I am happy with the major components of my day to day life, like:
- Career
- Finances
- Relationships
- Health
- How I spend time
Iâm aging and without something like SENS my health will decline and I will die. That is a major, ongoing problem / disaster in my life.
I wonder if you might have more immediately actionable problems than that, that might be a better immediate focus for your time and energy. I would guess that that is the case - that there are such more actionable problems. So then focusing on the SENS stuff would be an error. Note that this guess of mine doesnât necessarily contradict the idea that you should spend a bunch of time on something like SENS - but there might be an order involved where itâs like, you work on some other stuff first and then on something like SENS. Just some thoughts.
Is the fact of living during a time period where certain important problems have not been solved, where certain knowledge has not yet been created, best conceived of as a âdisasterâ?
Note that I would like for death to be solved very much. I would also like to try stuff like living on the moon (seriously, that would be cool!). But I think itâs still possible to live a good, meaningful, fulfilling life even if those particular things donât come to fruition within my lifetime. I think some people have managed to live meaningful lives even though they lived in worse times and circumstances than todayâŚstuff that prevents or interferes with the activities of living a meaningful life (such as learning things effectively, being rational, being able to look at things objectively) seems like a major disaster/threat/problem. But not having solved some technological/medical problem, no matter how important, doesnât quite seem like the same sort/type/class of problem to me.
I do. I would not classify them as major, ongoing problems / disasters though.
Right. I donât know what to do about the SENS problem anyway. So Iâm not doing much about it and spending most of my time on other things.
I think so. Death is a disaster. There are worse things than death, but death is pretty bad.
Lack of a good, meaningful, fulfilling life is a disaster, just not the only one. I think itâs possible to avoid that particular disaster while nevertheless suffering from other disasters.
Trying stuff like living on the moon would be cool.
Dying is a primary cause of not being able to try stuff like living on the moon. I donât know if itâll be super safe and reasonably affordable to live on the moon in 50 years or 500 years. Either way, without SENS Iâll almost certainly miss the opportunity. With SENS thereâs a good chance I wonât miss it.
For example, one could have a good, meaningful, fulfilling life that also includes a nasty divorce.
Do you think you could meaningfully improve your ability to do things like judge the merits of different proposals/organizations/research projects for solving aging?
Yes. However I have doubts about planning a project to do that, such as:
- Itâs not the kind of project Iâve enjoyed or been successful at in the past
- It doesnât sound like a fun, interesting project now
- Thereâd have to be >0 organizations where my help could make a meaningful difference in solving aging and my guess is there are currently 0
IMHO it seems like thereâs some kind of issue/problem/tension/contradiction if you think that the fact that you are aging is a disaster but you donât think being able to better judge proposals for solving it sounds âfunâ or âinterestingâ.
It makes me wonder if either you donât actually think itâs a disaster, or if maybe youâre super pessimistic about actually being able to successfully improve your ability to judge proposals.
Have you thoroughly looked at the various biotech companies that are working on aging, including some that are expressly inspired by SENS, particularly in senolytics?
That is one area where better ability to judge anti aging proposals could be beneficial btwâŚlike there is a very rapidly growing anti aging space and a bunch of potential opportunities for profit if you know what the hell youâre talking about. Could be pretty fun and interesting if youâre into it, IMHOâŚ
There is also the possibility of taking on a more entrepreneurial role ⌠like creating an organization if no adequate ones exist. It would still be important to judge what the best strategy to pursue is when doing that, of courseâŚand to even judge what the actual situation was and whether there were no adequate organizations existing, youâd need good judgment for figuring out what reasonable anti-aging proposals/strategies were ⌠so the judgment issue comes into play no matter what
You might not even have the judgment to figure that out reliably. Like, if you have a big potential to improve your ability to judge this kind of stuff, that implies that your existing judgment might not be very good or reliable ⌠which is actually a reason for optimism, cuz maybe the situation isnât as dire as you think it is! (And if it actually turns out to be pretty bad, when reanalyzing the situation after youâre better able to judge such issues, youâll also be in a better position from which to make potential improvementsâŚ)
I think Iâm pessimistic about succeeding at a project designed to improve my judgement.
However, Iâm optimistic about improving my judgement as a side-effect of doing something else I like.
For example, suppose I wanted to sell IT services to the biotech industry. Iâd be optimistic about my ability to succeed at selling IT services to the biotech industry. And Iâd be optimistic that as a side effect of working with biotech industry companies in an IT role, my ability to judge projects/proposals/organizations working on aging would improve.
What I like seems kinda arbitrary and whimmy when I analyze it explicitly.
But I seem to have pretty good success when I am sensitive to and just go with what I like and try to make the best of it, rather than decide what I âought toâ like and pursue that.
If you just try to make yourself do something you donât like or are not interested in, then thatâs generally not gonna go well. You actually have to change your ideas about it. This can involve trying it out a bit and thinking about it as you go, but just trying to âpower throughâ with willpower isnât gonna be sustainable generally.
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You omitted any analysis of how well CF replies in general, or in this thread, do on the three criteria you gave. Youâve implied that it goes without saying that CF is bad at these three points, which is false. CF excels at 2 of the 3 and is mixed and above average on 1. So your explanation of whatâs going on is wrong. And you misleadingly opened your veiled disagreement with me with âyesâ. You also indirectly attacked the forum youâre posting on and tried to make me look bad socially.
Are Bidenâs Actions on Ports Making the Supply Chain Problem Worse? Recently, Joe Biden announced that he would address the mess at the Port of Los Angeles by moving it to 24 hours 7 days a week activity. This sounds like it makes sense, as it means more time to load and unload. But thereâs something snarling the ports: empty shipping containers which are forty foot long steel structures that require warehouse space if they arenât being used to move things. And the increased unloading is causing more empty shipping containers to take all available space, and now even pile up such that firms have to put them in residential areas.
This problem is weird, and it shouldnât be happening. Large ships, which usually bring full containers to the U.S. and empties back to Asia, are no longer bringing the empties back. And itâs not clear why.
This problem is certainly occurring in other ports, like Tacoma. Phillip Sanfield, an official at the Port of LA, told me that yes, âIndeed, we are swamped.â And he didnât have any guesses as to why. âI donât have any insights into why shipping lines are refusing to pick up empties,â Sanfield added.
Presumably the thing to do is figure out who is making the decisions about the empties and ask them. Iâm guessing itâs either ship captains, their shipping company bosses on land somewhere, or politicians telling them what to do.
Stoller (the guy I quoted) doesnât know whatâs going on.
I think I misunderstood the previous information:
the pileup of containers must first be fetched out of the port, so there is space to unload more from ships
I thought they needed more truckers to show up and take stuff out of the port. But now I think they were referring to empty shipping containers which need to be taken away by ships not trucks.
Regardless, more shifts by dock workers to do more unloading wonât fix this. Biden is not helping with the actual issue and may make it worse. Or he may just waste money as dock workers sit around idle in the night and collect bonus pay. Bidenâs order is like âdo your job; make it workâ with no thought to how things work or what the problem is.