Yeah I pretty much agree with this assessment. I think you could probably get to 80% with 100 million and ten years and maybe 50% with 30 million and 7 years. Perhaps I'm optimistic, but right now the entire field is bottlenecked by the need for $4 million to do primate testing.

Aspen dental is a franchise based venture capital funded organization that already does this.

This is interesting, thanks for sharing.

I asked my friend about your other concerns regarding enshittification of the dental industry. If you're interested, this was their response:

Patients tend to do better with DSOs. There’s a number of reasons:

1. The first is doctor supervision—when doctors have their own offices, no one checks their work or holds them accountable. In a corporate setting, there is typically a clinical director that the doctors will report to.
2. The second issue is that the worst case is actually the doctor being the owner—that’s when they have the strongest financial incentive to do bullshit. The more the doctor is removed from being the owner, the less I think their judgement is influenced.

Now in nearly all DSOs and private practices, revenue is the chief KPI for doctors. So the pressure is there still to a degree.

With us, revenue is not a KPI—we don’t ever tell the doctors how much they produce And so we remove the financial biasing of their diagnosis and treatment.

But we are unique in this—definitely an outlier in how much we are trying to have the doctors be unbiased by the finances.

What’s also ironic about some of the replies is that our lobby goals are to actually get real regulation put into place so patients are protected from doctors doing whatever to maximize revenue But these somewhat personal ideals and goals being acted out—that do run counter to the pure capitalist logic

@towards_keeperhood yes this is correct. Most research seems to show ~80% of effects are additive.

Genes are actually simpler than most people tend to think

You’re ignoring several facts:

1. A significant fraction of cells turn over frequently in adults so the number of divisions for those cell types is far, far higher than 45 divisions. Those cell divisions CAN cause cancer, it a single extra cell division is going to have negligible impact on risk.
2. There’s an enzyme called telomerase which can extend telomeres. It’s active in embryos. So this isn’t really a concern.

I'm hosting laser tag again at 8:30 PM after the reading group. All are welcome!

I’m hosting laser tag tomorrow at 8:30 after the reading group. Everyone is welcome!

I appreciate the offer. It’s going to be a long time before we start human trials. At least five years, probably longer.

Billionaires read LessWrong. I have personally had two reach out to me after a viral blog post I made back in December of last year.

The way this works is almost always that someone the billionaire knows will send them an interesting post and they will read it.

Several of the people I've mentioned this to seemed surprised by it, so I thought it might be valuable information for others.

Can you link to a source about the increased cancer risk? Every source I've seen on this subject indicates retinoids DECREASE cancer risk, though I agree with you that this doesn't make much intuitive sense.

According to Claude they were first studied for cancer but the first actual FDA approval was for acne.