Aubrey didn’t specify a testable criterion in this conversation, but a reasonable one could be something like “a candidate in the 2024 presidential general election lists fighting aging as a campaign issue on their official website.”
You can check out my attempt on Metaculus to capture the essence of his claim, though it’s debatable whether I succeeded. Right now Metaculus says there’s a 75% chance of something culturally significant happening in anti-aging research in the 2020s.
My own guess is that something big might happen, but it would not cause public opinion to change as rapidly as what Aubrey has claimed. When the first mouse is demonstrated to have been rejuvenated, there will still be people who doubt it will scale to humans. I expect people to continue to doubt it until there is a very successful trial in humans, at which point opinion will probably have only gradually shifted in that direction beforehand.
I also expect people’s resistance to anti-aging to have quite a bit of inertia. My impression is that most people strongly oppose the research, or are indifferent, so it’s hard to imagine why this would change due to some development in mice.
You can check out my attempt on Metaculus to capture the essence of his claim, though it’s debatable whether I succeeded. Right now Metaculus says there’s a 75% chance of something culturally significant happening in anti-aging research in the 2020s.
This is good. However, you did set the bar for positive resolution a lot lower than I would have based on what he claimed this time around.
You can check out my attempt on Metaculus to capture the essence of his claim, though it’s debatable whether I succeeded. Right now Metaculus says there’s a 75% chance of something culturally significant happening in anti-aging research in the 2020s.
My own guess is that something big might happen, but it would not cause public opinion to change as rapidly as what Aubrey has claimed. When the first mouse is demonstrated to have been rejuvenated, there will still be people who doubt it will scale to humans. I expect people to continue to doubt it until there is a very successful trial in humans, at which point opinion will probably have only gradually shifted in that direction beforehand.
I also expect people’s resistance to anti-aging to have quite a bit of inertia. My impression is that most people strongly oppose the research, or are indifferent, so it’s hard to imagine why this would change due to some development in mice.
This is good. However, you did set the bar for positive resolution a lot lower than I would have based on what he claimed this time around.
I expected most people to be very skeptical of his strict claim so I wanted a more realistic hypothesis.