The Secret to a Longer Life? Don’t Ask These Dead Longevity Researchers

Make sure to read the article all the way to the end; I think it’s quite a powerful statement.<p>We’re too focussed on our individual choices, looking for elusive cures for aging; instead of fighting for things we know will help.<p>Reducing engine emmissions will make us live longer. Reducing pesticides will also make us live longer. Limiting work hours will make us healthier.<p>But instead, we pretend that our health is defined only by our individual life style decisions, and let the industry do whatever they want.

I think the article is saying that there are way too many confounding variables in determining the probabilistic nature of longevity and so far due to the fragments of data, contradictions in data, challenges in tracking, uncaptured info, it is extremely difficulty to meaningful understand what people could do to slowdown aging without running controlled study on thousands if not millions of people.<p>However, say someone really wants to figure this out, they really want to know every component of every meal people eat, every activity or habit and every moment of their lives in terms of heart rate and metabolism and provide a device to easily track all these and make sure the data is for anonymized for research only, and they managed to convince millions of people to implant such device at their birth, and they figured this out in 500 years and found a formula to extend life indefinitely, I wonder if this would introduce the classic “the rich&#x2F;wealthy lives forever” scenario, or the alternative scenario where the knowledge of longevity could hurt genetic evolution as a whole.

I believe to know, what might make me live longer, my body often tells me: sleep more, eat less, avoid too much meat, fat and sugar, don’t drink etc.<p>Many times, I catch myself thinking though: do I really wanna miss out on a great moment&#x2F;feeling just to live a couple of years longer with a broken body and&#x2F;or mind?<p>I can enjoy now. Who knows if I can then.

Mildly amusing, but basically silly. There is a reason why everyone in the past failed, and that is because they didn&#x27;t have sufficiently advanced biotechnology to (a) understand the causes of aging in terms of specific low-level cell and tissue damage, and (b) identify and build ways to repair those forms of damage.<p>We&#x27;ve only had a way to progress towards therapies for aging with this model of development for somewhere between 30-50 years, and no way to make progress towards therapies for aging with anything short of massive war-on-cancer style programs prior to the last 20 years. (Those programs didn&#x27;t happen, but in a different world could have; arguably it wouldn&#x27;t have made much difference as to where we are now, just as the war on cancer has only been a foundational effort for the last ten years of exponentially rapid development just prior to the advent of universal effective cancer therapies. It is possible that senolytics could have happened much earlier, decades ago, but finding and validating the candidate drugs would have been very hard back then). But now everything in biotech costs 100 times less than it did not so very long ago - that is really why things are heating up in applied longevity science.<p>The article also commits the usual journalistic sin of equating every effort. There is a vast difference between all of: eating a different diet; running a pharmaceutical discovery program aimed at a mechanism of aging; running that program to build a way to replicate calorie restriction; running that program to kill senescent cells or clear glucosepane cross-links. These activities have radically different expectation values in terms of best plausible outcome.<p>The biggest mistake most people make in their approach to the new world of rejuvenation science is to think of every possible methodology as having similar best plausible outcomes in terms of years gained. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Allow me to ask this related question: of our modern (if I may say so) societies, in our modern era; we see a lot of improvements and optimisations. But I rarely see ideas about the simple question of happiness.<p>It&#x27;s as if we think happinnes comes by x or y (in here longer existence).

Deathism appear to be rather popular here on HN [0].<p>0. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hpluspedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Deathism" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hpluspedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Deathism</a>

It is easier to market something as the &quot;cure&quot; than to actually discover and <i>validate</i> a cure