3 ms·
This feels like saying that a five-year MTBF estimate for a disk drive is meaningless until it's been tested for five years. No, we don't truly know if the esti
by D-Coder 5y ago
This feels like saying that a five-year MTBF estimate for a disk drive is meaningless until it's been tested for five years. No, we don't truly know if the estimate is correct, but nothing in life is truly known: some level of evidence will be good enough.
- nradov 5y agoYes but what evidence? We don't have any biomarkers that can be measured to determine the longevity effect of a particular intervention. For example if a hypothetical medication reduces blood glucose level (good) but also reduces skeletal muscle mass (bad) will that have an overall positive or negative effect on longevity? Who knows? It's a complex multifactorial issue. Disc drives are much simpler. We have decades of data on failure rates.
- dnautics 5y agoI would say that the simplicity has to do with the linear nature of most failure modes of disk drives. The overall failure curve is nonlinear due to compounding per time probabilities. But those probabilities are only nonlinear/cross-interacting at the point where the drive is already considered to be "a loss", and our engineering/maintenance strategies take advantage of this fact. We do not generally consider a human to be "a loss", if say, they start getting chronic back pain, which can start to precipitate other problems in a compounding fashion.