Item — HN Reader

Richard Hamming has a talk titled "You and Your Research", in which he discusses what sorts of things you should be working on. The summary is that you should be working on important problems. He then lists three of the most important problems that no one should actually work on, time travel, teleportation, and something else that I can't remember off the top of my head.

The thing Hamming understood, but which Bostrom, et al. don't is that sometimes even if something is extremely important or significant the lack of any reasonable approach to it makes it an unattractive thing to expend effort on. At least until a solution is more tractable.

Further, the idea that everyone dying is some great tragedy is only true in the philosophy Bostrom and others have adopted. It is one of massive egoism and human-centrism that I think is misplaced. These same people then reject any philosophies that lessen the devastation of death on the grounds that they are the fictions of lesser minds attempting to placate themselves over their impending death. But there is no objectively true philosophy. The whole point of philosophy is to invent a fiction that lets you cope with reality in a productive way.

4 comments

> The whole point of philosophy is to invent a fiction that lets you cope with reality in a productive way.

I think that if there's one thing that philosophers agree on, after arguing with each other for a couple of millennia, it's that the point of philosophy is not to find a clever way to lie to ourselves - it's to find out something true.

I think people are getting a bit hung up on my (admittedly poor) phrasing and less on the substance of my comment. Yes, philosophy wants to find out something "true", but reality as a whole is to complex to think about head on. Any philosophy with the goal of being completely factually true has to deal with a lot of information that isn't really relevant, e.g. physical (meaning atoms, etc.) interactions.

Since that is too much information to deal with you have to selectively ignore parts of it. A useful philosophy lets you get rid of essentially all the irrelevant information while keeping and fitting into a mental framework what is relevant. So in a sense it is a lie, but it is one that hopefully preserves the important parts. My argument was that Bostrom's philosophy ignores too many of the important parts by dismissing his critics' viewpoints as unfounded. Hopefully that clears things up a bit.

Sure. But that, of course, is why we invented scientists and mathematicians: to find out something true that grounds itself in checkable realities external to the mind of the perceiver, rather than ultimately grounding itself in the intuitions, rationalizations, and delusions generated by human psychology.

Life extension has been demonstrated in other species. And medication, such as metformin, has been shown to extend human lifespan (I believe average, not maximum). Anyway, the point is that life extension for humans is perfectly tractable.

Re metformin. From a study[0]: 'Patients with type 2 diabetes initiated with metformin monotherapy had longer survival than did matched, non-diabetic controls. Those treated with sulphonylurea had markedly reduced survival compared with both matched controls and those receiving metformin monotherapy. This supports the position of metformin as first-line therapy and implies that metformin may confer benefit in non-diabetes. Sulphonylurea remains a concern.'

[0] 'Can people with type 2 diabetes live longer than those without? A comparison of mortality in people initiated with metformin or sulphonylurea monotherapy and matched, non-diabetic controls' http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/dom.12354/abstrac...

>The thing Hamming understood, but which Bostrom, et al. don't is that sometimes even if something is extremely important or significant the lack of any reasonable approach to it makes it an unattractive thing to expend effort on. At least until a solution is more tractable. Further, the idea that women dying in childbirth is some great tragedy is only true in the philosophy Bostrom and others have adopted. It is one of massive egoism and human-centrism that I think is misplaced. These same people then reject any philosophies that lessen the devastation of women dying in childbirth on the grounds that they are the fictions of lesser minds attempting to placate themselves over their impending death during childbirth. But there is no objectively true philosophy. The whole point of philosophy is to invent a fiction that lets you cope with reality in a productive way.

I find your conception of philosophy unsatisfactory. Furthermore there are reasonable angles of attack we have on aging. We are making great strides in understanding metabolic pathways of aging in animal models, but we need the research funding to attract the researchers to get the work done. We will make significant progress when you can expect to have a bountiful academic career working on it. Longevity research is currently a career dead end.

> Longevity research is currently a career dead end.

Ouch, that's my career ;)

But the current trick to do longevity research in a way that will be funded is to point out how major diseases have age as a major risk factor, and that to tackle cancer, heart disease, etc, we need to understand more about aging. And that the median age in the US is increasing, therefore age-associated diseases will cause more of a health care cost burden.

In absolute terms, our society spends a pittance on this important problem. But relative to other biomedical researchers, aging researchers don't have that hard a time. You just have to be careful not to make overly bold claims and be lumped in with de Grey et al.

To summarize my thoughts on this article, I will add that I independently came to much the same conclusions as the OP, and that's why I'm doing what I am. I don't think I could make web apps all day or do 99% of careers because of this very absurdity. In fact, I am constantly surprised at the ability most people seem to have to go to a completely meaningless job every day.

> Longevity research is currently a career dead end.

David Sinclair[0] is wealthy and well known for his work in longevity. He Sold his company to GlaxoSmithKline for $720 million.

D Sinclair's earlier work was on resveratrol, and there's some more products coming. Well, actually one has arrived—in the US at least: http://www.elysiumhealth.com/

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Sinclair_%28biologist%29

Citing a single outlier does not change the prospects of an academic researcher going into longevity work.

Elysium has 5 Nobel Laureates on their board[0]! Their Chief Scientist is Leonard Guarente of MIT.

Novartis[1], the pharmaceutical company, who ranked number one in world-wide sales in 2013 is working on a longevity drug based on rapamycin.

Elizabeth Blackburn got a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, in 2009, for her work on telomeres!

Quite frankly: lulz!

[0] http://www.elysiumhealth.com/team [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novartis

nothing you said changes the incentives in front of researchers. Grant money is there in the billions for cancer research, obesity research etc. There is essentially no grant money there for basic longevity research. I say this having spoken with people trying to get funding for basic longevity research.

Maybe there's just less longevity researchers. The absolute funding makes little difference from an individual career perspective–even if it does have a large effect on the field as a whole.

I've linked to a page of academics from top institutions[0]. If you're at Harvard researching longevity, then you're doing OK career-wise, imho.

If you sell your company for $720 million, you're doing OK career-wise, imo.

Demonstrably, you're incorrect.

[0] http://www.elysiumhealth.com/team

Cancer cells are by definition immortal.

But there is no objectively true philosophy.

There is, however, objectively inconsistent philosophy. Bostrom would probably argue that most people believe things (such as valuing individual lives) that are inconsistent with complacency in the face of death. Witness, for example, the obstinate resistance to cryonics even among those who would eagerly seek out an untested and experimental surgery to avoid death at the hands of cancer or heart disease. Unless great care is taken to reason dispassionately, the enormity and apparent intractability of death compromise a rational assessment of its horror.

>Witness, for example, the obstinate resistance to cryonics even among those who would eagerly seek out an untested and experimental surgery to avoid death at the hands of cancer or heart disease.

There is a vast difference between an untested, experimental surgery to save you from death and a tested, nonworking procedure that relies on beneficent future people to invent wholly new technologies to save you from death.

Cryonics is not about saving lives, it's about hoping against the evidence to recreate them when they are already gone.

If you want to cheat death, you need to actually conduct an experimental science of cheating death (ie: preserving and restoring people before they are truly dead) rather than just buying the first available option, no matter how scientifically unworkable and technologically unrefined, like a lottery ticket.

The Wright brothers did not bet that their first design for an airplane would work. They experimented until they arrived at a design that did work.