This comment and some of the others show the ugly side of HN.
Judging a company just based on a web site. Also the company is still very young that it should be given time to prove itself.
mindless contrarianism
Judging a company just based on a web site. Also the company is still very young that it should be given time to prove itself.
mindless contrarianism
I personally thought the above comment provided detail and references as to why this a tough nut to crack as well as what the current promising approaches may be.
And yes, the company should be given time to prove itself.
But given that they are well-funded, and that their public face is their web site, I would think (and maybe I'm crazy) that they could provide something more interesting than a bunch of vanilla executive bios. This is an amazing area of research and this is the best they can show for it? Not impressed (so far).
Yes, it could be seen as "If Calico hasn't even invested the time and energy necessary to build a decent and informative web presence, they're obviously not serious about what they're doing."
... but it could also be seen as "If Calico hasn't been concerned about their website, maybe that's because they're concerned about other things and have made the decision that the benefit they'd get from a website isn't worth the administrative overhead."
I don't really agree with all of what he's saying either, but at least address the content...
I'm a comp. bio. PhD student so don't think this isn't a topic of interest to me, but the answer to every age related topic just isn't "here's a link to some sens promotional material". SENS has some fringe ideas and was mostly rejected by scientists as silly and founded by a charlatan, now Peter Thiel has shown an interest it's got a kind of misappropriated authenticity among those with no scientific background.
It's fair to say OP is a SENS enthusiast. But, as a fellow researcher, you know that there are always differences of opinion about what avenues will be more or less fruitful in a field. That's OK, time will tell.
Personally, I'm not certain whether SENS' fundamental position -- that we should focus on engineering solutions to damage rather than identifying causes -- is correct, but it seems at least a coherent argument. Suppose OP is right: that we are wasting too much money on one rather than another. It would be a real problem, with real consequences: lives lost, and so on. Worth debating, at least.
Given that a fanboy is an uncritical true believer and a shill is paid to claim an opinion that they otherwise do not hold, the two terms would seem to be largely incompatible.