The Economist's digital strategy and the limits of a model based on advertising - <AUTHOR> http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/04/the-economists-tom-standage-on-digital-strategy-and-the-limits-of-a-model-based-on-advertising/?utm_source=Daily+Lab+email+list&utm_campaign=464c55f003-dailylabemail3&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_d68264fd5e-464c55f003-395827456 <comment><USER3> I subscribe to the digital edition of the Economist, mostly read it via the mobile app but previous I read it on the website. Got really annoyed recently since they raised their prices from around $100/year everywhere to being a discount on the local cover price.

What was worse that since the cover price where I live (New Zealand) is much high than the US I was paying 2.5 times the US price to subscribe to exactly the same digital product, without even the excuse of delivery costs. So I changed my address to the US.

More details here:

[http://blog.darkmere.gen.nz/2015/03/parallel-importing-vs- th...](http://blog.darkmere.gen.nz/2015/03/parallel-importing-vs-the- economist/)

<comment><USER4> That's unfortunate.

The Economist's attempts at creating a sensible digital pricing model has just been a range of awful options. From the Kindle, to the iPad, etc.

To say nothing of the fact that it's still cheaper to just find a decent discount on the print edition and access the web version via that account, than it is to save the materials and costs and go digital-only.

For all the normative claims they make about the need for better environmentalism and economic policies, they sure seem to have difficulty keeping their own house in order.

<comment><USER5> > To say nothing of the fact that it's still cheaper to just find a decent > discount on the print edition and access the web version via that account

I thought I had found a clever trick when I called them and asked them to stop physical delivery ( as will they do if you're going on an extended trip, for example ). The next week they also suspended my digital access...

I tried to explain to them that I didn't actually want the paper copy but it didn't register with them. When it came to renew, I let the subscription lapse because it felt so wasteful to be throwing the magazine straight from the letterbox into the recycling bin. And I wasn't prepared to pay _more_ to go without the paper!

<comment><USER4> That'd be funny if it wasn't such an infuriating brand of stupidity on their part.

With only one or two exceptions where I like to keep print copies around for reference (or for travel use where I want something disposable–don't want to leave an iPad on the beach or by the pool, for example), I'm the same as you: it arrives, it goes straight to recycling, and I read it on my iPad/Kindle/whatever. Last year I went on a tear, trying to stop all paper delivery while retaining digital access.

Turns out very, very few publications were helpful. Everyone understood why I wanted to do it, but they make their ad money off of paper copies shipped. So, as with the Economist, you have a lot of rags who're talking the talk about conservation, provided it doesn't cost them a penny.

Sure, they'll charge the customer more for less.

A couple were great about it: a quick email and it was moved over to Newsstand, or their app, etc. But the rest, the bigger publications, almost uniformly baulked, and could never make it happen.

I even considered trying to shame them by creating a site so everyone see who's forward-thinking, and who's myopic. I may yet.

It kind of reaffirmed my view that the whole print industry is a broken model. The end result is that I canceled a bunch of subscriptions, since the ones that are supposed to have credibility about world affairs just lost it in my eyes, I couldn't take them seriously (not that I ever should have).

It's also made me extra sensitive to the whored-out nature of publications that take ad dollars.

As a result, I canceled a bunch of subscriptions, and focused my energy on the ones that operate from subscription models (which are more expensive individually, but I saved more than that getting there).

Turns out I'm getting better information, paying more attention to it, and don't have a stack of magazines to worry about recycling every month.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'd really like to see a strong competitor to the Economist that reuses their core model, but minus the absurdly over the top biases (sorry, opinions). Sort of like a weekly more in depth version of BBC News, with saner digital pricing and a more attractive website.

I used to be a regular read of TE, but stopped last year because of the infuriating and endless propaganda re: Putin and Russia. The topics they write about where the editors have very strong opinions on controversial topics have always been by far the worst of their output.

As Standage points out, people read TE to feel at the end like they're informed. To read TE and at the end feel like I've been treated like a child, or shovelled a big steaming plate of angry warmongering ... well, it didn't give me the TE experience I was paying for.

They should have learned from their experience of strongly supporting the invasion of Iraq, but apparently no such luck. I hoped after Micklethwait left they'd get a grip on this but it only got worse. They just don't seem capable of talking about wars or foreign policy with anything like the same detachment that they'd discuss e.g. the economy of Indonesia.

When I read on the BBC occasionally I read something eyebrow raising too, but it's much, much rarer. They have a specific commitment to being unbiased, they clearly separate fact from opinion instead of mixing them and overall they don't seem to have many journalists or editors with extreme opinions. The BBC's accuracy suffers badly however from being a real time news organisation. Whenever I read something that's clearly (factual) nonsense on the Beeb it's pretty obviously always because someone who wasn't a subject matter expert had to throw together a story within an hour and struggled to do it well.

A combination of the two approaches would be something I'd happily pay for again.

</comment><comment><USER7> This is a pet concept of mine:

 _" the idea that news organizations can hand over their content so it can be consumed on other platforms. The advantage, obviously, is reach, and maybe that model works [...] I'm not sure it does — it just means you're splitting the advertising revenue with someone else._

Standage assumes this model can only work where "other platforms" are sustained by advertising, but I think that's not the case. Any app with a subscription model could do it, and at that point you as a news org are actually tapping into _their_ revenues, regardless of where they come from. I think the first reputable news org that will make its content developer- friendly from a licensing perspective, will soon become a platform for all sorts of revenue-generating experiments.

Software and hardware devices will keep expanding -- any news org in isolation will constantly struggle to keep on. The Economist were among the first to launch on iOS, Android and Kindle, but they've missed other boats likes Snapchat Discover and this can only happen more and more frequently as the web expands. The only way to exploit this is to leave the minutia of platform- specific tweaks to other developers, and concentrate on producing great content people want to pay for.

<comment> the-dude The Economist is already on Blende ( [https://blendle.com](https://blendle.com) ), an article-publisher/aggregator with micropayments from a wallet, no ads.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> >the promise we make to the reader is that if you trust us to filter and distill the news, and if you give us an hour and a half of your time — which is roughly how long people spend reading The Economist each week — then we'll tell you what matters in the world and what's going on.

Except then somebody else mentions something else that the Economist hasn't talked about, or shares another article on Facebook and then you still have to go read that, or be left out.

Plus just getting your news once a week: 9/11 happened on a Tuesday, you wouldn't know until friday. The US president is elected wednesday night, you don't know until friday which means the people you talk with are going to assume you are a fool.

<comment><USER9> I've actually been relying entirely on The Economist for my news for over a year now. I used to spend a lot of time reading various news sources, but then at some point started asking myself for each story I read: "Does having this information make any difference to me? Do I need to know this? How much information does this actually contain?" to which the answer was "No, no, and very little".

The Economist's weekly schedule filters out a lot of the useless noise and it gives time to write in-depth analysis rather than just bloating up non-news to fill the 24h news cycle. As a result I have a much more in-depth understanding of the current affairs than I had before. Of course my view also gets slanted by The Economist's biases, but those biases are at least well justified and supported most of the time.

Of course that does not mean I'm blind to the world around me. When a president gets elected or 9/11 happens or something else that actually matters, I will hear about it. It's just that a lot of the useless noise masquerading as "news" gets filtered out.

<comment><USER8> The problem I have with filtering out news articles is that you are right about the mean, median and 0.9 quantile of news.

I am not convinced that the value/impact of the 1% doesn't drastically outvalue the rest. That said it seems they are offering a month free so I guess I should go have a look.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's telling to me that the former editor left to go to Bloomberg. Bloomberg represents, in my opinion, a more sustainable approach to news - they want their news org to break even or make money, but they don't expect it to be a barn burner and recognize that having the news sources internally gives them an advantage in their core business - their terminals. Dow Jones is taking a similar approach. With this approach, they can afford to pay for excellent journalists while not being a slave (completely) to the advertiser. It keeps them out of gray-areas like native advertising as well (although Bloomberg may have that as well).

<comment><USER11> Bloomberg does native advertisement but they label it as such.

The whole anti native advertisement movement seems so late it's silly considering news publishers have been basically doing it for years without any disclaimer. PG wrote about this some back in 2005: [http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html)

<comment><USER10> PG was writing about PR and the ability to place stories. This is different from native advertising. PR can place stories because, as PG points out, the news media is lazy and needs to feed the beast.

Native advertising is the reporting being actually bought and paying directly. Native advertising is a natural outcome of a struggling business model - <USER2> looked at what they were doing around PR and concluded that they could make actual revenue on it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wish we could do micro-subscriptions in a seamless way. I would gladly pay $0.50 a month for a site to get the ad-free version of it.

Unfortunately, the legal and financial problems with those kinds of systems have kept that from becoming a reality. It's not a particularly difficult technical challenge.

<comment><USER13> Probably the bigger problem is that the more money you'd be willing to pay to get rid of ads, the more your eyeballs are worth to a potential advertiser. You're demonstrating that you have disposable income that you're willing to part with to overcome an inconvenience.

<comment><USER14> >Probably the bigger problem is that the more money you'd be willing to pay to get rid of ads, the more your eyeballs are worth to a potential advertiser. You're demonstrating that you have disposable income that you're willing to part with to overcome an inconvenience.

Hm. Conventional wisdom is that at least for websites making money off of adsense, you don't want to advertise to Engineers, because like most sophisticated customers they don't click on ads.

My take is that the class of consumers willing to pay money to block ads is likely to be more sophisticated than average, and thus less likely to click on ads.

<comment><USER8> >Hm. Conventional wisdom is that at least for websites making money off of adsense, you don't want to advertise to Engineers, because like most sophisticated customers they don't click on ads.

Engineers will click on ads for products that are interesting for them. The fact that they won't click on most ads are an issue with the quality of that ad or product.

Digital Ocean advertise in my Twitter feed, but I am already a customer of theirs, otherwise I would be very tempted to click.

Most ads and most products suck so badly, but that isn't an issue with the advertising model.

<comment><USER14> >Digital Ocean advertise in my Twitter feed, but I am already a customer of theirs, otherwise I would be very tempted to click.

Huh. See, I have been using digital ocean as an example of how a good product can overcome terrible advertising, and how what really matters in the VPS market is how much ram/disk you are handing out per dollar you charge.

But then, I'm thinking of their animated ads (Which I see all the time, 'cause apparently google thinks I really want to watch ads produced by my competitors.)

<comment><USER8> I haven't seen their animated ads, because I adblock all sites by default, but their ad was a textbook case of a simple ad with a straightforward pitch: "VPS, starting from $5 a month" (if I recall correctly).

<comment><USER14> >I haven't seen their animated ads, because I adblock all sites by default,

wait, i thought this conversation started when I said something like "Engineers don't click on ads" and then you said something like "But I click on ads"

Now it comes out that you use adblock, which does seem to support my thesis in the general case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "what we actually sell is what I like to call the feeling of being informed"

Ugh.

</comment><comment><USER8> Advertising doesn't work because ads are so badly targeted. For kicks I turned adblock of on Facebook and the offers are so generic and useless, "oh you are a single guy you must be interested in this subpar dating service", you must be interested in saving money on heating from this company 100 miles away, you must be interested in a Bitcoin miner, are you really sure you don't want to sign up for a subpar dating service, here is this game that you can play it sucks like all the other free to play games.

The only company that can actually target ads is Twitter.

<comment><USER16> I find it pretty funny that you say that the only company that can target ads loses money every quarter, while you bash on a company who makes gobs of money through advertising.

Also, advertising certainly does work. Just not so well for organizations like The Economist, because they are pressured by new media companies like Facebook, which have the eyeballs and the necessary targeting options to deliver the same audience cheaper, plus every other audience you can imagine.

<comment><USER8> Do you have evidence to suggest a causal relationship between Twitters inability to make money and its better ad targeting?

That is to say, would Twitter be better at making money if it had ads that were targeted worse?</comment></comment></comment>


Large Bitcoin Collider Is Generating Trillions of Keys and Breaking into Wallets - <AUTHOR> https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/the-large-bitcoin-collider-is-generating-trillions-of-keys-and-breaking-into-wallets <comment><USER2> About 10% of Bitcoins were created early, before 2012, and have never been traded. If somebody ever finds the key of the early lost Bitcoins, they'll have a huge payoff, over a billion dollars. Speculation is that either "Satoshi Nakamoto", whoever he is, is holding onto them for a big payoff, or somebody lost the private key for all those early Bitcoins. As the years go on, the second explanation seems more likely.

<comment><USER3> Gaining access to the early wallets and bringing those Bitcoins into circulation will lead to a crash in Bitcoin value due to both increasing the supply (as in [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Price_Revolution?wpr...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Price_Revolution?wprov=sfla1)) and decreasing confidence of other Bitcoin holders in the security of their wallets. You could extract some portion of the value if you do it slowly and pretend that Nakamoto is using his wallets, but you will not be able to extract their current market value.

<comment><USER4> While agree the increase in supply would drop the price I don't think the Spanish Price Revolution is analogous . . I think that's more analogous to what cryptocurrencies are doing to the Dollar.

<comment><USER3> In what way? Cryptocurrencies can be treated as just another asset.

<comment><USER4> Assets than can be created ex nihilo which will drive inflation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Not sure their what their heuristics are for narrowing the search space, but there certainly are some good ones. For instance, early versions of blockchain.info's wallet generated private keys by reading an ARC4 stream that had been seeded with Math.random() calls xor'd with timestamps. Quite the circus!

<comment><USER6> If collisions exist in the hashing algorithm, how you derive the seed for a random number generator is pointless

<comment><USER7> Every hashing algorithm has collisions, for good cryptographic ones there's just no practical way of finding them.

<comment><USER8> There is no practical way of finding a collision for a specific key. Finding collisions to one of the created keys non-specifically is a much smaller search space.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> [http://directory.io/](http://directory.io/) seems relevant here.

<comment><USER10> You could utilise google's cache with this one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It seems suspicious. Bitcoin cryptography isn't broken, AFAIK, so chance to randomly break into any real wallet should be almost non-existent. I think, they either lying or exploit something different, like RNG weakness.

<comment><USER12> This explains the approach in more detail: [https://lbc.cryptoguru.org/man/theory](https://lbc.cryptoguru.org/man/theory)

<comment><USER13> This is confusing to me. The link describes narrowing the search space to ~136.17bit, but that is still far too large to be tractable. Do they get an additional birthday bound on that somehow? 68 bits would not be insane, but I don't really understand what's going on here.

I highly doubt they found a collision with a probability of 2^-136, unless they exploited some kind of bad RNG bug (in which case the probability is much higher, of course).

<comment> ryan-c No birthday bound. The keyspace reduction is based on the number of addresses with a balance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> If this kind of attack is feasible, then maybe one should have several wallets and spread one's Bitcoin funds among these wallets, to dilute the risk. Maybe one wallet could be used just for receiving external transactions, but its funds could be immediately transferred to other wallets. Or maybe there are also weaknesses to this approach...

I'm not currently a Bitcoin user, and ambivalent about Bitcoin's virtue, but still hope that this kind of attack turns out to be fruitless and impractical.

<comment><USER15> > _then maybe one should have several wallets and spread one 's Bitcoin funds > among these wallets, to dilute the risk_

Sounds like Bitcoin is ready for the mainstream!

<comment><USER16> To be fair, aren't bank accounts only insured by the government for up to $250,000 per account?

<comment><USER17> To make matters worse, they're only insured to 250k in the event of a bank failure (running out of money)

having your account or identity hacked, on the other hand, you are on your own to make sure the bank replenishes your account ^.^

<comment><USER18> That is not true. The law obligates the bank to make you whole (subject to certain limits if you delay reporting until well after you knew of the theft).

<comment><USER17> The first tier is 3 days. Additionally, you need to spend money to be made whole, which you can of course sue for legal costs afterwards.

These are non-trivial steps and there are not many banks waiting out there to just give you your money back without some prodding

<comment><USER18> Three days from when you become aware does not seem unreasonable to me. Further losses are preventable and if you choose not to prevent them, it makes sense to me that you should bear some responsibility.

I'm not sure what you mean when you say you have to spend money to be made whole. I'm not aware of the banks having any right to charge you in order to get them to comply with the law. Would you please explain?

<comment><USER17> You would need to sue them in a court of law if they don't comply, which involves hiring a lawyer, which of course is needlessly expensive.

A bank that follows the law after your money has gone poof is the /best/ situation you can hope for, and probably isn't the /average/ or /median/ situation.

I don't check my many bank accounts every day and I prefer to spend days out in the wild with little internet. I will not be a happy camper on the day I'm hacked and my bank tries to explain why it's my fault that they can't pay me :)

<comment><USER18> I know several people who have had their bank accounts stolen at one point or another, and it's never required a lawsuit to be made whole. This is because almost all the transactions by which you can lose money through your bank are reversible, except for cash withdrawals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It appears that they are finding the private keys for transactions that already occurred. Reusing an address is not part of Bitcoin's design and it was never intended for people to do that. By not reusing addresses (not reusing private keys) I think one would be immune to this attack. The article doesn't seem to have much detail; anyone have more detail on this?

Edit: The details are in the URL posted by alphydan; it looks like address reuse does not matter with their method.

<comment><USER20> Even more important, by reusing addresses you are making more signatures using the same private key. This has proven to be a vulnerability where one can deduce the private key from these signatures (though limited to a bad implementation) but it's worth considering.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Very interesting work. 3 Quintillion keys generated, 3 private keys with coin in them. I have to wonder what processing power is being put into it, and if that power would be more effective at just mining coin, if someone were just after the money. At least in the short term. I think in the long term attacks like this might become more and more prevalent. Because at some point it may be easier to do this than mine new bitcoin.

<comment><USER22> Bitcoin is finite and one would expect the supply to become smaller over time thanks to keys being lost or owners dying and their accounts being inaccessible. In the long term guessing keys may be the only way to obtain new coins.

<comment><USER23> The new mining...

This would basically make Bitcoin Keynesian, since coin stored in wallets would now decay with a given probability. So you would have to invest it at least a little to beat the decay (shrinkage) rate.

<comment><USER24> Bitcoin becomes unspendable and worthless when the private keys are lost.

But when you have the private keys, your Bitcoin doesn't "decay". On the contrary, it becomes more scarce, and therefore more valuable.

<comment><USER25> You missed the point.

Once the primary way of gaining bitcoins is hacking wallets, the longer a bitcoin is behind the same private key, the longer that given wallet is a target.

<comment><USER26> IMO, the most vulnerable wallets are going to be the ones actively in use and stored insecurely, for example, on Windows machines subject to the recent NSA bug.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Maybe this is what the future of "treasure hunting" looks like?

Myself and a friend ran a wallet recovery service a while back, brings back memories haha. Very cool work, even as someone who works in the blockchain space.

</comment><comment><USER28> Collide her? I just met her haha</comment>


How convolutional neural networks see the world - <AUTHOR> http://blog.keras.io/how-convolutional-neural-networks-see-the-world.html <comment><USER2> Question to deep learning practitioners:

Is there any research on comparing the 99.9% confidence about something wrong, to the human weakness of 'optical illusion'?

If you watch a few minutes of this Dan Ariely TED Talk [1], we humans are fooled into near certainty that the table on the left has longer vertical distance that the horizontal distance of that on the right. Even after the speaker shows this is not the case, we still "confidently see" the wrong thing. (not to mention, we suffer from non-optical illusions as well, like cognitive biases, and fallacious reasoning, as shown later in the talk).

It seems to me you guys have discovered 'machine optical illusion'. It's just that the machine has illusions about something completely different. I believe exploring the space of architectures/weights/what-not might lead towards making a machine get into the same kind of optical illusions as the human visual system gets into. At the least, it looks like a very promising research direction to me.

[1] [https://youtu.be/9X68dm92HVI?t=2m22s](https://youtu.be/9X68dm92HVI?t=2m22s)

<comment><USER3> That is not an example of how weak our brain is. That is an example of how incredibly intelligent our brain is.

If you saw both tables in the real, _physical, natural_ world, because of the effect of perspective, the table on the left is indeed _physically_ longer than the width of the table on the right. Our brain is correctly inferring this from perspective/trigonometry. The visual system is designed to correctly interpret the natural world, not correctly interpret lengths of line segments on a slide. This illustrates how hard it is to create computer algorithms that robustly infer 3D from 2D (this inference requires taking cues from shading, perspective, etc.)

Almost all optical illusions are examples of the strength, not weakness, of the human brain.

EDIT: I've emphasized the word "natural". The problem with the below examples of "illusions" constructed in the physical world is this: what do you expect the brain to do otherwise? When you see a scene in the world, is it a weakness that our brain discards the (extremely unlikely) possibility the scene is just a massive hologram five inches from your eyes, or a meticulously painted and lit cardboard scene? I don't.

<comment><USER4> Many (probably most) of these optical illusions can be translated to the real physical world. Not surprising, it just requires situations that are outside the normal experiences of the human brain, especially in the ancestral environment. For instance:

[https://s-media-cache- ak0.pinimg.com/736x/24/5b/59/245b59444...](https://s-media-cache- ak0.pinimg.com/736x/24/5b/59/245b59444cdcff14d139df7c37b7e271.jpg)

<comment><USER5> I like this one [http://0.media.collegehumor.cvcdn.com/70/36/483778211d5177e9...](http://0.media.collegehumor.cvcdn.com/70/36/483778211d5177e9b7b74dbc8bbc8290-amazing- floating-paper-cube-illusion.gif)

It seems impossible a few seconds until the trick is revealed.

<comment><USER6> I was expecting that (or the T-rex variation of) when he mentioned optical illusions. The image he posted is more related to perspective than how the visual cortex works -- that is, it can even be done inside a 3d game/engine, with clever texturing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> SPOILER WARNING!

Nice read at the end of the article:

 _" [...] Naturally, this does not qualify as "seeing" in any human sense, and from a scientific perspective it certainly doesn't mean that we somehow solved computer vision at this point. Don't believe the hype; we are merely standing on the first step of a very tall ladder._

 _Some say that the hierarchical-modular decomposition of visual space learned by a convnet is analogous to what the human visual cortex does. It may or may not be true, but there is no strong evidence to believe so. Of course, one would expect the visual cortex to learn something similar, to the extent that this constitutes a "natural" decomposition of our visual world (in much the same way that the Fourier decomposition would be a "natural" decomposition of a periodic audio signal). But the exact nature of the filters and hierarchy, and the process through which they are learned, has most likely little in common with our puny convnets. The visual cortex is not convolutional to begin with, and while it is structured in layers, the layers are themselves structured into cortical columns whose exact purpose is still not well understood --a feature not found in our artificial networks (although Geoff Hinton is working on it). Besides, there is so much more to visual perception than the classification of static pictures --human perception is fundamentally sequential and active, not static and passive, and is tightly intricated with motor control (e.g. eye saccades)._

 _Think about this next time your hear some VC or big-name CEO appear in the news to warn you against the existential threat posed by our recent advances in deep learning. Today we have better tools to map complex information spaces than we ever did before, which is awesome, but at the end of the day they are tools, not creatures, and none of what they do could reasonably qualify as "thinking". Drawing a smiley face on a rock doesn't make it "happy", even if your primate neocortex tells you so._

 _That said, visualizing what convnets learn is quite fascinating --who would have guessed that simple gradient descent with a reasonable loss function over a sufficiently large dataset would be enough to learn this beautiful hierarchical-modular network of patterns that manages to explain a complex visual space surprisingly well. Deep learning may not be intelligence is any real sense, but it 's still working considerably better than anybody could have anticipated just a few years ago. Now, if only we understood why... ;-)"_

<comment><USER8> _Drawing a smiley face on a rock doesn 't make it "happy", even if your primate neocortex tells you so._

That's one of the best analogies we've got with regard to "deep learning" versus reality. People around here seem to think the AI apocalypse is 3-5 years away and are rushing to fund billion dollar "sentient rock" research.

<comment><USER9> An AI doesn't have to understand the world in order to destroy it. In fact, the less it understands, the more dangerous it could be.

<comment><USER8> There's two lines of thought. Either a.) an AI will have the mental capacity of a 2 year old with the powers of a god — or — b.) an AI will have the mental capacity of a god (not a dumb Abrahamic god, but more like a universal atman) also combined with the powers of a god.

If you're in the "2 year old with unlimited power" camp, nothing can save us and everything is futile and we should all just eat drink and be merry for tomorrow the AI kills us all.

If you're in the AI-as-enlighened-buddha camp, the godlike AI will either save us all — or — just leave us alone to solve our own problems (while potentially locking out future godlike-AI development so we don't do too much runaway damage (eschaton, etc)).

<comment><USER10> Those are the only two lines of thought? Don't be INSANE. Where the hell do people get this shit from, bad sci-fi movies? I'm sorry, I don't really mean you're actually stupid or anything, it's just.... HOW ON EARTH could anyone with a passing familiarity with computer science possibly arrive at this sort of expectation? I don't understand!!

The powers of a GOD? What does that even mean? No AI is going to be able to go "Let there be light!" and make there be light. Heck, no AI is going to be able to go "I will hack into this camera and spy on you!" without either spending the requisite CPU-hours to crack the passwords or encryption protecting it, or analyzing all its attack surface for weaknesses like a hacker. Computational complexity is REAL, P does not and never will equal NP (we just don't know how to prove it yet), and there are real physical limits on the computing power that you can fit inside a given volume and its energy budget.

AT ITS BEST, an AI will have the same powers as a civilization of humans working together using computers the old-fashioned way, only faster.

<comment><USER11> Well, P/NP really has almost no bearing on this problem. That is a theoretical problem and even if P=NP, the algorithm could have a ginormous constant or degree. Conversely even if P=/=NP, the problem might be very easy to solve at human timescales with advanced enough algorithms/processing speed.

<comment><USER10> P/NP has direct bearing on (a) how easy it is for an AI entity to HACK ALL THE INTERNETS that are accessible to it but protected with (NP) cryptography and stuff, and (b) how easy it is for an AI entity to design the next generation of itself in advance of this SINGULARITY APOCALYPSE I keep hearing about (and designing a better computer is probably a problem in NP as well, to say nothing of manufacturing concerns).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> What I find interesting is that the auras that I get as a precursor to my migraines don't look far off from those images.

If you were to take a C shaped slice and overlay it onto video and then animated the color you would pretty much have it.

It would be interesting to see if they were connected somehow...

<comment><USER13> Sounds like you are describing "scintillating scotoma", if you wanted a name for that visual distortion.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scintillating_scotoma](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scintillating_scotoma)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> What would happen if you generated a lot of images like this, tagged them as "conv-net filter", and then added them to the set of images that the neural nets trained on?

Would the network learn more discriminating filters for everything else?

<comment><USER15> Very interesting question and worth an experiment or two. Personally, I don't think it would help because the patterns are complex and it is an internal representation. It would be like feeding it a hash values and labelling them "hash values". That wouldn't necessarily help you discriminate pre-hashed values. That said, I would definitely be interested in the results of a real test.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Just really curious? What is up with ML on HN today? So many posts about ML in a single day.

After reading this article I have to say even humans have hard time actually understand images and patterns like the one shown in the article, let alone a machine. I wonder what would a machine say about the famous "is this dress blue or grey" photo last year.

</comment><comment><USER17> Machines do not have to think or see in the same way as humans. To dismiss machine capablities simply because they do not resemble human intelligence seems hopelessly naive.

</comment><comment><USER18>
        we are merely standing on the first step of a very tall ladder.

...

        Deep learning may not be intelligence is any real sense, but it's still working considerably better than anybody could have anticipated just a few years ago. Now, if only we understood why... ;-)

Yes I'd agree with this, there needs to be a deeper level analysis for how the cognitive functions within the brain, for example how vision in the brain works. Such understanding will clearly take a great amount of effort to achieve, and I don't know if research enough research is aimed in this deeper theoretical direction, as opposed to neural net type machine learning.

</comment><comment><USER19> A little of–topic.

There is something interesting to be said about what kind of awareness a future AI (or whatever we should call it) will simulate the world.

Imagine what kind of perspectives are possible when thousands or millions of input sources are your senses.

<comment><USER20> >Imagine what kind of perspectives are possible when thousands or millions of input sources are your senses.

Doesn't this exactly describe human sensory input? Though our brain is efficient by throwing out most of the data early on in the signal chain (as research has revealed in vision and auditory input). Will future AI also need to be as efficient?

<comment><USER8> _Doesn 't this exactly describe human sensory input?_

Well, consider having a 360º array of 30 cameras all integrated into a perfect spherical sensory experience. It's something we can't really imagine experiencing natively, but it would be trivial for eBrains to coalesce visual systems that way from eBirth.

Our bodies have lots of low bitrate sensors like billions of individual sensory nerves distributed throughout our bodes ( _and_ they are each individually addressable in the brain), but we don't think of "touch" as a sense to "computationalize" like vision or sound or language.

One amusing thing about AI sensors: nobody ever talks about superhuman smell. Where are the quantum AI noses?

<comment><USER21> Biochemical sensors, like what that discredited blood test company theranos tried to do, is a sort of superhuman smell.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Its striking how similar CNNs are to good old JPEG compression. Makes me think you would get better results by chopping up input into blocks, and slapping few more layers on top. From the article description I get that VGG16 tries to guess whole picture content from existence of particular patterns totally ignoring their location and arrangement, hence nonsensical magpie prediction. Photoshop magpie with a beak sticking out its ass and it will pass as genuine because all prerequisite patterns are there.

</comment><comment><USER23> If you took every image agreeing with your conception of a magpie and composed it into one image, would it look anything like a magpie? The Google inceptionism team did the same experiment but supplied the networks with natural image priors. Perhaps hand-picked, but those examples were actually quite convicining.</comment>


Show HN: I wrote my own lightweight markup language for mathy blogs - <AUTHOR> I wrote my own lightweight markup language, similar to Markdown, that compiles to both HTML5 and LaTeX, supports LaTeX equations (through svgtex, i.e. serverside MathJax), references, captioned figures with semantically correct <figure> tag in html, syntax highlighted code blocks, and so on.
http://www.dllu.net/programming/dllup/
See the text file written in dllup markup language:
http://www.dllu.net/programming/dllup/index.dllu
and the PDF and LaTeX versions:
http://www.dllu.net/programming/dllup/index.pdf
http://www.dllu.net/programming/dllup/index_dllu.tex
The code is very hacky (I wrote it for my own use after all) and might crash if the syntax is not exactly right.
I also have experimental vim syntax highlighting support: http://i.imgur.com/imx6XCY.png
The HTML output of dllup is valid HTML5 (http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=www.dllu.net/programming/dllup/&charset=(detect+automatically)&doctype=Inline&group=0) and should be sufficiently semantic to be usable in lynx: http://i.imgur.com/ugSXX90.png <comment><USER2> Posts without URLs are penalized, so you might want to repost this as a link to your site, then add the above text as a first comment to the new thread. Good luck!</comment>


Pharo 1.4 released - <AUTHOR> http://www.pharo-project.org/news?dialog=pharo-1-4-released

<comment><USER2> Yeah, this is really great, between 1.3 and 1.4 no less than 860 individual issues were resolved.

Open source software is all about maintaining a constant forward evolution, and Pharo is a great example of that.

</comment><comment><USER3> FileSystem, Zinc, or Zodiac alone would have been enough to celebrate! It's amazing what's been accomplished in a short time...</comment>


Ask HN: How did you implement GDPR compliant Global Log Collection system? - <AUTHOR> Hello Guys, I am running hundreds of servers across the globe. Right now all these servers are pushing the data to centralized ELK cluster. I want to make a regional log collection system. Like all EU servers should send all logs to the EU cluster likewise for Japan, US, India servers.
Maintaining ELK clusters per region can be a pain and paying a huge amount to AWS Elastic Search Service is not a good idea.
Do you guys have some better suggestions? Any tools or best practices I should follow for this project? <comment><USER2> I'm the PM in charge of GDPR issues at the company I work for. I don't know if I can give you any black and white answers, it really depends on a lot of factors. Some directions though:

\- Try to minimize personal data in the logs or exclude it entirely

\- It may be OK to have personal data in logs (e.g. IP addresses) if there is a basis for it. One example is for infosec - keeping logs to review for breaches, and pin down how the breach happened may be a good enough reason. You should disclose it as part of the terms of use.

\- I don't know if you are really obligated to do per-region logs. If you are located in region A, and logs are located in region B, you still have to transfer data from A to B to look at it, so not really sure what it gets you.

I don't know if this is what you are looking for or not. Hope it helps though!</comment>


What Is Aging? Most Scientists Still Get It Wrong - <AUTHOR> http://joshmitteldorf.scienceblog.com/2015/01/05/what-is-aging-most-scientists-still-get-it-wrong/ <comment><USER2> It is important to note that the fact "Starvation is also a way to live longer." is probably wrong as some scientist have noticed.

The problem is that animals in laboratories are "coach potatoes". They don't do the exercise they naturally do in their habitat searching for food.

They live overcrowded in small cages and overstressed. Most lab animals are already ill from their artificial habitat, they have diabetes and other disorders.

Strong social animals are isolated so they don't create problems like fighting each other(what are thy going to do if not?).

Imagine you were forced to live in a sofa, or in your bed, all your life, with no sunlight but LED lighting.

Most of those animals are overeating for their activity, so making them starve is better than not doing it. But this tells us nothing about real animals in the real world.

[http://www.vivisectioninformation.com/index.php?p=1_27_Unrep...](http://www.vivisectioninformation.com/index.php?p=1_27_Unreproducable- results-from-the-animal-lab)

<comment><USER3> You mischaracterize calorie restriction with optimal nutrition by calling it starvation, and you mischaracterize the current research situation.

The evidence for it to extend healthy, mean, and maximum life span in a wide range of species is very extensive: mice, flies, nematodes, etc, etc, etc. The primate evidence for life span extension is mixed at this time, partially because the two decades-long studies were poorly designed in hindsight, and the expectation is that it doesn't extend life greatly in humans. Nonetheless, it has enormously impressive short term health effects in we primates [1]. If calorie restriction was a pill rather than a lifestyle, you'd beat a path to the manufacturer's door, as it has far greater positive effects on health for basically healthy people than any presently available medical technology.

It is true that there is some concern in the research community over the degree to which laboratory mice are not good reflections of what is being studied. This is not unknown, and it is not unacknowledged. A range of rigorous testing programs aim to do something about past less rigorous results - see for example the NIA Interventions Testing Program [2].

Interestingly it is worthy of note that many past research programs were tainted by inadvertent calorie restriction - the things they tested led to led to lab animals eating less. The effects of calorie restriction on health and life span are many times larger than those produced by most other things under testing.

To address your subtext of animal abuse, the only thing worse than running animal studies to advance medicine and life science knowledge is to not run those studies. Even the path to the future in which near all studies are carried out in tissue engineered flesh or simulation, causing no harm to creatures capable of suffering, requires present animal studies. Researchers want that future as it is better on all counts. Further, studies of calorie restriction and longevity are about the most benign of animal studies: these animals are healthier and longer-lived as a result of the restriction. If you want to do something about animal suffering, farming is the place to start, not research, as it accounts for 99.9% of the harms you dislike.

[1]: [http://impactaging.com/papers/v5/n7/full/100581.html](http://impactaging.com/papers/v5/n7/full/100581.html)

[2]: [http://www.nia.nih.gov/research/dab/interventions-testing- pr...](http://www.nia.nih.gov/research/dab/interventions-testing-program-itp)

<comment><USER4> Is it OK to try to establish a correlation between calorie intake and lifespan without taking into account variety in calorie spending, or a "life style"?

It seems that excess of calories have a big negative effect for an "idle/aged" lifestyle, and almost no effect for "hyper-active/young" lifestyle.

It seems also related to urban vs. rural populations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The best explanation I found was on the book The Value of Tomorrow by Eduardo Giannetti, Brazilian philosopher and economist (in this chapter he had several consultants): If there is a trade-off between longer lifespan and reproductive capacity at a young age, there will also be a point of equilibrium.

Suppose there was no senescence, we all lived perfectly healthy and at peak capacity for the duration of our lives. We would still have limited lifespan in nature, because of diseases, natural predators, etc. There would be a life expectancy, since people would not live forever. Now suppose a mutation occurs that grants the individual a boost in body functions at a young age with a caveat: a gradual decline in body functions after a certain age. If this certain age is way past the life expectancy of the population, this mutation would give competitive advantage to its bearers, with no real downside, since nobody lives way past the life expectancy anyway. This mutation would spread throughout the entire population and aging would establish itself in this population.

The point of equilibrium in these trade-offs would be different for each population, since the environments and species are different, hence why hummingbirds, dogs, humans and turtles have wildly varying life expectancies.

Trying to stop aging would involve stopping or mitigating these mechanisms, which are deeply ingrained in our systems. The consequences of doing so are far from straightforward, both to the individual (if we could not stop side effects to have the cake and eat it too) and to the population as a whole.

<comment><USER6> Yup. And the trade off between reproduction and aging is extremely well documented in biology. In short, reproduction prioritizes the set over the element. Kinda Borg-ish but that's what we have so far.

<comment><USER7> The tradeoff between reproduction and aging is sometimes present and sometimes absent. The successes are over-reported and the failures under-reported, so you might get the impression of "extremely well documented" with a cursory reading. Here is an example from Cynthia Kenyon's lab, "Healthy Animals with Extreme Longevity" [http://www.sciencemag.org/content/302/5645/611.full](http://www.sciencemag.org/content/302/5645/611.full)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Oh how nice a couple of references to some peer reviewed articles would have been. Quotes like "This is my own perspective, shared by a handful of world- class aging scientists, but it is not yet mainstream." make all my scientific alarms go off.

It is an interesting way of looking at it though.

<comment><USER9> > _all my scientific alarms go off_

Is it required on HN that every article be terse list of peer-reviewed facts?

<comment><USER10> No, but when you make claims like those in the title then those peer-reviewed facts make all the difference.

There's a ton of pseudo science and outright bs in the anti-aging scene so some references would definitely help in this case.

Articles that don't make grandiose claims don't need to put their evidence up front. For 'most scientists' in the title read 'most scientists that hold a view contrary to that of the author'.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This article gets so many things wrong I dont know where to start. The argument that "our bodies are useless after reproduction therefore aging makes us die when we are done" is so flawed in itself. If that was even remotely true, women would die much earlier than men since their bodies' reproductive age stops way earlier. So what is in nature's interest to have women live in their 80s versus men die in their 70s ? There is just no good "purpose" to justify those difference which are anyway way beyond the best times for reproductive ages for both genders.

<comment><USER3> In answer to your questions:

The grandmother hypothesis:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandmother_hypothesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandmother_hypothesis)

Evolution of sexually dimorphic longevity in humans:

[http://www.impactaging.com/papers/v6/n2/full/100640.html](http://www.impactaging.com/papers/v6/n2/full/100640.html)

<comment><USER12> I like another theory I read recently: That it's because women's mitochondria are more fine-tuned to their nuclear genome:

"The inheritance of mitochondria is asymmetric: you only get them from your mother, and your father makes no mitochondrial contribution at all. Your father's mitochondrial contribution dies with him and is not passed on. What does that mean? It means that there can be no selection to fine tune mitochondria to the male nuclear genome."

Mitochondria are extrmely important to the cell and have been linked to many effects of aging. The reasoning above suggests that mitochondria work more poorly in males. And indeed, the paper (linked below) explains that in fruit flies, mitochondrial genes in males are expressed with much higher variability than females.

Your two links depend on human biology, but early male death is a much more general phenomenon. Males die earlier in the vast majority of animals (with gender). This idea could explain it.

[http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/02/06/mothers- curse/](http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/02/06/mothers-curse/)

[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23281153](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23281153)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Ageing like everything in biology is incredibly complex. About the only thing we know for sure is that everyone with a simple theory to explain ageing is wrong.

Ageing is at least as complex as cancer, but has received 1000th the study. If we assume understanding of a field correlates with resources committed then ageing research is in the 1920s. If you read the scientific literature from 1920s on cancer you will find everyone had a theory and everyone was wrong.

</comment><comment><USER14> > It is the body shutting itself down, putting itself out of the way after it > has done its job, finished reproduction.

Males' reproductive abilities continue into much later life. Wouldn't this theory then suggest that males would live longer? The opposite is in fact the case.

</comment><comment><USER15> "These compromises have been made up ad hoc to avoid the inference that aging evolved to benefit the community, not the individual."

Isn't this just group selection again? Has this view become more accepted nowadays among biologists? There are very compelling arguments against it.

Maybe a better way to phrase it would be to say that aging has evolved to benefit the offspring, which traditionally happened to make up a significant part of the community?

<comment><USER16> What arguments are there against it? I had assumed that evolution applies on all levels (and not only to organisms). and what about ants - their evolution would always be to benefit the community, I suppose?

<comment><USER17> Ants are often siblings of each other due to the high number of ants produced by a single queen, so "group selection" for ants is really just "offspring selection".

Most cases where group/community selection appears to take place have been explained by individual selection. Similarly, most (if not all) cases of symbiotic and cooperative behavior between species have been explained by an evolution of selfish survival behavior of each species.

In both cases cooperation is not being directly selected for, but occurs as a special case of individual/selfish selection.

<comment><USER16> You mean groups are selected for because the group benefits the individual? Sure - but that seems to me to just be a point of view, not a refutation of group selection.

For example (to clarify), would you say religions are subject to evolution?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Does anyone here have the background to address this author's claims about telomeres? It seems like if telomeres were really a silver bullet to stop cellular aging, we'd have huge scientific consensus about it right now. My impression was that it was a promising line of investigation 20 years ago that didn't have the dramatic results that were hoped for.

But I'm not in biology or medicine, and I may be wildly off base. I'm naturally cynical about the presence of a silver bullet for aging, though.

<comment><USER19> The most convincing piece of evidence that telomeres are important in aging is that lack of telomerase (the protein that extends telomeres) or otherwise shortened telomeres causes progeroid (premature aging) disorders.

But there are problems. First, telomerase is activated in many cancers to allow cancer cells to divide indefinitely, so there is a fear that adding telomerase as an anti-aging treatment would increase cancer risk. It is assumed that the finite length and existence of telomeres is an anti-cancer mechanism by cells.

Secondly and even more problematic, aging occurs in tissues, and aging-like gene expression signatures in cells, which still have ample telomeres. There is a lot of evidence that other things like inflammation and metabolism, which have no direct connection to telomeres, are critical to aging.

So telomerase/telomere lengthening is exceedingly unlikely to be a "silver bullet" for aging. Experiments show that it can extend lifespan in mice modestly. Conversely, though, upregulating or downregulating many other proteins which have nothing to do with telomeres can also increase lifespan.

It is possible that telomeres are important in stem cell maintenance, since stem cells have to last a long time and replicate repeatedly (stem cells themselves are a very hot topic in aging right now).

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> One idea that I'm surprised I've never seen mentioned is the possibility that life ages in the same way that companies do. New high growth companies often have lots of money to hire new people, buy new equipment, build new office buildings, etc. When revenue eventually levels off or drops, often there are no longer enough resources to support everything that was built up in the growth phase. In older companies you might see a lot of old worn out equipment and infrastructure that is not getting repaired due to lack of resources. This effect can be seen on a larger scale in cities or even nations that experience a slowdown in growth.

What if aging is simply a side effect of the fact that we stop growing at a certain age? It could be that certain key resources needed to fully repair the body are reduced or shut off once growth stops. Aging might even be a kind of negative growth.

It's interesting that the effects of aging don't start showing up until after we stop growing. Also, the rate at which different forms of life age seems to be related to the growth rate. Some types of turtle can live to be over 200 years old but take 50 years to grow to full size.

I'd be curious to see if there is any research into aging along these lines. If aging is related to growth, perhaps an anti-aging treatment could be as simple as finding a way to restart growth for short periods of time to generate the additional resources needed to repair damaged tissue. I have heard of human growth hormone being used as an anti-aging treatment though something tells me there would be more involved than just one hormone.

<comment><USER19> Well, if the problem were "not enough resources", then you would expect that calories consumed would positively correlate with lifespan. But of course, calorie restriction increases lifespan. This theory was rather popular before 1950 and part of why people found calorie restriction's success surprising.

A more modern and sophisticated version is called the "disposable soma" theory of aging, which states that reproduction competes with maintenance activities for the body's resources. But it too suffers from the same problem, and the additional problem that some organisms do not appreciably age.

Yes, you are right that lifespan correlates with body mass/volume among species quite nicely, with some exceptions. And it is indeed quite suspicious that aging begins just about the same time growth stops. Growth hormone (GH) levels drop with age and GH supplementation can slow some age-related phenotypes. But, on the other hand, GH-deficient mice have increased lifespan, and GH is induced by cancer and its supplementation may increase cancer risk. There is a similar story for other growth hormones like IGF-1. Of course, these hormones, especially IGF-1, are intimately connected with metabolism, which is probably the set of pathways most heavily implicated in aging.

So I am not sure this "coincidence" of aging starting when growth stops has a known explanation. It would however make an intriguing sci-fi novel if the "cure" for aging involved always growing larger and larger in size.

<comment><USER20> By resources I wasn't necessarily referring to calories consumed. I was thinking of something like stem cells or some other resource useful for repairing damaged tissues that might be deliberately restricted or "turned off" by the body as part of the process of shutting down overall growth.

The rate of aging seems to be tied to the rate of growth with slower growing organisms also aging more slowly so you might expect GH-deficient mice to live longer if it resulted in a slower rate of growth.

Hopefully turning growth back on for a short period of time would not result in the body actually growing larger in size. With luck, resources made available by new growth would go to repair tissues damaged by aging before initiating new growth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This "hard-wired cease of regeneration/renew" is a nice high-level theory, while attempts to find a single cause (or a single gene) to stop or reverse the process, is, probably, waste of time. There is no single process to be stopped, leave alone reversed. Each major subsystem (if not each major cell type) probably has its own "enough markers". That's why there are so many different causes of "natural" death.

<comment><USER21> Well, it is possible that every subsystem has its own self-destruction procedures, but that would be such an inefficient way to design a system. And nature is usually a very efficient designer.

<comment><USER4> It is not self-destruction, I think, it is rather "never evolved/selected for a long run". Everything "important" is supposed to happen in youth, at peak and then "doesn't matter".

It is rather "stopping investing in repair" rather than "intentional self- destruction". But I think there is no single "marker/indicator" for this.

So, they could keep regeneration of some specific kind of cells in a lab animal, by manipulating some hormone, but it doesn't affect the other parallel processes in different kinds of cells.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Despite the fact that the principal, fundamental biochemical differences distinguishing old tissue from young tissue are a largely settled and defensible consensus these past twenty years [1], there are many theories of aging [2]. From the point of view of development of treatments for aging, the most important divide is between programmed aging theories (a loud minority) and the view of aging as accumulated damage (the majority). A simplistic way of looking at it is to say that in the programmed aging view epigenetic change causes damage, while in the aging as damage view the damage is a side-effect of the normal operation of metabolism and leads to epigenetic changes as a reaction.

(This simplistic view obscures a lot of argument within programmed aging, just as there is a lot of argument within the aging as damage view. The author of this article has developed a novel evolutionary theory of programmed aging to compare and contrast with a range of others, such as the hyperfunction theory of aging).

At the present time we are entering an age of genetics. Whether the research community thinks of aging as a program or not is very important from the point of view of which treatments they try to chase. If aging is programmed, we'd expect damage repair to be of limited utility. If aging is accumulated damage, we'd expect attempts to change epigenetic patterns and gene expression levels to be of limited utility.

Strangely, despite the fact that most researchers think of aging as damage accumulation, the research community actually spends much more time on trying to catalog and alter epigenetic and gene expression changes - the path that clearly won't have any great impact on the underlying causes of aging in that model. So if you do support programmed aging you should be pretty happy with the way things are going. If you don't, you really shouldn't: the field is heading in the wrong direction, for bad reasons. i.e. that it is easier to raise funds for the study and alteration of epigenetics, or the Big Pharma style development of drugs to do the same, which is the very hard exploration of how to safely alter a massively complex system that is very poorly understood, while it is much harder to raise funds to aim at rejuvenation through repair of damage, as this latter is a comparatively new approach in medicine.

So despite the fact that the majority of the field thinks that aging is damage, next to no groups work on damage repair. They are largely working on building a catalog of the precise way in which damage interacts with metabolism in great detail, a part of the ongoing process of producing a complete map of metabolism, a process that has only just started in the grand scheme of things: what we have today is just the sketch of an outline.

But that list of forms of damage that cause aging? That's good and defensible and therapies could be built starting now, with a proposed ten year timeline to get to working prototypes in mice given $100m/yr funding. The whole and main point of the SENS strategies for aging is that we can skip over the need for full understanding of the detailed operation of metabolism and just fix the damage we know distinguishes old tissue from young tissue. This is the logical way to go if aging is thought to be damage. And yet it has taken a decade of advocacy to get even a small number of researchers in the field to support this approach. [3]

Want to prove whether aging is programmed or not? Implement SENS therapies, a clear and very detailed research program with a billion dollar price tag (much less than has already been spent on investigating sirtuins and mTOR, efforts that have produced nothing but knowledge of metabolism, and none of the promised treatments to modestly slow aging in healthy individuals). If that produces actual rejuvenation in mice, then aging is damage accumulation. If it doesn't, then it is programmed. End of story, fastest way to the target, job done.

[1]: [http://sens.org/research/introduction-to-sens- research](http://sens.org/research/introduction-to-sens-research)

[2]: [http://www.senescence.info/aging_theories.html](http://www.senescence.info/aging_theories.html)

[3]: [http://sens.org/about/leadership/research-advisory- board](http://sens.org/about/leadership/research-advisory-board)

</comment><comment><USER22> Can't take seriously an article with this kind of anthropomorphic attitude to biology

</comment><comment><USER23> I enjoyed the post. Have one thing to add.

IIRC the role of telomeres in aging has been known for twenty or thirty years. I'm blanking on the name, but there was a biotech company that went public in the 90's that had a drug in the works to lengthen or prevent the shortening of telomeres. But two decades later they haven't made much progress.

</comment><comment><USER24> I was extremely skeptical of the title, but he makes a good case. Still it's very unlikely aging is evolved. An animal that lives longer would be able to reproduce more, therefore there is selection pressure for longer (reproductive) life spans.

It's far more likely there are other reasons. For example limited telomeres prevent cells from multiplying out of control. And if aging was easy to biologically prevent/reverse, we would expect to find a few people out of billions that live far outside the normal life expectancy. Like someone with a rare combination of genes that happens to have longer telomeres or younger hormones etc. Instead everyone dies pretty consistently within 90 years, give or take a decade.

<comment><USER25> "therefore there is selection pressure for longer (reproductive) life spans"

this is too simplistic. there is also selection pressure for shorter generational cycles, leading to faster evolution. keeping older generations around would consume extra resources.

<comment><USER24> You are anthropomorphising evolution. Natural selection only favors individuals, not the species as a whole. Plus it's not clear if that would actually be a benefit. An organism which has survived and reproduced for hundreds of years probably has very fit genes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> My favorite explanation of Againg comes from William Hamilton. He took advantage of the Euler-Lotka equation to calculate the number of offspring that would be alive at any given point in the future. Using this equation from the field of demographics, he showed that senescence has only a marginal effect on fitness. As such, selective pressure would not be strong enough to filter out mutations that might result in aging. Finally, he was able to derive various mortality curves that "seem" to match pretty well with real living systems.

<comment><USER7> Marginal effect on INDIVIDUAL fitness, but a huge effect on THE FITNESS OF ECOSYSTEMS. Without aging, ecosystems would be unstable dynamic systems, and would not last more than a single generation. Without aging, everyone would die at once, in famines and natural disasters. Aging is necessary to spread out the death rate, so that populations don't swing wildly up and down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I wonder what are the currently best established DIY techniques to slow aging. I know low food intake could help, but what else?

<comment><USER28> There is nothing else. Basically, calorie restriction works, and nothing else does. I recommend Fight Aging! if you are interested.

[https://www.fightaging.org/faq/](https://www.fightaging.org/faq/)

<comment><USER29> I'm not so sure those are the only two. I'm fairly certain high dietary intake of various vegetables, fruits, and legumes over processed foods would probably greatly add to the life expectancy of regular people. Don't have a lot of hard evidence but I have relatives who outlived their brothers and sisters by 10-20 years because they just ate significantly healthier and moved around more.

<comment><USER28> Healthy diet keeps you healthy, but it does not slow aging. It prevents death from reasons other than aging.

To prove "slowing aging", you need to demonstrate increase in maximum lifespan, not average lifespan. Exercise, diet, etc. increase average lifespan. There is no evidence they increase maximum lifespan, none at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> This is truly the most amazing time to be alive (so far). No matter what repercussions the destruction of aging might have, it awes me that we talk of dramatically extended life and the colonization of the stars not only as something feasible, but even possible within the next century.

<comment><USER31> Unfortunately it's just talking, there is no real progress in either space exploration let alone colonization or aging, hygiene and antibiotics was and it's still is the only thing that prolonged life in the last century, we still have a long way in both directions.

<comment><USER32> Not really. Life expectancy at birth has steadily climbed:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy#mediaviewer/Fi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy#mediaviewer/File:Life_Expectancy_at_Birth_by_Region_1950-2050.png)

The effect continued past the large effects of hygiene, antibiotics and child vaccination. You may argue that the curve is clearly asymptotic, and that a maximum age genetic barrier is clearly visible. You can't argue, however, that there isn't real progress after antibiotics and hygiene.

This type of barrier is typical of technological evolution. We do strain a technology until returns are minimal, and only then sidestep to the next level of evolution. Steam machines were mechanical wonders before the combustion engine. Valves were amazing right before the transistor made an entrance. Current "corrective medicine" will reach its peak right before "manipulative medicine" enters the fray.

<comment><USER11> > The effect continued past the large effects of hygiene, antibiotics and > child vaccination. You may argue that the curve is clearly asymptotic, and > that a maximum age genetic barrier is clearly visible. You can't argue, > however, that there isn't real progress after antibiotics and hygiene.

we are seeing a resurgence of bacteria resistant to antibiotics, though, and we have no new lines of antibiotics to fight them. These advances may only be temporary.

<comment><USER33> > we are seeing a resurgence of bacteria resistant to antibiotics, though, and > we have no new lines of antibiotics to fight them. These advances may only > be temporary.

We don't develop such, due to the broken way our pharmacy research is done.

It makes no sense for pharma companies to develop antibiotics due to low ROI and lifetime of the product. A better approach for this is government to fund researchers for areas that private sector has abandoned.

<comment><USER11> > A better approach for this is government to fund researchers for areas that > private sector has abandoned.

yeah, like Ebola research funding done by the government ? That was an efficient model.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> You need not be a scientist to understand aging.

</comment><comment><USER35> To be Immortal, or not to be, that is the question for each cell. Here is simple explanation of Aging(and probably cure)

[https://www.authorea.com/users/13335/articles/13690/_show_ar...](https://www.authorea.com/users/13335/articles/13690/_show_article)

This is a result of more than year of research by the Author.

</comment><comment><USER31> Aging is encoded in our DNA with a purpose, if we will be able to fully understand how DNA works me might be able to partially disable it but will we want to? maybe when we will reach that level of knowledge we will also have the wisdom to understand the implications.

<comment><USER28> Do you want to die?

Of course we will want to. I am sure there will be lots of side effects, but almost anything beats dying.

<comment><USER36> Do you want to live forever? In a world where everyone lives forever? I'm pretty sure most people will have had enough after the first million or so years.

Someone must have written sci-fi of this.

<comment><USER37> I'd like to be able to choose when I die.

<comment><USER38> and what number would you choose ? waitbutwhy had an interesting discussion on this a few weeks back: [http://waitbutwhy.com/table/how-long-would-you-live- if-you-c...](http://waitbutwhy.com/table/how-long-would-you-live-if-you-could- choose-any-number-of-years)

<comment><USER39> Thanks for the link. I think this is a fascinating question.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


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