This offers food for thought about various anti-aging strategies. For example, given the superexponential growth in mortality, if we had a magic medical treatment that could cut your mortality risk in half but didn’t affect the growth of said risk, then that would buy you very little late in life, but might extend life by decades if administered at a very young age.
Wait, what? What do you mean by halving your risk and not halving your risk growth, since your risk is determined entirely by your risk growth? I’m hoping you don’t mean capping the risk of death at .5. If you mean halving the rate but keeping it as a Gompertz curve, then that makes sense.
I’m playing around with a bunch of numbers; they will appear in a comment shortly.
When I integrate the curve in the post from 25 to 300, I get 52.34. (When you integrate a cdf, you get an expected value- that’s how many years I have left, on average.)
There are two parameters I can halve- the .003, and the 10. (I can also play with the age offset, 25).
Let’s start off playing with the growth rate (in this curve, that’s the 10). If I halve it (replace it with 20), my expected remaining years is now 104.7, which is an awesome boost- it doubles it. (This is no surprise, since all I’ve done is change the scaling on the x axis, and halving your experience of time doubles your lifespan.)
Now let’s go back and see what my remaining life would look like at 65, rather than 25. With an age offset of 25 and a divisor of 10, I get 16.4 years years; with an age offset of 25 and a divisor of 20, I get 66.5 years; with an age offset of −15 and a divisor of 20, I get the expected 32.7 years.
That shows us a few things- first, living the extra 40 years from 25 to 65 only earned me 4.1 years. Computing the function, I get an 85% chance that I live to see 65. How we model changing your death rate matters as well- if we assume that we use this magical medical treatment on you at 65 and it halves the rate you age at, you are essentially turned into a 45 year old living half-time, and you still get several decades left. If you turn you into a 130-year old instead, living in half-time, then you’re identical to the 65-year old living in normal time, and you get the normal doubling.
Now, let’s look at the x displacement (the .003). That’s what I think gwern means by halving your risk without halving the growth. As an added bonus, we don’t have to muck around with the age offset. If you do it at 25 years, you can expect to live for 59.3 more years; if you do it at 65, you can expect to live for 21.8 more years. There’s still some benefit to starting young: I get 7 extra years instead of 5.4 extra years- but the benefit is measured in months, not decades.
TL;DR If you can halve your experience of time, you double your time alive. No surprise. If you can reduce your age to the 25-45 region, that age reduction is added almost exactly to your lifespan (98% chance to make it to 45 from 25). If you can just change the .003 number, you only get a few years, and it’s very similar at all ages- 7 years if you start at 25, 5.4 years if you start at 65, 3 years if you start at 85.
So, I recently turned 23. I am on schedule to have my anti-aging regimen fully in place by 25, and beginning tonight am again attempting the uberman sleep schedule (which, if it works, will increase my subjective experience of time by 40-50%).
My logic for the 25 date was to give myself enough time to fully research the issue, and if I have to pick a time to freeze myself at, 25 seems a heck of a lot better than 45 or 65! But looking at models like this is interesting because you can see the difference between various kinds of freezes. If living healthily just drops the .003, then it’s not where big gains are. If I managed to drop it by a factor of 10, then I’d get an extra 23 years out of doing so. But I’m still projected to die at 100, after a 10x reduction in risk! That’s the same gain as increasing my time experience by 40% / decreasing my risk growth rate by 30%.
With changing that number, I also don’t see much benefit to doing it early. Reducing my risk by 10x is reducing my risk by 10x, but if my chance of dying by the time I hit 45 is really low anyway, and I still get 22.2 extra years if I start living healthily at 45 (21 years if you take into account the chance of not hitting 45), then is it really worth it to live healthily for 20 years to get 2 more years at the end of my life?
So, really, all of the hope of life extension hinges on the slowdown (I can make the 10 into a 20), the freeze (I can make the 10 infinity, and only have to deal with accidents), or the reverse (I can lower my t, essentially giving everyone access to the freeze). It seems likely to me that some components of living healthily (the calorie restriction stuff, for example) does actually work by slowdown, but then you need to ask if the effects are cumulative (since I’ve been growing my mitochondria for 40 years at 65, they can knock cancer out of the park, compared to if I had only been growing them 20 years) or fixed (there’s no reason to go on an anti-cancer diet until you get cancer).
beginning tonight am again attempting the uberman sleep schedule (which, if it works, will increase my subjective experience of time by 40-50%).
One of the possible uses for deep sleep is having a phase where the body heals itself more effectively. Some people have reported that the cuts they get heal noticeably slower than usual when they are on uberman. What if extreme polyphasic sleep does inhibit effective healing, and this also affects the anti-cancer component in the model for the Gompertz curve?
What if extreme polyphasic sleep does inhibit effective healing, and this also affects the anti-cancer component in the model for the Gompertz curve?
That’s a tough call, and depends on the numbers and how I value hours. Do I prefer daytime hours to nighttime hours? The reverse? Do I discount based on objective time, or subjective time? (i.e. should I seem less patient to others while on Uberman, because to me waiting 3 days for something represents being aware of waiting for 40% longer?) Do I try to weight the future more heavily, since the further future will probably be more awesome than the nearer future?
If I assume the simple goal of “maximize total number of hours awake,” then I just need to know how uberman affects my risk growth rate. If it has no physiological effect except aging me at my subjective time (i.e. 16 years pass on the calendar, but I’ve been awake as much as most people are in 22 years, and my body is 22 years older rather than 16) then it doesn’t matter whether I’m on it or not. If it ages me more slowly than that (my body ages 20 years in those 16, but I’m awake for 22) then I’m better off on it. If it ages me more quickly than that (my body ages 30 years in those 16), then I’m better off not doing it.
What seems likely as a middle road, though, is staying on uberman until my body hits 45 years old and cancer starts becoming an issue, and then switching to normal sleep, presuming that uberman does inhibit my cancer response but doesn’t increase my chance of death due to accident.
I am regretting not getting a blood test done, though, as it would be nice to compare white blood cell counts before and after.
If it has no physiological effect except aging me at my subjective time (i.e. 16 years pass on the calendar, but I’ve been awake as much as most people are in 22 years, and my body is 22 years older rather than 16) then it doesn’t matter whether I’m on it or not.
Incorrect, because you’ve only gotten the benefit of 16 years of medical advancement, rather than 22 years of medical advancement. This alone may overwhelm all other differences.
So, I recently turned 23. I am on schedule to have my anti-aging regimen fully in place by 25, and beginning tonight am again attempting the uberman sleep schedule (which, if it works, will increase my subjective experience of time by 40-50%).
So, two years later… How did it go? Are you still doing that?
Both that and a previous attempt at Uberman failed. I never got to the point where I felt more rested after a nap than I did before a nap (though I did seem more rested outside in the sunlight- I’m not sure if that actually reduced my level of fatigue, or just suppressed my awareness of it. I could look for a daily cycle in my psychomotor vigilance task data to check, but I never analyzed it). If I succeed in hacking the process of falling asleep (I have sleep onset insomnia and am getting tired of it), I’ll attempt it again, but I see no point in reattempting Uberman without doing that.
I’m doing much better with my anti-aging regimen, but I don’t think I’d call it “fully in place.” I’ve been on intermittent fasting for over a year, which is comparable to caloric restriction. I’ve got a project in the works to significantly improve the nutritional content of my diet which will happen over this summer (basically, Soylent, except I don’t quite trust his methodology / ingredient choices and so am planning on doing it myself. He’s missed at least two essential nutrients that made it onto my list- iron and sulfur- and I don’t think his judgment on non-essential nutrients is very good either).
I do regular strength exercises, though the regularity could stand to improve, and I’m beginning routine swimming exercise. About that time, I was starting the cat stretch which I stopped doing after a few months, because of a combination of low reward and not having a good spot for it in my morning ritual. I’m not sure what priority I should place on doing that exercise (which is primarily about maintaining your current level of control and flexibility) compared to learning skills and doing exercises that increase my level of control and flexibility.
He’s missed at least two essential nutrients that made it onto my list- iron and sulfur- and I don’t think his judgment on non-essential nutrients is very good either
After three months I should be finding deficiencies, and I did. I started having joint pain and found I fit the symptoms of a sulfur deficiency. This makes perfect sense as I consume almost none, and sulfur is a component of every living cell. Sulfur is hard to miss in a typical diet so the FDA would have little reason to recommend it. A typical male physique has 140g of sulfur, making it the sixth most abundant element in the human body. Ten grams of sulfur from Methylsulfonylmethane cured me right away, and I now consume 2g/day...I have not experienced any other deficiency symptoms and am quite confident I am now getting everything I need, but I will keep testing.
Right, that was how I noticed he had missed it, as with the iron deficiency that he discussed in his first post. When I made my list of nutrients, I checked to make sure everything on his list was on my list, but didn’t think to do the reverse.
When I integrate the curve in the post from 25 to 300, I get 52.34. (When you integrate a cdf, you get an expected value- that’s how many years I have left, on average.)
Please correct me if I’m wrong, but it appears that the curve in question cannot be a cdf because it is clearly not nondecreasing.
Wait, what? What do you mean by halving your risk and not halving your risk growth, since your risk is determined entirely by your risk growth? I’m hoping you don’t mean capping the risk of death at .5. If you mean halving the rate but keeping it as a Gompertz curve, then that makes sense.
I’m playing around with a bunch of numbers; they will appear in a comment shortly.
TL;DR? Scroll down to the bottom.
When I integrate the curve in the post from 25 to 300, I get 52.34. (When you integrate a cdf, you get an expected value- that’s how many years I have left, on average.)
There are two parameters I can halve- the .003, and the 10. (I can also play with the age offset, 25).
Let’s start off playing with the growth rate (in this curve, that’s the 10). If I halve it (replace it with 20), my expected remaining years is now 104.7, which is an awesome boost- it doubles it. (This is no surprise, since all I’ve done is change the scaling on the x axis, and halving your experience of time doubles your lifespan.)
Now let’s go back and see what my remaining life would look like at 65, rather than 25. With an age offset of 25 and a divisor of 10, I get 16.4 years years; with an age offset of 25 and a divisor of 20, I get 66.5 years; with an age offset of −15 and a divisor of 20, I get the expected 32.7 years.
That shows us a few things- first, living the extra 40 years from 25 to 65 only earned me 4.1 years. Computing the function, I get an 85% chance that I live to see 65. How we model changing your death rate matters as well- if we assume that we use this magical medical treatment on you at 65 and it halves the rate you age at, you are essentially turned into a 45 year old living half-time, and you still get several decades left. If you turn you into a 130-year old instead, living in half-time, then you’re identical to the 65-year old living in normal time, and you get the normal doubling.
Now, let’s look at the x displacement (the .003). That’s what I think gwern means by halving your risk without halving the growth. As an added bonus, we don’t have to muck around with the age offset. If you do it at 25 years, you can expect to live for 59.3 more years; if you do it at 65, you can expect to live for 21.8 more years. There’s still some benefit to starting young: I get 7 extra years instead of 5.4 extra years- but the benefit is measured in months, not decades.
TL;DR If you can halve your experience of time, you double your time alive. No surprise. If you can reduce your age to the 25-45 region, that age reduction is added almost exactly to your lifespan (98% chance to make it to 45 from 25). If you can just change the .003 number, you only get a few years, and it’s very similar at all ages- 7 years if you start at 25, 5.4 years if you start at 65, 3 years if you start at 85.
Why does Vaniver care?
So, I recently turned 23. I am on schedule to have my anti-aging regimen fully in place by 25, and beginning tonight am again attempting the uberman sleep schedule (which, if it works, will increase my subjective experience of time by 40-50%).
My logic for the 25 date was to give myself enough time to fully research the issue, and if I have to pick a time to freeze myself at, 25 seems a heck of a lot better than 45 or 65! But looking at models like this is interesting because you can see the difference between various kinds of freezes. If living healthily just drops the .003, then it’s not where big gains are. If I managed to drop it by a factor of 10, then I’d get an extra 23 years out of doing so. But I’m still projected to die at 100, after a 10x reduction in risk! That’s the same gain as increasing my time experience by 40% / decreasing my risk growth rate by 30%.
With changing that number, I also don’t see much benefit to doing it early. Reducing my risk by 10x is reducing my risk by 10x, but if my chance of dying by the time I hit 45 is really low anyway, and I still get 22.2 extra years if I start living healthily at 45 (21 years if you take into account the chance of not hitting 45), then is it really worth it to live healthily for 20 years to get 2 more years at the end of my life?
So, really, all of the hope of life extension hinges on the slowdown (I can make the 10 into a 20), the freeze (I can make the 10 infinity, and only have to deal with accidents), or the reverse (I can lower my t, essentially giving everyone access to the freeze). It seems likely to me that some components of living healthily (the calorie restriction stuff, for example) does actually work by slowdown, but then you need to ask if the effects are cumulative (since I’ve been growing my mitochondria for 40 years at 65, they can knock cancer out of the park, compared to if I had only been growing them 20 years) or fixed (there’s no reason to go on an anti-cancer diet until you get cancer).
One of the possible uses for deep sleep is having a phase where the body heals itself more effectively. Some people have reported that the cuts they get heal noticeably slower than usual when they are on uberman. What if extreme polyphasic sleep does inhibit effective healing, and this also affects the anti-cancer component in the model for the Gompertz curve?
That’s a tough call, and depends on the numbers and how I value hours. Do I prefer daytime hours to nighttime hours? The reverse? Do I discount based on objective time, or subjective time? (i.e. should I seem less patient to others while on Uberman, because to me waiting 3 days for something represents being aware of waiting for 40% longer?) Do I try to weight the future more heavily, since the further future will probably be more awesome than the nearer future?
If I assume the simple goal of “maximize total number of hours awake,” then I just need to know how uberman affects my risk growth rate. If it has no physiological effect except aging me at my subjective time (i.e. 16 years pass on the calendar, but I’ve been awake as much as most people are in 22 years, and my body is 22 years older rather than 16) then it doesn’t matter whether I’m on it or not. If it ages me more slowly than that (my body ages 20 years in those 16, but I’m awake for 22) then I’m better off on it. If it ages me more quickly than that (my body ages 30 years in those 16), then I’m better off not doing it.
What seems likely as a middle road, though, is staying on uberman until my body hits 45 years old and cancer starts becoming an issue, and then switching to normal sleep, presuming that uberman does inhibit my cancer response but doesn’t increase my chance of death due to accident.
I am regretting not getting a blood test done, though, as it would be nice to compare white blood cell counts before and after.
Incorrect, because you’ve only gotten the benefit of 16 years of medical advancement, rather than 22 years of medical advancement. This alone may overwhelm all other differences.
And then there are other time-dependent things, like compounding interest/returns.
So, two years later… How did it go? Are you still doing that?
Both that and a previous attempt at Uberman failed. I never got to the point where I felt more rested after a nap than I did before a nap (though I did seem more rested outside in the sunlight- I’m not sure if that actually reduced my level of fatigue, or just suppressed my awareness of it. I could look for a daily cycle in my psychomotor vigilance task data to check, but I never analyzed it). If I succeed in hacking the process of falling asleep (I have sleep onset insomnia and am getting tired of it), I’ll attempt it again, but I see no point in reattempting Uberman without doing that.
I’m doing much better with my anti-aging regimen, but I don’t think I’d call it “fully in place.” I’ve been on intermittent fasting for over a year, which is comparable to caloric restriction. I’ve got a project in the works to significantly improve the nutritional content of my diet which will happen over this summer (basically, Soylent, except I don’t quite trust his methodology / ingredient choices and so am planning on doing it myself. He’s missed at least two essential nutrients that made it onto my list- iron and sulfur- and I don’t think his judgment on non-essential nutrients is very good either).
I do regular strength exercises, though the regularity could stand to improve, and I’m beginning routine swimming exercise. About that time, I was starting the cat stretch which I stopped doing after a few months, because of a combination of low reward and not having a good spot for it in my morning ritual. I’m not sure what priority I should place on doing that exercise (which is primarily about maintaining your current level of control and flexibility) compared to learning skills and doing exercises that increase my level of control and flexibility.
He says he’s added sulfur: http://robrhinehart.com/?p=570
Right, that was how I noticed he had missed it, as with the iron deficiency that he discussed in his first post. When I made my list of nutrients, I checked to make sure everything on his list was on my list, but didn’t think to do the reverse.
Please correct me if I’m wrong, but it appears that the curve in question cannot be a cdf because it is clearly not nondecreasing.