TomBAvoider

I agree, but lucky with what? I'd say genes. It's not like he carefully picked them, he chanced into them, pure luck. After all, luck in other contexts is not dispositive. Most folks fail to reach 110 not because they got killed by the routine meteor, or because of any other luck dependent accident. Accidental deaths are rather low on the "cause of death" list, so getting lucky on that score will not buy you much. The vast majority of people are "lucky" enough not to die due to any accident. The thing that exercises (heh!) me is the universal claim that your life/healthspan is in your own hands. All those stats saying that only 10-20-30% of your life/healthspan is gene-dependent. If that were true, you'd expect health nuts to be overrepresented among the oldest old, centenarian/supercentenarian crowd. Yet that is clearly not true. If anything it seems the opposite. So, I suspect that lifestyle, diet, exercise and other modifiable factors have a much more limited impact than commonly claimed. I think the reality is that each of us has a certain genetically determined health/lifespan potential, and *within* the parameters of that potential, you might have some limited control. If your potential is 80 years, at best with optimal practices you'll reach that 80, but never 81, or Calmet's 122; with poor practices, maybe 78, 76, or disastrous alcoholism 50. Conversally if Calmet were a health nut, maybe she'd hit 125? It's the genes.

https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/man-110-still-drives-car-234745761.html Still lives independently and has no problem with daily living tasks, drves his car. Doesn't exercise, never did, though is "active". No special diet, eats whatever he wants. Drinks Ovaltine daily. Smoked for 20 years until 70. Drank a lot of milk as a young man. It's all about the genes, folks. A male supercentenarian is very rare. And here we have one with indifferent diet, former 20-year smoker, who never exercised. Would you pick him as a candidate for a supercentenarian? The man is in excellent health, never any health problems. Yet folks like Peter Attia go to extravagant lengths to implement "science based" (he's an MD!) heathy lifestyles and exercises maniacly... yet has had multiple surgeries already and he's not even 60. You wanna bet Attia - or any of the other prominent health nuts - will last anywhere near 110? Like I always say, it's all about your genes. No matter what you do, you have very little control over your health and longevity, regardless of what the health gurus claim. OK, now I have to go exercise - which I hate and only do, because of the alleged health benefits. I hope I can live in relatively good health until my 80's before I croak.

There's a great article in Gizmodo about the modern Mechanical Turk of AI. In one of my previous posts on AI, I mentioned how the claims of self-driving cars being actually controlled remotely by human supervisors reminded me of the Mechanical Turk fraud back in the day, where a machine was allegedly constructed that was supposedly able to play chess, and in reality it had a human chess master hidden inside actually doing the chess moves. This article describes 10 such extremely prominent cases of claims made for AI software, app, service where the actual work, the real heavy lifting was done by humans, often surreptitiously. The important thing to remember, is that they don't just involve some small AI startups, but the biggest names in tech, including Microsoft, Amazon, Google and of course Elon Musk - this ranged from simply misleading claims to outright fraud. The whole field is rife with scams, fraud and hype. You cannot take any AI claims at face value. No doubt there are legitimate AI applications, and there is potential for current and future benefits, but we are a very, very long way from the insane hype cycle claims out there. Incidentally, it seems even in an area I personally had great hopes for AI in, medical diagnosis, AI has been disappointing - in this case discovering colon cancer from blood samples, where AI transpired to be a dismal failure; oh well, I guess colonoscopies are still the gold standard, and my next colonoscopy is in nine years from now - somehow, I sense that AI will not substitute by reading out blood samples... we'll see, they've got nine years.

How crooked? If they're not so crooked that they make cleaning impossible, then what other harms are there from crooked teeth? I don't know. Perhaps they lead to loss of teeth in time due to poor alignment? I would guess it all depends on the degree of crookedness. Of course, there may be aesthetic considerations, but looking strictly from a health point of view, I suppose an orthodontist might be in a better position to evaluate the role of tooth alignment. As to grinding, I am not sure how connected it is to crooked teeth. My teeth are not crooked, yet each and every dentist and periodontist claims I grind my teeth. They recommend a plastic guard for the night. I have not done it. I have been ignoring that advice for some 40 years now and have still not died due to teeth grinding. FWIW, I am not aware of grinding my teeth, but they all swear I do. I don't think they're all making it up, but they base that in part on the prominence of my jaw muscles. Yet, I tend to chew my food pretty strongly and have eaten a lot of nuts daily, and f.ex. almonds can be a real exercise for your jaw muscles. A night guard is for the night, and is not going to fix the impact of chewing on my teeth during the day. My periodontist recommends soaking the almonds to soften them... I have no intention of engaging in any such unappetizing practice. I've been warned that I'll wear my teeth to nubs without a guard for the night and must stop chewing on hard foods. Maybe. But I'm moving along my sixth decade of life, and the teeth are still not nubs. I might regret it, but I'll take my chances with teeth grinding. YMMV.

Well, there are a number of yt channels that I follow, but for many, you sort of have to take a corrective, you can't just take them at face value. Dr. Greger, has a vegan bias and tends to be rather selective, but what I like is that he brings up interesting papers. I like the plant chompers guy. Peter Attia has interesting guests sometimes, but you really have to pick and choose. And so on, in no particular order, Lustgarten, Miche Phd, Sheekey, Carvalho, Brad Stanfield, Inside Exercise, Andy Galpin, Nutrition by Science, physionic, mic the vegan, layne norton.

Gee, who ever thought he was "reliable"? I listened to one episode, and immediately saw that his shtick was to take some initial findings and wildly extrapolate into confident recommendations. Worthless. Plus his recommendations fall into the completely useless and impractical category. The episode I listened to featured his supposed area of expertise, where he made a series of recommendations about exposing your eyes to various light conditions in just the "right way" - which encapsulated everything wrong with such "guru" podcasts; shaky science wildly exaggerated and claimed with 100% confidence, married to completely impractical routines that are supposedly going to benefit you. Who the F**k has the time to waste every morning on this speculative cr*p?? If you were to take seriously every recommendation from every one of these gurus, you would need not 24 hours a day, but 10,000 hours where the foot guy recommend 10 minutes of feet exercises, the back guy 15 minutes, the ear guy 7 minutes and so on for 10,000 hours of "health" routines every single day, and then comes Hubernan to add more time wasting snake oil on top of that. The hell with all those guys. All they ever do is pad their own pockets by wasting your time and attention to make money for themselves selling you nothing but a false dream. Waste of time. Another grifter, another hypester, another useless supplement pusher trying to scam you.

It's instructive to read old articles going back decades (and at this point, centuries) where prominent scientists, leaders in their fields have made predictions about how the future will look like, technology etc. You then compare it with the actual outcomes. Same with various doom (or glorious future nirvana) predictors. All have been consistently wrong. What all those wrong predictions have in common, the fundamental flaw underlying and the consistent mistake is the straight trend line extension. A crude example is how once it was predicted that given the increasing density of New York and increased need for horse carriages for transportation, and how much waste each horse generated, New York would inevitably drown in sh|t. It was a straight line extension of trend lines: number of people --> more, horse carriages --> more, density --> increasing, ergo result --> amount of horse waste --> drown. What it never factored in, was a disruption in the trend line of horse drawn carriages to cars, and so the horse waste is limited to Central Park. The same linear extension you see over and over and over again. Malthusian gloom prediction? Population growth, arable land, agricultural efficiency --> trend lines extended = mass die off in famine. Straight trend line extension. And wrong. Social trends and technology stimulate adaptations and responses in countless unpredictable ways. A trend doesn't just continue unimpeded - almost immediately it generates a response that breaks the trend line, so any prediction that rests on a simple straight line extension is doomed and destined to be wrong. We see this mistake repeated so often, it's just comical. There's this guy, Peter Zeihan, who is a lecturer somewhere and very popular on the corporate speech circuit and social media these days, whose shtick is making grandiose predictions about the near future - "China will starve and collapse", "Russian war will cause world-wide famine, collapse of German economy and Europe freezes" etc., and because the time horizon is so short, we get to see how comically wrong his predictions are. His stock in trade and technique is always the same. Grab some statistic or fact, draw a straight line extension of a trend, and announce a grand dramatic conclusion. So, Russia/Belorus produce the majority of some key ingredients in fertilizer, war disrupts access --> trend line extended, world-wide famine; Russia supplies majority of natural gas to Europe, supplies stop --> line extended, Europe freezes, German industry collapses, Germany is de-industralized. Of course, fertilizer from Russia is stopped, new sources are found and today we have excess grain production and record low grain prices; new gas is sourced, and natural gas prices are dramatically lower than even before the war. Zeihan is of course super popular, everyone listens to him, and nobody is fazed by how ludicrously and consistently he's wrong, meanwhile he is not the least chastened by how wrong his predictions turn out to be, and he keeps churning out these dramatic predictions which people love to hear (drama!), and his straight trend line extension shtick is all he uses, at this point he can't be unaware of this basic flaw, but the fees he generates are very nice, so why change... basically, a grifter. And really how surprising is it? Straight trend line extension is the easiest thing in the world. Any idiot can grab some fact and extend a trend line, and presto, a prediction! How can Johnny reach the moon from his back yard? Why, he puts one brick on another, that's already higher than the first, then another brick, then another, extend the trend line, and there you are, he reaches the moon! Just extending a trend line and calling it a day is so very, very, very much simpler than trying to anticipate how this trend will trigger another phenomenon, and in turn yet another in so many complicated and unanticipated ways that trying to predict how that whole complex matrix will look like far into the future is a thankless task indeed. As Yogi Berra said, making predictions is hard, especially about the future. So very much simpler to just grab a trend line and draw a pencil line straight, and there you have it, blissfully free of having to think and anticipate all the interactions and complications, all those troublesome realities of the actual world out there, rather than our cozy fake model we've built in our prediction bubble. And so convincing to the rubes out there! "Yep, true, definite fact that Europe runs on Russian gas... holy moly, right, doom ahead, wow, WOW!". The work is both easy, (just straight line extension!) and rewarding - perfect for all the hypesters and grifters out there, and so many delicious dreams to sell for the rubes to salivate over. We've seen the same brain-dead straight trend line extension in all the technology hype decades past, and it's no different with AI. Let's take some data mining and pattern recognition give it a sexy name AI, stretch the trend lines to absurd lengths with zero reference to any possible complicating factors which may interrupt our cozy model and there you have it, a cornocupia of absurd and laughable predictions about the brave new world of AI.

Yes, without some substantial genetic interventions, you are not going to gain more than a few years at most (even assuming that something like rapa actually slows down the rate of ageing in humans). It seems, that pharmacological agents are much less effective in longer lived species. The simpler the organism, the greater the effect - worms longer than mice, mice longer than dogs, monkeys and humans barely if at all. Healthy living (diet, exercise, avoiding alcohol, tobacco etc.) will simply allow you to come closer to your maximal lifespan potential, whatever that may be - for some of us, our bodies even with the best care were not designed for more than 80 or so, others have bodies with 100+ potential. But for real extention, lifestyle or even drugs are useless. For that, it comes down to genetic alterations. No matter how you starve, feed, exercise, drug or supplement a mouse, you are never going to get it to live as long as a naked mole rat. They have different genes. Until we humans alter our genes, we will gain next to nothing substantial. Some animals live for 200-500 years - it's not lifestyle, it's genes. And sadly, for anyone alive today, such genetic interventions will probably not be available. That will happen only for some lucky future generations. So why bother at all today, with our poor tools of lifestyle (and maybe drugs)? Personally, I'm shooting for healthspan. I don't count on 100+; I'm hoping that if all I get to is 85, at least I'll be a highly functioning 85, both physically and especially mentally - and even that is a very, very big ask and challenge... just look at all those lifelong health freaks who only last to their 70's or 80's often with pitiful mental capacities remaining. It's not easy to overcome your genetic destiny and limitations. All those healthy and still capable 90+ year olds? Quite rare, statistically. You hear about them precisely because they're rare. And btw., they often don't engage in especially dedicated health routines. It's mostly genes and luck. Think of Jack LaLanne and his brother. Jack was a lifelong diet and exercise freak who dedicated countless hours to taking care of his health - he didn't even make it to a 100. His brother, who did none of this, lived just as long as Jack (I think even a couple months longer). And both of them have been outlived by centennarians who have done nothing healthwise either. It's mostly genes. Just because you dedicate your life to your health guarantees nothing, as countless health gurus who drop dead early on, demonstrate (speaking of "outlive" - for some reason I have a feeling Peter Attia will not be beating any longevity records... sadly, he may not even participate in the sport he's been dedicating himself to - the "centennarian olympics"). That's why, if you manage to affect your healthspan even a little by all your efforts, you have truly accomplished a very difficult task. I'll count myself as very lucky to be a high funtioning 85-year old. More I don't have much hope for. Genetic alterations, the only real hope for humanity.

BPA? Why just that? The concern is with ALL plastics and compounds derived from them. Given the microplastics issues, I personally try to avoid all plastics in contact with my food. Mind you, plastics are impossible to avoid 100%, not just because they're in the food we eat (especially seafood), but because we breathe them in, and not just the volatiles they exude, but micro and nano-particles we breathe in. Anyone living anywhere else than possibly some remote jungle, is breathing in plastics. And we know that these settle in the body with deleterious results. Recently, there was a study out of Italy which showed that microplastics are incorporated into plaque and those with a lot of those plastics are 400%-500% more prone to fatal CV events. That's just the CVD effects. Not only do we absorb plastics, but they have documented negative health effects. So while plastics are impossible to avoid, it still makes sense to minimize exposure. Plastics in contact with food are an obvious target. I try not to eat or drink from plastic containers. However, not all alternatives are safe - glass and ceramics can be a source of heavy metal exposure, particularly lead; that wooden bowl/cutting board/spoon/spatula etc. - what was that wood treated with? And so on - plastics are not the only material of concern in contact with our food and beverages. Plastics are recent, but the problems are ancient - see the Romans and their lead lined vessels, or even prehistoric humans with meat burned over a fire - for that matter the smoke from cooking stoves, wood and also gas are a well known negative from ancient to modern humans. As a funny side note, I was suspicious of plastics all my life, based on nothing more than the fact that plastics often have a smell, sometimes a very strong, foul smell. I figured that something that exudes such strong smell, the volatile compounds cannot possibly be good for you in the context of historical exposure - we evolved alongside strong smelling food fruits vegetables and so on, but plastics are a very recent invention, especially as proliferated everywhere in recent decades. And there have never been long term exposure studies conducted. All that has always left me quite worried about plastics and other relatively (evolutionarily) recent substances that we put in contact with our food. So I've tended to avoid plastics in this context since I was a teenager. The recent concerns therefore do not seem to me to come as any great shock. I think many of us have had similar worries for a long time. YMMV.

As you know, the ancient rule applies: "dose makes the poison". Rapa is/was used as an immunosuppressant in organ transplants, but at lower doses it has been documented (human trials of a rapa analogue showed enchanced immunity against infectios agent, augmenting effectiveness of vaccinations) as an immune system rejuvenant. There also appears to be some evidence of cancer suppresion. All in all, an enchanced and rejuvenated immune system appears to be one of the most prominent effects of rapa (and its analogues). Again, however, dosage is critical, and unfortunately this is very unclear insofar as there are no validated dosage protocols for longevity and health promotion in humans. It is also possible that the optimal dosage may have a pretty narrow range (i.e. there isn't much of a safety margin), you derive benefits in a somewhat small window. Also absorbtion is an issue, and early experiments in mice failed because straight rapa wasn't assimilated at all - you need a pharmaceutical formulation for it to work (which is why FDA approved rapa analogues are preferred by many). And as I mentioned, there is a great deal of uncertainty because the effective equivalent dosages in mice are drastically higher and would be toxic in humans, which puts a big question mark over the entire enterprise in people - it would't be the first time when an agent that works great in animals fails completely in humans. There's growing suspicion that rapa would work best in humans combined with other agents. And perhaps there will be modified rapa derived agents that would work better (centered around suppressing complex I while sparing complex II). Bottom line, it's very early days for rapa use in humans for longevity/health purposes, and at this time remains a highly speculative endeavor. But as I said, there's the pressure of time, and not all of us have the luxury of waiting on more solid scientific evidence, and some may feel forced to gamble.

Understandable caution, but isn't the whole longevity endeavor on big gamble? Given the limitations of conducting human lifespan intervention studies (an RCT trial running 100+ years anyone?), there isn't a single human such study, nor will there ever likely be one. All you'll ever have is animal studies at best (monkey studies of 40+ years), so you either take a more or less well calculated gamble based on animal results or give up alltogether since the FDA can't clear any such drug for humans given that no such studies will be conducted. Some folks have decided that rapa is a worthwhile gamble, and perhaps the dog studies were a factor in such decisions. Few things are a certainty in medical science, so if someone wants to gamble on some intervention I would not condemn them. Isn't the origin of this very board and website the result of such a gamble by CR enthusiasts? It's all a gamble. And as gambles go, rapa seems not the worst of it - there are some human rapa-analogue results (immunity related) that may be suggestive, and no evidence of harm (to this point) other than minor ones like canker sores, so as far as drug interventions go, you could do worse. Obviously it's a gamble and nothing is certain (not even dosage!), but hey, it's either that, or do nothing. We could wait for more studies of rapa analogues, but time marches relentlessly, and not all of us have the luxury of waiting. You take your shot, and the chance that you may shorten and worsen your life, or do nothing. Each of us has to make that decision on their own.

Right. I don't think Kaeberlein should be responsible for every random person grabbing his research to make money. As long as he dosn't profit or in any way endorse those schemes, of course. He may not even be aware of this person, but yes, how to disassociate yourself from such folks becomes a full time job. The dog studies to date are suggestive, but have not been completed, so a lot of work remains before one can even begin to think of clearing rapa for dog longevity indications. Naturally, desperate pet owners will grab onto any hope, so any preliminary results should always come with plenty of caveats, cautions and warnings.

To be fair, Matt is very careful and nuanced in making any claims for rapa. I've listened to many hours of his interviews on many podcasts, and he certainly is careful not to hype rapa, so he definitely is not your classic hypester. And the fact is, that unlike for most of the supplement/pharmaceuticals out there (certainly resveratrol!), rapa actually has some very solid results, and Matt's studies are well designed. So cautious optimism wrt. dogs and rapa seems not unwarranted. Of course we still need to wait on more results, and caveats always apply, but if there is such a thing as scientifically and ethically sound studies (and we all better hope there is!), then I feel Kaeberlein qualifies. Clearly, this doesn't mean rapa research in mice or dogs necessarily translates to humans (especially that mice were exposed to massively larger doses than humans), and Matt to his credit never pushed rapa in humans - this remains a personal call and a deliberate gamble - which includes your pet - (I think Kaeberlein personally takes it), so you get to roll the dice as you see fit. I'm obviously not opposed to the search for longevity interventions, just opposed to hype and hucksterism. Insofar as Sinclair and Kaeberlein are concerned I think they belong on the opposite sides of this divide. YMMV.

I'd just like to point out, that I have been way, way, WAY, ahead of the curve when it comes to Mr. Sinclair. From the beginning, when he first came onto my radar years ago, at the start of the resveratrol hype, I pegged him as a snakeoil salesman, simply based on his classic shyster MO - he checked off all the boxes that identify such operators, and I denounced him as such. Btw. his mouse studies never showed max longevity benefits of resveratrol, at best a normalisation of lifespan in obese mice, and since then doubt has been cast on those studies too. There was nothing there, let alone grounds for wild claims. He certainly made out like a bandit in the stock buyout of his scientifically worthless biotech company, and has been a supplement pusher with one dubious pill after another. The man has been a shameless huckster spinning his money making schemes for so long now that it's a real puzzle as to why anyone would buy a single thing from his recommendations. Hypersters have existed long before PT Barnum cashed in from the suckers, but as he observed, a new sucker is born every minute. And we live in a time of extraordinary proliferation of HYPE, as we see every day in the headlines and breathless reporting about the next grand revolution that will radically change human history and achieve perpetual motion based on AI self-driving fusion powered quantum computers that will upload your brain into immortality on Mars, blah, blah, blabbity blah. Good on Matt, for calling out Sinclair, but sadly there's an endless supply of these hypesters, just as there is of the suckers who listen to them.

When it comes to weight training, I use lighter weights these days. I'm less worried about volume. It's about the ratio of weight to volume. I even use very light weights, like 50lbs, in a weight vest for squats. I do deep squats (a$$ to grass), 32 minutes nonstop with a 50lbs weight vest, twice a week. Never have a problem with my knees or other joints/tendons/muscles. When I was using heavier weights on an olympic bar (holding it behind my back, like Hackenschmidt), I had some soreness around my patella. I've given up the bar in favor of a weight vest, and lowered the weight. No problems.

Again nothing new in AI as far as the prevailing paradigm. The more tightly you can define a domain, the easier, quicker and better AI will perform. Chess is a classic example. A limited number of elements and limited number of rules. AI should eat it for breakfast, and it did. Trivial. Self-driving cars already involve many domains, and AI is having considerable difficulties. But that's just the start of the challenges. When you move into truly multi domain problems, AI collapses. This doesn't mean AI will never overmatch human capabilities in every area. It just means that the time horizon is considerably longer than the tech optimists imagine or the hypesters claim. Which is why I say, "fine, but in 200 years". Achieving general AI is an incredibly hard task, and will demand many very big breakthroughs. Heck, look how optimistic everyone was with the war on cancer declared back in the day - it was assumed five years at most and we'd have a cure for cancer, because look, we landed on the moon. Yet here we are over half a century later nowhere near conquering cancer. Because note, in many ways landing humans on the moon was a trivial problem (like chess!), as the domain was tightly defined - physics, material science and engineering. That's it, so it was easily solvable in principle. Cancer is a lot more murky, with a ton of biochemistry yet to be discovered. But cancer too, in principle is a fairly defined domain. It should be solvable in principle. I expect it will be. If anything I'm shocked at how poor AI performance has been to date - just on example: sustainable economical fusion energy. Very well defined domains, in principle not that different than landing on the moon: physics, material science and engineering. AI should be able to chart out a research and development program to give us a workable solution within a handful of years. And yet, nada - again I'm shocked at how very, very, very poor and unimpressive today's AI is. I expected a lot better. Seems it can't even hack trivial problems (i.e. trivial meaning "tightly defined domain"). My main objection to today's AI is the vast chasm between the grandiose claims of AI hypesters, and the abysmally sh|tty actual current AI capabilities. It's insulting.

That's what I'm talking about. The fact that you have the need for the continuous presence of remote human supervisors to rescue these "self-driving" vehicles tells you all you need to know - the whole concept is wild hype. Same with AI - there was a scadal a while ago, where some AI startup was showcasing its capabilities and then it transpired that the customer requests that were supposedly fulfilled by AI actually had remote humans to supervise the whole process to such a degree that in essence it was the humans doing the work all along. That is the definition of HYPE - wild exaggeration of pedestrian capabilities. Again, it's often at best small steps forward and no revolution. These technologies have their place, but they are quotidian progress of technology by small or big steps, and very, very, very, very rarely a revolution which the claims always center around. The AI hype is getting out of hand. In the end, it is the humans who have to do the heavy lifting, and AI is at best a more or less useful automation of some processes, just as the calculator helped folks with math instead of doing it by hand. Useful, yes, revolutionary as according to the hype, no. And as Dean points out you need to carefully assess the economic case for the technology. To make an exaggerated example: imagine that I invented a "self-driving" car that drove "automatically", but necessitated an engineer onboard at all times making sure that regular screwups don't turn dangerous, like when the car system mistakes a child at the side of the road for a mailbox because sunlight hit at a certain angle, and the kid stepped into the road with disastrous results. You can go back and tweak the programming, but you will need to do that in perpetuity, because the system is simply incapable of understading the broader context of an input and you'll never run out of novel situations. Well, in that case, I'd say, my supposed "self-driving" car is a complete economic failure, because I can either employ a driver at a fraction of the cost, or drive the damn car myself. That's what I mean by saying that managing the system introduces such inefficiencies, that you may as well do the work yourself. If I have to go over an AI generated text with a fine-tooth comb for possibly disastrous flaws, I may as well do the work myself from scratch. To me, the kind of hype you see around AI reminds me of the mechanical turk chess playing machine fraud from back in the day, where a big box with a chessboard was claimed to be a chess-playing machine, only it transpired that hidden inside was a dwarf who was actually the one playing the chess. If you need human supervisors and constant re-checking of the results because you can't trust the "intelligence" part of the AI, the whole thing needs to come down from the clouds and back to where it really belongs: incremental progress in specialised settings. Let us leave the talk of general artifical intelligence to scif-fi for now, and revisit the issue when actual rather than hype demonstrations are available (maybe in another 200 years?).

Dean covered it pretty well, so. Anyhow, look, optimism is important, and even excessive optimism (after all, how else are you going to get early investors), but I draw a line when human lives are at stake, which is why I'm so disgusted by Musk's hype outright lies. There are always going to be teething problems and lives lost (see: airplane development and test pilots), but when you're talking about the public rather than professionals who knowingly take the risk, you need to be realistic and ask hard questions about risk/reward. The problem with these are the same as with AI: risk of catastrophic failure due to knowledge domain handling. You cannot foresee each and every scenario that might come up, and while a sensor might recognize every signal in its domain, it fails catastrophically when you need to employ signals from a completely different domain, something a human does automatically based on vast cultural experience which is impossible to duplicate in a database, at least not today. These systems are therefore failing in ways humans call "lacking in common sense", and teaching systems such knowledge domain management is extremely difficult, what we translate into "common sense" might be trivial to us, but astonishingly complex for AI. Think of the extreme risks associated with running a nuclear power plant, flying an jumbo jet, or safely transporting a bus full of schoolchildren or even putting our military nukes under AI command. How relaxed are you going to be with AI in charge of any of these, while lacking in that hard to define "common sense"? And if you say, "well, for those we'll always need humans in the decision making loop", think about what you just admitted... you can't leave AI in charge of mission critical situations. At that point we're down to it really in the final analysis being a glorified calculator. Or as the Churchill anecdote went, when a lady at dinner protested "who do you think I am??" Winston: "we already know who you are, now we're just haggling over the price". Well, it's the same as with the wh*re - we already know AI is just a glorified calculator ("we know what you are", hence why we will always need a human in the loop), we're just haggling over the price - very, very glorious, marvellous, expensive calculator. I understand that there is a lot of amusement with asking AI to write this or that - but it's the same as it was when Siri first came out - on some level a novelty, and it was fun to ask questions. But the limitations are very apparent, and for mission critical stuff, it fails dramatically. Write an essay for your highschool paper, fine. Do a lawyer's job, write a petition to a judge or opposing counsel - we've seen the dramatic and embarrasing failures there. Low priority stuff ok. Mission critical, yeah, no. Yes, it has its place: automate non-critical processes, datamine, pattern recongnition, image analysis etc.. So not useless, just, like the majority of time, some good tools and technological progress, just not revolutionary. Revolutionary is rare by definition. The thing that I find a drag in all such situations is the overly broad applications which end up more of an inefficiency than help. Imagine needing to write something of importance (we've seen how well that goes when legal documents were involved!), and then having to check every sentence for some subtle or not subtle flaw. It's more work than just doing it yourself from scratch. Using AI is like doing the work twice. I'd just as soon do it once myself.

LOL, Dean, I thought about self-driving cars, but the OP did mention them in a bizarre aside wherein somehow those are going to come about later because they're a tougher problem than gen AI... in other words too absurd for words. I can't fathom why people are still getting killed taking Musk's hype claims about Tesla's self-driving capabilities at face value. But at least in the case of self driving cars a few technological benefits will come about as a result of all the billions poured in, so it's not a complete waste even if 100% autonomy is not going to be a reality anytime soon. By the way, I like Sabine Hossenfelder's various hype takedowns, going back to her original ones where she takes on a bunch of sacred cows in both theoretical and experimental physics. She tackled quantum computers and AI recently too. A rare voice of sanity in the deluge of hype BS.

It's amazing how little things change - like in not at all - when it comes to human nature. What never ceases to amaze me is how little people learn from history. Every hype and bubble seems new to people when it's happening, and when it's pointed out, at best you get "this time it's different". Now we're in full swing of the AI hype, and a lot of people are just losing their minds, and you get these sorts of hysterical well nigh incoherent rambling as the posts above illustrate. As if we have not gone through this exact play hundreds of times, with the same result "roar of a mountain that gives birth to a mouse". And that's at best. I'm still waiting for the endless energy from fusion that's been perpetually promised just around the corner, always the same few years from now (just recently there's been another flurry of promises after some minor experimental result). We went through this with "cybernetics" in the middle of the last century where humanoid robots were supposed to alter civilization like sci-fi replicants, and at the end of this we got, decades and decades later some factory robots and the roomba. In other words, extravagant hysterical googly-eyed pronouncements and paltry down to earth results. Biotech in the 80's was going to cure all disease starting with cancer; we got a handful of drugs for a few often obsure conditions. Quantum computers are going to calculate us into nirvana, or else nightmare of broken passwords, and so far we don't have a single quantum computer that can even come close to what a mediocre consumer desktop can crunch, but every few years the quantum computer hype bamboozles the next batch of gullible rubes, before dying down again. And AI itself, gee how many waves of hype have we been through? Already back in the 50's we were promised artificial general intelligence in just a few years, and got literally nothing other than a few tortured attempts to pass a Turing test by the "clever" method of grabbing onto a human interlocutor's statement, turning it into a question and letting the human babble on, with the obligatory interpolation of "and how did that make you feel?" to prolong the "conversation", fooling absolutely nobody except the above mentioned gullible rubes. In the 80's it was time for another AI hype wave, with massive database mining and the result were so called "expert systems", but at least there was a small mouse at the end of that mountain roar, and you got voicemail option trees and some banking applications. Now this current AI hype wave even more hysterical than before. No doubt a few mice will be birthed by this mountain of BS, with deep pattern recognition in imaging already being implemented in medicine among others, some process automation in a few non-critical areas (too fault-prone to trust with mission critical stuff) and the like. But it will inevitably crash against the same devastating limitation that has always broken previous AI hype - the merciless and rather pedestrian principle of GIGA (Garbage In Garbage Out), that cruel mistress of all mechanical analysis. No current or foreseeable future AI is able to employ knowledge domain switching on a deep level, and that makes it nothing more than a glorified calculator (or going back in time for a better insult, an abacus). We will need great breakthroughs to make that possible, optimistcally, maybe in another 200 years? Yawn. The coundown for the hype to die down has started, as we contemplate the pedestrian results, and there will be quiet waiting until the next wave of hype explodes with a new generation of gullible rubes. Nihil novi sub sole.

I'm not a huge fan of basing my protein intake on mouse studies. That said, MR has pointed out that true methionine restriction in humans (equivalent to that in rodents) is very difficult short of hospital level feeding, i.e., largely impractical. One could nonetheless make an argument for moderating methionine intake in the diet. There is are some very definite cautionary studies in humans when it comes to BCAA consumption, and excess seems pretty detrimental especially for CV health. Further investigation seems to have partcularly zeroed in on isoleucine as the biggest culprit, more so than leucine with valine being next. The argument against leucine seems to be mostly theoretical, centered around mtor activation, but actual live bad outcomes as opposed to mechanistic speculation seems to be lacking. Bottom line, current speculative recommendations seem to be to definitely minimize isoleucine, moderate methionine, and not fret excessively over leucine.

Huh. Yes, the powder does tend to clog the filter, but I find that if you distribute the powder very evenly, it’ll pass through but will simply take longer - instead of being ready after the beep, it’s still slowly seeping, so I let it sit some 10 minutes or so longer. I have a Zajirushi coffee maker. Years ago I did experiment with cacao directly in coffee, but it had trouble dissolving properly. As a result it would often precipitate to the bottom of the cup and was hard to consume fully (lots of swirling as you drank). Ultimately, I gave up as I was worried about metals or other undesirable chemicals in the cacao. Of course, that was before I came across the seemingly reliable Navitas, and with this current news about the pollution problem having been solved perhaps it is time to revisit the methodology. On the one hand, I have always been uneasy whether the cacao polyphenols really do pass completely through the filter, but on the other I am uneasy about fully trusting either that the pollution problem has been truly solved or more importantly that it’s been solved permanently (I can imagine that with time nasties might make their way back as happens so frequently in the world of business). I suppose one would have to continue to trust Navitas. For now, I think I’ll continue with my current method, though it would be good to find some way to measure the amount of polyphenols that make it through the filter. After all it makes a kind of intuitive sense that you’re not getting 100%, and some portion remains in the unconsumed sludge. That incidentally, is part of the reasoning wrt consuming matcha tea vs regularly brewed tea. In the end, I suppose one could be guided by the idea that to replicate the benefits as described by the various studies one should replicate the methods of consumption used by most of the papers: which means cacao powder dissolved directly in liquid and tea brewed rather than consumed as matcha. Endless fiddling, it will never stop.

Yes, Dean, I too consume the Navitas cacao in my coffee, by having it go through the same paper filter (I assume you are not putting the powder directly into your coffee cup, bypassing the filter?). However, as always, I am interested in dosing and timing protocols. Cocoa Polyphenols and Their Potential Benefits for Human Health doi: 10.1155/2012/906252 PMCID: PMC3488419 PMID: 23150750 And so, I wonder how effective this method is.

I rather tend to look at these questions with the black box approach. I think we often can't tell why exactly some food/nutrient is good/bad, i.e. we can't tell what's going on inside the black box. What matters is what goes in and comes out from the black box - i.e. food item goes in, and what emerges at the other end is an outcome good/bad, what goes on inside the box, who knows (or more exactly we create hypothesis as to what the mechanisms are, with varying degrees of certitude). I (we) observe that consuming F&V (what goes into the black box) has a good outcome for health (what comes out of the box). Scientists speculate that the reason is this or that nutrient (speculating about what goes on inside the box), and then they create a supplement like f.ex. lycopene, which may or may not have an equivalent outcome in health (usually not!). So why worry about what goes on inside the box (other than intellectual curiosity, which I too have), just look at outcomes and then decide if you want to consume X (say, chocolate) or not. Tentatively, it seems that the outcome (what comes out of the box) of consuming chocolate is health positive. If nonetheless someone is uneasy about some aspects of the food, you are welcome to modify it. For example, the speculation (what goes on inside the box) is that it's the chocolate polyphenols that are responsible. And that cadmium, excess calories, saturated fat etc. are all negatives. You could just look at outcomes and not worry about what's inside the box - cadmium, lead, calories, sugar, SFA - perhaps those work hormetically to your health advantage. Or you could speculate - I too love speculating and modifying. If it's polyphenols, then what I do is put some Navitas Organics powder on the bottom of my coffee filter, then coffee grounds on top, let hot water go through (in a coffemaker) and drink the liquid. I believe that it's been shown that the polyphenols go through the coffee filter and end up in the coffee, so that covers that. However, it also strains out some heavy metals at least to some degree (such as cadmium and lead), it does largely strain out any fats including saturated fats as well as substances that raise LDL, and finally have essentially zero calories. I believe that addresses all of your objections (heavy metal contamination, excess calories and saturated fat, sugar). That is if you believe that this will result in all the health benefits of chocolate and very few of the negatives. That's my contribution to the specuation about what goes on inside the black box.

Surely you're joking! AI unbiased? "Well trained"? At best AI might not *introduce* bias, and as we know even that is not an easy feat. But as what passes for AI atm does nothing more than assemble and rehash the source materials; it's dumb as rocks. If the underlying materials are flawed, the those flaws will be reflected, AI here doesn't correct for any "bias" in these materials. The old principle of analysis applies: GIGA - Garbage In Garbage Out. There is absolutely nothing to be gleaned from this AI exercise beyond the source materials. It is a form of Cliff Notes, which at best can simply accurately summerize the texts and says nothing about the merits of the texts. This current wave of hype over AI is a cultural moment, but sadly us humans still have to do the heavy lifting of novel insight. Big data analysis is surely useful, but the text scanning and assembly brings nothing informationally novel to the table. Wrt. the above distillation of omega-3 links, I honestly don't understand what the point of using AI is (other than it's trendy) - you can just read the links yourself.