This is one of those rare times that powerful people make bold choices that catalyze a shift in the world's thought paradigm. Aging will now be seen for what it is: the root of all chronic illness.
Absolutely. The goal should be to enact a vector of a new paradigm, as proactive team players synergize an out-of-the-box strategy of functionality and infotainment, re-engineering the learning curve framework of your dotted-line relationship.
This approach will surely recontextualize best-of-breed vortals, implement world-class research and innovate value-added technologies by embracing impactful infomediaries.
Imagine how much longer we'd live if we leveraged sticky e-services, brand user-centric channels, iterated seamless deliverables and matrix impactful architectures?
This will result in a significant thought paradigm shift in all things health-related, and it's a great thing that a company with as many resources and as high of a profile as Google is looking into this. Google is a company that is making self-driving cars, providing incredibly fast internet to consumers, providing Internet to suffering areas with a new idea (the Loon), exploring definitively new ideas for hardware (Google Glass) -- and now they're looking into aging.
I'd say Google guys are sufficiently more respectable than the political chameleon who's lobbying DC today [1], and just recently directed considerable resources on ads advocating a host of anti-environmental causes [2].
[1]: http://www.politico.com/story/2013/09/mark-zuckerberg-dc-969...
[2]: http://thinkprogress.org/immigration/2013/04/26/1925921/mark...
A lit class isn't going to make any comment on a phrase like that, or management speak in general. Management speak is just a jargon.
Its mostly not. Jargon is specialized use of terms used to facilitate clear communication of ideas within a specific community/domain. Management speak -- at least the form that is often mocked -- is just using flowery language to conceal the absence of substance, and is pretty much the opposite of jargon.
There is a jargon of management -- an array of terms with precise meanings in the field that are either not used outside of the field or are used outside with different meanings, and which facilitate clear communication in the domain.
But that's really not what people are talking about when they are talking complaining about "management speak", which seems to be all about marketing/PR buzzwords which are used to create certain feelings while minimizing communication of clear commitments and detailed information, which are used by management either when they are acting to promote the business in marketing/PR role, or when they've been successfully snowed over by some vendor's or other industry player's marketing.
And I think he wouldn't have touched that phrase with a barge pole.
>Management speak is just a jargon.
No. Jargon comes out of necessity and field-specific needs.
Management speak comes out of the desire to unecessarily dress-up bullshit.
So catalyzing a paradigm change means to make it happen faster.
I don't see the problem with this. Could you be more specific?
The problem with this is that "make it happen faster" is already clear and sufficient.
People understand it -- including people who don't have an idea what "catalyst" means (for me it's a totally transparent word, as its origin and etymology come from my language. YMMV).
If you want to dress it up to make it sound more impressive, then you're not communicating effectively.
And if you include 3-4 other unecessary buzzwords in the same sentense you're just name-dropping words.
"I saw a very puissant pismire lifting 100 times its weight in a sweven yesterday". Do you see anything wrong with this sentense?
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/pismire http://www.thefreedictionary.com/puissant http://www.thefreedictionary.com/sweven
(Except if you're a chemist, and you use the word "catalyst" as it applies to your terminology)
Do you only read Simple English wikipedia? It's very clear and sufficient.
And, some phrases are simply used too often by people trying to sound smart when they really have nothing to say. There is nothing wrong with catalyzing synergy, but because so many people have applied those words when they had nothing to say, the phrase has gradually become meaningless. Omit meaningless words.
I disagree. Catalyze is more succinct. In addition, to catalyze has the connotation of making change happen via the injection of a catalyst, thus connecting the agent of change with the change it brings. It's a better word.
Catalyst is not a difficult vocabulary word, nor a particularly uncommon word. Compare it's frequency to the words you used: http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=catalyst%2C+pui...
Managers have their jargon because they often trade in abstract concepts (Plan of Record, Resources, Asks, Action Items, OKRs) peculiar to their trade that are ripe for shorthanding, which is pretty similar to the reason you see it in other fields.
In his view, it occurred over generations as adherents to older scientific models died of old age - e.g. the Copernican model replaced the Ptolomeic model because Ptolomeic astronomers went extinct.
However, the idea of an action paradigm is interesting - can you give an example of usage in that way?
But your comments are factually wrong. None of Google's products you mention are new or really that much better (so far.)
>> Google is a company that is making self-driving cars
So is every major car manufacturer out there. Who's ahead of the game? I don't know because Google gets all the press and fawning from fanboys--like you.
">>providing incredibly fast internet to consumers
Experimenting in a few ares with plenty of subsidies doesn't count. The much hated Verizon has done a LOT more on that regard http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verizon_FiOS
">> providing Internet to suffering area with a patently new idea (the Loon)"
Not providing anything yet, just experiments and Loon is not a new idea at all. http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB120347353988378955.ht...
">> exploring definitively new ideas for hardware (Google Glass)" Not a new idea at all. Different thinking of course but the verdict is still out.
One day--the focused like a laser--Google will manufacture their toilet paper and you'll be here to wonder how we managed without toilet paper before Google invented it.
It's Google. They have the right people, the right ideas, the resources, and they started first. Source: I'm a prof in a related field with graduated PhD students at Google.
The Google cars get press because they are really very good.
By the way: " Mercedes missed a barn-door sized opportunity last week when it revealed technical details of next year's 2014 S-class, which showed that while this flagship model could potentially have been the world's first autonomous driving car, Mercedes has decided not to give it that capability. For now, the driver's hands have to remain on the wheel at all times.
"The car would do it [autonomous driving] today," said Jochen Haab technical support manager, "we have had test cars doing that, but what happens if a child steps out into the street and the radar misses it?" http://www.roadandtrack.com/go/first-looks/new-car-tech-2014...
I believe we covered the "fawning from fanboys" part already.
>Source: I'm a prof in a related field with graduated PhD students at Google.
That's not a "source". That's at best a "full discosure" and at worst a "conflict of interest" in this discussion...
For the record, none of my former students work on the Google cars as far as I know.
http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-autos-mercede...
Well, shit, that quote right there plus your hostile attitude sure have me impressed. 62 whole miles! They're clearly on the doorstep of releasing a production autonomous car, as you were trying to imply over at <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6408590>.
Meanwhile, that other company's car has made the trip from San Francisco to Los Angeles (at least 380 miles, in case you didn't know):
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/06/science/sebastian-thrun-se...
That was two years ago.
Here's a suggestion: why don't you just take a step back from the topic of Google, since you clearly get all twisted up inside about it?
I'm here to impress you sir, that's my mission in life.
Now who said that they drove a total of 62 miles vs a 62 mile trip? Did the car crash at mile 62 or they reached the destination? All these are little details that need to be taken in consideration before an idiot exclaims "Google is #1 in autonomous cars..."
By the way, see anything funny http://i.bnet.com/blogs/google-self-driving-car.jpg sticking out of the Mercedes car http://www.trbimg.com/img-522e6325/turbine/la-fi-hy-autos-20... ? Don't tell me they have shrunk it to make it fits inside a normal car already. How much does the Google system cost now, is it $100K+ just for the autonomous driving system? Details, details, details
I didn't say anything about total miles; I was comparing Mercedes' single 62 mile trip against the other car's single 380+ mile trip. But if you want to bring up total miles logged, That Company In Mountain View hit 300k miles last year [1] and there are absolutely no public numbers from Mercedes. If the figure were impressive, they'd probably have released it.
But now you want to make a fuss over the LIDAR on top of That Company's car while the S Class gets by on just radar. Your earlier post quoted a Mercedes engineer saying "we have had test cars doing that, but what happens if a child steps out into the street and the radar misses it?" -- well, gosh, maybe that funny spinning thing is doing something useful. Wouldn't you want an autonomous car to use any and every available method to detect obstacles? Details indeed.
[1] http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-self-driving-car-...
http://ideas.time.com/2013/09/18/finally-the-war-on-aging-ha...
This announcement could be interpreted as strong support for the general concepts that Aubrey talks about.
> So soul-destroying has this knowledge been, for almost everyone, that we have constructed our entire society and world view around ways to put it out of our minds'.
Absolutely ridiculous. Besides the fact that I think a 'soul' is a poorly-defined construct and thus hard to crush, I really don't see a problem with death; to me it's just as necessary as birth. Sure, it's sad when someone dies, and death can be a traumatic experience, but it's also simply part of being a biological organism. I suppose I find some agreement with de Grey in that large portions of societies fear death and try not to think about it. However, perpetual avoidance through the declaration of war on Death seems practically infantile in view.
You know, as opposed to not tiling the universe in anything.
More seriously, I don't think that's an accurate comparison. What fundamentally is the problem with the people saying "God gave us the Earth to exploit"? Well, it's what you said, overconsumption. But what is actually wrong with "overconsumption"? (That is to say, at what point does consumption become overconsumption?) Is there something inherently wrong with pumping lots of oil out of the earth? No, of course not. What's wrong with consuming too much now is that it leaves less for us later. Or that it has other ill effects, such as polluting the atmosphere and making our environment unlivable. There's nothing wrong with unbounded amount of consumption per se if we can find a way to deal with the ill effects (and make sure to leave enough for future people). The value against overconsumption is instrumental, not terminal. If you are in a situation where such consumption would cause a problem, well, don't do that then; but if you're not, go ahead.
Similarly with overpopulation -- there's nothing inherently wrong with a universe full of people; the worry rather is that you'll have so many people with so little space and resources for each that they'd have a terrible quality of life. Once again: Well, don't do that, then! Anticipate problems and avert them (or fail to anticipate them and then solve them, possibly by reducing population or consumption). Eliezer Yudkowsky is not suggesting anything close to the idea that we should make as many people as possible even if all of them would be miserable, or that we consume every resource as fast as possible even if we render the world uninhabitable for our descendants.
In short, the problem is not a large population, nor lots of consumption, but the side-effects of these things, and the shortsightedness that leads people to disregard them. Gotta maintain the distinction between terminal values and instrumental ones.
...OK, there is one obvious thing I'm glossing over. Namely, the idea that it's good to leave some space for the non-humans, as well; their disregard for other forms of life is I think something else we would agree is wrong with the "God gave us the earth to exploit" people, and there the comparison with Yudkowsky is perhaps a little more accurate. But, regarding animals, I don't think Yudkowsky's position is really different from that of most people. Yes, we'd like to have a world with, say, polar bears in it, and not just ones in zoos, or ones who are miserable all the time; but we probably wouldn't want to have a world that was partly ordered according to polar bear values. (Whatever that means.)
Now, other intelligent forms of life is a another can of worms, but I don't think the "God gave us the Earth to exploit" people worry much about those, so I'm going to stop here because I don't really know how to compare there.
(Also I'm not really sure that your earlier "tiling" post is really an accurate representation of Yudkowsky's ideas, but I didn't really want to argue about it, partly because I'm not prepared to right now and partly because it seemed essentially irrelevant.)
This tends to be glossed over in discussions of his work, but Aubrey de Grey is specifically interested in reducing the (currently inevitable) human suffering associated with aging. Clinical immortality would be an eventual side-effect of succeeding in that mission.
Every manner of treatable and correctable disease and condition is "part of being a biological organism," but it seems absurd to hold such a standpoint if you're not also in favour of discarding modern medicine in order to die slowly and painfully from cancer.
Ah, I see, you're engaged in a 'War on Metaphor'.
laugh.
Absolutely everything we have built with technology is not simply part of being a biological organism. Who are you to say what being a biological organism is about? For that matter, what's special about biology (nothing, but that's a different discussion)?
Smallpox is simply a part of being a biological organism. Fighting with other organisms to the death is part of being a biological organism. Survival of the fittest is part of being a biological organism. But we're better than that. See, we have pretty powerful brains that allow us to escape the endless cycle of suffering and death that is "being a biological organism". You're not forced to use yours for that purpose, but don't act like there is some bright line between all the other supposed rules we break and curing death. It is all part of the same progression.
Let's just go ahead and pump the brakes here before we start clapping each other on the back and talking about shifted paradigms. I'll gladly join in the happy-clappy fest once some actual results come through. But saying we've catalyzed a shift in the world's thought paradigm (that is a really pretentious way of saying "this might make people think differently", by the way) at the announcement of a new product might be just a wee bit premature.
All we're doing today is announcing a moon shot.
We need to get out of that hole first. Google is doing the right thing.
Imagine what the world would look like if the medieval elite were still alive today. It's good that the people in power die every once in a while.
If everyone died at 30, everyone would say the same thing about life extension past 30.
If everyone died at 200, everyone would say the same thing about life extension past 200.
Why does death have to be where it is now? Natural death from aging comes a little longer than a few other causes of death tend to hit, but it's still very, very soon. People's twitch thinking skills start to decline so early (even in the 20s), and while they can more than make up for it through increasing knowledge, we have so little time to build that knowledge before we have to go.
This is thought provoking - if even a perfect solution to such a problem won't give us what we want, then we do need to "make people think differently" and try to focus on a different, bigger problem than the current approach of trying to strike out separate illnesses.
By the way, allowing medicine to think about not only "how to bring a broken-person to average" but "how to bring an average person to above-average" would also require a major change in the way of thinking for the whole area. Some homo sapiens are extremely resistant for diseases, some are smarter than average, some have much lower aging damage. Instead of thinking how to fix a genetic disease by replacing a broken gene with the "average" one; we should think about what is the best that we, as a species, could be.
Take a look at, for example, http://youtu.be/qMAwnA5WvLc (TEDx, Aubrey de Grey) linked in another thread.
having a massive stroke/heart attack/aneurisma? at least you pop and you're gone. going through chemo/radio for months/years to slowly, painfully wither away is bullshit.
same is true for all those diseases, parkinsons, alzheimers, etc.
fuck them all. they are the bane of our existance, literally. pure evil.
Its not instant death, but the process of a slow death that is the enemy.
3 years increase from a non-infant mortality related improvement is actually pretty huge. I'd have to look it up, but I think the impact of non-infant vaccinations would be roughly a similar sized increase.
Going from 80 to 83 (for example) is nice, but it doesn't have a radical impact on how we should live our lives - going from 80 to 160 could do that. If we want major improvements, then we either need to make sure that the other things are cumulative (say, that we can get 20 disease-cures to add 3 years each); or we need to look in completely different directions.
It depends on what you see as a goal - in the long run, I believe that we can get to lifespans measured in centuries, because it's technically possible as seen from other lifeforms. If the marginal improvements due to curing diseases can't get us there, then we should investigate other options how to achieve that, instead of treating a 5% increase as "pretty huge" and being satisfied with that.