3 ms·

> Hear me out, please. Nope. And I hate that phrase, it rarely pans out with anything that makes any sense. Yeah it would be great if Nabs were all we needed

> Hear me out, please. Nope. And I hate that phrase, it rarely pans out with anything that makes any sense. Yeah it would be great if Nabs were all we needed and they were all sterilizing and permanent so any foreign pathogen was instantly destroyed. But the immune system has a complicated friend-or-foe problem which pathogens are constantly trying to exploit. I've had virus-triggered pericarditis before where presumably igG Nabs to the cold virus I had managed to attack my pericardium. Having T-cells and B-cells be latent and ready to activate on infection and not constantly attacking surface proteins is a good thing. Waning Nabs is a feature, not a bug. And the multilayered approach to the immune system probably means that immune escape of viruses is shuttled down the route where viruses focus on Nabs, while the multiple kinds of TLA subtypes and the secondary defense of the humoral immune system mean that T-cell epitopes are not the focus of viral evolution and immune escape. The immune system evolved the way it did based on a 500M year long arms race between eucaryotes and pathogens, it is really quite good at what it does. Of course there's weaknesses in it, but we have the advantage of looking at the specific virus or pathogen that we're concerned with and spending great effort to custom design treatments, while the body needs to individually react to any possible pathogen that the body might encounter on its own. We can do custom bespoke treatment having analyzed the pathogen extensively to start with, while the immune system's battle starts the moment there's first contact by the individual organism with the enemy. It works great for solving that latter problem. Most pathogens also never gain access to the nucleus and can't be transcribed into the nucleus. And even there, the reason why we have a placenta and are mammals is likely because some organism was infected by a retrovirus and learned to form syncytia and learned a knew trick from a virus. Evolution can take a seeming "fault" like that and turn it into a strength on the long-term. Most likely all we need to do is be able to sit down with any particular individual human's immune system and convince it to attack something even though the immune system has concerns about friendly-fire issues. Although the problem of doing something like clearing EBV out of the neurons of someone who is at risk of developing MS is problematic since you don't want to kill a lot of EBV-infected neurons (which is probably a "fault" of the nerve system rather than being a fault of the immune system -- but one again it is likely a necessary "fault" given the fact that we don't want to be scattershot blowing away nerves). That is likely to look more like CRISPR treatment to gene-edit the virus out of the DNA of those neurons. The DNA viruses that incorporate into neurons of T lymphocytes, B lymphocytes and neurons are indeed problematic, but that is a very small number of pathogens that manage to get past all those defenses that we have, there's a heavy amount of survivorship/selection bias there. The hundreds of cold viruses out there we clobber pretty routinely. For most everything else the ability to regenerate cells with the ability to kill infected cells works fine. The cells which "learn" stuff is where things get really tricky. That is almost like a UEFI rootkit. And our ability to prevent computer viruses is also primitive, we have some general heuristics to quarantine virus-looking code but it has a ton of false positives and we mostly rely on distribution of signatures of the virus once researchers have analyzed infected computers. The human immune system can protect against viruses that the human race has never encountered before.

manholio 4y ago
> I hate that phrase, it rarely pans out with anything that makes any sense. That's just the evolutionary loop of contrarian views. Of course the large majority will be crap, because that's why the mainstream views are dominant. But sometimes, even if short of an infosec revolution in immunology, which was clearly a rhetorical stretch on my part, some contrarian view will make people think in a different way or challenge them to defend mainstream views and really think really hard about why those views are what they are. It seems by the bulk and quality of the responses that I have achieved such an effect, so the whole exercise was not so non-sensical. > And even there, the reason why we have a placenta and are mammals is likely because some organism was infected by a retrovirus and learned to form syncytia and learned a knew trick from a virus. Evolution can take a seeming "fault" like that and turn it into a strength on the long-term. I think this is the crux of the argument right here. Evolution is satisfied and will even favor a certain number of informational security compromises if it induces variability that has (even a small chance of) improving long term fitness. But the perspective I was approaching the problem was short term host security - the thing we, as rational members of a given species living in the present day care about, because we know full well that the vast majority of compromised individuals will not survive. So we are likely to make a different short term tradeoff, even if it hurts the long term fitness of the species. Modern medicine and social security systems already do that to a large degree. More generally, the perspective I wanted to present was that of intelligent design versus evolutionary fitness, that a blind watchmaker might leave gaping design holes for a malevolent rational attacker. I think there is ample evidence that evolution by natural selection is not all powerful and all knowing against rationality (at least if we don't consider rationality just another facet of evolution).

manholio 4y ago

> I hate that phrase, it rarely pans out with anything that makes any sense. That's just the evolutionary loop of contrarian views. Of course the large majority will be crap, because that's why the mainstream views are dominant. But sometimes, even if short of an infosec revolution in immunology, which was clearly a rhetorical stretch on my part, some contrarian view will make people think in a different way or challenge them to defend mainstream views and really think really hard about why those views are what they are. It seems by the bulk and quality of the responses that I have achieved such an effect, so the whole exercise was not so non-sensical. > And even there, the reason why we have a placenta and are mammals is likely because some organism was infected by a retrovirus and learned to form syncytia and learned a knew trick from a virus. Evolution can take a seeming "fault" like that and turn it into a strength on the long-term. I think this is the crux of the argument right here. Evolution is satisfied and will even favor a certain number of informational security compromises if it induces variability that has (even a small chance of) improving long term fitness. But the perspective I was approaching the problem was short term host security - the thing we, as rational members of a given species living in the present day care about, because we know full well that the vast majority of compromised individuals will not survive. So we are likely to make a different short term tradeoff, even if it hurts the long term fitness of the species. Modern medicine and social security systems already do that to a large degree. More generally, the perspective I wanted to present was that of intelligent design versus evolutionary fitness, that a blind watchmaker might leave gaping design holes for a malevolent rational attacker. I think there is ample evidence that evolution by natural selection is not all powerful and all knowing against rationality (at least if we don't consider rationality just another facet of evolution).