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Comment by joebob42 | Hacker News Reader

Sounds interesting, although it's one of those which really probably ought to include "in mice" in the title.

Still, there's so much progress being made in health stuff generally. Makes me optimistic about my older years.

"Our doctors have made such astonishing advances over the last 7 years, our medical knowledge doubling in that time, that I think if I'd only been born another 25 years later, then I am sure they would easily relieve me of my asthma."

--- Laurence Stern, writing in Tristam Shandy, in 1759. He used the word "asthma" to refer to the tuberculosis that eventually killed him. As for a cure for tuberculosis, he was wrong by 200 years.

As far as I know, this was the first prediction of steady advances in medicine, as well as the first use of the trope "If I'd only been born 25 years later, doctors could cure me."

I wonder if anyone has tried to map scientific progress in some quantifiable way, and if so, whether or not it matches punctuated equilibrium. It does seem as if there are periods of time in which we make steady progress, and once in a while leaps and bounds improvements are made all at once.

It also reminds me of how genetic algorithms that I've written tend to work - lots of "no improvement, cull, no improvement, cull" followed by "huge improvement".

It would give the impression, during those bursts, that you're just around the corner from a wildly different world.

There have been a couple efforts I know of to “quantify” science progress in general. In one study[0], physicists, chemists and medical researchers were asked to rate the important of different Nobel-prize-winning discoveries in their field since the prize was established. The results generally showed that discoveries are getting harder to make, where “harder” is indicated by the age of the discoverer and the number of participants in the process.

One important factor that I feel like is overlooked here is that some discoveries are less likely to be appreciated immediately, largely because their impact is not yet fully felt. Also some form of anti-recency bias may be at play here, in that new results that are still somewhat under debate are less likely to be deemed “important” than older, established discoveries.

0: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/11/diminish...

"It does seem as if there are periods of time in which we make steady progress, and once in a while leaps and bounds improvements are made all at once."

You might be interested in Thomas Khun's[1] famous work: "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions".[2]

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Kuhn

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Re...

Thanks, it looks like it.

This is the best reference timeline I've found, which separates human progress into distinct epochs.

https://www.southampton.ac.uk/~cpd/history.html

Obviously the mice are hyper intelligent beings tricking us into finding their immortality.

Lab mice are probably evolving via artificial selection to be more prone to respond to drugs in a way that maximizes paper citations.

Something a bit similar is experiments that use only one, ad hoc, animal disease model.

For me it looks too easy to have a successful experiment (and article) if you can choose how you poison the animal.

I have always wondered why they did not use a commercial model, and better tested their hypothesis on several, unrelated animal models.

Startup idea:

Grow black mice that are hyperresponsive and white mice that are hyporesponsive (?) while optimizing for minimum genetic distance.

Sell them in equally weighted batches as yin/yang mice ("purely for esthetic reasons, also suitable for lab tests")

We'll know when the dolphins leave (who are second only to mice). "So long, and thanks for all the fish."

You know, if they trick us into funding our own immortality, most of us are good with that deal.

Mice lie and monkeys exaggerate.

It’s an irregular verb.

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