The Secret to a Longer Life? Don’t Ask These Dead Longevity Researchers | Hacker News Reader

The Secret to a Longer Life? Don’t Ask These Dead Longevity Researchers

nytimes.com

46 pointsonuralp41 comments

Make sure to read the article all the way to the end; I think it’s quite a powerful statement.

We’re too focussed on our individual choices, looking for elusive cures for aging; instead of fighting for things we know will help.

Reducing engine emmissions will make us live longer. Reducing pesticides will also make us live longer. Limiting work hours will make us healthier.

But instead, we pretend that our health is defined only by our individual life style decisions, and let the industry do whatever they want.

> Make sure to read the article all the way to the end;

> Today, the greatest threat to your life span may be the Trump administration’s assault on public health and medical research

Yeah, the end turns it into "what you can do to live longer is fight the trump administration". When paired with the lack of information presented in the article, makes it seem like some pedestrian political clickbait.

Don’t get too hung up on the Trump part, it’s not the important part.

The important argument is that our incredible success in extending human age over the last century is not due to individual lifestyle changes, but societal changes.

If we want to live longer, we need to stop poisoning our environment.

I think the article is saying that there are way too many confounding variables in determining the probabilistic nature of longevity and so far due to the fragments of data, contradictions in data, challenges in tracking, uncaptured info, it is extremely difficulty to meaningful understand what people could do to slowdown aging without running controlled study on thousands if not millions of people.

However, say someone really wants to figure this out, they really want to know every component of every meal people eat, every activity or habit and every moment of their lives in terms of heart rate and metabolism and provide a device to easily track all these and make sure the data is for anonymized for research only, and they managed to convince millions of people to implant such device at their birth, and they figured this out in 500 years and found a formula to extend life indefinitely, I wonder if this would introduce the classic “the rich/wealthy lives forever” scenario, or the alternative scenario where the knowledge of longevity could hurt genetic evolution as a whole.

I believe to know, what might make me live longer, my body often tells me: sleep more, eat less, avoid too much meat, fat and sugar, don’t drink etc.

Many times, I catch myself thinking though: do I really wanna miss out on a great moment/feeling just to live a couple of years longer with a broken body and/or mind?

I can enjoy now. Who knows if I can then.

> to live a couple of years longer with a broken body and/or mind?

You don't live a couple of years longer with a broken body/mind. You live a couple years longer before your body/mind breaks down.

Males in the USA have an 81% chance of living to age 65 [1]. I think it makes sense to take care of yourself. Of course, allow yourself the occasional indulgence.

Your habits of your 20s and 30s could significantly impact your 40s and 50s. Taking care of yourself means enjoying more great moments later on too. Also, taking care of yourself can be in itself enjoyable. Pick up a sport, or if you're not competitive, make going to the gym a social thing. And eating healthy can certainly be tasty.

[1]: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TO65.MA.ZS?locat...

>Pick up a sport, or if you're not competitive, make going to the gym a social thing.

Gross. Just run or, preferably, swim for 40 minutes to some hardcore music[0]. Let the endorphin high melt the pain and carry you through!

>And eating healthy can certainly be tasty.

It can be tasty when you consider fruit. When you consider everything else, it's misery. We evolved to crave sugar and fat. Gg

But you have to deprecate mouth pleasure for a more durable basis of well-being, which is being healthier, and well-being is important because you want to live for as long as possible so you can someday witness the year of the Linux desktop!

[0]: https://youtu.be/Ihi_kJJj_8A

> When you consider everything else, it's misery.

You're really missing out there. A friend of mine has given up meat for lent, and we're now trying a bunch of vegetarian recipes. It fits quite well because I've recently started looking into Indian cooking where you can do a lot without meat.

The only problem is that I absolutely despise all the stuff around cooking (searching for recipes, shopping for ingredients, doing the dishes, people that insist that cooking is super-easy and judge you for not doing it more often).

Visit Japan sometime. The packaged food is good and not heavily weighted towards the "sugar-cream" U.S. norms. Salty and umami flavors are preferred instead and you can pick up a decent example of it from any konbini, everywhere you go.

As the article says about aging, it's a collective problem. We are systematically encouraging ourselves at a large scale to consume take-out pizza and Coke.

> It can be tasty when you consider fruit. When you consider everything else, it's misery.

I used to think that, but now I'm living with a hard-vegetarian/soft-vegan and I've discovered that it's not exactly true, even though my tastes didn't really change and I still dislike most of the vegetables.

Goddamn, only 81% to just 65? We're doomed.

The point of all those things you mentioned is not to live longer, but to feel better today.

You might enjoy a sugar rush for 20 minutes, and then crash hard and feel tired and slightly depressed for 2 hours. Is it worth it?

That kind of reaction to sugar sounds more like a nocebo reaction because you're overly afraid of sugar than actual effects of the sugar.

Short term thinking is one way, rarely the best, at least if done regularly. You'd be dead long if nature didn't accumulate a set of non long term mechanisms and learning schemes.

I couldn’t agree more. Long term thinking is exactly what I do

Oh, I interpreted your comment half backward.

To add to the discussion, it takes time or innate brain sensitivity to actually seek regularity and long term process. It's so so so easy to use the brain area dealing with rapid satisfaction..

I do agree again. It’s easier and it compensates for other things, e.g. a stressful day at work. I do admit, though, that I am trying to restrain myself. Eg I don't buy any sweet, if you don’t have them at home you can’t be tempted. I am trying to do intermittent fasting from time to time. Alas, I’m not perfect and indulge more often than restrain.

Mildly amusing, but basically silly. There is a reason why everyone in the past failed, and that is because they didn't have sufficiently advanced biotechnology to (a) understand the causes of aging in terms of specific low-level cell and tissue damage, and (b) identify and build ways to repair those forms of damage.

We've only had a way to progress towards therapies for aging with this model of development for somewhere between 30-50 years, and no way to make progress towards therapies for aging with anything short of massive war-on-cancer style programs prior to the last 20 years. (Those programs didn't happen, but in a different world could have; arguably it wouldn't have made much difference as to where we are now, just as the war on cancer has only been a foundational effort for the last ten years of exponentially rapid development just prior to the advent of universal effective cancer therapies. It is possible that senolytics could have happened much earlier, decades ago, but finding and validating the candidate drugs would have been very hard back then). But now everything in biotech costs 100 times less than it did not so very long ago - that is really why things are heating up in applied longevity science.

The article also commits the usual journalistic sin of equating every effort. There is a vast difference between all of: eating a different diet; running a pharmaceutical discovery program aimed at a mechanism of aging; running that program to build a way to replicate calorie restriction; running that program to kill senescent cells or clear glucosepane cross-links. These activities have radically different expectation values in terms of best plausible outcome.

The biggest mistake most people make in their approach to the new world of rejuvenation science is to think of every possible methodology as having similar best plausible outcomes in terms of years gained. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Suppose short of an eccentric bankrolling a jumpstart to institutionalizing a longevity research culture (for discussions sake, lets say Elon or the ghost of howard hughes) how do you imagine todays research culture would evolve into the necessary scale such longevity research would allegedly require?

An aging research community already exists that is ten times or more larger than would be needed to get to a comprehensive implementation of mouse rejuvenation after the SENS Research Foundation model in ten to twenty years. They are just largely not working on that. Amyloid removal is about the only area that does have a lot of attention focused on it.

The next few decades will be a slow process of proving that the SENS model works well, and that other models don't work well, when it comes to reversing age-related disease and producing rejuvenation in older individuals. There will be reluctant acceptance on the part of the mainstream, and development will largely shift to what works, slowly and late.

This can be seen in its infancy today in the rapid progression of work on senolytics. In just six years, clearance of senescent cells has already far outpaced the past few decades of work on calorie restriction mimetics, producing more impressive and reliable results in animal studies. Things that work are hard to ignore, so everyone now retrofits senescent cells into their models of aging and development - that didn't include them seven years ago - and continues to try to ignore the rest of the SENS to-do list. Senolytics development is becoming heavily funded, and is on its way to the clinic.

This process will reoccur every time the poorly funded bootstrapping side of the SENS research community manages to advance to the point of a technology demonstration, which happened in 2011 for cellular senescence. Expect this to happen for cross-link breaking sometime in the next few years, which will be just as impressive for cardiovascular aging as senescent cell clearance is for inflammatory/fibrotic conditions of aging.

One would hope that at some point, some people involving in this process make the realization that they could just implement the rest of SENS themselves, with the successful biotech company they are involved in. There are a number of existing companies/groups where this may well happen, if they grow sufficiently large.

There's a bit of a bikeshedding effect in longevity science. Getting old only involves not dying aftet all. For most people that seems as simple as getting up in the morning every day and following often repeated diet and excercise advice.

To most people, any advance in longevity science just seems like a scam to sell vitamins or expensive cosmetic procedures.

I sense some wishful thinking in your comment.

Let me guess, you believe that "sufficiently advanced biotechnology" should appear just in time to reverse your own aging, correct?

I'd say, if you're 20 year old, and your ancestors typically lived past 80, then you probably have a chance. Perhaps in 60 years they will at least find a way to freeze you properly.

Allow me to ask this related question: of our modern (if I may say so) societies, in our modern era; we see a lot of improvements and optimisations. But I rarely see ideas about the simple question of happiness.

It's as if we think happinnes comes by x or y (in here longer existence).

Well, what would a society that optimizes for happiness actually do differently?

Kill all the unhappy people. Such an action would be be the most effective way of raising the average level of happiness.

No society should ever optimise for a single simple factor.

That's Goodhart's law, by the way. "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." Because people game it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

There's a related memorable, though probably untrue, anecdote about a Soviet nail factory: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/22375/did-a-sov...

It is not quite the same as Goodhart’s law as it is more a philosophical position in that even if it was not possible to game, we should never do it.

it's odd because recently I felt most "modern" society is based on gaming things until things break.

Yes that certain is true :)

There's a difference between optimising for 'highest level of happiness per person' and optimising for most happiness in total. The second is probably closer to most utilitarian mindsets and may even lead to the moral action being having as many offspring as possible (the details then depend on how exactly you draw your utility function, and especially at what point it goes negative).

Maybe it's not an optimization, not an atomic/individual or material thing. A way to balance few factors, social, self, effort, rest, new, stable, expression, help ..

Deathism appear to be rather popular here on HN [0].

0. https://hpluspedia.org/wiki/Deathism

I think individual death is necessary for the greater of tapestry of life to flourish and to be something worth being involved. Most great people I ever knew or read seem to share this "live and let live" attitude. In contrast, the individuals who really really want to live forever are the ones that bore me to death after 5 minutes.

Some people are boring, therefore everyone should die? Are you sure you've thought that through?

I am not sure where you got the idea from that ending aging will end death. I do agree with you that those that want to live forever (i.e. those that beleive in a heaven) do tend to bore.

It is easier to market something as the "cure" than to actually discover and validate a cure

Just like, in spite of the fact that cancer cannot be cured, it’s a lot easier to market research to “cure” it rather than “treat” it.

Of course cancer can be cured. What I wish we did is spend more on preventing cnacer, but the regulatory system basically makes this impossible.

I don’t think so. Cancer is constantly being evolutionarily selected for. Eventually it finds a way to circumvent the cell’s regulatory system. In a way that you didn’t intend, you’re right it’s a problem with regulation.

It seems to me to be a truism, much more akin to thermodynamics than typical biology.

Yes but we know from large long lived animals like elephants and bowhead whales that the cancer rate can be very significantly reduced. If we had the same anticancer systems as the bowhead whales basically no one would get cancer even if they lived for a 1000 years. This is what we need to be working on.

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