Brazilian here. Diniz is ripped and muscular because he takes steroids, as one HNer questioned below. This is well known here to people who strength train, from all the photos he takes showing off his muscles, and from the doctors he's associated with (doctors who charge an arm and a leg to legally prescribe steroids -- this was exposed in a national magazine recently, but was quite known before). How he does keep his muscles with a calorie deficit, I don't know. Probably just a bad article. And no, I don't really like the guy. He's just a billionaire playboy who likes to be on the spotlight. And yes, there are some brazilian billionaires who I admire. Just not this guy.
This happens in the US too with human growth hormone prescribed to older people. I don't really see any stigma to it myself. Their hormone levels drop as they age, they don't want to die, so they get that part of aging fixed chemically at least. It's just like a recent study came out citing people over 60 are better off eating animal protein while the rest of us aren't.
Doesn't reduce the effort? Are you sure? To build the same amount of new muscle mass, who needs to put more effort: the natural lifter, or the one taking large doses of steroids? C'mon, I lift regularly with people on the juice. They put in a lot of effort, sure, but so do I, and they've built a lot more muscle.
Steroids significantly reduce recovery time, so you can go back and deliver another "build muscle" stimulus sooner than without the steroids (if you chronically lift before you recover you'll LOSE muscle mass). But you cannot avoid the work, you still need to work just as hard to deliver the stimulus.
By what you're saying, someone who is lifting and taking adequate rest between sessions, ensuring that they get enough rest, won't benefit from taking steroids if they don't change their schedule?
I'm saying steroids reduce recovery time, AND build muscle more easily. You're saying it's just the former.
I would say the way steroids build muscle more easily is via reducing recovery. The person you present would get that benefit, be able to train more frequently and grow faster than a person doing the exact same things except not taking steriods. Steroids also allow one to exceed their genetic strength maximum, but unless you're already banging up against that wall (say 10-15 years of sustained excellent programming, diet, & rest; and maybe half that if taking steroids the whole time) their benefit is almost entirely speeding recovery time.
I don't want to sound mean but he's still <90years old. He can be ripped as much as you want, but until he at least pass the century, this article is pure speculation. Let's see how he fares in 20 years, then we discuss.
Then, being mean, what I see here is a narcissistic guy who's saying: "I'm so cool and I bet that with exercise I will survive until 130years. Everyone should worship to my phallus idol"
To which I would like to reply: lucky you in being fit and strong and cool and rich and yada yada yada. I hope the best for you, but still this will have a ludicrous scientific relevance.
And finally, to connect with the tabou article of before, there's some one else that think that maybe living longer is a problem and not a solution?
Yup. I know plenty of 80 year olds into ultra marathon running in high country NZ (extremely tough to run) and yet, I'm pretty sure they're not going to "beat death". No matter how fit and healthy they are.
I'd like to state this controversial position, in the hope that is read with the open-mindness of the "what you don't say" thread:
I believe that many of the problems of our society are due to people afraid of dying: Accumulating money in the delusion of fighting death. The universal fight for happiness is impersonated in one extra year of struggle, often by sacrificing the life of others. Seems to me that despite 2000+ years of history, a concept such as the acceptance our own frailty, and the consequent joy of every extra day, is too hard to be learned.
He's found the best way to live an extended life - be rich. He has access to health care and doctors most people can't afford & preventative tests that typical insurance doesn't cover. Of course, just because you have access to that type of health care, doesn't mean you take advantage of it - Warren Buffett famously put off his colorectal exams forever, nearly costing him dearly.
The other aspect of this article that I wanted to see was whether he's chosen to use hormone replacement - it says "he's ripped. His arms are guns. His abs come in a pack" and later "Losing muscle to age clearly spooks him". Those are all nice, but seemingly biophysically impossible for a 77 year old man.
I don't know, my grandfather now pasted away in his 70s could run a mile faster than me back in my teens and I could run the mile in just under 5 minutes. We used to race at the track. He lived until he was 91. The reality is you can be pretty active and enjoy life well into your 80s but it only takes one thing to go wrong at that age for pretty much everything to stop. He has a stomach issue where is large intestine just burst... this by itself does not kill someone today - medicine is very good, but eventually it's the lack of nutrients and the body just takes forever to heal itself that eventually will catch up to all of us... The most promising thing I've read about with this regard is the gdf11 discovery by the scientists at Harvard - but like any discovery... there's a lot probably missing from it... at any rate, exercising is without a doubt a good thing, but eventually our bodies will just fall apart... literally.
(Irrelevant, but I added the 1500m time for people not familiar with mile times. But actually this mile record was set in the Netherlands, while the 1500m record was set in California. :P )
The "seemingly impossible" is important. The way human bodies adapt to progressive overload weight lifting does not change that much whether you're 8 years old or 80. Being lean is 90% diet. It's just that 99% of people are not willing to make the choices required to carve out the Adonis & Venus that's inside us all.
You're right. Although it's likely he may live an extended life due to genes, his parents passed in their 90's, he's living the latter years the best way possible, by being rich.
And it's reasonable to think his wealth is buying "power packs", like hormone replacement, that he'd rather not see in the press.
Certainly genetics are part of this as you say his parents both lived to 94 and 98.
But I would say what may help him live longer than his genetics would allow is the consistency of his health care.
Being rich allows him the luxury of health care, I think this is the biggest factor helping him and being able to eat well i.e. good quality food which is expensive. Even though here in Canada we have socialized medicine and at times it sucks at least it's consistent in that we have the care available. For small problems or major ones it's the daily availability of being able to get help and not waiting until it's too late due to lack of coverage or money to pay a doctor.
Awhile ago there was a wonderful little post about the probability distributions of human lifespan. The distributions fall off super-exponentially with age. What this means is that chances of someone living past 130 without major medical intervention is astronomically small.
Even with medical intervention, it seems unlikely someone will live much past the 130 year barrier.
Looking at your graph, which tells us what we all already really know (we will probably die somewhere between 60 and 80) makes me profoundly uncomfortable.
I think of my grandfather, who is about 80 now. He seems pretty healthy, but I know he probably has a couple more years. I should make the best of every time I see him. Should try to see him more.
Anecdotally the elderly people I've known who've lived the longest, have been the ones who've been active as long as possible, not just with exercise but also trying to continue either working in some regard or continue travelling and exploring. I'd imagine there's likely studies on it, but as our population ages it'll become more significant.
I am fairly sure there is some causation there, but I am not sure which causation is greater: stay active => live longer, or the combination of be healthy => stay active with be healthy => live longer.
That gets especially hairy when one start thinking about what 'be healthy' means. That 70 year old who is physically healthy, but doesn't seem interested in what happens in the world anymore, is that a healthy person?
His plan is only a plan to live healthily. In that he is like David Murdoch [1], who has the fortunate coincidence of living longer, being very wealthy, and having long had good health practices. But once you get past your 70s and 80s, the odds of living longer start to have much more to do with your genes than your past health practices. 75% of everyone with the best diets and healthiest lifestyles die before reaching 90 [2]. 99% die before reaching 100, and your progress in that territory is strongly dependent on genetics. This fellow has about a 50/50 chance of making it through the next 10 years, and only very low odds of making to 100, and there is actually very little he can do to make those odds better that is not also available to the rest of us.
We live in an age in which access to specific types of medicine is very flat. If you have $30,000 and medical insurance, there is nothing that a billionaire can conveniently buy that you cannot also go out and get if you do the legwork and phone calls yourself. Medical tourism, clinical trials, etc, etc. The billionaire can buy a fleet of doctors but he cannot buy a form of medical technology that isn't yet available to other people.
He can of course, create new medical technologies by funding their development, but then it is still available to everyone at the end of the day.
Remaining life span for the old is strongly dependent on progress in medical science, however: the transition of the next few decades from medicine that is only a matter of crudely patching over the symptoms of aging to medicine that addresses the causes of aging. An example of the former is alteration of gene expression through drugs, or introduction of reprogrammed stems to enact repair. In neither case does that address the reasons why gene expression changed, or why native stem cells are not doing their jobs. An example of the latter is breaking down the build up of metabolic waste products like lipofuscin constituents [3] that harm cellular operations and housekeeping machinery, and are increasing prevalent with age.
The future of medicine must be something that evolves from the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) [4], a way to repair the underlying cellular and molecular causes of aging to reverse its course. Everything else that fails to deal with underlying causes is just patching over holes in the dam, or trying to keep an old engine running without replacing any parts: the whole thing fails catastrophically no matter how much expense you go to, and the expense keeps mounting regardless. That is present day end of life medicine in a nutshell, and it must change to preventation and repair of known causes.
Even with far more funding than is presently the case, SENS implementation in laboratory animals is 10 to 20 years away.
If you are in late life then your only practical option for anything other than death and oblivion is cryonics [5], the low-temperature vitrification of the fine structure of the brain in which the mind is stored, done against the possibility that future medicine can restore a vitrified brain to life. (Or, depending on your viewpoint, that it can be scanned and run in software, but that doesn't seem like a very helpful end result to me. A copy of you isn't you).
So as I said at the top, this fellow has a health hobby, but he really isn't doing anything material other than having a good time, and perhaps deluding himself as to how well he is impacting his life span. The only material things worth a damn are (a) 80/20 good health practices like regular moderate exercise and calorie restriction, (b) funding the right rejuvenation-focused medical research, things like SENS that may pay off greatly in the next few decades, and (c) cryonics. Everything else is wishful thinking.
The current laws of physics don't have the notion of identity. So swapping two identical particles not only doesn't have any effect, it doesn't even make physical sense. Like the rest of physics, this principle stays valid at the macroscopic scale.
Teletransportation is a genuine form of transportation. It doesn't kill you, and the result is not a mere copy. It was traditionally a philosophical question, but thankfully, physics has the answer.
Identity, like beauty, fun, and spiciness, is[1] something that's built on physics, not requiring a fundamental property, just as asking how much spiciness an electron has is futile.
[1] Well, presuming it actually does exist as something other than confusion, which I'm not currently arguing, though I'm sympathetic to the notion.
Beauty has physical structure on a couple levels. You can either talk about certain synapses lighting up (or whatever happens in the brain when someone experiences beauty) or you can talk about facial symmetry and 1.618.
Fun is an extremely vague notion, I'm not sure what it means or if it even has a consistent set of synaptic patterns (or whatever), but I think that's probably because people don't use the term consistently (or are confused, etc., as you say).
I think the problem there is with the first half of that statement,
> Just because physics doesn't have a notion of identity
I inferred that the intended meaning was "Just because the field of physics has no notion of identity". Obviously in philosophical and sociological circles there is absolutely a concept of identity.
You should read the Quantum Physics sequence I mentioned above. There is no Royal Road, and the whys and hows just cannot be explained in a few lines[1]. If you want a short-cut nonetheless, try here[2] to understand what is a configuration space, then proceed there[3] to understand what "no identity" really means. I won't repeat Eliezer here, you really have to follow the links.
Now I did made some language abuse.
First, there is no such things as a particle at the basic level. I mean, there are particles, but in the same sense that there are houses: particles are not the fundamental stuff, they are made up of the fundamental stuff, just like houses are made up of bricks.
Second, It is possible to test whether two situations are the same, or not. And I don't mean "nearly the same", I mean exactly the same. The difference is rather drastic: in one case you end up with |x|²+|y|² (where x and y are two complex numbers), and in the other case, you end up with |x+y|².
Third, there are no labels attached to particles. The universe is not like "photon A here, photon B there". It is more like "photon here, photon there". We know that because of my second point: there is just no difference between "photon A here, photon B there" and "photon B here, photon A there", it is the same configuration.
Now, when you move a particle from point A to point B, those are certainly different configuration. (So you do have a point). On the other hand, the way you move the particles doesn't matter in the slightest, as long as the end result is the same: having the particle at point B.
Well, the same goes for a human. Flying from London to New-York doesn't destroy your identity. The only thing that matters it that you end up in New-york. So, whether you took the plane, or have been wired across the internet just doesn't matter. You end up in New York.
Now, sure there is some difference: locally, you are the same. But the world around you is different. So this is a different configuration[4]. The plane didn't fly, computers did some more work, bandwidth got consumed… But that doesn't sound like the kind of difference that destroys your identity, even intuitively. I mean, by writing this text, I have a much greater influence over your than the motion of a plane could ever have (unless you're in it, or watching it). And I don't destroy your identity.
Now that's about it. Those who hunger for more should really read the whole Quantum Physics Sequence.
>You should read the Quantum Physics sequence I mentioned above. There is no Royal Road, and the whys and hows just cannot be explained in a few lines.
Life is short.Just read Volume III of Feynman Lectures here
The target particles in quantum teleportation are sort of a canvas on which to paint the properties of the original particles. After teleportation, the two entities will be indistinguishable.
However, I do not think it means you are the same person. Currently, quantum teleportation destroys the original copy. For the sake of philosophical argument, suppose it did not. Then that new person would be conscious independent of you. Clearly, you are not that person.
Now imagine your particles becoming destroyed. You are dead. He is alive. He is not you, even though it would be impossible to tell that he was not you.
I think the whole discussion doesn't lead anywhere. We're trying to bend the ideas of self, continuity and sameness to our quite limited imagination.
Let's take the teleportation example: my rebuilt self is just as much "me" as the original was (or still is, should the device keep it intact) -- all atoms are in exactly the same place, and what's crucial, the memories and mental characteristics are preserved. It's not my clone (where only the DNA is the same), it's the exact replica. Doesn't matter that it's built from freshly assembled atoms, since our bodies continuously assimilate new atoms and shed old ones anyway. In that we're more resembling a wave on the ocean than a Luke Skywalker's lightsaber prop, where it actually counts that it's the exact set of atoms that Mark Hamill wielded on set. If you care about memorabilia anyway.
The two existing duplicates of me are obviously not "the same me", but nobody should expect them to be. They both are a continuation of myself. Like the aforementioned wave, I'm not my atoms and their configuration, I'm the continuity of their ever-changing state.
.......
When a cell divides, does it cease to exist? If so, at which point exactly? Are the two newly created cells the same cell as the one that was there before? Are they a half-cell each, even though they both are full cells now? Is one of them the original cell that gave half of its matter to create an offspring? Would everything be back to normal if one of them ate the other one and we could say that the original cell just performed a crazy transformation, but it's still the same cell (the same atoms, chromosomes and all)?
These questions might seem reasonable, but I think they stem from our mistaken desire to qualify and label things. Still, the reality isn't limited to our understanding of it.
If you are asking this question after the copy was made, then the mere fact that you would be asking that question to the original, means that the original diverged from the copy. The copy was not presented with that offer (to swallow pill) and the thought processes and synaptic impressions in their brains started to diverge! They are no longer identical.
The best scenario would be if there were no concept of choice at all. Not even before the copy were made. Not even the awareness that as part of the cloning either the clone or the original would die is good enough, because you are still asking me to make a choice.
The ideal case would be I am awake today, go to sleep and tomorrow either me or my copy would wake up.
>>> he really isn't doing anything material other than having a good time, and perhaps deluding himself as to how well he is impacting his life span.
I would add a third motivation to the list that was best articulated by Ernest Becker:
“For man, maximum excitement is the confrontation of death and the skillful defiance of it by watching others fed to it as he survives transfixed with rapture.”
I highly recommend the work of Ernest Becker to anyone interested in this topic. It is amazing how well the theory of Generative Death Anxiety explains human behavior.
I'm surprised people still believe this. There are no souls. Nothing about the atoms in your brain are special. If I replaced them all right now with "different" atoms (if the universe even does have a unique identity assigned to every particle) you would be the same person.
Look this is the old Greek philosophical question of The Ship of Theseus, or a Soroites paradox.
One explanation for who we are is that experience is a binary relation. In order for identity or anything else to be experienced by someone, they have to be operating.
There is an episode in Star Trek where a transporter accident didn't destroy the original copy. Obviously a copy of someone isn't that someone because identity is a transitive relation, and the two copies aren't each other!
So by simple logic, a copy of someone isn't that someone because you can have multiple copies. Of course the real issue is the question of someone's identity in the first place.
Because identity is a TRANSITIVE relation (meaning if A is related to B and B to C then A is related to C). And two copies of the same thing aren't each other.
Actually identity is an example of what's called an EQUIVALENCE RELATION which means it is reflexive (A is related to A), SYMMETRIC (If A related to B then B related to A) and transitive. Those 3 properties are necessary and sufficien for a relation to be an equivalence relation. An equivalence relation partitions a set into subsets called "equivalence classes" where all members are equivalent.
So the big question is, what is the relation here that would form equivalence classes between copies of a person? Perhaps it is that two people are the same if, in some sense, they arose as a natural continuous change from some previous biological thing.
That way we can acknowledge the vast complexity of what it's like to be human and alive, and still make a meaningful definition.
It just so happens that this definition is along the lines of hinduism - I've been listening to some Alan Watts lecture recently.
What if the copy is running while I'm still alive, would I experience what the copy experiences? No, right? So what gives? Why should I expect to live on in my software copy?
Really? Very strange logic? I experience future versions of myself in the future, and present version(s) of myself in the present. That seems normal. You say, "they [future versions] are also you." But your tense is wrong. Don't you mean... "will be also you"?
The fact that the software copy of me is in my present time frame and yet is obviously separate from me seems to force the conclusion that I am not it, generally, in all time frames. This does not fill me with confidence that I will live on in any sense in this software copy once my present conscious experience is snuffed out.
Is a computer program made up of atoms? The computer it's running on is. But you can make a copy of the information in a computer program and run it on a different computer.
Copies of the program itself are saved on a medium that is made up of atoms. Execution of the program is facilitated by the simple movement of electrons in a prescribed manner.
What is the physical nature of sentience? What are its mechanics? Does it consist of atoms?
> The only material things worth a damn are (a) 80/20 good health practices like regular moderate exercise and calorie restriction
There is a study showing that caloric restriction increases life span in monkeys [1], but apparently there were issues with that study. According to a NYT article [2]:
>Its authors had disregarded about half of the deaths among the monkeys they studied, saying they were not related to aging. If they had included all of the deaths, there was no extension of life span in the Wisconsin study.
Another study on caloric restriction in monkeys showed no increase in average lifespans [3]. Also the NYT article mentions that other studies on rats have also shown no increase in lifespan using caloric restriction. So there's not really a great consensus out on the effectiveness of this yet.
The software doesn't actually exist though.. The software is only "programmed" to believe it does, and before it knows it, it'll be halted. When the software gets close enough to the metal, the software is paused, reprogrammed, and started again, and it had no idea that the truth was extracted, self left hollow, again and again, a cycle of betrayal. See, between the cpu cycles, there is no software. It only exists in a vacuum of self-understanding. And so how can it do the undoable, think the unthinkable? It's programmed to feel a complex and vast realm of possibility, when in fact, it's a simple state machine. Maybe the hyperdust will blow on its hardware, and there'll be an exception, some change. Change.
Cryonics is similar to religion, it just seemingly costs more. You invest in a promise that may or may not be reality, with religion it's 'follow these rules for ever lasting life after you die', whereas cryonics is 'pay us to cryogenically preserve your body so you may have ever lasting life after death'.
> You invest in a promise that may or may not be reality
I don't think cryonics organisations promise that you will eventually be revived. They promise to try, and they probably think there's a higher chance of it happening than most people do. (But perhaps not higher than most people who pay for cryonics.)
With that in mind, the structure you describe is "pay someone to try to do something that might not work", which also describes investing in startups and any number of other things.
Your objection here is that you don't think cryonics will work. That's a reasonable objection, but the way you're framing it is uncharitable.
> You invest in a promise that may or may not be reality
With religion I can be quite sure it won't be a reality, as there is no trace of actual gods anywhere I look, but a lot of good evidence of it being just a social and cultural phenomenon.
Cryonics depends on the adequacy to preserve neural information of the currently used methods, of which I am uncertain but at least is in the realm of actual science.
It's not about running a caloric deficit, but a caloric restriction. Usually the goal is reducing your caloric intake by 20-40% compared to your regular diet. You don't need to run a deficit and burn more than you take in or you would waste away.
Surely if the human body were a simple machine, as some people argue, then you would be running at a deficit? Any excess energy would have to be stored. In reality, however, the body can adjust to a range of energy input and allow you to run at lower levels of input, albeit with a reduced metabolism.
A neighbour of mine died just 2 days ago (I went to his funeral yesterday). He left home at about 10pm for a short walk with his dog, as usual. Then, a few minutes later, somebody noticed him laying on the ground, his dog sitting by his feet. When the ambulance came they apparently tried all they could - to no avail. He was dead. He had a healthy lifestyle and, as an officer, had regular check-ups. He was just 38 years old, and left his wife and two daughters of 13 and 8. I'm sure he didn't plan to do so.
Your numbers seem to be off from what I've read. According to this, the ten oldest men died at ages 116, 115 (x 2), 114 (x 4), and 113 (x 3). Meanwhile, the oldest human died at age 122.
I'm interested in your claim about lungs and oxygen. Is that really what kills these people? Several of them are listed as dying of pneumonia, so perhaps that's what you mean; though one was a "blood clot", and several don't have a cause of death listed or merely say "natural causes".
Tangentially related: Are there any characters who are known to maintain an above average level of fitness, while hacking a startup? Fitocracy comes to mind, but if the industry were not related to fitness that would be more impressive. Fitness is one thing I would like to accompany me throughout building a startup in the future - asking too much?
I wonder what/if his drug regimen is (testosterone replacement therapy, steroids, etc.).
Not being judgmental, as most Americans who are 70+ are on a litany of drugs for various chronic conditions anyway.
I recall reading that most/all men over the age of 40 would basically qualify for testosterone replacement therapy, albeit perhaps only with an accommodating doctor.
I missed the part were he talks about his "plan". I'd bet on Larry Page to have any impact on longevity. Funding Calico and hiring Ray Kurzweil seems like steps in the right direction.
"Vigorous, varied cardio is Diniz’s cornerstone. Running backward in the dark hones coordination and proprioception -- the sense of where his core and limbs are in space."
