CR Conference and the CR Society Future

[Saul]

Hi Dean!

 

No question, what you're doing is valuable.

 

But it would be best if we had a lot more activity, from a lot more people.

 

I'm on summer break from my job (Math Prof), which is why I'm able to be involved a little more in the Forums at the moment.

 

But it would be a lot better to have more people involved, and posting much more often, even if we had to give up some of the functionality of the Forums.

 

  --  Saul

[Dean Pomerleau]

Saul,

 

I'm on summer break from my job (Math Prof), which is why I'm able to be involved a little more in the Forums at the moment.

 

It's great to see more posts from you! I hope your summer break is going well.

 

But it would be a lot better to have more people involved, and posting much more often ...

 

That is one thing we definitely agree on!

 

--Dean

[Todd S]

FYI:  I'm one of the members who stopped following the posts for a while when the email lists were dropped. I never actually received the individual emails. I instead looked at the archives when I had time.

 

In the meantime, I've instead been following the forums at https://www.gymnasticbodies.com/forum/discover/unread/-- which are of significant interest to me.

 

I've recently picked up on the CR forums -- and attended the Tucson CR Society Conference.

 

One point about the forums compared to the previous email lists is that posts are publicly available to anyone, whereas previously the emails were private to CR Society members.

 

As I get closer to retirement age (I'm currently 69), this becomes less important to me. But it is still a consideration for me. I am wary of posting too much. I also notice that I don't see posts from David or Robert, for example. Why is that? Are they also concerned about posts being publicly available to anyone?

 

Thanks,

Todd

[Dean Pomerleau]

Hi Todd,

 

It's really nice to have you posting (again). I'm not sure why neither David nor Robert post (regularly) to these forums. I doubt it is concern over privacy issues.

 

If you are considered in this regard, why not sign up with a new, anonymous account where you don't use your complete real name?

 

There are several active posters and long-term CR folks who use pseudonyms (e.g. TomBAvoider).

 

--Dean

[gracezw]

Todd, you look a lot younger than your real age! Thank you for sharing!

 

I wonder about the same thing --- why do David and Robert never post on the forum.

 

I've recently picked up on the CR forums -- and attended the Tucson CR Society Conference.

One point about the forums compared to the previous email lists is that posts are publicly available to anyone, whereas previously the emails were private to CR Society members.

 

... I am wary of posting too much. I also notice that I don't see posts from David or Robert, for example. Why is that? Are they also concerned about posts being publicly available to anyone?

[gracezw]

Dean, first of all, can you tell me how I use multiquote? I have tried but it does not work for me.

 

Now I have a guess about why David and Robert do not post here. They don't feel the need for posting, because they prefer to be intellectually solitary.

 

Also Dean, how did the people running the forums decide that they would not want the access to forums to be protected by a password? Why did they prefer to have an individual member sign in with an anonymous account?

[Saul]

FYI:  I'm one of the members who stopped following the posts for a while when the email lists were dropped. I never actually received the individual emails. I instead looked at the archives when I had time.

  

I've recently picked up on the CR forums -- and attended the Tucson CR Society Conference.

Hi Todd!

 

It was great running into you (a former Rochesterian) at CR IX!

 

I remember, you used to access the CR mailing lists through the archives  -- so there's no surprise that you like the Forums.

 

I'm getting used to them.

 

 

  -- Saul

[Dean Pomerleau]

Grace,

 

Dean, first of all, can you tell me how I use multiquote? I have tried but it does not work for me.

 

If all you are going to do is insert the entire message(s) in a quote (esp at the bottom), it isn't worth even bothering. To do an in-line quote of a short passage from someone's post, where is what I do:

• First I use my computer's standard mouse / keyboard functionality to copy the passage I want to quote to the clipboard. 
• Then I hit the "quote" button on the toolbar in the posting window. It is the button I've circled in red (BTW Todd - the button I've circled in green is the one to insert an image, like the imgur.com links you were posting elsewhere as a URL):

• Hitting the "quote" button will open up a window like this one, within which I paste the text I want to reference:

Now I have a guess about why David and Robert do not post here. They don't feel the need for posting, because they prefer to be intellectually solitary.

 

That is quite possibly the explanation. Many long-time CR folks have their practice on "autopilot" and don't feel the need or desire to connect with other CR practitioners, either veterans or new folks. To each his own. But I just think it is a bit sad that none of the 5 Board members of the CRS engage on the forums very often (i.e. more than once per week or so - which Michael and James the only ones who seem to be doing even that, although Brian was quite active for a while there not too long ago - I hope he's ok...). If they were like the Board of Directors of a standard corporation, it would be understandable, since those roles are often mostly just to serve as a figurehead and "window dressing" - with hired (and paid!) executives, managers and employees doing the real business of the company.

 

But in the case of the CRS, the Board members are the only folks with any real say or even involvement with what happens (or doesn't...) with the Society. They are supposed to be the real leadership, and there doesn't seem to be very much leading going on at the moment, no offense. Of course, as I've said, it isn't entirely clear what they should be doing to lead - David and Robert did a great job (along with or in support of April) to organize the conference, and Michael did his best to organize the thwarted study of CR & Immunity. It's just not clear what to they (or we) should do next (hence the title of this thread), given our lack of membership and lack of engagement by the members we do have...

 

Also Dean, how did the people running the forums decide that they would not want the access to forums to be protected by a password? Why did they prefer to have an individual member sign in with an anonymous account?

 

As for privacy of the forums - I can't say for sure since I wasn't involved in the decision (at least as far as I recall), but there is a lot of value in having an open access forum that the web search engines are able to index.

 

First, it makes it so that the information is available to a much wider audience. For example, today if you do a Google search of "Cold Exposure and Longevity" - the thread I started on the topic is the #2 search result Google returns, immediately behind a short article by someone whose name is quite familiar to CR folks, Josh Mittledorf. So it's not only a useful resource for the general public, but it's also a good recruiting tool - allowing new folks to discover the CR Society and our forums when they do a Google search on a health topic and one of our discussions pops up.

 

Plus once indexed by the search engines, Google (and I expect Bing) caches a copy of the web page so people will be able to access it even if the CR Society should ever disappear. For example, here is Google's cached version of the 13th page of the Cold Exposure thread, safe for all eternity¹. In my mind if Google goes, we all go...☺ 

 

Note - for anyone concerned about privacy, besides creating an anonymous account with a pseudonym, you can all post your question or discussion to the Members-Only forum, which is where we are posting right now!  I started this particular thread on Members Only because I knew we'd be discussing sensitive issues that I didn't think it appropriate for the world to see. But many newcomers can and do post to this forum if they are shy and don't want to the world to learn about their situation and their questions.

 

So there are quite a few alternatives if you are concerned with privacy. In a sense, with the way things are set up now we get the best of both worlds - the world can benefit from most of our discussions, while allowing people to maintain their privacy if that is their choice.

 

--Dean

 

-------------

¹ For anyone who wants to know how to access Google's cached version of a page, simply click on the little green down arrow next to a search result and select "Cached", like this:

 

[Saul]

Hi Dean!

 

 

• First I use my computer's standard mouse / keyboard functionality to copy the passage I want to quote to the clipboard. 
• Then I hit the "quote" button on the toolbar in the posting window. It is the button I've circled in red (BTW Todd - the button I've circled in green is the one to insert an image, the the imgur.com links you were posting elsewhere as a URL):

;

• Hitting the "quote" button will open up a window like this one, within which I paste the text I want to reference:

It works for quoting!  Thanks for the tip!

 

And it's nice to know how to insert URL's as graphics.

 

I notice that there are also "copy" and "paste"  buttons; perhaps they could be used (in lieu of the clipboard?)  I'll try it.

 

  --  Saul

[Dean Pomerleau]

Saul,

 

I'm happy to help. Maybe these features will help make using the Forums a little less burdensome for you!

 

--Dean

[Saul]

Yes!

 

(I don't know whether the "copy" and "paste" buttons are useful?)

 

 

  -- Saul

[Todd S]

Dean,

 

 

 

• (BTW Todd - the button I've circled in green is the one to insert an image, the the imgur.com links you were posting elsewhere as a URL):

 

I initially tried to insert the images, but reverted to inserting URLs instead -- because I was unable to get the images inserted properly (on my iMac using Apple's Safari browser). Doing a paste of an image (following your instructions posted quite a while ago on how to use imgur.com) just resulted in a question mark within a box. Perhaps the .JPG format is unusual in some way.

 

 

 

 

David and Robert did a great job (along with or in support of April) to organize the conference, and Michael did his best to organize the thwarted study of CR & Immunity.

 

Agreed!

 

 

 

 

why not sign up with a new, anonymous account where you don't use your complete real name

 

I don't like it when others use anonymous account names, so I try not to do it myself.

 

When the gymnasticbodies.com website was started, many users had anonymous account names. Eventually a change was made -- and everyone now uses their real names. I like that better.

 

 

 

 

As for privacy of the forums - I can't say for sure since I wasn't involved in the decision (at least as far as I recall), but there is a lot of value in having an open access forum that the web search engines are able to index.

 

I think it is interesting to compare the CR Society forums with the only other forums site that I visit regularly to look at "Unread Content" from all the (sub-)forums I have access to:

 

The general forums are open to anyone.

 

The most active and interesting (to me) forums, however, are the ones that correspond to a specific course that has been purchased. Access to each specific forum is restricted to those members who have purchased the corresponding course.

 

I think this scheme works well if you have 'products' -- which we've noted that the CR Society doesn't really have at this point in time.

 

 

Thanks,

Todd

[Dean Pomerleau]

Todd,

 

Here is one of the images you posted to the Cold Exposure thread, inserted with via the "picture" button I circled above, but I had to add the extension ".png" to it to get it recognized as an image. It's obviously a little too big! If you follow my instructions exactly, you'll see the specific URL on the imgur.com page (labelled "Direct Link") you need to copy-and-paste into the window that pops up when you hit the "picture" button on the posting toolbar:

 

[Michael R]

 

"serving as a beacon and a source of information for a few insanely self-disciplined individuals (like ourselves) who are obsessed with engineering their own maximum health and longevity"

From my perspective, the above just about sums it up. I think perhaps in retrospect it was a mistake to give this organization such a "method specific" focus and name. Most of the active current members can probably be characterized as being zealous about health and longevity using a science based approach and not married to any one idea. "CR" suffers in being both excessively limited in scope, yet also somewhat ambiguous. When someone engages me in person about health/diet I never say "I do calorie restriction", I say "I eat a plant based whole food diet".

 

Well, it wouldn't make sense for you to say you do CR, because you don't ;) .

 

The reason for calling our organization "The CR Society" was then, and is now, that the Society was and is established to support the practice and advance scientific knowledge of human CR. We focus/focused on CR because at the time it was the only intervention known to retard the biological aging of mammals, period, and it's still the only means of doing so that is practicable by humans (primate translatability still being highly uncertain, of course). Methionine restriction, eg, is impossible in practice if you eat actual food (and dangerous if you don't), rapamycin being exciting but far less proven and quite transparently extremely dangerous — far more so than CR itself, which is itself undeniably fraught.

 

It happens that we are lucky enough to retain, renew, or attract a significant number of posters (Dean, most notably, as well as James Cain, yourself, and maybe TomB — I'm not clear on this) who don't yet, or no longer, or just aren't and won't practice CR, but who engage in thoughtful, intelligent, and evidence-based discussion that is either about CR or in what we might call its vestibule (the Cold Exposure stuff, eg), or is at least of interest to CR folk as health-conscious people. I'm extremely glad to have all of you, as I'm sure many others of us arebut I wouldn't want the Forums to be taken over by generic health-food nuts, typical Paleo, low-carb, or vegan zealots, supplement nuts, etc.

 

 

IMO, the most notable is that it takes much more time to try to keep up with the posts, and to post. (A notable exception is Dean, who is semi-retired.) I believe that the typical CR Society member has a profession, and doesn't have a lot of free time that he/she wants to navigate, and post, to the CR Society. So switching from Lists to Forums has tended to marginalize us.

I agree with you that from a practical perspective, we likely lost quite a few folks when we switched to forum-only communication (except for Al), at least in terms of them actively engaging in discussions. Here is a link to the main CR list archives in the last full month before it became "Al Pater only". Al had the most posts, but there was quite a diversity of people engaged in lively discussions.

 

My incomplete survey of the non-Al posts in that link is not consistent with that characterization: most of them are people we've retained (me, Sthira, Mike C); Bill Theurer was only posting for a very brief period (tho' I can't prove a negative about what he might have done going forward, since he arrived just in time for the closing of the List); nearly all of the small minority of non-Al posts (including most from the above posters) are lacking in substance; the 2 substantive posts I found were one from me (consistent with my current practice) and one from Sthira (who, again, also posts here) that is substantive but FWIW less so than a typical current Sthira post.

 

Even if an exhaustive survey of that month were to show what you say, Dean, I can tell you that the Lists were, indeed, essentially void of anyting but Al Pater's posts for the last couple of years before we restricted them. We're certainly doing better now, although I attribute that more to the blessing of your (Dean's) re-engagement, which I take it is largely coincidental to rather than dependent on the move to the Forums.

 

For many old-timers (Al, Michael, Brian, Khurram, TimC, Kenton) I get the impression that it isn't the difficulty of the forums that leads them to post relatively rarely. I won't try to speak for them directly but I get the impression it's other things going on in their lives that take precedence over following or engaging in CR-related (or health-related) discussions. People get busy, priorities shift, and so they drift away from any hobby or endeavor, not just CR. It's a fact of life.

I can tell you with absolute certainty that the infrequency or absence of posts by me, Brian, TimC, Robert, and David has nothing to do with a dislike of the Forum format . You (Dean) largely have it right for these folks, and to my knowledge many others who were former regular posters to the List. Indeed, note that none of these people were posting with any kind of frequency in the last 2 years thereof, so it has nothing to do with the platform change. I don't have the time or attention span required to dig and post as I prefer; as Dean suggests, Robert and David's diet and longevity lifestyles are on autopilot, and they aren't engaged, as those of us who follow and/or post to the Forums are, with the further scientific and practical details of the diet. Really, David was never terribly engaged with such, except when something really revolutionary-looking came along or that was highly personal to him, and didn't post much after the very earliest years of the List.

 

One point about the forums compared to the previous email lists is that posts are publicly available to anyone, whereas previously the emails were private to CR Society members.

 

As I get closer to retirement age (I'm currently 69), this becomes less important to me. But it is still a consideration for me. I am wary of posting too much. I also notice that I don't see posts from David or Robert, for example. Why is that? Are they also concerned about posts being publicly available to anyone?

Nope! Of all the people named, I was the only one who has historically been especially concerned with privacy, and I'm still here and my reasons for relatively infrequent posting are totally unrelated to privacy issues.

 

As Dean notes, if you're concerned about privacy, one option would be to change your user name: when logged in, find the dropdown menu under your user name next to the "Sign out" button in the upper right-hand corner of the screen; from the dropdown menu, select "my settings," and then on the left-hand nav bar in your settings select "Display Name." If you'd like, I can then go in and edit out cases where you've signed off as "Todd" or where others have addressed you as such.

 

 

Dean, first of all, can you tell me how I use multiquote? I have tried but it does not work for me.

If all you are going to do is insert the entire message(s) in a quote (esp at the bottom), it isn't worth even bothering.

 

Yes: Grace, please don't do this. It makes the Forums less readable, and creates false-positives when searching. Please trim out all but the material in the quoted post to which you are directly responding.

 

I just think it is a bit sad that none of the 5 Board members of the CRS engage on the forums very often ... But in the case of the CRS, the Board members are the only folks with any real say or even involvement with what happens (or doesn't...) with the Society. They are supposed to be the real leadership, and there doesn't seem to be very much leading going on at the moment, no offense. Of course, as I've said, it isn't entirely clear what they should be doing to lead - David and Robert did a great job (along with or in support of April) to organize the conference, and Michael did his best to organize the thwarted study of CR & Immunity. It's just not clear what to they (or we) should do next (hence the title of this thread), given our lack of membership and lack of engagement by the members we do have...

Indeed — regretfully (tho' I would separate out being actively engaged in leadership and being an active poster here: in principle, it's quite possible to do one entirely to the exclusion of the other). The problem isn't that the Board isn't trying to lead: it's the lack of strong ideas on what to do to change things, and the chicken-and-egg problems we discussed at the Conf around needing numbers and funding to get anything done, and needing to get things done to raise numbers and funding.

 

This does get me back to my plea at the Conf: would anyone who either has notes on, or remembers ideas from, our session on advancing the Society — or who has any such ideas, irrespective of whether they were discussed at that session — please send them to me via PM (or email at mik-alra-ATcad-visionDOTcom (replacing AT and DOT with the relevant characters and excising the hyphens)? There were a few good ideas, but while I was engaged in the discussion I unfortunately wasn't taking notes ...

[Dean Pomerleau]

Michael,

 

Thanks for your insights and perspective. I think we are on the same page - a bit of a rare convergence these days! ☺.

 

As for ideas from the brainstorming session at the Conference about the CRS future - here are a couple things I remember off the top of my head (I too was engaged in the discussion and so didn't take notes):

1. I believe it was Alan G. who suggested we consider buying Google ads for specific, narrowly-targeted searches (like "calorie restriction") to point people to our website.
2. I believe it was Mitch who suggested we hire someone to work (for pay) part-time with the task of building our paid membership ranks, and incentivize them by making their income dependent (at least in part) on how many members / how much money they bring in.
3. The idea that seemed to garner the most support was the one I mentioned in the opening message of this thread, namely:
   
   "One good idea that did come out of it was to try to build a CRS membership roster, including email addresses of all members, by (somehow) sending an email to everyone who we've ever had as members to see if they respond, still consider themselves members, and if not, ask them why not and what the CRS might do to serve them better."

I think #3 was the best of the bunch. It seems like a good first step to figure out who big a community we actually are. Of course where we go from there is still an open question in my mind - but an occasional official email from the CRS to all its members seems like a minimum first step to becoming a viable organization. If nothing else, it might facilitate efforts like yours to enlist member participation in scientific studies. Speaking of which, one other item I can recall (from the "Citizen Science" session) that I hope won't fall through the cracks was you reaching out in your role as Chief Science Director to the researchers at the National Weight Control Registry to see if we can get a sub-study going with them to investigate the potentially unique psychology and strategies used by long-term CR practitioners to help us "stick with the program".

 

--Dean

[Todd S]

Dean,

 

 

 

If you follow my instructions exactly, you'll see the specific URL on the imgur.com page (labelled "Direct Link") you need to copy-and-paste into the window that pops up when you hit the "picture" button on the posting toolbar

 

I was following those exact instructions of yours, but for me in the "Share this Image" section at the lower right of the screen -- the "Share Link" item was present and the "Embed in HTML" item was present but the "Direct Link" item was absent.

 

You also indicated that:

 

 

but I had to add the extension ".png" to it to get it recognized as an image

 

Perhaps that has something to do with why imgur.com didn't show the "Direct Link" option to me.

 

Thanks,

Todd

[Dean Pomerleau]

Todd,

 

it's weird imgur.com doesn't give your the "Direct Link" option. But the only difference between the "Share Link" and "Direct Link" options on imgur.com is that the "Direct Link" URLs have the ".png" extension added to the end of the "Share Link" URL.

 

--Dean

[gracezw]

Saul, nice to have met you at the conference too! I enjoyed the time with you.

 

Thank you, Dean, for helping me with multiquoting! It now works for me.

 

Another multiquoting question: I see that there are two buttons, "multiquote," and "quote" at the lower right corner of each post. Every time I tried to use that "multiquote" button, I got lost. Does it work for you? The "quote" button works for me -- that was how I quote the entire post.

 

 

• First I use my computer's standard mouse / keyboard functionality to copy the passage I want to quote to the clipboard. 
• Then I hit the "quote" button on the toolbar in the posting window. It is the button I've circled in red (BTW Todd - the button I've circled in green is the one to insert an image, the the imgur.com links you were posting elsewhere as a URL):

;

• Hitting the "quote" button will open up a window like this one, within which I paste the text I want to reference:

It works for quoting!  Thanks for the tip!

[gracezw]

Dean, thanks for explaining about "members-only forum." I often wondered in what way it would be "members-only."

 

==

 

Quote Dean:

 

Note - for anyone concerned about privacy, besides creating an anonymous account with a pseudonym, you can all post your question or discussion to the Members-Only forum, which is where we are posting right now!  I started this particular thread on Members Only because I knew we'd be discussing sensitive issues that I didn't think it appropriate for the world to see. But many newcomers can and do post to this forum if they are shy and don't want to the world to learn about their situation and their questions.

[gracezw]

Todd, I use another forum where many members use their screen names. When they feel more comfortable and closer to others, they sign their real names at the bottom of their posts. Some other members use their real names all the time. I think I am fine with either way.

 

==

Quote Todd:

 

I don't like it when others use anonymous account names, so I try not to do it myself.

 

When the gymnasticbodies.com website was started, many users had anonymous account names. Eventually a change was made -- and everyone now uses their real names. I like that better.

[gracezw]

Todd, what you wrote here about your forum is interesting. I am responding more here.

 

I pay to be in private online forums run by my nutritional medicine doctor's team. Everyone pays a smaller monthly fee to get in. Each can post on the general discussion forum, read others' posts on "ask the doctor" forum. I pay a higher fee to get to ask the doctor specific questions on me and my family. Recently they completely changed the format to please ipad and smart phone users at the cost of computer users including me. The new format looks so crappy on my screen that I have posted my complaints.  A lot of other computer users complained as well. There was no warning in advance, and it has been a week and still no explanation so far. It is a private business, not a volunteer-based organization as CRS is! I will probably not renew my current membership with them because of that.

==

 

Quote Todd:

"Unread Content" from all the (sub-)forums I have access to:

 

The general forums are open to anyone.

 

The most active and interesting (to me) forums, however, are the ones that correspond to a specific course that has been purchased. Access to each specific forum is restricted to those members who have purchased the corresponding course.

 

I think this scheme works well if you have 'products' -- which we've noted that the CR Society doesn't really have at this point in time.

[gracezw]

Another member complained saying that she ran two much larger forums as a volunteer and would give more thought and care than what has been done.

[Todd S]

Being uncertain where to ask this, I'm doing it here:  Does Al Pater still do frequent postings of abstracts he thinks are interesting/relevant to CR? If so, where are they accessible?

 

[The crsociety.org website pulldown menu item Email List Archives doesn't work for me. And I don't see a forum dedicated to them.]

 

Thanks,

Todd

[Dean Pomerleau]

Todd,

 

Let me Google that for you.

 

Oh lookie there. The #1 search result is this page:

 

http://www.crsociety.org/resources/lists

 

Where you can sign up or modify your settings for the two email lists, CR and CR-community, on which Al Pater continues to faithfully send out abstracts of studies he thinks are interesting, both related to CR and general health topics, respectively.

 

--Dean

[Todd S]

Dean (and Tim, if he sees this),

 

No need for googling, since the crsociety.org 'Resources' pulldown menu item "CR Email Lists" provides signup to get the emails.

 

My question, though, was really about access to the archives. [i've never signed up for emails, which I get enough of already from other sources.] The 'Resources' pulldown menu item "Email List Archives" results in a "Strict Standards:Non-static method ..." error.

 

However, this time I instead navigated to the 'Resources' pulldown memu item "CR Email Lists" -- and logged in (with, it turns out, a different login than the regular CR Society member login). I found that the archives are accessible from there -- in addition to being able to sign up to receive emails (which I never have done and don't plan to do).

 

Sometime in the future if Tim can find the time, he might remove (or otherwise fix) the 'Resources' pulldown menu item "Email List Archives" -- since it doesn't work as it is now.

 

Thanks,

Todd