The CEO of Bioviva USA Inc, Elizabeth Parrish, claims to be the first human in world history to have successfully reversed the effects of natural ageing - thanks to experimental gene therapy provided by her company.
Parrish first underwent gene therapy in 2015 - one designed to protect against muscle mass depletion that is inherent to ageing and another to fight stem cell depletion due to age-related diseases.
Originally meant to prove that her company’s gene therapy was safe, the results - should they prove to be effective in the long-term and withstand due scientific scrutiny - would be the very first successful demonstration of telomere lengthening in any human.
Another first world problem: ageing…
I think you’ll find this is a human world problem!
Low median age just means society has a lot of young people, it doesn’t mean that those young people won’t get old.
You will notice that average life expectancies are all below 80 years, I wonder why that is. Perhaps because people, all people, universally, get old and die?
Reducing malaria and HIV deaths in Africa will increase ageing related deaths, and those people already in their 70s would no doubt be interested in solutions to this problem that the first world might happen to develop.
In this decade, this will probably cost six digits.
In the next, five.
In the next, four.
By that time millions of people will have been murdered by their governments through their refusal to provide anti-aging therapies through public healthcare even though treatment for aging-related diseases, nursery homes etc. end up ultimately costing far more. Others will die because states will seek to regulate and ban this technology because people are owned by the collective mob and bodily autonomy is subject to popular approval. Many will perish because the tragedy of poverty assigns their lives literally insignificant value. Some will be denied life through the pressure of
After that, after the systems have taken their collective heads out of their asses, when people no longer need to sneak off to Shitholistan to receive treatments, when the bloodlust of the moralists has been sated and when technology has brought the horrendous expenses down, just like it has done with genetic sequencing, death might finally feel the first blows of its own aging.
We will rejoice in this retaliation. The greatest murderer of them all is the only one deserving execution, and one day it will stop escaping justice.
Welcome to Ravendor — a truly elite house. Your keen, analytical mind and deep love of knowledge for its own sake were not enough alone to get you into this house, because Ravindors must also be lovers of people. To you, most people are both an open book and an endless, beautiful mystery, and your combination of compassion for people you don’t understand and fascination with what it is that makes them different truly sets you apart.
Ravenclaw/Slytherin. Greaaaaaaaat. =/
Same as you, hpgross. I don’t see what’s so bad about it, though?
You got:
Raverin
You have a genuine love of learning and acquiring new
knowledge, but your efforts at self-improvement are geared specifically
towards achieving the success you know you deserve. You prefer to avoid
confrontation, not because you’re afraid of it, but because you don’t
suffer fools gladly. You have a particular gift for seeing the merit of
both sides of an argument, and you’re not afraid to use that ability to
win in a fight, even when you know you’re wrong.
Bad taste after HPMoR I guess. Though I suppose there would be at least a couple other gadflies to make it bearable.
Ah, I read several chapters of HPMoR, and then gave up because the jokes were starting to get less funny but Harry Potter James Electron Volts* stayed at the same level of smugness.
But hey, if you don’t like someone who is uncannily similar to yourself, their existence just gives you more information about which parts of your personality to emphasize and which to downplay!
*I remember his initials but not what they stand for.
Which house am I if after getting my results I hack the database (okay, inspect the webpage source code) to see all the possible results for comparison purposes?
A story that may have relevance for others, or then again, maybe not:
When I was in college, about ten or so years ago, I was a history major. I wanted to learn to dance, so I joined a swing dance club on campus. To my surprise, this club had about twice as many men as women (in high school, the last time I’d tried dancing, the ratio had gone the other way–lots of girls, and boys only that you could drag by their ears).
But apparently, there had been some kind of word spread specifically to the STEM guys that dance was a way that they could meet girls.
So anyway. I joined the swing dance club, and met a few guys. And at one point, when socializing with the guys outside of dance class, one of them asked me what my research was on. (I had already established that I was an honors history student doing a thesis, just as he had established that he was an honors… I’m not sure if he was CS or Math, but it was one of those.)
So I gave him the thumbnail sketch of my research. Now, to be clear, an honors senior thesis, while nothing like what a graduate student would do, was still fairly in-depth. I had to translate primary sources from the original late-Classical Latin. (My professor said, basically, that while there were plenty of translations of my source material, that I’d only be able to comfortably trust them if I had at least made a stab at a translation of my own. And he was right.) And there was so much secondary material, often contradictory, that I had been carefully sorting through.
But I was able to sift it into a three-sentence summary of my senior thesis work, you know, as one does.
So I gave him that summary, and then asked–since he was also an undergraduate senior doing an honors thesis–what his research was on.
“Oh,” he said, “you wouldn’t understand it.”
Reader, I went home in a frothing rage. Because I had thought we were playing one game–a game of ‘let’s talk about what we’re passionate about!’– and he had been playing another game, which was, one-upsmanship. I had done my best to give a basically understandable brief of my research–and he had used that against me. As if my research, my painstaking translation, my digging through archives and ILLs of esoteric works, my reading of ten thousand articles in Speculum (yes, the pre-eminent medievalist journal in North America is called Speculum, I’m sorry, it’s hilarious/sad but also true), and then my effort to sum it up for him, was nothing. Because his research into some kind of algorithm or other was just too complex for my tiny brain to conceive of. Because I just couldn’t possibly understand his work.
Now, the important note here is that the person I went home to was my senior year roommate. She was a graduate student–normally undergrads and graduate students couldn’t be roommates, but we’d been friends for years, and the tenured faculty-in-residence used his powers for good and permitted us to be roommates that year. Anyway. My senior year roommate was basically… in retrospect I think possibly an avatar of Athena. She was six feet tall, blonde, attractive in a muscular athletic way, a rock climber and racquetball player, sweet but sharp, extremely socially awkward, exceptionally kind even when it cost her to be kind, and an incredibly brilliant computer science major who spent most of her time working on extremely complicated mathematical algorithms. (Yes, I was a little in love with her, why do you ask? But she was as straight as a length of rope, and is now happily married, and so am I, so it worked out.)
(Still, yes, she is my mental image of Athena, to this day.)
Anyway, I came home in a frothing rage to my roommate, the Athena avatar. And I said, “He made me feel like such an idiot, that I could sum up my research to him but his research was just too smart for stupid little me.”
And she shut her book, and smiled at me, with her dark eyes and her high cheekbones and her bright hair, and said, “If he can’t explain his research to you, then he’s not nearly as smart as he thinks he is.”
Now I hesitated, because I’d be in college long enough to have sort of bought into the ridiculous idea that if you couldn’t dazzle them with your brilliance, you should baffle them with your bullshit. But she said, “Look, I’ve been doing work on computer science algorithms that have significantly complicated mathematical underpinnings. What do I do?”
And I said, “Genetic algorithms–that is, self-optimizing algorithms–for prioritization, specifically for scheduling.”
“Right,” she said. “You couldn’t code them because you’re not a computer scientist or a mathematician. But you can understand what I do. If someone can’t explain it like that, it isn’t a problem with you as a person. It’s a problem with them. They either don’t understand it as well as they think they do–or they want to make you feel inferior. And neither is a positive thing.”
So. There.
If you are looking into something and have a question, and someone treats you like an idiot for not understanding right away… here is what I have to say: maybe it isn’t you who is the idiot.
ATTN: ALL COLLEGE STUDENTS EVERYWHERE PLS READ
HEED ATHENA AVATAR’S WORDS BBCAKES EVERYWHERE.
As an academic working in academia: this this this. Never buy into the elitist bullcrap of ‘oh, you wouldn’t understand.’ And never perpetuate that crap yourself, either out of pretension or even simple laziness. If you can’t explain it to a ten-year-old, go back and hit the books again cause you’re not there yet.
This idea that non-STEM people can’t possibly understand STEM is complete bull. Everyone can understand a basic overview, even if they don’t follow all of the math. STEM fields shouldn’t be an inscrutable mass of numbers and equations.
This. Every day and twice on Saturday.
Yup.
Okay I get the point being made here but if really rather not have to worry about being branded as a sexist for not being able to explain things on the spot.
Also this can serve as a plausibly deniable means of communicating “I don’t want to talk about it.”
Okay okay okay okay urgent possibly-protip time
“I’m not sure how well I could explain the stuff I work on to someone who doesn’t have the background, but I could try if you’re interested” or something like that
This removes the risk of being perceived as engaging in one-upsmanship and recognizes that it’s not that STEM is inherently hard to understand but instead it’s one’s own linguistic skills in explaining ideas in an outsider-accessible way that matter.
Furthermore, it gives a slight status concession in the form of “you did cool thing [explaining your complicated field to an outsider] which I might not be able to replicate” to compensate for the status hit that might otherwise happen [”I can understand your stuff but you can’t understand my stuff”].
And this is how I would go about improving my probability of having fruitful interactions with people to whom I couldn’t explain my things that well.
Of course then there’s the fact that the skills to recognize this level of human interaction aren’t always there (they probably correlate pretty well with the ability to explain things in an easily understandable way) and this is why such things should be told publicly! Release information to the commons so that people whose social skills function differently can nonetheless improve their skills!
There is nothing evil about consciously thinking about these mechanics and trying to navigate them with system 2 and anyone telling you otherwise is someone whose system 1 is naturally better adapted for them, simply trying to be a fucking rentseeker maintaining their positional goods of being above you and should be scorned.
Then there are those assholes who think everything is solely positional and if this one guy (assuming he was just unskilled instead of deliberately mean, because that’s the prior for most people) had better skills at making the interaction less unpleasant, everyone else would suffer proportionally and thus any attempts to improve human interaction are inevitably doomed; they are simply, obviously, utterly empirically wrong. Scorn dem as well.
We should develop a program for open-sourcing social skills for people who are better at installing Linux than interacting with people. Not only would it make such people more pleasant to interact with, it would also reduce the burden of explaining such things repeatedly. And it would also undermine the system 1 positionalist assholes. Everyone who deserves to win (liberal arts geek women, neckbeards, etc.) wins!
I feel like “If aliens arrived today, they would think (human institution) is totally baffling” is a pretty useless claim, since it’s practically a fully general argument against any sort of human institution.
Imagine explaining food to aliens. “Yeah, so we derive matter and energy for our bodies to use (we’ll explain bodies later) from existing lifeforms, by putting them inside ourselves and breaking down their chemical bonds. But first we process them in all sorts of ways. Some pre-processing of these other lifeforms is necessary or helpful for the internal chemical-bond-breaking, but others have no such justification beyond hundreds of years of history. Also, there are varieties specific to certain regions, and many people prefer their region’s lifeform-processing methods to others. And somehow, everyone thinks this is totally normal!”
Break out of the pro-food groupthink, IMO.
I think aliens would not be nearly so perplexed at most of our institutions. Like, it isn’t like our human institutions are going to be universal, but most of them are ways to address things that any species is going to need to be able to address, and they’d have to be really stupid to be unable to draw a parallel.
this sort of “oh no, humans are so bad and disgusting, aliens would be ashamed of the fact we’re violent” thinking is why the reveal of “A Small Talent For War” was so great
i get really annoyed at what tumblr thinks aliens would be super perplexed about, or how they think aliens would be different in general. and these posts are all written in the same way!
the post about the demon being super confused and for some reason upset over gender roles? well, firstly, dimorphism and sexual selection is a thing in nature, it’s not as though humans are unique in that regard, and secondly, if the demon is that alien i find it hard to believe they would even notice that there is propriety, that the option to put these things on your face or these certain clothes even existed, or that they would even care. they’re a demon, from hell, possessing you. presumably they have shit to do.
the post about sight somehow being unique to humans? photoreception is RIDICULOUSLY COMMON. it is not biologically plausible, like, at all.
this thing about explaining food to aliens is a parody, i think? it’s in the same reductionist forced-absurdism style. there is no way aliens would not understand resource consumption to maintain equilibrium. it’s only ever done to try to demonstrate TO HUMANS how absurd things we take for granted sound when stated in this style of language.
alien aliens can be done well, but tumblr does not do them well. it isn’t even about aliens.
Tumblr aliens seems to be basically about Yog-Sothoth being baffled about Shub-Niggurath.
To The Black Goat of the Woods With a Thousand Young, sexual selection and dimorphism and eating and so on make perfect sense, because they are the products of evolution and nature. The Beyond-One has no attachments to the processes of evolution, and there is a peculiar particularity to the products that are inevitable from the processes that created them.
Basic AI drives are what makes sense to Yog-Sothoth. Consuming energy and maximizing resources is natural. The specific human-cultural forms of “food” and “gold” are very much tainted by their origin from Shub-Niggurath and thus make less sense to Yog-Sothoth than their mind-in-general idealized forms. Optimizing the universe to match one’s utility function is Yog-Sothoth, sex & drugs & rock’n’roll are Shub-Niggurath.
And our human position suspended between the two lets us recognize this certain absurdity. Our minds are implementing enough general consciousness and cognition to be occasionally surprised by how ridiculous the specific things our animal evolutionary history has produced are, but at the same time our inevitable origins are what makes us have those things and take them for granted in the first place. When people imagine these aliens, they are imagining something that is a bit less Shub-Niggurath and a bit more Yog-Sothoth than we are; just like we are a bit more Yog-Sothoth and a bit less Shub-Niggurath than peacocks or ants are.
I mean I’ve seen videos where they talk to little kids and it’s like hey Sally what do you think about the wage gap? and Billy you should really stop contributing to rape culture, don’t you think? and hey they’re eight years old, sure it helps to teach about communication and consent etc. but these kids are going to be convinced that gender is a warzone before they hit puberty, let alone college.
unsurprising that an increasing number say fuck this I’m out, nb4life y’all
just look at the incentives
you say that like “nonbinary” or “agender” is truly neutral
i would guess enbies are, on average, more supportive of intersectional feminism than either men or women
Speaking as a supporter of intersectional feminism, this makes perfect sense as a central point of intersectional feminism is to stop the war and establish a fair peace treaty. Of course there are those career guerrillas who are incentivized to see the war going on because they can’t imagine anything else, but the rest of us are actually trying to solve the problems.
There’s promethean-steel-feminism!intersectional feminism, and then there’s, uh, “intersectional” “feminism”. I feel that nonbinarity is correlated somewhat with the latter, unfortunately. Which is definitely a faction.
The other dimension that possibly divides different kinds of feminists is the relative focus on gender abolitionism. On the one hand, everyone is treated equally if gender does not exist. On the other, people with strong gender identities, and trans people who want to pass/express their strong gender identity with coded body language, clothing, etc – can’t. I imagine cis-by-default, nonbinary, and agender people would be more likely to support the first, while trans people would be more likely to support the second.
And all these being under the umbrella of intersectional feminism.
Me bridging gaps between different groups seems to be a thing, and as a non-binary trans person my gender abolitionism is basically gender pluralism taken to its logical conclusion.
I don’t expect gender to stop existing, but it can probably be transformed into unrecognizability by morphological freedom and abolishing cultural prescriptiveness.
For every single thing in hard gender some trans people benefit from, some other trans people suffer from it just as well, and people who want to be “the kind of people who wear skirts and like flowers and have a certain kind of body language” can still be that kind of people even if we destroy the idea that trans women aren’t women if they wear pants. There are numerous people with strong gender identities who can’t be perceived as members of their gender if said gender is assumed to consist of cultural things that are personally incompatible with them.
A huge number of trans people seem to be basically “gender is bullshit, I’m definitely a woman and people should respect that, but I don’t want to have to suffer all the social prescriptions to prove it, I want to be an individual person damnit not a role (still 100% woman though you don’t take that away from me)” and I can’t see how they would be incompatible with postgender hyperpluralist morphological freedom utopia which allows people to specify their gender as a modifier which is not intrinsically linked to their clothes/body language/etc. and most importantly not invalidated by not having the right kind of clothes/body language/etc.
I understand that in our current cistem dystopia some women would be misgendered as men if men wearing skirts was more normal, but that isn’t a flaw in “men wearing skirts was more normal” but rather in “would be misgendered if”. Assholes not respecting people’s genders is the problem, and trying to shift around the disrespect (”don’t invalidate us, invalidate those other women instead!”) doesn’t help, eradicating the disrespect does. That’s what must be done. Trying to survive in the cistem is a necessity I will not condemn, but trying to maintain the cistem of disrespecting people’s genders is a violation of others’ self-determination and gender freedom, and as a free and open source gender advocate I will not tolerate it.
This is what I want to abolish. The disrespect and the invalidation and the idea that people aren’t allowed to choose. Another’s right to choose is not a violation of my gender freedom; my attempt to impose my views on gender upon them would be.
I mean I’ve seen videos where they talk to little kids and it’s like hey Sally what do you think about the wage gap? and Billy you should really stop contributing to rape culture, don’t you think? and hey they’re eight years old, sure it helps to teach about communication and consent etc. but these kids are going to be convinced that gender is a warzone before they hit puberty, let alone college.
unsurprising that an increasing number say fuck this I’m out, nb4life y’all
just look at the incentives
you say that like “nonbinary” or “agender” is truly neutral
i would guess enbies are, on average, more supportive of intersectional feminism than either men or women
Speaking as a supporter of intersectional feminism, this makes perfect sense as a central point of intersectional feminism is to stop the war and establish a fair peace treaty. Of course there are those career guerrillas who are incentivized to see the war going on because they can’t imagine anything else, but the rest of us are actually trying to solve the problems.
There’s promethean-steel-feminism!intersectional feminism, and then there’s, uh, “intersectional” “feminism”. I feel that nonbinarity is correlated somewhat with the latter, unfortunately. Which is definitely a faction.
That’s why I’m taking over. I didn’t specify how big a faction “the rest of us” are, but it needs to get bigger, and seems to be getting bigger indeed. One country is already basically conquered because the steel faction has seized control of the edge of the Overton Window, and I have Secret Plans to make it scale across the entire world as well.
Europeans: Haha those dumb Americans voting for Trump!
*Ignores Golden Dawn in Greece*
*Ignores UKIP in Britain*
*Ignores Swedish Democrats*
*Ignores Svoboda in Ukraine*
*Ignores AfD in Germany*
*Ignores the 80+ other fascist groups in Europe that have been gaining traction*
Europeans: Stupid Americans don’t you know that we made racism illegal in 1881 :) No racism in Europe :)
I really do hold a lot of loathing for this continent.
I’ve seen blatant neo nazi rallies in my city on a few separate occasions with signs like “Hitler was right”. Pretty much everybody just walked past without batting an eyelid.
Okay so gender nonconformity may be boosted by endocrine disruptors leading to physical dysphoria (plastic in the water? some medications during pregnancy? chem trails? who knows). But what about cultural shifts leading to a rise in social dysphoria, where people wish to opt out of their assigned gender?
Gender roles were more restrictive in the past, but they were also taken for granted and less intensively examined, and when they were studied it was typically to attribute them to God or natural law or some other relatively remote and unchangeable source that doesn’t demand any personal response.
Today, everyone in the developed world will be bombarded from an early age not just with gender roles, but also deconstructions of gender roles and a worldview where they are constructed from human actions, tradition, patriarchy, capitalism, warring forces that you, yes YOU, can help or hinder in your personal life.
This is exhausting! Everything you do becomes weighted with symbolism in the struggle to define what gender means, and to be a man or a woman is to join an army locked in ideological struggle.
Combine this with the obsessive focus on internal identity, “born this way”, and the idea that men and women have some completely different gender qualia at a fundamental level and it’s unsurprising that many people would decide they just don’t feel strongly enough to justify claiming any gender at all.
we shall give people the means motive and opportunity to opt out of the cistem until it collapses under the weight of its own impossibility and this creative destruction shall achieve the redistribution of the means of social construction so that the abolition of gender as all previous generations have known it shall be reality and one day our children will not know that once people were very concerned about what their genitals looked like and adults wrapped them in pieces of cloth superficially hiding their genitals but also signaling very strongly to everyone what they looked like despite such things making very little sense and our descendants will not even be horrified when we tell them the reason old buildings have an even number of bathrooms because the idea itself will be just as absurd as purple hippos with six legs
