Aubrey de Grey: Why we age and how we can avoid it | Hacker News Reader

Aubrey de Grey: Why we age and how we can avoid it

ted.com

22 pointsamichail8 comments

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SENS http://www.sens.org/

Death sucks, let's get rid of it.

ted is pretty consistently amazing in their presentations.

eh? lots of them are not serious. only a handful are of comparable quality to Aubrey.

There really is a sucker born every minute. You people really buy this schtick?

You sound surprised. Death and aging are engineering problems. This is a site filled with people who believe engineering problems can be solved. What Aubrey brings to the table is reminding us of this and daring to attempt it. Fixes are possible.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness

It's amazing what a difference believing something is possible makes

If you believe curing aging is as simple as he says, and that there's even a chance of it happening this century, you are a sucker.

> Death and aging are engineering problems.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineer's_Syndrome

The tendency to see solvable technical problems where there aren't necessarily any. Exemplified by those financially successful technical people who purchase sports franchises and then always manage them into the ground, having approached the enterprise as an engineering problem. Also evidenced by the horrendous record of technocratic governments and affiliated political philosophies formed by technical people.

What's your point? Because engineering didn't work in some cases this is a case there it also doesn't work, because... we are suckers?

It's not like there wouldn't also be a handful of examples where engineering did actually lead to some usable results.

Simple, no, but I'll bite on the second half of your statement "that there's even a chance of it happening this century" because the chance is there. Curing aging is incremental. Life expectancy at birth in the United States in 1900 was 47 years, today it's 76.

It's fascinating--you're so confident in your negativity that you'll predict 100 years out! I couldn't have imagined 30 years ago I'd be wasting time on something called the internet responding to a troll calling people "suckers" in a hacker forum, but here I am. Shame on me for responding, really. Good night...

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