Steve Hsu: prediction

Transcript context

…I see. Yeah.. Okay. So I guess it would make sense then that for example, with certain health risks, the thing that makes you more likely to get diabetes or heart disease today might be… I don't know what the pleiotropic effect of that could be. But maybe that's not that important one year from now. Let me point out that most of the diseases we care about now—not the rare ones, but the common ones—manifest when you're 50-60 years old. So there was never any evolutionary advantage of being super long-lived. There's even a debate about whether the grandparents being around to help raise the kids lifts the fitness of the family unit. But, most of the time in our evolutionary past, humans just died fairly early. So, many of these diseases would never have been optimized against evolution. But, we see them now because we live under such good conditions, we can regulate people over 80 or 90 years. Regarding the linearity and additivity point, I was going to make the analogy that– and I'm curious if this is valid– but when you're programming, one thing that's good practice is to have all the implementation details in separate function calls or separate programs or something, and then have your main loop of operation just be called different functions like, “Do this, do that”, so that you can easily comment stuff away or change arguments. This seemed very similar to that where by turning these names on and off, you can change what the next offering will be. And, you don't have to worry about actually implementing whatever the underlying mechanism is.…

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