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27chaos comments on Rationality Quotes December 2014 - Less Wrong
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I wasn't familiar with the name, so I looked it up. There are some pretty strong criticisms of him here: http://www2.technologyreview.com/sens/docs/estepetal.pdf
Looks like pseudoscience.
I have seen him speak a couple of times and he addressed many of these criticisms in the talks. You might want to read his response to these criticisms before assuming they are valid.
A lot of this comes from a lack of appreciation of the difference between science and engineering. In engineering you just have to find something that works. You don't need to understand everything.
Some debate here and you can easily find his talks online:
http://www2.technologyreview.com/sens/
In his talks I did not get the sense that he is positioning himself as a great misunderstood maverick. He does say that in his opinion much ageing research is unproductive because it is aimed at understanding the problem rather than fixing it.
For example, rather than tweak metabolic processes to produce slightly smaller amounts of toxic substances, remove those substances by various means, or replace the cells grown old from said toxic substances.
His solution to cancer is to remove the telomerase genes. This way cancer cells will die after X divisions. Of course this creates the problem that stem cells will not work. So we will need to replenish germ lines in the immune system, stomach walls, skin etc.
These are "dumb" strategies and rarely of interest to scientists perhaps for that reason.
There is a similar issue in nanotechology discussed in Drexler's book "Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization". For example you do not need to solve the protein folding problem in generality in order to design proteins that have specific shapes. You just need to find a set of patterns that allow you to build proteins of specific shapes.
(edited for typos)
I will definitely be going over this, it looks very helpful. Thank you for making this.
I haven't finished the document yet, but I noticed it keeps on using the word "unscientific", which sounds problematic as one of its aims is to define pseudoscience.
?
They explicitly say that there is no rigid definition distinguishing pseudoscience from legitimate science. They claim that in order to distinguish between them it's necessary to point at specific instances of misleading behaviors, and they enumerate these behaviors at the very beginning of the paper.
But in that list of problems, they keep on saying "Unscientifically simplified, Unscientifically claimed, etc", which is a problem unless they define science. They clearly haven't learned how to taboo words like science, which shows here.
Tabooing words is a tool, not a mandatory exercise. They weren't relying on the word "unscientifically" to do the work for them.
For example, here is the first instance of the word I spotted upon looking at the article again:
It seems clear that they're not relying on the word in an inappropriate way. Tabooing is useful sometimes, but requiring others to taboo any subject of conversation is not productive and adds an unnecessary mechanism for biases to influence us.
The particular use you quote looks justified. I was referring to this, from earlier:
where it looked like anything they didn't like could be included under the unscientific category.
This seems bad to me and unscientific sounds like a fair label for such practices. I don't know why you disagree.
Admittedly this usage is confusing. But judging from the arguments made elsewhere in the paper, they seem to be saying there's no good evidence suggesting these specific therapies will work. A lot of what he does seems to be highly speculative. Calling speculation unscientific seems fair to me, science is about going out and looking at the world, then creating ideas in response to what you observe.
There no such thing as evidence-based decision on strategies for research funding. Nobody really knows good criteria for deciding which research should get grants to be carried out.
Aubrey de Grey among other things makes the argument that it's good to put out prices for research groups that get mices to a certain increased lifespan. That's the Methuselah Foundation’s Mprize.
Now the Methuselah Foundation worked to set up the new organ liver price that gives 1 million to the first team that creates a regenerative or bioengineered solution that keeps a large animal alive for 90 days without native liver function.
Funding that kind of research is useful whether or not certain arguments Aubrey de Grey made about “Whole Body Interdiction of Lengthening of Telomeres” are correct. In science there's room for people proposing ideas that turn out to be wrong.
The authors provide more arguments than ones about telomeres. Further, they charge that he's misrepresenting evidence systematically, not just making specific proposals that turn out to be wrong. I agree giving prizes for increasing the lifespan of mice is a good idea, but that's not a very strong reason to support him. Do you have examples of novel scientific ideas he's had that have turned out to be useful?
Why exactly?
The SENS website lists 42 published papers that were funded with SENS grant money. The foundation has a yearly budget of 4 million that it uses to award grants to science that's publishable. A lot of that money comes out of Grey's own pocket and Peter Thiel's pocket. Other money comes from private donations. It's mainly additional money for the subject that wouldn't be there without Aubrey de Grey activism.
Aubrey de Grey may very well represent a picture of aging that underestiamtes the difficulties. However the resulting effect is that now a company like Google did start a project with Calico that's speficially targeted on curing aging.
If you want to convince Silicon Valley's billionaires to pay for more anti-aging research Aubrey de Grey might simply be making the right moves when scientists who are more conservative about possible success can't convince donars to put up money.
Because most advances in mouse models don't carry over into humans.
While mouse model aren't perfect, they do produce new knowledge and you simply can't do some exploratory research in humans.
I should distinguish between "supporting him as an activist" and "supporting him as a legitimate scientific researcher". I think that the fact he provides prizes to others is a decent reason to support him in the first category but not a reason to support him in the second. Even if we collapse the two categories, the mice thing doesn't seem like enough to outweigh misrepresenting research to the public.
Mostly, I was wondering whether you knew of any innovations or discoveries he found as a scientist. Because as the above link describes it, even if he has been a good activist he has been a poor scientist, not finding anything new and misleading people about the old.
This sounds like Dark Arts, which would make it deserve the label pseudoscience. If your argument is that there's a legitimate place for "marketing" like that, I see your point but I'm reluctant to agree.
If his core impact would be by standing in the lab then his beard wouldn't matter. He did publish a paper with 36 citations in the last century but that's not where his main impact is.
Dark arts would be if he wouldn't believe in his own ideas and just pretends to. I don't think that's true.
If you would label all grant proposal that are misleading about the likely applicability of the research results to real world issues as pseudoscience I doubt that much science is left at the end.
In a perfect world grant committies might hand out money based on evidence-based methods for handing out grant money. We don't live in that world. In our world grant committies might not be better than monkey's that pick randomly.
But as long as the funded research at least produces publishable papers that replicate, that's fine. In the current state of academic biology replicability itself is even a pretty high standard.