Police got called to an overcrowded presentation on “rejuvenation” technology

I’ve thought about this a few times and I came to the conclusion that when you become a billionaire you become that alien to humanity. You are so far removed from average peoples needs you take on a fully alien mindset

Their robots can't even walk by the sea without being slowly destroyed by salt (and they are not really adapted to sand walking). So we are far.

“The future is here. It’s just not widely distributed yet”

- William Gibson

Sure, but I look at it this way: if billionaires wan't to spend money on something, these technological long-shots aren't the worst they could do.

I'll take infinite amounts of these long-shots over a single WEF-esque attempt to reorganise society from the top down to institute a techno-fascist regime.

MIT contributes tremendously to military technology. It's the primary purpose. I'd be concerned for that reputational and moral hazard such that the the UX challenges of a blog wouldn't even register.

Even Chomsky couldn't make it out clean and got sucked into state actor trouble.

Not to defend MIT, but as I got zero with my blockers (uBo + uMatrix + FF tracking protection), maybe it’s time for an upgrade? ;) Might of course also be another reason.

I got another one from an add as well.

Tested with Firefox, Privacy Badger, and NoScript - zero popups, zero ads.

Four pop-ups for me.

Boomers have to spend their final portions wealth on incredible health care services to extend their life by a few months to years.

It highly depends on the definition you use, gather them from wikipedia and a few dictionaries and you will see. Looking at it from different languages is also worth looking into. I see it as an unavoidable (so far and in my opinion for a long time) disposition to go through a process. As such I would not consider aging in general as a disease. But individual processes taking place in aging would be in my opinion, especially since they can happen at earlier age in some people. I am much more interested in providing better quality of life to people impacted by those than to everybody (the societal impact would be quite dramatic).

This is a short story about thatquestion:

https://nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon

Any change in my body that is causing me discomfort is a disease.

If we collectively decide “yes” then maybe we can finally start devoting more resources to identifying and treating the underlying causes.

Let’s get rigorous and start separating snake oil from real science backed treatments.

My thoughts exactly. If we live forever there is no need for (or resources to sustain) children. That would be bad in many ways.

I do totally agree that pouring “discretionary investments” into healthcare is perhaps more kind that other things (Mars fantasy).

I don’t want to live forever, but I sure would be happy with 20 year old me’s ability to recover from physical exertion and injuries.

Technically, I think if something happens in 100% of cases that's the mainline and not an exception case that you can analyze/fix. So probably we cannot say it's a disease.

Now, in order to stop aging you will need to understand and stop all processes that lead to aging. everything we are doing today, in all domains, is trivial compared to understanding biology (even for simpler organisms). The complexity is just mindblowing (google: roche merabolic map poster). It would be probably easier (although this is still far far far out of reach) to create a new body and transfer the brain's content than to stop aging.

That should not stop us from trying to understand it though and there may be "low hanging fruits" that may add 1-2-10 years to life.

Another thing worth pondering is quality of life. If you could live the same amount of time without most of the decline that comes with old age who wouldn't want to do that?

It’s a genetic disease in my main. The fact that it affects most animals is a matter of quantity, not quality.

>Is aging a disease?

The question is more relevant from a political/legal perspective but less so from a technical perspective. From a technical perspective the most important question is how do we go about fixing it.

You’ve already got an answer from an expert working in the field who spent years studying and more years practicing.

Randos on the internet aren’t going to give you a better answer. If you want another perspective ask the rep to put you in touch with an MD who thinks it IS a good use of resources.

Would you pay a large amount for another speculative technology development (say Tesla auto pilot)?

Personally I would only do that if I know and care about the topic, in which case I would have an answer already.

There are 2 questions here: 1/ can you afford it? Is paying the fee for the procedure for you like buying a meal at a fancy restaurant which you do without thinking too much about itor is it a lot of money? 2/ what are the odds of the kid developing a disease and the stem cells from the collected blood being usable for the said disease?

I would say go for it if financially this has virtually zero impact on you, but also be realistic about ever using it.

> Their rep has been hounding me about it

In my opinion, the more aggressive the sales person, the higher margin they have. If it is something you want to do, negotiate on the price.

Three kids in three different hospitals (and two different states) in the US, and they all have this.

I don’t think it’s a hospital program it’s just an up-sell they get a kick-back on for selling to you.

It’s not a specific recommendation from that hospital, it’s the same as a car dealer upselling a third party insurance program.

As for value and utility, I think that’s covered here already, but I put it in the same bucket as cryogenics. Who knows where those stem cells go and how they’re maintained?

That said, my youngest is 10, so the state of science here might have changed since I last made the decision.