If the M-Prize had been to rejuvenate a mouse or simply to stop aging for a fixed and appreciable period of time, say 4 months, I think it unlikely that there would have been many takers, and more unlikely still that there would be any winners.

For such “incentivizing” prizes to work, the theoretical problems generally have to be largely or completely overcome, and the requisite expertise has to be widespread or reasonably easily achievable. So, for example, an X-Prize to teleport a 1 gram integrated circuit (or other complex structure) over a distance of, say, 15 feet, or an X-Prize to demonstrate a working “molecular assembler” aren’t very likely to be successful. — Mike Darwin

I am sick and tired of hearing people describing the crash of ’08 as a “black swan” event.

The U.S. economy had two bubbles, the dot-com bubble of the late 90′s and the housing bubble during the oughts. Both bubbles were obviously fake growth, as are all bubbles, and a crash was inevitable. There was nothing “black swan” about the crash of ’08. It was entirely predictable and inevitable.

How would you structure an X-prize for cryonics? I’ve heard people suggest that the feat be something like reviving a small mammal from vitrification. That sounds good, unless you understand what’s involved. An X-Prize for the longest lived mouse, or for achieving “space” flight privately, are in a completely different class than recovering a rat from -130 deg C. Why? Because the fundamental theoretical and technical barriers to spaceflight were solved over 40 years ago. Similarly, the lifespan of mammals has been manipulated with some success since the 1930s. Ask for incremental advances in these two areas and you are likely to get them.

There is also the hard reality that virtually all of the expertise in solid organ cryopreservation now resides in a building in Fontana, CA. That is a barking mad state of affairs! I’ve seen the technology required to achieve the modest level of success in this area to date, and it is enormously complex, “arty” and daunting. Just mastering the various models (such as small animal organ transplantation) is a black art. This is true of both spaceflight and gerontology, as well. The difference is that by comparison to solid organ cryopreservation, these very hard to master and “art-intensive” technologies are well distributed. Because rocketry is so useful for warfare, nation-states have kept the expertise viable – and the advent of communications and weather satellites has helped, as well. Almost every good gerontology lab in terms of rodent liespan work can trace its pedigree back to Roy Walford at UCLA. It is a high art to do lifespan experiments because so much can go wrong. The US, and other governments have spent a lot of money on aging and they will likely continue to do so. That’s why these other labs exist.

Leaving cryonics out of it, organ cryopreservation has become completely disenfranchised and the way the remaining outpost is structured is 100% not conducive to that changing. One of the great and powerful things about academia is its relative openness, and its strong incentive for teaching, training and mentoring. I’ve met some of the finest minds in critical care medicine, and I can tell you that they are all very much aware they are going to retire someday. They inhabit a culture where it is incumbent upon them to teach others and to mentor others to continue their work; and even to help found centers of study elsewhere in the world. A culture of secrecy and presumed immortality is not conducive to the dissemination of ideas. If you look at history of any scientific advance or revolution, it becomes apparent that different intellectual loci are essential to progress. Each institution inevitably develops its own culture and that culture will invariably limit its creativity. There are no exceptions to this.

Reading FUTURE BABBLE made me reflect on the singular lack of prophetic ability of my good and long-time friend Greg Fahy. Greg has been reassuring us that vitrification is “just around the corner” for at least 20 years now! It’s not Greg’s fault that it hasn’t happened yet; but he does have to take responsibility for being a lousy prophet. And more importantly, we have to stop believing him. I mean, what’s up with us that we keep buying into the prophecies of a guy who has a 100% track record of failure as technological forecaster? And we are not talking about an n of 1 here, either!

As far as a cryonics X-Prize goes, were the knowledge and skill base there, the ideal goal, IMHO, would be to demonstrate consistent recovery of integrated EEG activity in a mammalian brain (excluding rats and mice) following stable cryopreservation (i.e., cooling to and storage at -100 deg C for at least 7-days). That’s the ideal. Next best is Kenneth Hayworth’s Brain Preservation Technology Prize. The problems with scaling up brain fixation and room temperature vitrification (polymer embedding) are very different than the problems of scaling up cryopreservation from tissue culture to whole organs. I’m not sure I agree with Ken’s estimate of “absolute certainty” that it is possible to adequately fix and RT vitrify a human brain. But, it IS more of a technical problem than a theoretical one when compared to scaling up organ cryopreservation from tiny volumes of tissue to whole organs.

Ironically, where organ vitrification stands (or should I say rests?) right now is also due largely to a series of technical problems: cryoprotectant toxicity, cryoprotectant equilibration, viscoelastic injury, and fracturing. That’s four really serious and daunting technical problems. Nevertheless, it is my hunch that were the research more disseminated and being worked on by a broader cross section of minds (and institutional cultures), organ cryopreservation would be a done deal – if not now, then within the decade. But alas, that isn’t the case.

Fixation is looking better and better ;-0! I wish Ken luck and godspeed. — Mike Darwin

A few weeks ago I attended a lecture at The Old Operating Theatre in London. It is the oldest operating “room” now in existence and was created at St. Thomas’ Hospital in 1822. A large group of students from outside London was present (14-16 year olds) and, as the lecturer knew I was present, I was sometimes asked for commentary. One of the issues discussed was trephination, and that led the lecturer to inquire about Congresswoman Gabriel Giffords, who had been shot in the head some weeks previously. I noted that despite its compelling logic, and despite excellent performance in early, small trials, decompressive craniectomy, wherein a large portion of the skull is removed to accommodate cerebral swelling, had recently been demonstrated not to be effective in improving either survival or neurological outcome in a large, prospective, randomized clinical trial with the clever acronym of TOPHAT. After the lecture, a group of students wanted to talk with me about how it was possible that so many useless, disgusting and clearly harmful treatments had predominated in medicine and surgery for so long, for centuries, in fact? How was this POSSIBLE, they wanted to know?

I told them that one good way to understand this was to look at politics. Politics is usually seen as authoritarian, and organized from the top down. But in fact, in both the UK and the US, politicians mostly get their start from the bottom up. People just don’t start paying attention to them until they get to near the top tier. Most politicians start out small and begin running for office with no large scale support, beyond a party endorsement, which is pretty easy to get… The important point about their being local is that the people who elect them will have a lot of opportunity to MEASURE their effectiveness and to MEASURE the effectiveness of their specific decisions. BUT THEY DON’T. If a politician, great or small, advocates that a tax be levied or removed, that a law be enacted, or that any other measure be taken, there is no systematic and rigorous SCIENTIFIC evaluation of the outcome. In other words, did it work? How well did it work? If not, why not, and what were the consequences? Since this is never done in politics, the issues are decided on the basis of ideologies, opinions, bullying, appeal to emotions, and clever rhetoric uninformed by facts.

A consequence of this is that decision making goes back and forth like the tide in the Thames: conservatives, labour, conservatives, labour, until the system becomes so dysfunctional that another, new kind of nutter is minted and empowered. At no point are the DECISIONS examined by scientific means and their practitioners held accountable. And, the funny thing is, no one thinks this is at all unusual. It’s just the way politics is, and people even say, “Well that’s politics!” with exasperation and resignation. That’s how it was in medicine and still is, to a surprising extent today. Semmelweiss, Hunter, Koch, Pasteur – these men all helped to provide a more scientific foundation for medicine. However the advent of systematic scientific medicine, so called Evidence Based Medicine, is only about 15 years old!

One reason you might benefit from reading FUTURE BABBLE is that Gardner answers an even more fundamental question than the one about why we are hierarchical, and that is why are we such suckers for people who obviously can’t predict anything???? [Actually, I suspect the answer to that questions overlaps with the answer to the question of why we are so hierarchical.] The answer to that question is that it is in large measure a function of the way our brains are configured as a result of being evolved to function in an environment that is radically different from the one we currently inhabit. We are configured to see patterns where none exist and we have a strong survival-linked incentive to believe we can be sure, or at least less uncertain, about the future. Those are very likely biological realities that will be difficult to work around.

Finally, I largely agree with your observations about hunter-gatherer societies and authoritarianism. A book you might really enjoy reading that examines this in detail is CRAZY HORSE AND CUSTER: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors by Stephen Ambrose. Ambrose makes a pretty convincing case that the primary reason for the conquest of the Amerindians by the Americans was their inability to understand, let alone embrace, hierarchical social structure. — Mike Darwin

Clearly we need to try something radically different: When you have a really hard problem, ask everyone to help you try to solve it.* I’d like to see cryonics organizations develop an open innovation model, perhaps based on the X Prizes, to provide the incentive for other people to spend their own money and employ their own minds on well posed technical goals related to cryonics and applicable to our immediate needs. According to the experience of the X Prizes, a $10 million prize leads the contestants to spend on the order of $100 million of their own money in developing new technologies to solve the engineering challenge!

Moreover, we may already have good contracts within the X Prize foundation to help us. One well known cryonicist sits on the X Prize Foundation’s board of trustees, and possibly more if another famous inventor there follows through with his interest in cryonics by signing up (based on confidential information I’ve received about the second fellow):

http://www.xprize.org/about/board-of-trustees

Incentive prizes have the potential to offer the cryonics movement the benefit of far more resources than we could acquire ourselves. We have free money just sitting there on the table. Why don’t we try to pick it up and improve our chances for survival?

*The Japanese government should consider an incentive prize to help it deal with its nuclear disaster.

The War on Cancer A Progress Report for Skeptics
http://www.csicop.org/si/show/war_on_cancer_a_progress_report_for_skeptics/

But you can’t check your predictions unless you write them down, indeed…

I’ve spent a great deal of time over the last year recording my own predictions: http://predictionbook.com/users/gwern At last count, I had around 900 registered and 202 closed/judged.

I’ve found it a valuable exercise in teaching me the truth of Roy Amara’s saying: “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.”

I think the more important and informative question is why do men not realize the inherently hierarchical structure of their pack animal species?

We formally recognize how dominance hierarchies mold and influence the behavior of other animal species. Why do we not discuss how the dominance hierarchy decides for us what things are worthy of discussion?

I discuss such things, but I am not at the top, and the top does not disseminate my opinions. Thus I am discredited, at least by those who value only opinions disseminated by those at the top, which is to say 99.99 percent of all humans.

Drs Somit and Petersen discovered this as well when they covered these same topics in their book DOMINANCE, DEMOCRACY AND DARWINISM. One of them was quoted as being disappointed that their book was ignored. But as a logical extension of their theories, it should have been ignored, and it was.

I recently viewed a video from about 30 years ago of some New Guinea tribes that met white men for the first time. Up to that time they have lived only a simple forest, stone age existence. It was interesting to see that the near non-existence of a social hierarchy. I think that larger the society, the stronger the social hierarchy.You can see this also in the San/Bushmen societies of Africa–the near lack of social hierarchy. In fact in their small tribes, the people actively fight against the ascendance of people to the top. One westerner social scientist saw a concrete example of this when, to thank them for helping him in his studies of them, he bought them a large steer for a farewell feast. The tribespeople disparaged the worth of the steer, when in fact it was a huge bonanza. But in their hierarchy hatred, they resisted the rise of some to the top of the hierarchy, hence the insults about his steer.

In modern society we have accepted, unknowingly, societal complexity and its positive rewards (technology via specialization), and also received the negative rewards of an out of control societal elite due to a runaway hierarchy.