in life expectancy starting in 1900 was due to better public sanitation that eliminated a handful of deadly infectious diseases. But now the low hanging fruit has been picked. There's not much more we can do by treating disease. For example, if we completely cured skin cancer, it would only increase life expectancy by a few days. And if we somehow cured ALL cancer it would only increase life expectancy by 3.2 years.

People's bodies simply break down over time. We are not machines that have interchangeable parts. We're more like a piece of metal that rusts until it is so fragile the merest touch will shatter it. Until we can address the root cause of death (aging), no amount of medical care can keep a person alive indefinitely.

And we've made very little progress.

Some people had hoped that by eating a near-starvation diet they could slow the course of aging. Unfortunately, as more data has come in it turns out that caloric restriction tends to work really well for worms, less well for mice, and maybe not much at all for larger animals.

In more online places, a man named Bryan Johnson has become famous for his anti-aging "Blueprint" that includes hundreds of daily supplements and other quirky behaviour such as not eating after 11:30am. Johnson insists that, in his mid-40s, he has the mind and body of a man in his 20s. But looking at pictures, it's obvious that this isn't true. Rather than looking like a young man, he looks like an uncanny middle-aged man.

When we look at centarians, we don't see any obvious traits that led to their long life spans except for having long-lived relatives. High IQ is a positive, as is having lots of social connections. But there's no silver bullet and father time comes for everyone. By age 120, it's inevitable you will die, unless we can arrest the aging process. Perhaps a breakthrough is right around the corner. But there haven't been any incremental steps in that direction.

Wasn’t there a tech billionaire who bought blood from teenagers to try to extend his life that way? What happened with that?

Howard Hughes. It successfully extended his lifespan to 150 years. Unfortunately his crippling addiction to morphine and mint chocolate chip ice cream reduced his lifespan by 78 years, for a total lifespan of 72.5 years.

I know that it happened in Silicon Valley the TV show.

But it does apparently work, not to increase life span, but to make one feel rejuvenated. Unclear if it saps the equivalent amount of vitality from the donor.

I am actually a little bit unsettled that certain interventions that do seem to preserve youthfulness, such as sleeping a lot, avoiding the sun (and other radiation), reducing your metabolism/body temp, and consuming the blood of virgins really resembles vampire behavior.

Isn't donating blood supposed to be good for your health too? Within limits, obviously.

ALLEGEDLY it helps clear out toxins, heavy metals, and other 'forever' chemicals that the body can't otherwise process.

I believe it.

Also supposed to help with blood pressure, which anecdotally seems to be the case for me (I give blood, sometimes double red, on a very regular basis).

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28083954/

Some doubt on this

Ah, regression to the mean, the eternal enemy of miracle cures and performance enhancing supplements.

It can definitely lower your iron levels, which is usually a good thing.

I used to donate plasma, and they would refuse to do it if my blood pressure was too high (I was of average fitness but I had to walk a decent distance to get to the donation place so the often made me wait for ten minutes). Maybe I should do some blood letting at home for my hypertension, since i doubt they would let me donate.

Yeah, the idea is that new blood is less polluted. You're dumping all of that on whoever gets your blood, but I think if you're in that situation, that's the least of your worries.

Do they really do no advanced filtering before donation? I guess I thought they would for some reason.

Depends on the clinic. The high end ones will offer ultra filtered blood with an option for enriched adrenechrome levels

Supposedly it's good for you, although that seems awfully convenient doesn't it? What if the research showed the opposite effect. I doubt it would get published.

The primary mechanism for benefits would appear to be reducing iron levels in males. But it also apparently burns 600 calories, so it's a great way to stay trim for the summer bikini season ladies!

The one time I asked a doctor, he told me that donating a pint of blood cost closer to 2000 calories for your body to replace.

That was Qanon

I thought there was a guy who actually did it?

Bryan Johnson has actually done it, both him towards his father and his son towards him. I'm actually really interested in this, because people are already getting my relatively pretty healthy blood for free (which is good), and I'd love to be able to use it to improve my dad's health.

It's been claimed about Peter Thiel.

homophobic joke about it not being blood deleted

Is buying blood of teenage boys better than other 'fluids'?

Much of the progress is in making people who are 40-60 years old live to 80, or making 70-year-olds feel like 50-year-olds, but not much about making people who are 80 live to 100+, as the rate of decline/decay is too rapid. There seems to be a rapid shutdown mode where the body calls it quits and nothing can reverse this.

Bryan Johnson has become famous for his anti-aging "Blueprint" that includes hundreds of daily supplements and other quirky behaviour such as not eating after 11:30am. Johnson insists that, in his mid-40s, he has the mind and body of a man in his 20s. But looking at pictures, it's obvious that this isn't true. Rather than looking like a young man, he looks like an uncanny middle-aged man.

Agree I am not convinced either.

It's not a discrete "rapid shutdown mode", it's just the smooth Gompertz-Makeham curve. Your odds of a natural-causes death double every 8 years, starting at age 30 at the latest (though possibly much earlier; non-natural causes obscure things for 20-somethings and teens).

Come up with a medical revolution that cures 50% of death? You'd think that would double lifespans but no, it just buys everyone 8 more years. Exponentials are wild.

Your odds of a natural-causes death double every 8 years, starting at age 30 at the latest (though possibly much earlier; non-natural causes obscure things for 20-somethings and teens).

The odds of death that most closely follow that curve is, of all things, covid. Doesn't have a peak for infant mortality, and doesn't have another peak for violent deaths in late teens and early 20s.

There seems to be a rapid shutdown mode where the body calls it quits and nothing can reverse this.

I remember reading a Scientific American article back in the 90s, on why aging is a very hard problem to "solve", which pointed out, using a tale about Henry Ford and the Model T as analogy, that this is what we should expect, based on Darwinian evolution. I recall another author on the subject using prostate issues as another example case.

There seems to be a rapid shutdown mode where the body calls it quits and nothing can reverse this.

My rough model is that you can do a lot of interventions that will improve general health, and if you can stave off cancer you WILL live longer on average... but once some major subsystem in the body starts to go, the knock-on effects will lead to rapid deterioration across the board. A complex system will run smoothly until something important fails... then you see a rapid cascade of failures which looks like 'sudden' onset of death.

I.e., maybe you have the skin, liver, heart, and lungs of a 50 year old, but if your kidneys give out then that will barely matter, it'll all start to go unless you do a drastic intervention. Which subsystem fails is somewhat of a diceroll.

So yeah, you can gain a few extra healthy years on average via good habits and preventative care, but its still a question of which of your internal organs will be the first to betray you.

It’s fear of death + hubris IMO, and has bad policy consequences because funds that could be used to improve general health are spent researching ways to stave off the inevitable decline of the old. Humans are designed to die, and that’s fine. If you want the keys to eternal life, try contemplating how your identity can also be found in the greater part of humanity; behold, the immortal part of yourself. At the very least, invest your identity into a young human so you know a part of you lives on. How amazing that you have the opportunity to double your identity’s lifespan by creating a child with someone you love? Your identity is combined with your lover’s and it gets to be a kid again. That’s awesome.

I enjoyed this cope

Johnson is notable insofar as he spent his 20s and 30s sacrificing his health to make a bunch of money. And now he's burning that money to regain health and youth and is, through absurd amounts of effort, at least partially successful.

The other current respectable Anti-aging Guru Dr. David Sinclair, also looks younger than his actual age (55).

Which lends credence to the claim that his interventions improve SOMETHING.

BUT I kind of hate that we live in an era where makeup, plastic surgery, and other cosmetic technologies are mature enough that it is easy to fake youthfulness so we can't rely on our own eyes to judge.

I do wonder at the fact that various Hollywood Stars (Keanu, Tom Cruise, Sylvester Stallone, to name a few) can stay active and fit well past the age that normally people start falling apart slowly.

Johnson is notable insofar as he spent his 20s and 30s sacrificing his health to make a bunch of money. And now he's burning that money to regain health and youth and is, through absurd amounts of effort, at least partially successful.

Judging by the pictures in Time, he looks like the biggest fitness freak in the world, which he probably is. He looks about 10 years younger and will probably be one of these old guys that have a crystal-clear memory and can put on their socks standing up until they keel over in their nineties.

Which is not a bad thing at all, but it's a very long way from immortality.

He looks exactly his age to me. His skin just looks a little funny, like he exfoliated or something.

He looks 46 to you?

Absolutely. He has very wrinkly and loose skin that makes it impossible for him to be confused for someone in his 30s. I actually didn't know his age and guessed he was 45.

I think it presents an interesting calculation though.

It makes it more palatable to sacrifice your 20's and 30's in the pursuit of wealth (rather than social life, sex, etc. etc.) and then, once you achieve amazing wealth, spend some portion of that to get yourself back to the vitality of your 20's (or close to it) and make up for your lost time, with a LOT more money than you'd usually have.

If money can buy back some time and health, it makes it much more palatable to sacrifice those earlier on.

But this doesn't scale, does it? How many people can achieve amazing wealth?

Probably a lot, if they are pursuing actual promising ideas and not spending time on crypto scam #4192.

Real question is how many people, if they weren't trying to "live life while they're young" would actually be able to switch into hardcore productivity mode for that long.

I think part of the reason Johnson is able to do such absurd things to regain youth is because he's already the type of person with the ability to commit to very hard, very uncomfortable, almost psychotically meticulous projects.

THAT'S the part that will stump most people.

Aubrey de Grey is the guy who keeps saying that aging's defeat is just around the corner; does everyone just ignore him nowadays? Or just get pissed off at him for continually raising false hope?

(Or is he dead?)

Aubrey de Grey

It didn't help that he got MeToo'd. That tends to end careers pretty fast.

That I didn't know.

The other current respectable Anti-aging Guru Dr. David Sinclair, also looks younger than his actual age (55).

Which lends credence to the claim that his interventions improve SOMETHING.

youthfulness is along a spectrum so some people will look young by virtue of just falling along the favorable end of the curve of the distribution ,not because of a specific health protocol.

I think there is possibly an inverse correlation between IQ and youthfulness ,with less intelligent people looking younger for their age and smarter people tending to age faster even if they may also live longer (e.g. Tom Cruise vs James Woods). I observed this a lot in school, in which the smartest students tended to also look the oldest and were also taller.

This is exactly wrong in my experience, my social group are late-20s early-30s, and the least intelligent ended up in labouring and other outdoorsy jobs and as a consequence aged way faster than those who hid from the sun in an office all day.

Holding a thinking face expression for much of the day also creates wrinkles around the face. The greats have eye-areas marked out like world war trench formations

I observed this a lot in school, in which the smartest students tended to also look the oldest and were also taller.

Uh, how much of that is just the difference between the youngest and oldest kids in the class? You could potentially have almost a year’s worth of development difference- a pretty big deal for kids both physically and cognitively.

It was more than just being 6-12 months older. if anything the difference was most pronounced in 10-12th grade when the relative difference would have been smallest due to redshirting

In response to @Glassnoser in particular, I would point out that Kurzweil, as one of the original singularitarians, is likely banking on ASI to bail us out here.

Is aging an incredibly difficult problem? I would be the last to deny it. But is it fundamentally intractable, such that there is no hope at all of an end to it? I can't see a justification. It's an engineering problem, a brutal one, but solutions aren't ruled out by the laws of physics. We have existence proofs that there are organisms with negligible senescence around, and even large animals like sharks that live centuries if they're lucky. It's not a property restricted to jellyfish, and even a mere 50-100 years added to healthy human lifespan would be amazing.

Frankly speaking, I think it's a damning indictment of general rationality that we don't devote an appreciable fraction of GDP to solving it. If I was a billionaire, especially one staring death in the face, I'm not sure how much good my money would do me if I wasn't around to spend it. What good is anything if you're dead?

I think your evaluation of the current situation is quite accurate. There are pretty much no current interventions that would provide a guaranteed century of healthy life. That being said, we're not spending multiple percentages of GDP on the problem (or at least not productively, most medical therapy can be described as ad-hoc patches and sprays of WD-40 on a rusty old beater, when what we need is a full engine replacement and transmission overhaul). And with the potential of creating artificial entities much smarter than us, and soon? I wouldn't bet against it happening in the average remaining life expectancy of us Mottizens.

That Greenland shark with "negligible senescence" has so slow metabolism (and correspondingly swims so slow) so after correcting for it its lifespan not meaninhfully longer than that of humans. Some parrots, however, rival human life expectancy while having faster metabolism

My problem is the suspension. Bones and joints.

Joe Rogan claims a stem cell therapy basically fixed one of his problematic joints.

I’ve heard the same hundreds of times (I managed a GNC and people talked health all day every day with me).

Skeptical but intrigued.

Ditto.

I suspect there's a bias in the medical industry against stuff that's not a drug.

Frankly speaking, I think it's a damning indictment of general rationality that we don't devote an appreciable fraction of GDP to solving it. If I was a billionaire, especially one staring death in the face, I'm not sure how much good my money would do me if I wasn't around to spend it. What good is anything if you're dead?

This is what many billionaires are doing. Almost every tech mogul is investing in some sort of life extension tech or start-up. So far nothing has panned out, but of course, success is something measured in decades, so it's possibly soon to tell

Couldn't the vast majority of the work be done on rats? It shouldn't take that long to figure out what works if progress is in fact being made.

A few billionaires are, whereas I wish it were the majority. What marginal value do many billions provide, when you're dead, especially when you have enough money for almost all material needs?

It should be a national priority too in first world countries. You don't have to worry nearly as much about the burden of elderly people needing expensive medical care if you can stop them getting old in the first place.

What marginal value do many billions provide, when you're dead, especially when you have enough money for almost all material needs?

The main benefit I'd assume is being able to pass the money on to your surviving family.

A billionaire can satisfy most of their extended families needs with a relatively small fraction of their income. A few hundred million is more than enough to ensure they never go wanting! Plus, if said family are going to die too, it's an investment in their future.

I think immortality is achievable and worth working on, but Kurzweil seems to have some unrealistic beliefs about our current progress. In one of his books, he made the tenuous argument that technology is always accelerating just because technology is used to develop technology, so as technology improves technological progress accelerates. That's the entire basis for his extrapolating all kinds of progress curves out in ways that aren't supported by anything else (other than a few empirical examples like Moore's law, which has slowed down and physically must end soon). He seems to be forcing his beliefs about the current progress on longevity onto these progress curves, despite evidence that the rate of progress is less than it is.

What he is not doing is hoping for a discrete jump in the rate of technological progress due to an artificiaal intelligence break through. He is saying that when we reach longevity escape velocity, it will be because the trend that we are currently seeing will have continued to that point. I think an honest assessment would say that the current trend is not good and something needs to change for us to reach our goal.

Moore's law has slowed down but his point is about a general trend of compute becoming cheaper per dollar, not a specific trend of transistors miniaturizing. He traces out a similar pattern of acceleration back to the dawn of life on Earth, long epochs of tiny creatures, followed by larger and more complex life. And then bang! It's the Anthropocene, goodbye to all the land mammal biomass that isn't us or ours. Even before transistors there was acceleration in compute capacity through electromechanical computing. Presumably acceleration will continue into photonics or some other method, perhaps with a delay period or sudden acceleration. You could argue that it's still accelerating, if you include the software and architectural improvements in the newest GPUs their effective compute/$ for AI tasks is rising faster than before.

I think his AI predictions turned out quite well - his original prediction was AGI by 2029 which looks conservative, if anything. Many today give a date of 2027, assuming all goes according to schedule. Singularity by 2045 is even more conservative. He was saying this back in the early 2000s, so clearly his reading of trend-lines has some merit to it.

His health practices however will probably not stand the test of time.

a general trend of compute becoming cheaper per dollar

That stopped happening once Intel stopped being competitive. Compute now costs the same amount per dollar (unless you're Apple and are just buying TSMC the machines); that's why new AMD CPUs are twice the price of the old ones despite not being twice as fast and nVidia's products in particular have the same or worse price/performance ratios than they did 5 years ago.

This seems trivially not true.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gpu-price-performance

I do agree that no amount of better hardware performance can overcome poorly-written software.

If Nvidia's products have the same or worse price/performance ratio as 5 years ago then why are they the biggest company in the world today and a minnow five years ago? Shouldn't it be the other way around?

For some tasks, there's no difference. My favourite game Civ IV can run on 20-year old hardware. It runs a little faster on a modern CPU but that's about it.

The 4090 is not really for gaming, it's for mucking around with advanced image-generation, AI and training consumer-level LORAs. For some things the 4090 really is the cheapest way to run it, there is 0 performance per $ for anything below 24 GB of VRAM. Just like how there is 0 performance per $ on the Geforce 3 for most tasks. It doesn't even run modern OSes, you'd be better off with whatever comes with your CPU.

NVIDIA boasts 25x energy efficiency gains over the last generation for its flagship AI processors. OK, that's advertising - round that down to 10x or even 5x... That's still a huge improvement.

https://www.nvidia.com/en-au/data-center/gb200-nvl72/?ncid=no-ncid

Off topic but whats the best intro to Civ4 for someone who can't even parse the map? Aside from playing the game solo obviously that's the best.

Sulla's tutorial got me started with Civ IV; I recommend it in the strongest possible terms.

There are beginners playthroughs on youtube: https://youtube.com/watch?v=CgBnpbaQFo4 or https://youtube.com/watch?v=_f-pwq6cKwk?list=PLs3acGYgI1-vw-A3LHOb_BDQxKNtv1tze

There's a text guide here (this would be the best IMO for getting started, in terms of efficient reading): https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/beginner-help-the-basics.648469/

There's a slightly more advanced tactic/strategy guide here: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/sisiutils-strategy-guide-for-beginners.165632/

The game manual is here: https://forums.civfanatics.com/resources/civ-4-manual.12753/

The map is pretty straightforward. It's all about getting three resources - food, commerce and production. There's a little button you can press on to show the per-tile yields, another one that highlights special resources.

You get the most value in making cities near food resources so they can quickly grow and get pops working other tiles: hills, mineral resources and forests for production or luxury resources/coast/rivers for commerce. Commerce is wealth, culture, espionage and most of all research, you control where exactly it goes with sliders.

Shouldn't it be the other way around?

This isn't saying absolute performance hasn't increased: it has.

What I'm saying is that a 4090 performs twice as well as a 3090, but at roughly twice the price. That's "same price/performance ratio", it's just that the right tail on the graph grows.

https://www.pcworld.com/article/1364477/nvidia-rtx-4090-vs-nvidia-rtx-3090.html

The GeForce RTX 4090’s $1,599 MSRP is significantly less than the $1,999 whopper of a price that the RTX 3090 Ti launched with. It’s also $100 more than the original RTX 3090’s debut $1499 price. Good news, however – the RTX 3090 Ti has dropped to a much lower $1099 for the Founders Edition, and sometimes can be found for less. The 3090 can often be found for under $900, and even closer to $700 if you’re OK with a used graphics card.

The 3090 price fell precisely because of the 4090, due to market forces. Today, the 4090 seems to be back up to around 2000 USD due to the AI boom and sanctions/sanctionsbusting. But anyone would rather have a 4090 for $2000 than a 3090 TI for $2000. In theory, you could get a 4090 for $1600 compared to a 3090 TI for $2000, which is a very good deal. Progress continues.

When the 5000 series emerges, the 4090 will fall to the $1000-1500 range too.

Secular falls in GPU prices (and heightened price/performance) are being suppressed by high demand but they're still observable.

Kurzweil, as one of the original singularitarians, is likely banking on ASI to bail us out here.

Yeah about that...

Ilya Sutskever, co-founder of AI labs Safe Superintelligence (SSI) and OpenAI, told Reuters recently that results from scaling up pre-training - the phase of training an AI model that uses a vast amount of unlabeled data to understand language patterns and structures - have plateaued.

Sutskever is widely credited as an early advocate of achieving massive leaps in generative AI advancement through the use of more data and computing power in pre-training, which eventually created ChatGPT. Sutskever left OpenAI earlier this year to found SSI.

“The 2010s were the age of scaling, now we're back in the age of wonder and discovery once again. Everyone is looking for the next thing,” Sutskever said. “Scaling the right thing matters more now than ever.”

Sutskever declined to share more details on how his team is addressing the issue, other than saying SSI is working on an alternative approach to scaling up pre-training.

On the other hand, we have both Dario Amodei from Anthropic and Altman from OAI extolling the virtues of test-time compute in the vein of o1 (as the article acknowledges).

Personally, while I find the recent relative stagnation in LLMs to be annoying, it's only been what, two years since GPT-4? There are open source models that beat the OG GPT-4 while being much smaller (Llama 405B versus likely a trillion for 4), and models like Sonnet 3.5 are a small but appreciable improvement. I'm not going to call scaling out until we've spent either another year or a hundred billion USD on it, and we'll have to see how test time compute pans out.

Besides, even Ilya says they're working on their own secret sauce solution. We'll see when we see, it's far far too early to call AGI out of the cards.

Sure, I agree with all of that. It would be silly for skeptics of LLMs to “declare victory” now. I say give it another 5 years at least. The main reason I brought it up is because Ilya’s the one who’s saying it, which lends quite a bit more authority to the claim.

He's saying that we'll have to scale up something else - inference time is the most obvious choice. Synthetic data is also widely used. Ilya wouldn't be founding his own 'making superintelligence' company if he thought it wasn't possible.

Ray Kurzweil was on Joe Rogan's podcast recently. He seems completely deluded about life extension. I think he said we're at 20% of the longevity escape velocity, which means life expectancy is increasing by about ten weeks every year, so that you're really only 42 weeks closer to death every year. He says this is accelerating such that we will reach longevity escape velocity in about ten years I think. This strikes me as ridiculously optimistic and timed so that he is just young enough to be able to benefit from this.

The guy is not doing well, judging by his appearance. Joe Rogan asked him his age and I was expecting to hear an answer that started with a 9 and was shocked when he said he was in his seventies. Judging by videos from just a few years ago, he has started to age really fast. His body was slumped over and he talked very slowly. The interview was painful to listen to. He's taking something like 60 pills a day to stay young and it doesn't seem to be helping.

With Mr Kurzweil the next big breakthrough is always in 10-30 years. LLMs and chat GPT are breakthroughs, but probably not what he and others like him have in mind of something that radically alters existence itself.

The guy is not doing well, judging by his appearance. Joe Rogan asked him his age and I was expecting to hear an answer that started with a 9 and was shocked when he said he was in his seventies. Judging by videos from just a few years ago, he has started to age really fast. His body was slumped over and he talked very slowly. The interview was painful to listen to. He's taking something like 60 pills a day to stay young and it doesn't seem to be helping.

Yeah and this is with plastic surgery and hair transplants , which it's evident compared to older pictures

Unrelated to the actual science or lack thereof in this subject, I think thinking on the extreme measures that Kurzweil is taking to extend his life I find his clear lack of success as a very stark reminder that one of the most important things in life is learning to accept gracefully the inevitable and inescapable quality of death.

While I’m not keen to die and in no hurry, it can’t be mentally or physically healthy spending this much time and energy trying to extend your life. I think there’s a kind of hilarious irony in that.

People who live long don't take hundreds of supplements, but are generally those who love life, themselves, socially active and even a bit insufferable. Like Trump. Oldest person in my family was a bit like him, also pretty sharp to old age, very high self-regard.

Lifting weights to restore muscle lost after sarcopenia starts in sixties really helps. You won't live much longer, but you can move around and do stuff. E.g. Dr. Eugster who decided to lift weights to regain muscle at 87, lived to 97 pretty actively. Or here's Ernestine Shepherd, training old people in a gym at age.. probably late 80s.. She had a body better than most twenty-somethings by 80, nice muscle definition, erect posture. (see attachment for age 85)

If they're physically active and careful enough, easily live to mid 90s.

My grandma who I'm talking about had a massive heart attack at 79 after smoking for half a century, the kind that usually kills people, then lived fairly sedentarily on heart medication until 93 and her irreversible overnight fall in the bathroom while living alone. After that she spent a year in a hospice, mostly sleeping or drowsing but lucid for the daily hr one of her sons came, brought her beer and visited. Her mind was going so she lost her filter, and we heard incredible things. I wonder if she'd have preferred DNR.

and even a bit insufferable.

I am relieved.

Poor Ray.

Yeah, I remember Ray talking about escape velocity. That's just a stupid belief for such a smart person. We're going the wrong direction. In the early 1900s, we were at 40% of escape velocity. It's been going down every since. Today, it's close to zero.

And the supplements... Let's say that, in isolation, each of these supplements increased lifespan by 0.2 years which is unlikely, but not impossible. But that doesn't mean that, in aggregate they will increase lifespan by 0.2*60 = 12 years. In fact, all these supplements might interact with each other in negative ways and actually be harmful in aggregate. I don't know. Neither does Ray.

But that doesn't mean that, in aggregate they will increase lifespan by 0.2*60 = 12 years. In fact, it might be worse. They might interact with each other in negative ways.

It's certainly not additive.

For someone who is so smart it's sad how he fell off into the realm of health nonsense

In the early 1900s, we were at 40% of escape velocity.

I think this is misleading. The number care about is more like "life expectancy conditioned on being a healthy adult", which I don't think was changing much back then, nor has changed much recently. But probably is still going up a little if you control for demographics, which, in my limited understanding, have been changing in the West to mask (small) improvements in longevity.

I don't know exactly what you mean by "healthy young adult" (healthy young adults by definition die rarely), but life expectancy at every age has increased since 1900:

https://ourworldindata.org/its-not-just-about-child-mortality-life-expectancy-improved-at-all-ages

Life expectancy at 20 years old in 1900 was just under 65 and is now over 80.

Whoops, thanks for correcting me and for providing a link.

The number care about is more like "life expectancy conditioned on being a healthy adult", which I don't think was changing much back then.

This is not accurate. In the year 1900, mortality was much higher than today at every age range. Healthy adults were constantly being felled in the prime of life by bacterial infections or infectious diseases.

But yes, there was no true escape velocity then or now. The gains were all in helping people realize their potential, but the potential itself remains fixed.

Oh, I stand corrected.

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