3 ms·

That’s a naive take on what senescence is. Look it up. You can stop it, but be prepared to then have to figure out how to deal with all the side effects it prev

That’s a naive take on what senescence is. Look it up. You can stop it, but be prepared to then have to figure out how to deal with all the side effects it prevents. And then you can fix those but be prepared to deal with those side effects. And so on. My point isn’t to stop researching and understanding and even treating, but it’s that life is a balance of tradeoffs. Looking at it as if energy is a universal currency that can be traded for every other function is a fundamental misinterpretation of everything we understand about biology.

ACCount37 1y ago
There is no physical or biological constraint that says "senescence absolutely has to happen". In some species, it doesn't seem to happen at all. In others, it happens extremely slowly. Clearly, there are massive longevity gains left on the table - ones we'll never pick up if we keep whining about "life" being "a balance of tradeoffs".
- simianparrot 1y ago
  And in those species there's other constraints that weigh up for it. I'm not sure which ones you're thinking of, but in every single one I know of there's other tradeoffs. And if there's some without them, I'm pretty sure we just haven't discovered them yet. I find it peculiar that you interpret my statements as "whining". I specifically wrote: > My point isn’t to stop researching and understanding and even treating, but it’s that life is a balance of tradeoffs What's whiny about that? Modern medicine has for a while been in a position of treating symptoms of symptoms of symptoms, often of its own making. That doesn't mean we should stop treating symptoms! But it means we have to look at the bigger picture and stop thinking everything is a "problem" to be "fixed", and work harder to understand why things work the way they do, and what the costs of altering them truly are. Sometimes fixing one thing isn't worth the tradeoffs in other areas.
  - ACCount37 1y ago
    There is no "fairness enforcement" in life, and biology is no exception. The closest we get is conservation laws, and those do not forbid living healthily well into your 500s. You're out looking for "tradeoffs" that may not be there, or may not be worth caring about. There is no "balance of tradeoffs" in everything. There isn't an Authority on Biology that says "if you get good X then you must take bad Y to keep things fair for everyone". There are just shitty local minima you get stuck in unless you manage to climb your way out. Do you want to get 50% less cancer, or to live to 120? The answer is "yes". You can have both. Nothing forbids you from having both. Is it easy to get both? No. It's not easy to get even one of those. But nature barely even tried. Humans can do better than that.
    - simianparrot 1y ago
      > But nature barely even tried. Humans can do better than that. ~3.8 billion years of evolution "barely even tried"? There's hubris and then there's _hubris_. But to repeat myself: I am not saying we shouldn't try. I'm saying we should expect no free lunch, and that the concept of tradeoffs for every alteration is a much healthier mental framework to work off of because _so far_ that's been the one consistent truth in all of biology.
      - ACCount37 1y ago
        And tell me - for those "~3.8 billion years of evolution", what was the optimization target? What was natural selection selecting for, exactly? Longevity? Happiness? Quality of life? Hahahahaha hahaha hahah ha no. There is no "fairness" in biology, and natural selection isn't your friend. It's aligned with your interests sometimes - but if evolution could make humans reproduce much more effectively by making them live half as long and ten times as miserable? It would. There's just one primary metric that evolution cares about, and it totally would throw your well-being under the bus for it. Evolution doesn't care much about whether humans live long and happy lives. Only humans themselves care about that. There are a lot of optimizations possible there, and humans have to be the ones to find them.
      - sothatsit 1y ago
        If you think evolution was optimising for longevity, then you really haven't thought it through. For 3.8 billion years, organisms just needed to survive long enough to reproduce. Cancer, heart disease, and other age-related diseases only became significant killers in the last few hundred years. That's nowhere near enough time for evolution to address them. And even then, age-related diseases don't directly influence people's chance of reproducing and passing on their genes. Conversely, evolution has had millions of years to work on fighting infectious diseases, which have been bigger killers for most of our history.

ACCount37 1y ago

There is no physical or biological constraint that says "senescence absolutely has to happen". In some species, it doesn't seem to happen at all. In others, it happens extremely slowly. Clearly, there are massive longevity gains left on the table - ones we'll never pick up if we keep whining about "life" being "a balance of tradeoffs".

simianparrot 1y ago
And in those species there's other constraints that weigh up for it. I'm not sure which ones you're thinking of, but in every single one I know of there's other tradeoffs. And if there's some without them, I'm pretty sure we just haven't discovered them yet. I find it peculiar that you interpret my statements as "whining". I specifically wrote: > My point isn’t to stop researching and understanding and even treating, but it’s that life is a balance of tradeoffs What's whiny about that? Modern medicine has for a while been in a position of treating symptoms of symptoms of symptoms, often of its own making. That doesn't mean we should stop treating symptoms! But it means we have to look at the bigger picture and stop thinking everything is a "problem" to be "fixed", and work harder to understand why things work the way they do, and what the costs of altering them truly are. Sometimes fixing one thing isn't worth the tradeoffs in other areas.
- ACCount37 1y ago
  There is no "fairness enforcement" in life, and biology is no exception. The closest we get is conservation laws, and those do not forbid living healthily well into your 500s. You're out looking for "tradeoffs" that may not be there, or may not be worth caring about. There is no "balance of tradeoffs" in everything. There isn't an Authority on Biology that says "if you get good X then you must take bad Y to keep things fair for everyone". There are just shitty local minima you get stuck in unless you manage to climb your way out. Do you want to get 50% less cancer, or to live to 120? The answer is "yes". You can have both. Nothing forbids you from having both. Is it easy to get both? No. It's not easy to get even one of those. But nature barely even tried. Humans can do better than that.
  - simianparrot 1y ago
    > But nature barely even tried. Humans can do better than that. ~3.8 billion years of evolution "barely even tried"? There's hubris and then there's _hubris_. But to repeat myself: I am not saying we shouldn't try. I'm saying we should expect no free lunch, and that the concept of tradeoffs for every alteration is a much healthier mental framework to work off of because _so far_ that's been the one consistent truth in all of biology.
    - ACCount37 1y ago
      And tell me - for those "~3.8 billion years of evolution", what was the optimization target? What was natural selection selecting for, exactly? Longevity? Happiness? Quality of life? Hahahahaha hahaha hahah ha no. There is no "fairness" in biology, and natural selection isn't your friend. It's aligned with your interests sometimes - but if evolution could make humans reproduce much more effectively by making them live half as long and ten times as miserable? It would. There's just one primary metric that evolution cares about, and it totally would throw your well-being under the bus for it. Evolution doesn't care much about whether humans live long and happy lives. Only humans themselves care about that. There are a lot of optimizations possible there, and humans have to be the ones to find them.
    - sothatsit 1y ago
      If you think evolution was optimising for longevity, then you really haven't thought it through. For 3.8 billion years, organisms just needed to survive long enough to reproduce. Cancer, heart disease, and other age-related diseases only became significant killers in the last few hundred years. That's nowhere near enough time for evolution to address them. And even then, age-related diseases don't directly influence people's chance of reproducing and passing on their genes. Conversely, evolution has had millions of years to work on fighting infectious diseases, which have been bigger killers for most of our history.