Congrats to Gero for the $2.2m of funding to create a drug that helps extend human life! I did two interviews with Gero in 2019 at Undoing Aging – here, with Peter Fedichev on Quantifying Aging in Large Scale Human Studies: And here with Ksenia Tsvetkova on Data Driven Longevity: Doris Yu at Tech In…
There is a really interesting Aeon article on what bad science, and how it fails. Update: a discussion on this exists in the philsci FB group on here. What is Bad Science? According to Imre Lakatos, science degenerates unless it is both theoretically and experimentally progressive. Can Lakatos’s ‘scientific programme’ approach, which incorporates merits of…
Feral cats kill about 1 million native animals per day in ecosystems which didn’t evolve to cope with cats. How should we deal with the problem of feral cats? I hear a lot of ‘kill ’em all’ [1]. When in HK I noticed a lot of cats with one ear slightly smaller.. then found out…
STELARC – CONTINGENT AND CONTESTABLE FUTURES: DIGITAL NOISE, GLITCHES & CONTAMINATIONS Synopsis: In the age of the chimera, uncertainty and ambivalence generate unexpected anxieties. The dead, the near-dead, the brain dead, the yet to be born, the partially living and synthetic life all now share a material and proximal existence, with other living bodies, microbial…
I had the absolute privilege of interviewing Judith Campisi at the Undoing Aging conference in Berlin. She was so sweet and kind – it was really a pleasure to spend time with her discussing senolytics, regenerative medicine, and the anti-aging movement. Judith Campisi was humble, open minded, and careful not to overstate…
True & false vs right & wrong – People converge their views to set of rights and wrongs relative to in-group biases in their peer group. As a survival mechanism, convergence in groups is sometimes more healthy than being right – so one should optimize for convergence sometimes even at the cost of getting stuff…
Remembering Lee Smolin’s theory of the dynamical evolution of the universe where through a form of natural selection, black holes spawn new universes, I thought that if a superintelligent civilization understood its mechanics, they may try to control it, and engineer or bias the physics in the spawned universe – and possibly migrate to this…
Is democracy loosing its credibility, will it cede to dictatorship? Will AI out-compete us in all areas of economic usefulness – making us the future useless class? It’s difficult to get around the bottlenecks of networking and coordination in distributed democracies. In the past quite naturally distributed systems being scattered are more redundant wer in…
Materialism was a pre-socratic view that for something to be real it has to be matter – physical stuff made of atoms (which at the time were considered hard like billiard balls – fundametal parts of reality). The reason these days the term physicalism is used is because it can describe things that aren’t matter…
Andrés Gómez Emilsson joined in to add very insightful questions for a 3 part interview series with Mike Johnson, covering the relationship of metaphysics to qualia/consciousness/hedonic valence, and defining their terms, whether panpsychism matters, increasing sensitivity to bliss, valence variance, Effective Altruism, cause prioritization, and the importance of consciousness/valence research . Andrés Gómez Emilsson interviews…
