You Know You're In California When...

...you find yourself wondering, "What's that banging sound?" only to realize that the tectonic plates are shifting within a few miles of where you live.

I've lived in California since 1996, so I'm well aware that this locale, as lovely as it is, brings with it the whole "ground might open up and swallow you" thing. This is by far the most intense quake I've ever felt...looks like they've marked it as a 5.6 at this point.

So, yeah, I was a bit freaked out for a moment there. Sorry if this is the most inane thing I've ever posted, but now that the building isn't threatening to crush my head, I'm finding the post-analysis to be fairly fascinating. The location and magnitude data appeared online within only minutes of the quake, and probably even sooner than that on the radio.

Hopefully the rest of you Silicon Valley folks are okay.

"Visions of the Future" To Air In November

Visions of the Future, the BBC special hosted by physicist Michio Kaku will air as a three-part series starting on 5 November, 2007:

In this new three-part series, leading theoretical physicist and futurist Dr Michio Kaku explores the cutting edge science of today, tomorrow, and beyond. He argues that humankind is at a turning point in history. In this century, we are going to make the historic transition from the 'Age of Discovery' to the 'Age of Mastery', a period in which we will move from being passive observers of nature to its active choreographers. This will give us not only unparalleled possibilities but also great responsibilities.

I was interviewed for a portion of this special back in May -- at this point I honestly don't remember a whole lot about what I actually said, but I know I discussed life extension and (I think) the fact that technological innovation should lead to an increase in diversity, not a decrease. I've no clue how the editing is going to make it sound, though -- I guess the main thing I hope is that my enthusiasm for longevity medicine and for the proliferation of diversity comes through, and that my disapproval of "eugenics", etc., also comes through. (One question that seems to come up a lot is whether I think we're going to end up with a "world of genetic haves and have-nots", and the amount of inherent prejudice behind that question never ceases to astound me).

Seriousness aside for the moment, though: one funny thing (well, funny to me) that happened during the filming was that we all walked to a nearby park so that the camerapeople could get some footage of me sitting on a bench typing on a laptop. I figure they just wanted the footage for visual variety, but I found it amusing because I've never in my life gone to that park to work on the computer.

Overall, the description of the "Visions of the Future" series reminds me a lot of all those "Gee Whiz, What If This Happened?" speculative science shows I loved to watch as a youngster. That's one reason I thought it was a neat thing to participate in -- I remember watching an "invention" show called Beyond 2000 (lated renamed Beyond Tomorrow) over a period of several years, and I'm a bit of a "retro-future" enthusiast in that I love mining the Web and old basement boxes for magazine articles purporting to predict the Amazing Developments Just Around The Corner.

I've read and watched so much media of this sort that I've found it impossible to even consider getting "attached" to any particular vision of the future -- even though flying cars, jet packs, and houses made entirely of plastic figured big in American 1950s "futurism", there was still plenty of subtle and not-so-subtle variety in the overall future-speculative genre. And I've also seen enough years even in my own less-than-30 of them to realize how ridiculous trying to pinpoint "exact arrival dates" for any given technology is. "2000" has come and gone (remember when people used to append "2000" to everything, in an effort to make it sound cool and futuristic?) and a lot of things I imagine a lot of people were waiting for ended up becoming obsolete before they could be invented.

So, in short, I do understand and appreciate superlativity critiques. I think it's important for everyone to realize that while a person might be able to say, "Okay, I can imagine X and what it would take to build X, and here's when I think we'll have X on that basis", they can't go much further beyond the very short term in that extrapolation. One of the "retro-future" articles I recall reading a while back proposed a post-2000 world "entirely run by vaccuum tubes, with computers weighing no more than a few tons!" There's a huge element of uncertainty in science, and we don't always know what's going to be important, or what one given technology (along with the prevailing set of social conditions) is going to enable.

But -- I also figure that some degree of sweeping, superlative near-pantomime is part and parcel of the popularization of science. Some people might not end up giving the topics discussed on "future-speculative" programs a second thought, but others will undoubtedly be inspired to learn and study more. I know that such programs were a huge inspiration for me as a child. And most sensible people, I think, realize that utopia and apocalypse are equally unrealistic propositions -- but projecting forward our present-day dreams, wishes, hopes, and deep anxieties can still be a useful (and, dare I say, enjoyable) exercise. Just remember that there's a lot we can do now to help improve things in the world -- even in the absence of benevolent nanobot swarms.

Longevity Medicine Is Just More Basic Health Care

Stathis Papaioannou, a contributor on one of the myriad email lists I'm subscribed to, offered the following common-sense comment recently:

Treatment of hypertension, for example, is treatment to slow down the aging of your cardiovascular system, so you can live longer and stay physiologically younger*. You don't hear anyone saying that treating hypertension is wrong, because we should just let people develop cardiac failure or have a stroke naturally.

I like this comment because it tidily makes what ought to be a fairly obvious point: which is that we already have longevity medicine to some extent. If a person has hypertension and manages to get it properly treated, it is quite likely that he or she will remain in better health longer than otherwise, because his or her body will not be experiencing as much in the way of accumulated damage.

If testing for (and treating) treating hypertension is basic health care for people in middle-age and beyond, there should be nothing too difficult about imagining eventually testing for (and treating) issues pertaining to cancer vulnerability, critical cell loss and atrophy, mitochondrial mutation, etc.

While the ongoing quest to achieve better health care for all persons is, and will ever remain, broadly applied and global in scope, it is well worth acknowledging that people get old everywhere in the world. This makes the drive to develop effective basic health care for older people of universal importance. Hypertension, cancer, atherosclerosis, etc., do not discriminate on the basis of race, creed, national origin, or economic status. And if we're going to consider hypertension treatment part of basic health care, why not other forms of maintenance care?

---

* One minor semantic quibble: Eventually I would like to see the words "older" and "younger" used only in the context of describing a chronological state. Older bodies are still going to be older bodies, regardless of how healthy they are. Just as the health care needs of thirtysomethings differ from the health care needs of young children, the health care needs of ninetysomethings and centenarians differ from those of younger folks.

In some respects (and I realize I might be over-analyzing things here...it has happened before!) saying that we want to "keep older bodies young" may stand to alienate the aged from the idea of robust good health -- that is, we must be wary of making "healthy" synonymous with "young". Older people deserve good health, and good basic health care (that is, health care that actually stands a chance of keeping them alive) as younger people do.

Intelligence, Assumptions, and the g Conundrum

Cosma Shalizi at Three-Toed Sloth has written a long (but well worth the read) article entitled g, A Statistical Myth.

This article really elucidates a lot of the issues I have with the usual attempts to quantify "intelligence" and explain what causes it. An excerpt:

the case for g rests on a statistical technique, factor analysis, which works solely on correlations between tests. Factor analysis is handy for summarizing data, but can't tell us where the correlations came from; it always says that there is a general factor whenever there only positive correlations. The appearance of g is a trivial reflection of that correlation structure. A clear example, known since 1916, shows that factor analysis can give the appearance of a general factor when there are actually many thousands of completely independent and equally strong causes at work. Heritability doesn't distinguish these alternatives either. Exploratory factor analysis being no good at discovering causal structure, it provides no support for the reality of g.

These purely methodological points don't, themselves, give reason to doubt the reality and importance of g, but do show that a certain line of argument is invalid and some supposed evidence is irrelevant. Since that's about the only case which anyone does advance for g, however, which accords very poorly with other evidence, from neuroscience and cognitive psychology, about the structure of the mind, it is very hard for me to find any reason to believe in the importance of g, and many to reject it. These are all pretty elementary points, and the persistence of the debates, and in particular the fossilized invocation of ancient statistical methods, is really pretty damn depressing.

I've avoided writing much about this particular subject so far, because I wanted to wait until I either wrote or found something that would make it clear that I am not basing my opinions on intelligence on mere "political correctness", or on emotional appeals to some notion that every individual has the exact same set of abilities (which obviously isn't true).

I've read a lot of literature on theories of intelligence, including a fair number of papers on g and on psychometrics. I've also been professionally tested twice (on the Weschler Pre-School and Primary Scale of Intelligence at age 4, and on the Weschler Adult Intelligence Scale at age 20), so I have direct experience with at least one type of IQ test.

I don't dispute the fact that people who score well on certain types of tests are statistically more likely to, say, graduate from college or hold down a particular kind of job, but I do dispute the utility of IQ testing in evaluating an individual's "potential" or their ability to eventually process and understand intellectual and practical problems. It just has always seemed to me as if much of the "intelligence" literature doesn't tell the whole story, and is rife with implicit assumptions that are rarely ever examined.

One thing that gives me some hope that this might not always be the case, though, is that some studies are approaching intelligence in a way that does demonstrate awareness of some of these assumptions. This article in Science Daily describes a study meant to (at least in part) bypass the language difficulties commonly observed in autistic persons:

Led by psychologist Laurent Mottron of the University of Montreal, the team gave both autistic kids and normal kids two of the most popular IQ tests used in schools. The two tests are both highly regarded, but they are very different. The so-called WISC relies heavily on language, which is why the psychologists were suspicious of it. The other, known as the Raven's Progressive Matrices, is considered the preeminent test of what's called "fluid intelligence," that is, the ability to infer rules, to set and manage goals, to do high-level abstractions. Basically the test presents arrays of complicated patterns with one missing, and test takers are required to choose the one that would logically complete the series. The test demands a good memory, focused attention and other "executive skills," but--unlike the WISC--it doesn't require much language.

The idea was that the autistic kids' true intelligence might shine through if they could bypass the language deficit. And that's exactly what happened.

The difference between their scores on the WISC and the Raven's test was striking: For example, not a single autistic child scored in the "high intelligence" range of the WISC, yet fully a third did on the Raven's. Similarly, a third of the autistics had WISC scores in the mentally retarded range, whereas only one in 20 scored that low on the Raven's test. The normal kids had basically the same results on both tests.

EDIT: Here's a link to the paper describing the study referenced in the Science Daily article. Recommended reading, since researcher Michelle Dawson has pointed out a few clarifications with regard to the paper and how it was described in the press release.

I'd be curious to know what some of you statistically-minded folk think of the idea of "g as a statistical myth", as described in the first article I linked to. I've noticed that a lot of discussions of intelligence and "g" I read around the Web are dominated by those who seem to have high confidence in factor analysis as far as its ability to support the notion of g, but I would like to know whether that confidence also translates to assuming that supposedly "g-loaded" tasks are probably accomplished as a function of the same "property".

It seems to me that to make such an assumption, a person would have to ignore all the evidence pointing to the fact that different kinds of brains may, in fact, operate and solve problems differently (and that while one skill might correlate with another in a typical person, this isn't necessarily the case for a less typical person).

A Few Brief Thoughts

In looking back over my posting history here on Existence is Wonderful, it is very interesting to see how my own attitudes have shifted over time. There are still some fundamental principles I adhere to: e.g., "Life is a good thing", and "All different kinds of people are valuable", but lately I've been coming to terms with some of the "affiliation uneasiness" that has been bothering me in the background throughout my public writing endeavors so far.

As of now, I'm still OK with using the term "transhumanism" to describe some of my take on technosocial development (EDIT: Not anymore, not as of 2008. Transhumanism is not a term I identify with these days). I do believe that radical longevity is a great goal (and one that I will continue to advocate fiercely for). I find talking about robots and cyborgs, etc., to be fascinating and a lot of fun. I'm all for continuing the human process of shaping our environment (with sustainability in mind) to suit our needs and creative energies, and for enabling consensual "augmentation" and modification without regard for unexamined, parochial notions of what is "natural".

But here's the thing: I am massively social-libertarian when it comes to the issue of morphological freedom -- one of the things that strikes me as tremendously important in any movement that wants to "push" for positive outcomes in society involving the individual's rights to control his/her own form and function is the notion that we have to be radically tolerant of people who choose forms and functions that we ourselves would not. Which includes forms and functions that we (as in, any one of us) might even find bizarre or aesthetically displeasing.

I'm finding myself increasingly uncomfortable with the idea of being associated with people who can't understand how power relationships work, and who think that disability activism is "extremism" despite the wealth of good, cogent disability literature out there (which has much in common with transhumanist-themed morphological freedom literature).

Of course, this doesn't necessarily mean I'm getting annoyed at "transhumanists", per se -- I in fact think that many emerging mainstream attitudes are quite akin to early eugenic attitudes (e.g., the drive toward prenatal testing causing a shift away from trying to help keep all kinds of children alive once they are born), and that in the mainstream, these attitudes are probably more pernicious and powerful due to being examined less frequently and less consciously than in culturally critical and speculative movements.

I guess I'm just getting annoyed with how so much has been written on the nature of power dynamics, on the real reasons behind the need for disability activism (e.g., so that vulnerable populations are not continually depersonalized, and so that more people understand the nature of interdependence in society), and on similar stuff, but how some people still don't seem to be able to get past the status quo. I want to help shape a future that is truly "better" than the present, as opposed to just an extreme, exaggerated version of current fashion.

I don't know if this is even possible, given the complexity of the tasks at hand, but I do get the sense that a better future (one in which people enjoy increased liberty, tolerance, and safety from environmental and other risks) isn't going to happen through assuming too much about what forms and functionalities are "acceptable" for the future to contain.

On Advocacy and Semantics

Nick Tarleton commented on my last post, saying:

Conjecture: some people, through some psychological quirk, interpret "opposition to X" as "not wanting any instance of X to exist" - so if you're opposed to aging, you must want to eliminate all instances of aging in the world, i.e. kill old people.

Conjecture 2: some people conflate judgments about the desirability of traits or states with judgments about the inherent worth of people with those traits/in those states. Evaluating aging as bad is tantamount to evaluating aged people as worth less than the young.

I've been thinking about these conjectures since yesterday, and I really do think Nick has hit the proverbial nail on the head here. While the people who oppose longevity medicine obviously vary in terms of their reasons for doing so, I am wondering now if perhaps some of that opposition is rooted in a sense that it is wrong to "medicalize" aging. And as someone who generally prefers the social model of disability to the medical model, I can understand, if not sympathize completely, with this viewpoint.

Here's why: if I take Nick's conjectures above and re-word them thusly:

Conjecture: some people, through some psychological quirk, interpret "opposition to X" as "not wanting any instance of X to exist" - so if you're opposed to autism, you must want to eliminate all instances of autism in the world, i.e. kill autistic people.

Conjecture 2: some people conflate judgments about the desirability of traits or states with judgments about the inherent worth of people with those traits/in those states. Evaluating autism as bad is tantamount to evaluating autistic people as worth less than the nonautistic.

...they start looking eerily familiar. I've seen very similar arguments coming from people who insist that yes, of course they value their autistic child (or brother, or sister, or neighbor, etc.) as a person, but that they would "remove the autism" from that person if they could. And that if they'd known of a way to prevent the autistic person from being born autistic, they would have chosen it "in a heartbeat".

Often, the people who make these arguments have a terrible time seeing how there could possibly be anything offensive about what they are saying. And when autistic self-advocates tell these folks that they find the notion that they ought to be "cured" (for their own good, for the good of society) insulting -- let's just say that the conversations don't always end with hearts and flowers.

I've stayed out of most of the major flamewars I've witnessed on the advocacy pages I read, but I've certainly read enough of them to get a sense of the common arguments that get made (and how those arguments fit in with my own various philosophical and ethical leanings).

And overall, I've gotten the distinct sense that there's a pretty clear difference between "disability" and "disease", as well as between "things that kill you" and "things that make you different". Put in those terms, autism and aging fall into very different categories, since while autistic people might be more vulnerable than nonautistic people in various ways, autism will not kill you. Aging, however, will.

But: on the other hand, there is a framing system in which autism and aging do fall into the same category -- and that is the one in which both "states" (aged, autistic) grant a person membership in a group devalued by those in society who hold the majority of the political and effective power.

Autistic and elderly people also share some common fears ("will I be institutionalized?") and common problems (employment discrimination, etc.). From within this framing system, it seems obvious that reducing the degree to which persons in the disenfranchised groups are treated as pathologies will help improve the lot of such people.

Have you ever been pathologized?

I have, and believe me, it's no fun. Not helpful, either. There was a professional who tried to insist that I needed to "work harder at being normal", and who refused to note any of the progress I'd made in learning to communicate more effectively and take care of myself physically at one point.

This was not only disparaging to my efforts, but dangerous -- if I'd had less presence of mind, or if I'd let this person intimidate me, I might have ended up returning to prior, unhealthy patterns of forgetting to eat and neglecting important aspects of self-care (because I was channeling too much energy into trying to maintain a facade of "standard" operation).

It was really only when I came to a point of self-acceptance -- as in, I started becoming better able to see myself as a healthy autistic-spectrum person as opposed to a "damaged" version of a neurotypical person -- that I started really branching out in my activities. I used to spend my weekends wandering in circles in the living room or fretting over the fact that I still couldn't manage driving a car at my age, but now I spend them writing, researching, editing, and even attending the occasional seminar or conference.

So, on the basis of that experience (and others, when I was growing up, in which certain teachers decided to single me out as a Behavior Problem rather than a kid who was simply developing atypically) I am very, very reluctant to think in "medicalized" terms when it comes to things that don't directly hurt or kill people.

I think that medicalizing things that shouldn't be medicalized can make people end up in worse condition than however they started out prior to seeking (or being put into) "treatment". And I think that treating any person as a "walking disease" and failing to see the person past whatever their challenges might be means you're running the risk of losing your ability to perceive the person at all.

Which is where the need for semantic clarification comes in.

When some people say "aging", they mean, "getting older" in the sense of accumulating birthdays.

When put in those terms, I am definitely "pro-aging" because I most certainly think that people should be enabled to experience as many birthdays as possible!

But when others refer to "aging", they mean, "the underlying bodily processes that lead to stroke, heart disease, immune collapse, dementia, and death".

When put in those terms, I am "anti-aging". (And those processes -- the nasty ones that kill you -- are the ones discussed in Ending Aging, which I highly recommend for anyone who wants to learn more about the science of SENS.)

So basically, I see aging as both a pathology and not a pathology, depending on the context in which it is used and on how it is defined.

I don't think old people are a pathology -- I think that the things that kill old people are pathologies. And I think it would be unfortunate indeed if people coming across longevity advocacy saw the whole thing as an attempt to pathologize the elderly and define them as "gross" and "scary".

I don't know if that's actually the impression people get or not, but if it is, I would like to know so I can work on explaining longevity advocacy better and emphasizing the fact that the goal is to help people survive and maintain their preferred health-state (defined according to individual criteria, not some arbitrary "optimality" measure) for as long as possible.

Now, returning back to the subject of autism for a moment, I want to make it clear that I do not think that autism can be defined (as I think aging can) as simultaneously, or alternately, "a pathology or not a pathology, depending on context".

Despite the similar social and political challenges faced by elderly and autistic people, and the common experience of lacking power as compared to the young and/or neurotypical (which should certainly be acknowledged), autism does not share with aging the "it'll kill you if you don't do something about it" component. And that's a very important component -- one that cannot be trivialized or argued away as a social construct.

You can, after all, be happy, healthy, and autistic.

You cannot be healthy, happy, and dead.

There is no "social model" for death, and I think that anyone who claims to champion the rights of any given group cannot seek to define that group as "obligated to die"!

Longevity advocates, therefore, have a very interesting challenge -- one that entails both discouraging age discrimination (especially with regard to health care) and at the same time, promoting the idea that we ought to develop treatments allowing older people to make their bodies function more like younger bodies.

I can see the political thorniness here and I'm frankly not sure what to do about it at the moment, except perhaps to say that I don't think that older people should be made to feel as if they have to embrace their own age-related death in order to accept themselves as people. To define "not being near death" as the exclusive province of the young seems a rather horrid proposition.

Exploring the Longevity Terrain

The Erickson School (part of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County) is the home of the Center for Aging Studies. According to the Center's web site:

Striving to enhance the well-being of elderly persons, the Center works collaboratively with aging network professionals, policy makers, researchers, and aging service practitioners by sharing research findings and developing new research and demonstration projects that deal with real issues.

Dr. Bill Thomas is a professor at Erickson's Center for Aging Studies. His blog is (wonderfully) titled "Changing Aging". I've not read through the entirety of Dr. Thomas's site, but I like what I've seen so far -- a lot of positive, common-sense, pro-longevity writing. Thomas suggests an interesting take on the subject of aging in a September 22 post entitled simply, "Pro-Aging":

So let's just say that I am pro-aging. I think longevity is integral to human development, much feared, little understood and a sign of success not failure.

More to the point-- every morning those of us who wake up do so one day older than we were the day before. Fine then. Let's explore this new terrain.

I've actually been uncomfortable with the phrase "anti-aging" for quite some time now. "Anti-aging" is one of those terms that seems to have been co-opted by "quack" supplement vendors and shady "immortality" prophets of various stripes. Web searches for "anti-aging" often lead to pages that contain plenty of bright, flashy slogans and glowing promises, but no solid scientific content whatsoever. And that isn't what I'm about here. My desire to promote longevity medicine and longevity in general is based on the simple premise that all people are valuable, regardless of age.

Lately, it has become apparent to me that perhaps those who consider themselves to be part of the "healthy life extension community" would do well to educate themselves about issues associated with how today's elderly persons are treated and viewed within society.

If our goal is to make it possible for people of all ages -- including the very old -- to access the care they need to maintain their health (and by extension, their life) as best as possible, a fundamental step toward that goal is that of promoting ethical, respectful treatment of older people. Regardless of what medical breakthroughs might come about within the lifetimes of those alive today, we are all getting older every day, and someday, we will all be old.

What kind of lives we lead when we are old will depend in part upon the attitudes we adopt today toward the elders that already exist. This means that yes, we all have an interest in such notions as the problems with institutional nursing. We also need to encourage efforts to improve the safety of medicine for the elderly. And we need to improve efforts toward creating a more interdependent culture, in which the contributions of diverse types and ages of persons are recognized more consistently.

So, while I understand the sentiment behind the call to "battle" the aging process, as if it were some sort of enemy, I think I actually like the notion of (in Dr. Bill Thomas's words) changing aging better. Because it's not as if I don't want people to get older -- getting older means you're living, not dying, after all!

Rather, I think that attitudes toward the elderly, both socially and in terms of what medical options are made available, need to change so that eventually, "aging" won't be synonymous in people's minds with sickness and death -- but with continued vitality and the freedom to keep enjoying the endless wonders of existence, unhindered by prejudiced attitudes and "burden" rhetoric that seeks to stamp individuals with arbitrary expiration dates.

Busy, busy...

I'm still working on the Singularity Summit writeups...two more installments in that series, and then it will be finished. Between working on that series, writing my recent Madeleine L'Engle memorial piece, and trying to parse all this stuff on superlativity, keeping up with the usual civil-rights/neurodiversity pages I read, and wondering what to say next about healthy life extension (oh yeah, and the day job, which has been rather intense lately), I think it's safe to say that my bandwidth is fairly saturated.

Briefly, though, for the moment I'll say that I've been thinking a lot (again) about the "proper" way to approach discussing the subject of healthy life extension. Sometimes the approach is difficult because I never really know what "knee-jerk" reactions I'm going to end up getting from people. My desire to promote longevity medicine is based on the very simple reason that a person can only have experiences, and be happy, as long as they are alive.

I realize that as biological organisms we are all vulnerable (and always will be vulnerable) to potentially being smacked down at any time (by disease, by a bus, by an errant meteorite...), but medicine has always been about responding to this vulnerability as best we can. Longevity medicine is, fundamentally, simply an extension of general medicine that includes the elderly within the sphere of "lives worth saving".