Gwern rubbishes longevity research.
I think he's taking about the dream of achieving indefinite numbers of healthy years.
However, there are some people who live into their 90s in pretty good health, and they're far from the majority. What's the likelihood of just making good health into one's 90s much more likely? I'm not talking about lifestyle improvement-- I'm talking about some technological fix.
So, he's specifically talking about the failures of previous longevity research. It seems to me that modern longevity research has portions that are considerably better (among other things, the reductionistic view appears to be the dominant view among the top researchers). Consider this section in particular:
I could wish Stambler made more of an effort to evaluate researchers on scientific grounds and give a better idea of where ideas have been vindicated or refuted by subsequent work.
That Stambler spent too little time on whether or not they actually ...
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