Thats very far from reality, I presume you don't know many old people or speak to them about their ailments?
So we're making progress. But we don't see it, because that becomes the new normal, and we see all these remaining things that cause problems for old people.
But that's just creatively selecting the data that supports the point. You can do that with everything else. We solved a lot of things "in the lab" or "in mice".
Did you know that we conquered Alzheimer's? It's safe to say I mean in countries like Guinea-Bissau, Somalia or Chad with under 100 cases per 100k people.
TB is weird. We do indeed know how to actively manage it (e.g. screen people regularly and treat detected cases), but countries like the US don’t do that. Nonetheless TB does not cause much disease in the US.
Every time I’ve tried to figure out why this is, I’ve come to the tentative conclusion that no one really knows. Maybe it’s the general lack of malnutrition?
But that's not because we got better at treating hookworm or black lung. The big ideas there are "wear shoes" and "don't work as a miner". You don't have to treat a problem you never have.
(Wikipedia: "There is no cure or discovered treatments for pneumoconiosis.")
What's your definition of "conquered"? In the US breast cancer is the most common type of cancer, and together with lung cancers account for ~500k cases each year. 100k of those people will die within 5 years.
Now we created new issues to replace the old. Microplastic, PFAS, antibiotic resistance, obesity, etc.
And my knees want to have a word with your assessment :).
If only it actually worked that way instead of being code for favoritism for a few demographic groups, ignoring many other people who are excluded, and actively discriminating against straight white men.
Scott Adams is right to challenge it.
Edit: Disney exec admits on hidden camera "Certainly, there have been times where, 'there's no way we're hiring a white male for this'"
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/watch-disney-exec-...
I'm not 100% on the reasons. Seems like he simply has a lot of hubris.
[1] https://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/03/fos...
That's another misrepresentation. In that link he says "To be fair, there’s still plenty of evidence for evolution."
It sounds like he's a skeptic who demands proof of the things we're not supposed to question. That's a good thing.
But some people don't like it and misrepresent his words to try to discredit him.
Edit: I agree that Adams is not a scientist and doesn't understand how science works. That article gets an F in my book. Nonetheless, suggesting that asking questions is the same as claiming something "isn't real" is, itself, an anti-scientific view.
I don't know about fossils, but a lot of current scientific thinking probably is still wrong. We recently had a big scientific revolution when genetic sequencing revealed that much of the thinking at that time was wrong.
Also, it's absurd to interpret his comedic exaggerations literally.
...
> But personally, I’m cautious about any theory that keeps the same conclusion regardless of how many times the evidence for it changes. There was a time when the seemingly straight line of fossil evidence was the primary foundation for the theory. Now it seems that that straight line was like Little Billy from Family Circus finding his way home from the playground
This where he's simply wrong and misunderstands what paleontologists and biology experts have always said.
No serious expert in the field has dug up an australopithecus specimen and said "See, here is my great grandmother!". It's absurd to think that. Adams has likely seen the march of progress and thought "Oh, this is what the experts think happened". But that's simply not true and never has been.
Evolution simply posits gradual change over generations. A result of that is a messy family tree with a lot of dead "branches".
But further, the concept of "species" has always been a messy one. A prime example of this is the fact that Neanderthals breed with the Denisovans and some of their offspring have survived to today. 2 different species closely related enough that they could have viable offspring. That makes for a messy tree.
This is an obvious fact to any biologist and isn't the least bit outside of what the theory of evolution predicts. Again, the only real prediction of evolution is that speciation happens gradually as a result of changes in generations. It doesn't predict "straight lines" like Adams asserts, it never has. Nor does it exclude the possibility for the same features to evolve multiple times. It never has.
So, when he goes out of his way to write an article "fossils are bullshit" what exactly do you think he's trying to communicate? He doesn't outright deny evolution is a thing, but he does explicitly voice doubts about evolution being a solid theory.
Now, that doesn't mean that we aren't constantly learning new things from new fossils. That's the nature of science. Adams being concerned that new data updates a theory is a severe misunderstanding of exactly how scientific research works.
> Are those really developed countries? A decent free public school education is a requirement for a nation to be considered developed.
Here's some data:
In 2025 1, 2,755 measles cases (2,429 confirmed, 326 probable)
and 0 rubella cases have been reported in Canada. [0]
Education in Canada is for the most part provided publicly,
funded and overseen by federal, provincial, and local
governments. [1]
Medicare is a term that refers to Canada's
publicly funded health care system.
Instead of having a single national plan, we have 13
provincial and territorial health care insurance plans.
Under this system, all Canadian residents have
reasonable access to medically necessary hospital and
physician services without paying out-of-pocket. [2]
[0] https://health-infobase.canada.ca/measles-rubella/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Canada
[2] https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/canada-healt...
You are welcome.
PrEP just happens to actually work here, but I guess condoms could too. But historically that's not gonna happen.
It's probably not worth the effort, though. But we can, and do, eradicate diseases via preventative mechanisms. Which is astounding.
But we have made very little progress in staving off degenerative-type diseases. Even the primary degenerative disease you mention, knee failure, we cure largely with a wholesale replacement. That obviously isn't applicable to organs we can't just swap out.
The sum of all causes of death will very likely continue to be 100%...
If not, we'll have a whole lot of new problems.
The 5 year survival rate for localized (early stage) breast cancer is 99%
Did we remove it as a cause of death? No. But the prognosis is much less dire by now than it was even a few decades ago.
Very few causes are ever completely "conquered", they just move down in relative relevance.
I fully acknowledge that we've made large strides in understanding and treating breast cancer, but in most cases, once it spreads it's still "game over", and so it is still an immensely fearful experience for people to go through. Contrast that with, for example, HIV. 35 years ago it was probably the scariest disease there was, considered a guaranteed death sentence. Now it is largely preventable with PrEP, and treatments are so good that it is a manageable condition with lifespans on par with HIV-negative people for most of those who diligently follow their treatments.
We also need to think about quality of life, which tends to go way down after you're diagnosed with one of these diseases
Prevention and delay is significantly better than management or even curing
That said prostate cancer is most of the time not a big deal. Getting prostate cancer will still probably the most dangerous thing that ever happens to you (how many single events have a 5%+ mortality rate? besides birth) and should be treated incredibly seriously, but the odds are still good you'll be fine.
That stands in stark contrast to lung cancer, which has a median survival time of ~15 months. Pancreatic cancer usually kills you in less than a year. Colon cancer is better, but still only ~6 years. Leukemia and Lymphoma can occur in middle age or even in early childhood, and rob an entire lifetime.
Not all of the solutions can be called "cures" but a solution nonetheless is better than nothing and calling it "old age, shit out of luck."
It takes a lot.
Reducing one's cancer risk is well within the power of any person. But "People should just have more willpower" is an ineffectual public policy.
Currently it's still somewhat accepted to vape inside of public buildings. Which, IMHO, is insane
Why though?
I'm not arguing for or against vaping, just stating that the negative health effects from vaping appear to be rather minor. In it's pure form its just nicotine and propylene glycol. Nicotine is well studied and similar to caffeine in harm (outside the addiction) and PG is used in medical inhalers (along with almost everything else, seriously its used in food and cosmetics everywhere).
Well because second hand smoke is so obvious and real and second hand vape... I mean... I'm not convinced it even exists. I see the vapor for about 2 seconds then it's gone. I can sniff as hard as I want, I'm not smelling anything.
But smoking? Woof. I could tell someone smoked 2 hours ago from 10 feet away. My fingers used to smell like ash 24/7. Even walking past someone 20 feet away, outside, in the wind, you can clearly smell cigarette smoke.
So I don't think it is the same.
Look at the cultural attitudes towards smoking pot. Often the same cities/governments/people what were fining cigarette smoking out of existence suddenly have a hands-off attitude towards pot.
In NYC its illegal to smoke or drink in parks, but you can walk through a park reeking of pot and see cops writing tickets to the 2 kids who hid their beer too poorly.
You're right - it might actually be worse, but is still not well studied.
So what you actually meant was "it's definitely not as bad as cigarettes" given your lack of evidence despite the link ? Or what, this makes no sense
Anecdote lines up with actual data from GOOG: In a three-year period, the NYPD issued a total of 440 tickets for public smoking violations.
vs
In the period between January and March of this year, the NYPD wrote over 7,000 tickets for public drinking. This represents a significant increase compared to the same period in 2022, with roughly 5,000 more tickets issued.
I really dislike the smell of cannabis and can count with the fingers of one hand how often I vape it per year, so I am not exactly an advocate, but comparing it with tobacco is silly.
Have an edible, do whatever you want in your own home, enjoy. But don't rationalize the laissez faire attitude towards one type of secondhand smoke over another.
Also, second hand smoke where? Do you often have people smoking indoors with you?
Look, I was a Tobacco smoker, and the level of addiction you have with Tobacco is on another level.
I was smoking easily 20 cigs a day. I don't know anyone, even the most stoner of stoners, who smokes 20 joints a day. That doesn't even sound, like, logistically possible.
Obviously smoking anything is bad, but getting an order of magnitude or more less smoke HAS to be a big win.
Also nicotine. Nicotine even by itself is a problem. Don't listen to Zyn bros, nicotine is in fact evil and it does destroy your cardiovascular system over time.
There are a couple reasons to believe that aging is malleable.
One is that we know how to de-age human cells using the same factors that fertilized oocytes use to de-age the underlying egg cell (typically many decades in age). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_pluripotent_stem_cell
The second is that nature has examples of biological immortality. Planaria are a fascinating one as they have among the trashiest, most mutated genome on the planet. They're even polypoid, where they have multiple sets of chromosomes, but they're simultaneously the best regenerators on the planet. Despite having a discrete nervous system and centralized brain, you can slice a planaria into hundreds of pieces, and each of those will regenerate into a full, functional adult. They don't age, they don't get cancer. The issue is that we have no idea how this happens. So there is still a lot for us to learn about the fundamentals of aging and regeneration overall.
not dominant if mean life expectancy is < 40. Aging only has an impact after age 55.
(and if 55 seems young, you have a cushy life)
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/acel.70103
https://longevity.technology/news/human-trial-finds-therapeu...
Two, ethics,
Three, it took something like 10K young people per old person to make it work, and it was at best a proof of concept
Four, ethics
Thus last I checked statins were only proven to prevent heart attacks in males under the age of 65 who have already had a heart attack. That is a large enough group to show results, and their change of heart attacks is known to be higher than normal so you don't have to study as well. Does this really mean other people should take statins, and if so who - hard to know. Our best evidence after years of study is that high cholesterol increases your odds of a heart attack, but a few people live to their 80s with high cholestrol without ever having a heart attack and nobody really knows why. (I haven't looked at the above in about 10 years so I might not know about some more recent science) We would like better study about statins and quality of life, but those are really expensive, and that is depsite statins being cheap and a lot of people willing to take part in a study.
Recently I had to get my late father's paperwork in order and this meant going through lots of medical stuff. There was also paperwork regarding my mum, it was IPF that got her.
I also had to take a sack full of pills down to the chemist to get disposed of. This is in the UK where we have the NHS. The NHS would prefer to have people in good health whereas I suspect that the private healthcare system of the USA prefers to have people in bad health and medically dependent. It is just a different business model.
What surprised me about the NHS paperwork was how much of it was focused on lifestyle choices, so that means living a physically active life and eating certain foods.
My dad did the doctor visits and the pills but he did not do the lifestyle recommendations. He would behave like a tired toddler if you put fruit and vegetables on his plate. He was also heavily car dependent, as if any other mode of transport was not 'manly' enough for him. We had concerns for other road users with his driving but we could not get him to take the train, never mind walk as far as the nearest shop, five minutes away.
Alcohol was another cause for concern. Although never drunk, he would drink every day. He would have it with his greasy food, thinking he was eating like a king.
I know diet and nutrition is controversial, however, the NHS were wanting him to eat five portions of fruit and vegetables a day, and there were forms so that he could fill in how many grains, nuts, seeds, potatoes, vegetables and pieces of fruit he was eating. He wasn't eating any of those things, he was on the saturated fats, which invariably come from animal products. There were no checkboxes on the form for meat, cheese or processed foods, which is no surprise since there is no fibre in any of this stuff. There aren't any antioxidants either.
The NHS prefers lifestyle interventions rather than pills. This varies by doctor, but, this is the general idea.
Age related diseases are not due to age, in this day and age. They are down to poor lifestyle choices, cancer and all. Forget genetics too, sure, some people win the lottery, and others lose the cancer lottery. But the more you know then the more you realise that no amount of pills, procedures and testing will spare anyone from blocked arteries due to saturated fats with side portions of bad cholesterol.
It is the same with alcohol. If we treated pensioners as if they were under age, to ban them from obtaining alcohol, then there would be a lot of miserable pensioners but they would be living a lot longer. Same with processed food and animal products, if we banned pensioners from such things then they would be miserable but live out to be a hundred years old.
Face to face with my dad's NHS paperwork made me realise that I knew what I was reading all along. For decades we have known what gives you the non-communicable chronic diseases. We have also known that it is fibre and phytonutrients from whole foods that enable your body to protect itself against things such as inflammation.
Looking for cures is grift. There is no cure or treatment for those that spend hours a day consuming toxins whilst they pretend they are living like a king just because they are eating heavily marketed animal products that are sold as 'good for protein'. With health and longevity, you can't have your cake full of transfats and eat it.
I wish more people understood that. Medicine definitely has its place but if you don't put in the preventative work on your side it's a losing battle.
I know 80+ years old who go skying every single day in winter, still chop their own fire wood, &c. Meanwhile there are plenty of ~50 years old who are already in worse health/shape, eat like shit, sleep like shit, never exercise, complain about their bad backs and bad knees, bad digestion, &c.
Medicine is very good at keeping you alive, but if you want to keep a good quality of life there is nothing medicine can provide that is even remotely as good as being fit. And even if you lose the genetic lottery: medicine will be much more effective if you have a clean base, you better go to chemo with an extra 20kg of muscle rather than 20kg of fat, high blood pressure and diabetes
30 year olds don't get Alzheimer's no matter how unhealthy their diet and lifestyle is. There are things you can and should do to improve your odds, but overall old people are going to be less healthy than young people.
The government (or society, whatever) could reduce lifestyle diseases by closing the roads so that people do not drive, requiring jobs to be 50% physical, turning off electric lighting after 9pm, banning overly tasty packaged food, observing a sabbath, etc. Like that will ever happen. The studies are clear, so why don't we do this?
GLP-1 agonists are showing us that behavior has deeper roots than simple choice. People on these medications are able to choose the healthier choice without feeling something lacking, but when they are discontinued they typically return to old habits.
In the meantime, there have been successes at treating lifestyle diseases and giving people better, happier lives. I wish they could stop their behaviors, but I like that they have a chance to treat atrial fibrillation, coronary artery disease, etc.
The problem is it's not something you can pay someone to solve.
At least in Western society, if any of you have experienced this struggle with an older relative burning through resources to desperately cling to life you know that we seem to lack some fundamental ability to approach or handle this topic philosophically.
In no time I'll in the same boat. Secular society doesn't really have a great answer here.
My fear is that I will lose the decision-making agency quickly and unexpectedly and have my clear wishes disregarded for some stupid technical reason which would require someone to take professional or legal risk to fulfill them.
I've built a room in my house which is designed to be easily disconnected from the building HVAC such that I can safely discharge, and then automatically vent to outdoors, bottles of compressed gaseous nitrogen or helium.
For safety, the prep for discharge requires a few minutes of work, with hands and brain that are at least marginally nimble. I worry very much about the risk of waiting too long, or having a debilitating issue crop up unexpectedly (I am presently of sound mind and body, and not old).
We are afraid of death. That's stupid. Any life model that fails to account for death, is flawed in the extreme. I prefer mine, but I certainly would not impose it on others.
I treat a lot of old people, and IPF is at least a couple orders of magnitude rarer than the other conditions listed. Age does play a role because it shows up when people are older, but there is something else at play in it (autoimmune, genetics) that makes people hit the unlucky lottery.
I bring this up so that people reading this don't conflate normal aging related changes to the lungs with IPF. IPF is a horrible disease that kills the person in a few years (2-5 after diagnosis).
We're great at that.
Curing?
Horrible.
Which is a real problem seeing as how people want to spend as much money as possible for diminishing returns on lifespan.
[1]https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/false-alzheime...
Like Kirk said; let them die. They don’t want to care about themselves, neither do I.
Physics doesn’t care about any of us. Only we do. If we want better healthcare do the political work to make so we can put agency into better healthcare and less agency into Wall Street’s war against line go down we’ve been waging for generations.
So they do care, just not about you and me.
Sorry for the non-constructive comment. I guess the only constructive-ish thing is to recommend that if you've got elderly loved ones exhibiting short-term memory issues, get them tested ASAP. Then, get the "legal stuff" started right away (powers of attorney).
Two takeaways for me:
The things the medical industry will do to keep people "alive" are extraordinary, and expensive, and (in some cases) abuses of the concept of "living".
Moving to a sane jurisdiction where assisted suicide is legal is the only possible (but not guaranteed) strategy to approach this problem in a dignified way.
(OK, some people will argue that suicide is never dignified or moral or whatever, but I am not interested in their opinions about what I can do with my body in this situation, or really any others)
I believe they share the same underlying mechanisms (loss of neurons), though in different regions, and their cure is equivalent to immortality.
mattmaroon•1d ago