Vital Factors
- This is my term for a particular kind of nonlinear causal system. I think it's a pretty good name but if you know of an established term for this, lmk!
- My prime example comes from something regenerative medicine researcher Aubrey de Grey said in a talk in... 2014.
- (to be clear: I'm not really opinionated about whether this model is accurate in relation to life-extension; it remains a decent hypothetical case study if you can imagine a world in which it's accurate)
- Although it doesn't really account for complexity, including interactions between the factors. The actual model might, but this rendition doesn't.
- I'm also going to present the model as if AdG is very confident in it, and I am not now certain that was true at the time, let alone still true.
- Actually, I did a little research & it looks like he now has a model he calls the "seven deadly things"
- At any rate, here's how I recall the gist of what he said:
- > We've identified these 9 deadly things, all of which must be addressed in order for a person to not age & die. If any one factor were completely addressed, then it wouldn't affect things much at all, because the other 8 would kill the person at about the same time.
- > And if 5/9 factors were completely addressed, then maybe on average, there'd be a couple month increase in life expectancy, and maybe a few specific diseases would be less common, but ultimately the other 4 factors would still have a huge effect.
- > Even with 8/9 factors completely addressed, life might extend a couple of years, but the 1 remaining factor would still be enough to kill everybody within a couple of years of when they would usually die. Maybe some rare cases would live to 120 because of having already a favorable situation in relation to the missing factor. But for most people it still wouldn't make much difference.
- > But! If you can get all 9 factors! Suddenly that last factor is the tipping point and now people can live forever.
- > This, by the way, is part of why it's hard to get funding to work on this project—there's little gradual benefit from the work that we would do.
- Lots of situations are not like this. As I write this on March 13th, 2020, there are about 150k confirmed covid19 cases worldwide. Here, a tiny decrease in the exponential spreading rate R can result in a million people not getting infected.
- However, I was recently thinking about another challenge where it seems possible to me that something like this might apply:
- human collaboration based in & consistent fundamental samesidedness
- I need to go to bed though. Maybe sometime soon I'll write up my perspective on how it's relevant. Feel free to ask me about it on twitter
- In the meantime, I'll give you a hint that this piece is relevant:
- Related concepts:
- "overdetermined"
- another way to express the original case study is that it's overdetermined that (in the absence of something else killing them sooner) most humans die by the age of 100 and usually sooner
- "bottlenecks"
- similar because the nature of bottlenecks is that you always have one. if you fix your bottleneck, one will emerge somewhere else. similarly, improvements in cardiac results for elderly patients mostly mean they die of cancer soon after instead
- though if a bottleneck is x, it sort of feels like this is 1/x...
- swiss cheese model, though maybe upside down
- search my facebook for where I tried asking if there was a name for this, a few years ago
- pull in notes from journal here (this link accessible only to me)