I should distinguish between “supporting him as an activist” and “supporting him as a legitimate scientific researcher”. I think that the fact he provides prizes to others is a decent reason to support him in the first category but not a reason to support him in the second. Even if we collapse the two categories, the mice thing doesn’t seem like enough to outweigh misrepresenting research to the public.
Mostly, I was wondering whether you knew of any innovations or discoveries he found as a scientist. Because as the above link describes it, even if he has been a good activist he has been a poor scientist, not finding anything new and misleading people about the old.
Aubrey de Grey may very well represent a picture of aging that underestiamtes the difficulties. However the resulting effect is that now a company like Google did start a project with Calico that’s speficially targeted on curing aging.
If you want to convince Silicon Valley’s billionaires to pay for more anti-aging research Aubrey de Grey might simply be making the right moves when scientists who are more conservative about possible success can’t convince donars to put up money.
This sounds like Dark Arts, which would make it deserve the label pseudoscience. If your argument is that there’s a legitimate place for “marketing” like that, I see your point but I’m reluctant to agree.
I should distinguish between “supporting him as an activist” and “supporting him as a legitimate scientific researcher”
If his core impact would be by standing in the lab then his beard wouldn’t matter.
He did publish a paper with 36 citations in the last century but that’s not where his main impact is.
This sounds like Dark Arts, which would make it deserve the label pseudoscience. If your argument is that there’s a legitimate place for “marketing” like that, I see your point but I’m reluctant to agree.
Dark arts would be if he wouldn’t believe in his own ideas and just pretends to. I don’t think that’s true.
If you would label all grant proposal that are misleading about the likely applicability of the research results to real world issues as pseudoscience I doubt that much science is left at the end.
In a perfect world grant committies might hand out money based on evidence-based methods for handing out grant money. We don’t live in that world. In our world grant committies might not be better than monkey’s that pick randomly.
But as long as the funded research at least produces publishable papers that replicate, that’s fine. In the current state of academic biology replicability itself is even a pretty high standard.
Because most advances in mouse models don’t carry over into humans.
While mouse model aren’t perfect, they do produce new knowledge and you simply can’t do some exploratory research in humans.
I should distinguish between “supporting him as an activist” and “supporting him as a legitimate scientific researcher”. I think that the fact he provides prizes to others is a decent reason to support him in the first category but not a reason to support him in the second. Even if we collapse the two categories, the mice thing doesn’t seem like enough to outweigh misrepresenting research to the public.
Mostly, I was wondering whether you knew of any innovations or discoveries he found as a scientist. Because as the above link describes it, even if he has been a good activist he has been a poor scientist, not finding anything new and misleading people about the old.
This sounds like Dark Arts, which would make it deserve the label pseudoscience. If your argument is that there’s a legitimate place for “marketing” like that, I see your point but I’m reluctant to agree.
If his core impact would be by standing in the lab then his beard wouldn’t matter. He did publish a paper with 36 citations in the last century but that’s not where his main impact is.
Dark arts would be if he wouldn’t believe in his own ideas and just pretends to. I don’t think that’s true.
If you would label all grant proposal that are misleading about the likely applicability of the research results to real world issues as pseudoscience I doubt that much science is left at the end.
In a perfect world grant committies might hand out money based on evidence-based methods for handing out grant money. We don’t live in that world. In our world grant committies might not be better than monkey’s that pick randomly.
But as long as the funded research at least produces publishable papers that replicate, that’s fine. In the current state of academic biology replicability itself is even a pretty high standard.