Aging can be defeated, Aubrey de Grey

Image: Geoff Oliver Bugbee

There are two certainties in life, death and taxes. The chief scientist of the SENS Foundation, would like to edit that statement.

He asks if aging is a side effect of metabolism - which leads to damage - which leads to pathology. If so, could aging be an engineering problem? That's the fundamental question posed Aubrey de Grey this afternoon.

Regenerative medicine "seeks to restore a tissue or organ to its state before it suffered damage." While expressing suitable humility about the complexity of the challenge, he compares the body to a machine. Within ten years, he believes that proven therepeutic avenues will open that will add 30 years of healthy life to middle aged men and women.

As for why should we defeat aging. "It kills far more people than malaria. It's very, very bad for you."

Wayne

"Junior" at Cesar Millan show

Photo: Geoff Oliver Bugbee

"If you want to succeed, double your failure rate"

Photo: Geoff Oliver Bugbee

So a man who picked a number that ended in the number 48 wins the Spanish national lottery. Insisting before a press conference it wasn't mere luck, he was asked by the assembled media about how he knew. "For seven nights in row, I dreamt of the number seven, and seven times seven is 48."

Leonard Mlodinow began today's IdeaFestival session and his book, The Drunkard's Walk, with that anecdote. For the next hour he explains through one demonstration after another how our pattern-loving selves, our anchors and prior beliefs about what we've seen - or think we've seen - is a feature of a world in a state of nearly infinite possibility. We really are a frail people driven to make sense of the world - and sometimes to our detriment.

I know what you're thinking. But there are positives. Don't take failure to pitch that book idea or business plan to heart because it may say very little about you. There must be talent, yes, and timing - duh - plays a role. Quoting an IBM pioneer on probability, he says "if you want to succeed, double your failure rate." So be stubborn.

It raises the probablity of being lucky.

Wayne

Daniel Simons: It's what we know that just ain't so

The world isn't as it seems, experimental psychologist Daniel Simons says, and demonstrates through repeated short clips the problem isn't what we know, but what we know just ain't so.*

Beginning with an illustration drawn by Julian Beever - an IF alum, by the way - he makes the point about the power of illusion and about how we should call into question our own beliefs about what our eyes are telling us. 

The problem is compounded when our attention is drawn to a particular feature of the world.

He demonstrates this using the well known "gorilla" videos for which he is known, but after a number of people correctly guess that a gorilla has invaded the scene, Simons replays it to point out the other changes - blindingly obvious in retrospect - that have been missed by the smartypants in the audience. Updated "gorilla" videos can be found on the Web.

"Satisfaction of search" accounts, he adds, for the number of suits filed against radiologists. You're only aware of things you have noticed, not what you have missed. It's a simple and profound thought. And while a missed cancer diagnosis is tragic, noticing everything would be far more problematic. In fact, it's impossible, except, perhaps, for Dunning–Kruger graduates.

Beside being humbling, these limits on our cognition have real world implications. Juries tend to be very trusting about confident eyewitnesses, and confident eyewitnesses are often wrong. He proceeds to illustrate this from his own experience of being completely and hopelessly wrong about a vivid memory related to his interaction with graduate students. This is a human problem, but when they occur with public figures and are amplified by partisan point-making, for example, the tendency is to assume that the teller is either crazy or lying. Not helpful.

One consequence of trusting our intuition about what we've seen can be illustrated in the video posted here. About half the people approached in this test recognize, according to Simons and the test subjects' accounts, that they're giving direction to yet a second stranger, and still continue as if nothing has happened. What's up with that?

Wayne

* shout out to Will Rogers.

The other Wes Moore? Expectations matter

Image: Geoff Oliver Bugbee

Wes Moore's story began in circumstance and ends in understanding despite circumstance. In one compelling story after another, he points out that it might easily have been the other way around. 

Finding himself getting "caught up" in Baltimore following the death of his father, this future Rhodes Scholar began, before he was 10, began to decide what days he would skip school. His mother noticed. His mother was not amused.

"My mom was always assertive and creative with her punishments," he says, joking.

But military school? After numerous failed promises to straighten up, to do right thing, she one day tells him that he was off to military school "next week." And when the time came, thinking that she would drive around the block a few times, he said she "just kept on driving" and deposited him at a school in Pennsylvania deep in the woods. No joke. His attempted escape in the middle of the night using a map offered to him as part of an elaborate and painful prank was the beginning of understanding, and over time he accepted and used the opportunity - decent grades, permission to participate in athletics, command of a small group of fellow cadets.

The following year he declined the opportunity extended by his mother to come home.

Unknown to him the other Wes Moore - a father - found himself incarcerated for felony murder, having participated in a robbery that resulted in the death of an off-duty police officer, himself a new father of triplets. One decision, dozens of shattered lives. 

"We are not products of our environment, we are products of our expectations" this Wes Moore stresses. Someone, at some point, put those expectations in our minds "and we either live up to them, or live down to them. The only difference in my life was that there were people who were willing to hold on to my long dreams long enough for me to grow and to mature and to find out that they, too, were my dreams."

Questioned on stage by a perceptive Ellen McGirt, the Wes Moore sitting on stage confesses to not one, but two middle names, the spelling of which I will now butcher. They are "Watende," or "revenge will not be sought," and "Omare," meaning "the highest," deposited by his father and mother, respectively, because they could not agree on a single middle name. They believed.

Wayne