10 ms·

http://sens.org/ http://sens.org/. Humans need more lifespan, badly. I’d have said AI safety, but it’s already on your list. Excellent. I’d also have said bas

by mietek 11y ago

http://sens.org/ http://sens.org/. Humans need more lifespan, badly. I’d have said AI safety, but it’s already on your list. Excellent. I’d also have said basic income. Good to know you’re on it. Meta-research. Academic publishing is obsolete, and knowledge should not be paywalled. How many researchers already make use of https://www.reddit.com/r/scholar https://www.reddit.com/r/scholar or http://sci-hub.io/ http://sci-hub.io/? Bacteriophages. Antibiotics are running out, while phages have been tested by the Soviets, and are available as an over-the-counter treatment in certain countries. Open-source infrastructure. How many ‘unicorns’ were only possible because of years of prior volunteer work? See @nayafia’s recent post: https://medium.com/@nayafia/how-i-stumbled-upon-the-internet-s-biggest-blind-spot-b9aa23618c58 https://medium.com/@nayafia/how-i-stumbled-upon-the-internet... Feynman’s and Drexler’s molecular nanotechnology. Smalley muddied the waters, and the National Research Council dropped the ball. We can do better than just nanoelectronics. See also “Ask PG: What Is The Most Frighteningly Ambitious Idea You Have Been Pitched On?”, paying attention to the Yudkowsky Ambition scale: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4509934 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4509934

derrida 11y ago
> Humans need more lifespan, badly. Do we? Or do we need more realistic perspective about death? Why quantity over quality? Seems there's a lot of quality improvements that could be made [1]. For instance, I read recently (can't recall source) that San Fransisco's homeless is the least happy in the world. Also that the top 1% in the world make over $35K a year, but there are far happier people than exist in middle America living in poverty [2]. Looking at populations that are happier - but in poverty - is perhaps an interesting study. Imagine a cross disciplinary study between (perhaps) techniques used in epidemiology/health informatics & anthropology / the humanities. --- [1] Notice that cancer, heart-disease, Alzheimer, etc research also falls into this category - allowing people to live with less suffering. [2] Yeah, 3 assertions, no sources, sorry - just my word & unreliable memory of something someone said in a book once folks :)
- mietek 11y ago
  > Why quantity over quality? That’s a false dichotomy. Please disregard my one-liner, and watch one of de Grey’s talks instead — or read his “When Quality and Quantity Do Not Compete”: http://online.liebertpub.com.sci-hub.io/doi/abs/10.1089/rej.2011.1307 http://online.liebertpub.com.sci-hub.io/doi/abs/10.1089/rej....
  - empressplay 11y ago
    You can live for a thousand years and you will still procrastinate and you will still not want to die. An extended lifespan won't help those issues. You need to get over them whether you live 50 years or 500.
    - JoshTriplett 11y ago
      > You can live for a thousand years and you will still procrastinate and you will still not want to die. Of course not! Why should you ever want to die? Why should you ever "get over" that? It's a bug. We haven't fixed it yet. It should not be romanticized, and it should most certainly not be treated as inevitable. It's an abomination we have yet to eliminate.
      - derrida 11y ago
        > it should most certainly not be treated as inevitable. What life never dies? What non-living thing does not change?
        JoshTriplett 11y ago
        Do you think of cancer as inevitable? Or do you think of it as something humans could cure someday? Do you think of degenerative mental disorders as inevitable? Or do you think humans can cure them someday? I don't think of death as inevitable. I think of it as something humans can cure someday. Thinking of it as inevitable means giving up on all possible solutions.
jspaulding 11y ago
> Academic publishing is obsolete To expand upon this, it's not just publishing papers behind paywalls that is the problem. The entire system we use to advance humanities shared knowledge is broken. The Internet enables a dramatically more efficient model of scientific collaboration. The problem is academic science has been stuck with a reward system from the 17th century. And quite simply, it does not reward what we want it to reward anymore. However, there is a solution: science funders can distribute their money in a way that creates a very different set of incentives. Sadly, almost all science funders are very conservative organizations. YC Research can play a critical role in catalyzing a transition to an Internet-native model of research. My startup, Thinklab, wants to help. We're a service that helps science funders reward participation in a massively collaborative open online model of research.
- rfurmani 11y ago
  I agree completely about the system being broken and that innovation would be fantastic (I wrote a few paragraphs below, but in a very different direction). I'll take a close look at Thinklab, and it'd be great to see a dialogue forming here.
  - jspaulding 11y ago
    Great! I read your comments and have to admit I'm unfamiliar with what a "collaborative atlas" is or would be? But I certainly agree it's a big problem that scientists are only rewarded for publishing papers. There needs to be a way to reward scientists for sharing in smaller chunks -- even just an idea that might help out a peer.
- BorisVSchmid 11y ago
  Can we add some nuance here? It is not like in the last few decades there has been no new knowledge generated. Just in my own field of biology, the amount of progress we have made in understanding how cells regulate themselves (20 year ago we were still teaching DNA->RNA->PROTEINS that do stuff), how immune systems function and can be used (stem cell therapy, cancer treatments, HIV drugs) and the flow of genetic information between organisms (the advance of (whole) genome sequencing into becoming a generic tool) has been mind-boggling.
Thriptic 11y ago
Antibiotics are running out because we stopped researching them, for a variety of reasons, and it takes time to bring research pipelines back online.
biofox 11y ago
I couldn't agree more about funding SENS related research. I think focusing on extended lifespan misses the point though (although it's a nice side benefit). The diseases of old age cause more suffering than everything else combined. Seeing people I love deteriorate to a state of constant suffering is unbearable to watch. Seeing signs of ageing in myself hammers home just how helpless I am to do anything. I don't understand why AI safety gets more attention. We're already facing our own personal dissolution from natural causes -- a real and tangible existential threat which is already claiming people in the most torturous ways possible. To be brutally honest, I'd rather die quickly in an AI takeover than suffer decades of chronic pain and dementia... and one of these scenarios seems a lot more likely than the other. Let's get real, take responsibility, and do something about ageing.
- pinouchon 11y ago
  Reducing existential risk is not about minimizing the amount of suffering in our own lives. It's about making the lives of our potential trillions of descendants possible.
  - eli_gottlieb 11y ago
    There's no reason to care about "potential trillions of descendants" who don't exist, nor is there any reason to maximize the amount of humans in the universe, etc. The "existential risk" talk tends to assume, to start with, that some wonderful, incredibly happy and nice "intergalactic civilization" of future transhumans or posthumans will exist, unless existential risks "destroy" it "in embryo" in our near-term future. Given the incredible prior improbability of intergalactic utopias, there's basically no reason to take the thought-experiment at its word or to value a particularly improbable imagined far-future over the actually-existing present and very likely near-futures.
    - yummyfajitas 11y ago
      The "existential risk" talk tends to assume, to start with, that some wonderful, incredibly happy and nice "intergalactic civilization" of future transhumans or posthumans will exist... Can you cite such a person? I've read quite a few folks concerned with existential risk, and never saw this assumption before.
seiji 11y ago
I’d have said AI safety, but it’s already on your list. Excellent. But, why? Nothing about "AI safety" is remotely useful. It would be like researching "alcohol safety" (something everybody has access to and nobody can restrict) or researching how ants can influence "human safety" (tiny things trying to influence massive things). It's nonsense no matter which way you think about it unless you just want to write SF novels. Open-source infrastructure. Sadly, we don't need "research" to study how it works, we need direct payments to contributors. As a "startup culture" we need to stop the trend of billion dollar companies using free open source labor to reduce corporate costs and boost corporate profits while paying highly skilled professional volunteers nothing. Yudkowsky Ambition A key part of _research_ is you need to have a plan of attack. Saying "We're going to fund research into antigravity, time travel, and zero point energy" sure sounds like fun, but it's an absolute waste of time.
- zanny 11y ago
  > boost corporate profits while paying highly skilled professional volunteers nothing. This is a problem of ancient outdated patent and copyright law, not scientific innovation. Its in the field of politics since the industry is entirely built on state enforced IP legislation.
  - seiji 11y ago
    But open source code is all about "no patent restrictions" and free licensing even with retained copyright (or even outright copyright assignment/dumb CLAs). Iterating those concepts don't seem to fix the issue of Twitter running 50,000 copies of an application developed by 3 open source volunteer people and not paying those 3 people anything.
    - zanny 11y ago
      The issue is that with copyright and patent law the way it is written software is heavily biased towards proprietary development for profit, by restricting what the user can do with the software they run. It is also an issue of users not caring that they are being given the equivalent of a car with a sealed engine compartment. The average consumer can understand why that is bad, even if they themselves would never open up the engine, because it would mean they could not let their local mechanic fix their car, they would have to submit to the manufacturer at whatever price they want to charge because there is no competition anymore. They just don't correlate that to proprietary software at all, which is understandable because most people cannot internalize concepts related to information transfer, scarcity, transformation, or preservation. They exist in the real world and more easily relate to the physical and ignore the implications of ignorance in all that is not presented to them in that medium. That still remains a political problem, one with your system of economics. I guess since YC is funding that UBI research it may also be relevant to research alternatives to US IP law that can optimize for productivity and social utility of the results, because we are obviously not close to a maxima right now.
theaustinseven 11y ago
I would say along the lines of academic publishing, there is also a problem with people publishing misleading or plain wrong press releases. I think there needs to be a better way of evaluating the reliability of research, and a way to possibly improve the peer review process. This may mean that research has to be more open with the data that they collect. I think there is definitely some work to be done here.
return0 11y ago
If i could pick just one, it would be academic publishing. It's an ancient system that locks in tons of useful empirical data and rots the roots of science with its publish-or-perish/impact factor lunacy. It's also a sector (digital publishing) which YC knows well and can easily make a great contribution. This can be a game changer, as it can alter the way public funding is allocated.

by mietek 11y ago

derrida 11y ago

> Humans need more lifespan, badly. Do we? Or do we need more realistic perspective about death? Why quantity over quality? Seems there's a lot of quality improvements that could be made [1]. For instance, I read recently (can't recall source) that San Fransisco's homeless is the least happy in the world. Also that the top 1% in the world make over $35K a year, but there are far happier people than exist in middle America living in poverty [2]. Looking at populations that are happier - but in poverty - is perhaps an interesting study. Imagine a cross disciplinary study between (perhaps) techniques used in epidemiology/health informatics & anthropology / the humanities. --- [1] Notice that cancer, heart-disease, Alzheimer, etc research also falls into this category - allowing people to live with less suffering. [2] Yeah, 3 assertions, no sources, sorry - just my word & unreliable memory of something someone said in a book once folks :)

mietek 11y ago
> Why quantity over quality? That’s a false dichotomy. Please disregard my one-liner, and watch one of de Grey’s talks instead — or read his “When Quality and Quantity Do Not Compete”: http://online.liebertpub.com.sci-hub.io/doi/abs/10.1089/rej.2011.1307 http://online.liebertpub.com.sci-hub.io/doi/abs/10.1089/rej....
- empressplay 11y ago
  You can live for a thousand years and you will still procrastinate and you will still not want to die. An extended lifespan won't help those issues. You need to get over them whether you live 50 years or 500.
  - JoshTriplett 11y ago
    > You can live for a thousand years and you will still procrastinate and you will still not want to die. Of course not! Why should you ever want to die? Why should you ever "get over" that? It's a bug. We haven't fixed it yet. It should not be romanticized, and it should most certainly not be treated as inevitable. It's an abomination we have yet to eliminate.
    - derrida 11y ago
      > it should most certainly not be treated as inevitable. What life never dies? What non-living thing does not change?
      - JoshTriplett 11y ago
        Do you think of cancer as inevitable? Or do you think of it as something humans could cure someday? Do you think of degenerative mental disorders as inevitable? Or do you think humans can cure them someday? I don't think of death as inevitable. I think of it as something humans can cure someday. Thinking of it as inevitable means giving up on all possible solutions.

jspaulding 11y ago

> Academic publishing is obsolete To expand upon this, it's not just publishing papers behind paywalls that is the problem. The entire system we use to advance humanities shared knowledge is broken. The Internet enables a dramatically more efficient model of scientific collaboration. The problem is academic science has been stuck with a reward system from the 17th century. And quite simply, it does not reward what we want it to reward anymore. However, there is a solution: science funders can distribute their money in a way that creates a very different set of incentives. Sadly, almost all science funders are very conservative organizations. YC Research can play a critical role in catalyzing a transition to an Internet-native model of research. My startup, Thinklab, wants to help. We're a service that helps science funders reward participation in a massively collaborative open online model of research.

rfurmani 11y ago
I agree completely about the system being broken and that innovation would be fantastic (I wrote a few paragraphs below, but in a very different direction). I'll take a close look at Thinklab, and it'd be great to see a dialogue forming here.
- jspaulding 11y ago
  Great! I read your comments and have to admit I'm unfamiliar with what a "collaborative atlas" is or would be? But I certainly agree it's a big problem that scientists are only rewarded for publishing papers. There needs to be a way to reward scientists for sharing in smaller chunks -- even just an idea that might help out a peer.
BorisVSchmid 11y ago
Can we add some nuance here? It is not like in the last few decades there has been no new knowledge generated. Just in my own field of biology, the amount of progress we have made in understanding how cells regulate themselves (20 year ago we were still teaching DNA->RNA->PROTEINS that do stuff), how immune systems function and can be used (stem cell therapy, cancer treatments, HIV drugs) and the flow of genetic information between organisms (the advance of (whole) genome sequencing into becoming a generic tool) has been mind-boggling.

Thriptic 11y ago

Antibiotics are running out because we stopped researching them, for a variety of reasons, and it takes time to bring research pipelines back online.

biofox 11y ago

I couldn't agree more about funding SENS related research. I think focusing on extended lifespan misses the point though (although it's a nice side benefit). The diseases of old age cause more suffering than everything else combined. Seeing people I love deteriorate to a state of constant suffering is unbearable to watch. Seeing signs of ageing in myself hammers home just how helpless I am to do anything. I don't understand why AI safety gets more attention. We're already facing our own personal dissolution from natural causes -- a real and tangible existential threat which is already claiming people in the most torturous ways possible. To be brutally honest, I'd rather die quickly in an AI takeover than suffer decades of chronic pain and dementia... and one of these scenarios seems a lot more likely than the other. Let's get real, take responsibility, and do something about ageing.

pinouchon 11y ago
Reducing existential risk is not about minimizing the amount of suffering in our own lives. It's about making the lives of our potential trillions of descendants possible.
- eli_gottlieb 11y ago
  There's no reason to care about "potential trillions of descendants" who don't exist, nor is there any reason to maximize the amount of humans in the universe, etc. The "existential risk" talk tends to assume, to start with, that some wonderful, incredibly happy and nice "intergalactic civilization" of future transhumans or posthumans will exist, unless existential risks "destroy" it "in embryo" in our near-term future. Given the incredible prior improbability of intergalactic utopias, there's basically no reason to take the thought-experiment at its word or to value a particularly improbable imagined far-future over the actually-existing present and very likely near-futures.
  - yummyfajitas 11y ago
    The "existential risk" talk tends to assume, to start with, that some wonderful, incredibly happy and nice "intergalactic civilization" of future transhumans or posthumans will exist... Can you cite such a person? I've read quite a few folks concerned with existential risk, and never saw this assumption before.

seiji 11y ago

I’d have said AI safety, but it’s already on your list. Excellent. But, why? Nothing about "AI safety" is remotely useful. It would be like researching "alcohol safety" (something everybody has access to and nobody can restrict) or researching how ants can influence "human safety" (tiny things trying to influence massive things). It's nonsense no matter which way you think about it unless you just want to write SF novels. Open-source infrastructure. Sadly, we don't need "research" to study how it works, we need direct payments to contributors. As a "startup culture" we need to stop the trend of billion dollar companies using free open source labor to reduce corporate costs and boost corporate profits while paying highly skilled professional volunteers nothing. Yudkowsky Ambition A key part of _research_ is you need to have a plan of attack. Saying "We're going to fund research into antigravity, time travel, and zero point energy" sure sounds like fun, but it's an absolute waste of time.

zanny 11y ago
> boost corporate profits while paying highly skilled professional volunteers nothing. This is a problem of ancient outdated patent and copyright law, not scientific innovation. Its in the field of politics since the industry is entirely built on state enforced IP legislation.
- seiji 11y ago
  But open source code is all about "no patent restrictions" and free licensing even with retained copyright (or even outright copyright assignment/dumb CLAs). Iterating those concepts don't seem to fix the issue of Twitter running 50,000 copies of an application developed by 3 open source volunteer people and not paying those 3 people anything.
  - zanny 11y ago
    The issue is that with copyright and patent law the way it is written software is heavily biased towards proprietary development for profit, by restricting what the user can do with the software they run. It is also an issue of users not caring that they are being given the equivalent of a car with a sealed engine compartment. The average consumer can understand why that is bad, even if they themselves would never open up the engine, because it would mean they could not let their local mechanic fix their car, they would have to submit to the manufacturer at whatever price they want to charge because there is no competition anymore. They just don't correlate that to proprietary software at all, which is understandable because most people cannot internalize concepts related to information transfer, scarcity, transformation, or preservation. They exist in the real world and more easily relate to the physical and ignore the implications of ignorance in all that is not presented to them in that medium. That still remains a political problem, one with your system of economics. I guess since YC is funding that UBI research it may also be relevant to research alternatives to US IP law that can optimize for productivity and social utility of the results, because we are obviously not close to a maxima right now.

theaustinseven 11y ago

I would say along the lines of academic publishing, there is also a problem with people publishing misleading or plain wrong press releases. I think there needs to be a better way of evaluating the reliability of research, and a way to possibly improve the peer review process. This may mean that research has to be more open with the data that they collect. I think there is definitely some work to be done here.

return0 11y ago

If i could pick just one, it would be academic publishing. It's an ancient system that locks in tons of useful empirical data and rots the roots of science with its publish-or-perish/impact factor lunacy. It's also a sector (digital publishing) which YC knows well and can easily make a great contribution. This can be a game changer, as it can alter the way public funding is allocated.