ageing healthier, set point theory & research trials controlled by gods
CC#77- The Brain Being Even More Complicated Than We Thought, AI Making Us Even Worse at Communicating & Skiing Becoming Even More Trendy
Hey there and welcome to ✨ CuratedCuriosity - a bi-weekly newsletter delivering inspiration from all over the internet to the notoriously curious.
Things I Enjoyed Reading.
🌡️ Singing the Blues
Yet another nice Scott Alexander article - this time on a ‘set point theory’ to explain multiple (mental) health disorders. I don’t know enough about the medical foundations to be able to evaluate his claims, but based on my subjective experiences and anecdotal evidence, a lot of this seems to make sense…
Just as your body has an inner thermostat regulating temperature, it has an inner “lipostat” regulating body weight. The lipostat is why you feel hungry when you haven’t eaten enough and full when you have. It’s why, after you overeat, you might fidget a lot (fidgeting burns calories) - or why, if you’re starving, you’ll get weak and tired and not move very much (staying in one place conserves calories).
In the modern era, people do get fat pretty often. I think of this more as a disorder of the lipostat, caused by damage from years of unhealthy eating, rather than a failure of it. In the short term, the lipostat does a great job preventing obesity, returning people back to the same weight even after 10,000+ calorie diets through extreme fidgeting and subsequent fasting. It’s only long-run exposure to whatever modern food is doing that messes with the factory settings.
I argue that anorexia is a lipostat disorder, where it’s set permanently low. I realize this conflicts with the many stories of people becoming anorexic for psychosocial reasons (eg they wanted to be a ballerina and their coach made fun of their weight), but I think the psychosocial reasons (and the subsequent extreme dieting) cause the lipostat to permanently re-set at a lower weight.
🧓 #181 - Laura Deming on the science that could keep us healthy in our 80s and beyond [🎧]
Really interesting introduction to the field of the life-prolonging therapies - I certainly hadn’t given this a lot of thought before and didn’t anticipate how much is actually happening in this area. Also, Laura Deming is certainly an impressive & inspiring person - went to college with 12, dropped out of MIT to accept the Thiel fellowship and went on to found a venture capital fund focusing on life extension with more than $25 million in funding.
"The question I care about is: What do I want to do? Like, when I'm 80, how strong do I want to be? OK, and then if I want to be that strong, how well do my muscles have to work? OK, and then if that's true, what would they have to look like at the cellular level for that to be true? Then what do we have to do to make that happen? In my head, it's much more about agency and what choice do I have over my health. And even if I live the same number of years, can I live as an 80-year-old running every day happily with my grandkids?" — Laura Deming
Some topics covered:
How lifespan is surprisingly easy to manipulate in animals, which suggests human longevity could be increased too.
Why we irrationally accept age-related health decline as inevitable.
Laura’s thoughts on how ending ageing is primarily a social challenge, not a scientific one.
Laura’s vision for how increased longevity could positively transform society by giving humans agency over when and how they age.
Why this decade may be the most important decade ever for making progress on anti-ageing research.
🏛️ Declining trust in Zeus is a technology
It took humans a long long time to ‘discover’ them methodology of randomized control trials and there might still be other methods out there that just haven’t been found yet - maybe the declining trust in science could inspire/trigger some fruitful exploration in those areas?
Randomized-controlled trials only caught on about 80 years ago, and whenever I think about that, I have to sit down and catch my breath for a while. The thing everybody agrees is the “gold standard” of evidence, the thing the FDA requires before it will legally allow you to sell a drug—that thing is younger than my grandparents. (…)
Why did it take us so long to put them together?
I think the answer is: first, we had to stop trusting Zeus.To us, coin flips are random (“Heads: I go first. Tails: you go first.”)1. But to an ancient human, coin flips aren’t random at all—they reveal the will of the gods (“Heads: Zeus wants me to go first. Tails: Zeus wants you to go first”)2. In the Bible, for instance, people are always casting lots to figure out what God wants them to do: which goat to kill, who should get each tract of land, when to start a genocide, etc.
This is, of course, a big problem for running RCTs. If you think that the outcome of a coin flip is meaningful rather than meaningless, you can’t use it to produce two equivalent groups, and you can’t study the impact of doing something to one group and not the other. You can only run a ZCT—a Zeus controlled trial.
Food for Thought.
🤑 Seems like a great idea, no?
🧠 Recent research has been challenging the classical theory that ‘body parts are represented in the brain’s cortex in a topographical map’ - it seems like our brain is much more flexibel than we use to believe. Very interesting in the context of thinking of neuroscience as ‘pre-paradigmatic’ - my (uninformed) guess would be that, as methods become more advanced, researcher will find even more heterogeneity and we will completely move away from a theory of clear cut boundaries of brain functionalities (which arose to some kind of oversimplification due to lack of information).
🇺🇸 Biden & Trump are both over 75 - while that doesn’t make them incapable per se, they are for sure not immune to cognitive decline. Should there be an age limit for presidents?
Random Stuff.
⏰ Maybe it’s time for humans to learn to communicate efficiently?
🏃♂️ Somehow I am always mesmerized by aesthetic data visualisations - really enjoyed this entertainning short data viz story about preparing to run a marathon.
⛷️ Speaking from personal experience now, I can tell that Americans are really into sports - both actively and passively (which makes me even more surprised about the obesity pandemic). One thing I found surprising though is that more and more people are going skiing in the U.S. - considering that we are faced with less snow and increasingly expensive ticket prices, this seems rather counterintuitive to me. Is it just that skiing is becoming more trendy?
Personal Update.
Had some fun weeks exploring Boston - I went to a drum and bass concert in an Irish pub, visited the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum (I can recommend), had some truly American pizza (aka lots of toppings) in one of Boston’s most famous pizza places and went to the local Women in Data Science conference.
Oh and yes I also did do some work….
Can you believed it - I queued with my bicycle to cross a street! Almost felt like I am back in Copenhagen!