this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2024
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My information is about a decade out of date, for reasons which I will explain later because it is an interesting and semi related story. But I recall from the days that humanity+ magazine still posted blog articles that there were about seven processes in the human body that causes aging (don't ask me which seven or how to evaluate the research so take this all with a bit of salt). And I'd assume that all seven of them are important and need to be dealt with at the same time. Also there was interesting and effective life extension research done on mice with both low kcal (but that didn't research life quality) and blood transfusions, but I have no idea if this ever scales up to humans. A long time ago SSC did find a 'all those nootropics you take, how effective are they really according to the science?' site and iirc the only thing that really was effective (for being more productive/smart as that is the focus of LW) was caffeine, and some minor others but 90% of them didn't work (sadly I don't hve a link, but iirc this was based on actual science and not the normal SSC selfreports (which it did slightly match iirc but the self reports had a lot of 'I touched grass', 'I worked out', 'I took the meds my doc said I should take', and 'I slept a normal amount' things which also were effective nothing really groundbreaking seems there isn't an easy hack (which should loop back into the anti-aging thing which I assume there also isn't an easy hack, so Quikin is right, eat those veggies).
CW: one reference to transphobia, and a long rambling post about the blog part of the humanity+ magazine, and some public people related to that.
So there that is what I can recall and have glanced about the anti-aging stuff, now for the H+ magazine gossip (CW: reference of transphobia, of course). H+mag used to be a blog/magazine which regularly posted articles about all kinds of transhumanist subjects, from robotics to anti-aging to a bit 'woo' articles about greater humanity (don't get me wrong those articles were fine, I thought the 'woo' articles (and that is my phrasing, it wasn't as bad as I make it out to be, but it was a bit woo for a transhumanist magazine) were interesting and it fitted with the idea of H+ to be a humanist transhumanist organization. After all, we should all benefit from technological advances, and people should not be left behind. And then suddenly the constant trickle of H+ articles in my rss reader stopped. That confused me, esp as the last article (in my rss reader) was a imho pretty normal post from the (iirc) main guy behind the magazine/blog who said that we should make sure that everybody benefits from transhumanism and that we should be careful with rightwing people in the movement who don't want that. This article no longer exists (well the whole blog no longer exists, and the url is dead), it was deleted so quickly that the normal cache things like google or the wayback machine didn't index it, and the only reason I had seen it was because my rss reader had kept a local copy. After this the blog/mag basically was dead, there were a couple more articles posted but the amount went from several a week to one a month. I have no idea who pulled the plug, but it is pretty worrying, as apparently some of the C-suite of H+ are not that onboard with everybody sharing in the transhumanist future. (That Natasha Vita-More (ex-director) wrote an transphobic 'you cannot change gender/sex' thing somewhere 2018 (how can you be into transhumanism and think this? How can you want to live forever in such a way that you refuse to give your age, but be so weird about trans people. I'm not mad, I'm disappointed) is worrying. Ben Goertzel, who used to be big into robotics and AI latest book (in 2018 according to wikipedia) was about PSI (I'm sure he will be back to AI soon now that that is popular). So this is all pretty weird. Vita-More also follows a few d/acc accounts (which is one of those techno optimist offshoots from concurrency people) and various libertarian causes things. So what I think is what happened with h+ mag is that the right libertarians and the left humanist/socialist/etc in the transhumanist movement got into an early clash re the upcoming culture wars (iirc this was before the start of the online culture wars of 2014) and this split large parts of the movement apart and caused a more inward focus vs the broader popularization and optimism of the early 2010s. This idea is also slightly matched by the history timeline of transhumanism kept by the H+ people. (also note im not saying the H+ people are far right (while doing a quick skim I even saw Vita-More had spoken against the far right (on the subject of AI but still, being against the far right good (that she did it by platforming a steve bannon goon is bad however)), I'd think most of them are just californian ideologians/libertarians who don't want to be really bothered by the culture wars because they just want to live forever). But it is interesting how weird it all got, and how the hypewave of the 2010s seems to have died down re-anti aging. (Of course what is more likely is just that my sources into reading this all disappeared and I see that as the hype wave drying up, anyway talked about the H+mag blog stuff on reddit before but don't think I have ever talked about it here, so here is my long rambling post (I also did a lookup on what some of the visible people, most of it was silent after 2018, but it seems various things (like the H+mag facebook page (yes very retro)) are starting up again this year guess the hype is back!).Wasn’t Racheal Haywire involved with that?
Sorry doesn't ring a bell, Im pretty bad with names anyway.
Tis for the better!