My suggestion is to pick a specific aging research question and dig into the models, methods and evidence. For example, when people hypothesize that “naked mole rats don’t age,” how do scientists study that hypothesis? How does that inform our concept of “immortality,” and what is the distinction between “being immortal” and “not aging?”
I think you’ll have better luck with this approach than trying to build a very broad, somewhat undirected knowledge of biology. Nothing wrong with broad knowledge, it’s just that only a tiny fraction will be directly pertinent to any particular topic you’re interested in.
I value specificity & find that being too general with research foci or questions hurts both specificity and quality of work, so I agree with what you said. But, I’m not quite there yet regarding investigating narrowly focused hypotheses for specific biology questions. I’m approaching this [writing about immortality] in a few ways:
I want to distinguish between longevity and immortality: I believe that longevity refers specifically to increasing human healthspan whereas immortality is the meta cause area which includes longevity (and other cause areas related to not dying) underneath its umbrella but itself [immortality] is specifically: the overall effort to eliminate every possible cause of death (e.g. another germane cause area that isn’t longevity could be human mind uploading or mind backup & restore capabilities or indestructibility related body modifications, and more). Part of that distinguishing will involve mapping out other coherent cause areas underneath immortality.
There are a ridiculously many causes of death, medical or otherwise, thus I believe a much larger community of people & organizations working in the immortality area needs to exist such that we increase the rate of germane problem solving progress. I want there to be a species-wide project towards immortality that dwarfs even what the Manhattan Project was so part of my writing focus & other work will be explicitly geared towards organizing and community building.
I’m deeply concerned about politics & governance in a society with longer lived or immortal humans, this is one area where I will want to get very specific.
I want to find a biology research niche or few to explore deeply & write quality research papers in, plus this will help me navigate through quackery and maintain an ongoing eye towards what “real” or decent research in the field looks like. Max Planck had insightful things to say about the issue of non-scientists or non-researchers attempting to navigate the minefield of what’s rubbish and what’s real in a scientific discipline in The Philosophy of Physics which I took to heart (it’s a short book, very good, do recommend).
I want to distinguish between longevity and immortality: I believe that longevity refers specifically to increasing human healthspan whereas immortality is the meta cause area which includes longevity (and other cause areas related to not dying) underneath its umbrella but itself [immortality] is specifically: the overall effort to eliminate every possible cause of death (e.g. another germane cause area that isn’t longevity could be human mind uploading or mind backup & restore capabilities or indestructibility related body modifications, and more). Part of that distinguishing will involve mapping out other coherent cause areas underneath immortality.
This makes sense. We can actually distinguish three concepts:
Immortality: living forever, an unlimited or extremely long expected lifespan.
Longevity: decreasing the death rate
Anti-aging: decreasing the death “acceleration” that occurs as an organism ages
Naked mole rats don’t appear to live as long as humans, so they have lower longevity. However, there is some research showing that naked mole rats don’t seem to age, meaning that they are no more likely to die at age 35 than they were at age 3.
An organism could in theory be extremely short-lived, while also not aging. We could imagine a bug that has a 50% chance of dying every day, but always has the same 50% chance per day of dying. By contrast, an American’s life expectancy is 78 years of age, but their chance of dying increases year by year once they’re past early childhood. I’d like to understand
Best of luck with your research! I’m in a biomedical engineering graduate program and am interested in anti-aging, but haven’t researched the subject as I haven’t had time. Let me know if you have biology related questions however!
Thank you! Right now it seems like I’ll be doing more organizing than research, but I intend to increase the research I do over time. Organizing in this space (i.e. community building for immortality studies & related things) seems like a comparative advantage for me at the moment relative to other actions.
A minor quibble because I agree with the three concepts you mentioned and how you used them, but I think increasing healthspan covers what you referred to as anti-aging. To increase a human’s healthspan, one must necessarily decrease that “acceleration” and also do a few other things: rejuvenation biology, preventative medicine, holistic care (better diets, better & more exercise, etc.).
My suggestion is to pick a specific aging research question and dig into the models, methods and evidence. For example, when people hypothesize that “naked mole rats don’t age,” how do scientists study that hypothesis? How does that inform our concept of “immortality,” and what is the distinction between “being immortal” and “not aging?”
I think you’ll have better luck with this approach than trying to build a very broad, somewhat undirected knowledge of biology. Nothing wrong with broad knowledge, it’s just that only a tiny fraction will be directly pertinent to any particular topic you’re interested in.
I value specificity & find that being too general with research foci or questions hurts both specificity and quality of work, so I agree with what you said. But, I’m not quite there yet regarding investigating narrowly focused hypotheses for specific biology questions. I’m approaching this [writing about immortality] in a few ways:
I want to distinguish between longevity and immortality: I believe that longevity refers specifically to increasing human healthspan whereas immortality is the meta cause area which includes longevity (and other cause areas related to not dying) underneath its umbrella but itself [immortality] is specifically: the overall effort to eliminate every possible cause of death (e.g. another germane cause area that isn’t longevity could be human mind uploading or mind backup & restore capabilities or indestructibility related body modifications, and more). Part of that distinguishing will involve mapping out other coherent cause areas underneath immortality.
There are a ridiculously many causes of death, medical or otherwise, thus I believe a much larger community of people & organizations working in the immortality area needs to exist such that we increase the rate of germane problem solving progress. I want there to be a species-wide project towards immortality that dwarfs even what the Manhattan Project was so part of my writing focus & other work will be explicitly geared towards organizing and community building.
I’m deeply concerned about politics & governance in a society with longer lived or immortal humans, this is one area where I will want to get very specific.
I want to find a biology research niche or few to explore deeply & write quality research papers in, plus this will help me navigate through quackery and maintain an ongoing eye towards what “real” or decent research in the field looks like. Max Planck had insightful things to say about the issue of non-scientists or non-researchers attempting to navigate the minefield of what’s rubbish and what’s real in a scientific discipline in The Philosophy of Physics which I took to heart (it’s a short book, very good, do recommend).
This makes sense. We can actually distinguish three concepts:
Immortality: living forever, an unlimited or extremely long expected lifespan.
Longevity: decreasing the death rate
Anti-aging: decreasing the death “acceleration” that occurs as an organism ages
Naked mole rats don’t appear to live as long as humans, so they have lower longevity. However, there is some research showing that naked mole rats don’t seem to age, meaning that they are no more likely to die at age 35 than they were at age 3.
An organism could in theory be extremely short-lived, while also not aging. We could imagine a bug that has a 50% chance of dying every day, but always has the same 50% chance per day of dying. By contrast, an American’s life expectancy is 78 years of age, but their chance of dying increases year by year once they’re past early childhood. I’d like to understand
Best of luck with your research! I’m in a biomedical engineering graduate program and am interested in anti-aging, but haven’t researched the subject as I haven’t had time. Let me know if you have biology related questions however!
Thank you! Right now it seems like I’ll be doing more organizing than research, but I intend to increase the research I do over time. Organizing in this space (i.e. community building for immortality studies & related things) seems like a comparative advantage for me at the moment relative to other actions.
A minor quibble because I agree with the three concepts you mentioned and how you used them, but I think increasing healthspan covers what you referred to as anti-aging. To increase a human’s healthspan, one must necessarily decrease that “acceleration” and also do a few other things: rejuvenation biology, preventative medicine, holistic care (better diets, better & more exercise, etc.).