Vaniver comments on An alarming fact about the anti-aging community - Less Wrong

30 Post author: diegocaleiro 16 February 2015 05:49PM

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Tags: organs longevists anti-aging rationality cfar immortalists

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Comment author: Vaniver 16 February 2015 08:06:36PM 9 points [-]

Two responses:

First, if this is a useful thing that we should be doing, good on you for making the case for it.

Second, it's not at all clear to me that this is a useful thing that we should be doing. What is the use case where I say "I'm glad I have those frozen cells from young me"? Egg freezing has obvious benefits given declining fertility with age, and unsurprisingly I see a significant infrastructure in place for freezing eggs. But for those of us that aren't women, that doesn't seem tremendously useful.

How big is the (expected) difference in success between, say, organs rebuilt with cells from a 25 year old to organs rebuilt with cells from a 45 year old? (If we don't know that, why are we saying the case for this as a life extension technology is "certain"?)

Comment author: dxu 17 February 2015 02:13:13AM *  2 points [-]

I think what diegocaleiro is saying is that the people he asked didn't make any arguments of the above form. They didn't consider the option rationally, and then reject it for rational, analytical reasons. From the post itself:

I could not even find a single individual who looked into it and decided it wasn't worth it, or was too pricy, or something of that sort.

It seems (from diegocaleiro's description) that no one he asked had actually performed a cost-benefit analysis, even a flawed or half-hearted one. The question of what this sort of behavior implies is an entirely separate one from that of whether cell freezing is a useful practice.

Comment author: Vaniver 17 February 2015 02:51:10AM *  2 points [-]

It seems (from diegocaleiro's description) that no one he asked had actually performed a cost-benefit analysis, even a flawed or half-hearted one. The question of the what this sort of behavior implies is an entirely separate one from that of whether cell freezing is a useful practice.

Would you describe my comment as a cost-benefit analysis? I mean, I know what cognitive algorithms I executed before typing it up to the limit of my introspection, but I don't know if diegocaleiro would look at that and say "oh, he's rationalizing" or "oh, he didn't think that this was a promising technology but had considered it before / hadn't thought of it because of that."

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 17 February 2015 04:14:21AM 0 points [-]

http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/epigenetics/twins/

It's possible to see quite a bit of epigenetic change in identical twins as they age. This doesn't necessary mean that those changes are deterioration, but it might be worth looking at what a person's base state is, or a least a younger state.

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