Kevin Dewalt’s Blog

Ok, ok, I hear ya. I’m about 5 years late to the party on this one. But after some advice from a few people who seem to be pretty balanced and productive in their lives I decided to pick up a copy of David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD). You can read about it at Wikipedia or Amazon or at one of the many techie bloggers that cover the topic.

In a nutshell, GTD is a fluid personal management process that operates closer to the way most of us work. Most of us deal with a constant influx of new tasks, dozens of disparate projects at home and at work, and changing deadlines. GTD provides a framework for us to deal with this onslaught.

I doubt that I will ever implement all of Allen’s ideas. For one thing, much of the book focuses on dealing with paper. I don’t handle much paper at home or at work. I typically carry a notebook to meetings and use it to scribble down some hieroglyphics ostensibly posing as English that even I cannot read. So I don’t imagine that I’ll be creating tickler files.

But ultimately I come out of these meetings with “to-dos” for myself that need to be tracked and managed. GTD provides the framework for managing and tracking everything.

I also don’t quite see the point of keeping my email inbox empty. I need to review (in one form or another) email as it arrives. But with desktop search I don’t need to categorize everything into folders. I don’t write down everything everyone says in meetings and I don’t see why I need to categorize every email.

But I can understand why GTD has a cult-like following among techies. It provides a practical structure for organizing our hectic lives into the ways we actually work.

So I’m going to give it a shot.

I have to confess that the first time I heard about Twitter I thought it was the silliest service imaginable. And the second time. And the third. Heck, I even signed up for the site and still thought it was silly. More than silly, I actually figured it would add about as much value to my life as playing video games. I had this vision of my cell phone being flooded with “I’m watching TV” messages.

I have to confess that I’m slowly becoming a believer in Twitter. What ultimately pushed me over the edge? I met some new colleagues who are knee-deep in the trenches of driving organizational change with collaborative web technology. In the course of exchanging contact info they passed along their Twitter IDs.

“Excuse me? YOU guys use Twitter?”

Suddenly I felt old. Past my prime. I had become that guy I never wanted to be: the guy who “doesn’t get it”. In a state of panic I vowed to start Twittering that night and prove to the world that I still have it.

So what have I learned? Well, the jury is still out, but I think this service is here to stay for me. Like most people, I have that occasional observation/stray thought/idea that I want to tell people about. YouTube videos and blog posts are great for communicating a certain level of info, but sometimes I just want to blurt out something. Or pass along an article I read in Wired. Somehow email and blog posts don’t work for this type of communicating.

But the best part of Twitter so far is what I’m hearing about.

I don’t really care what most people are thinking about. This isn’t to suggest that I think most people don’t have much to offer - they do. They just don’t take the time and put forth the energy to think critically about the world.

But there are a handful of friends and colleagues that I really want to hear from. I want to know about the conference they are attending. The new web service they just tried. The cool business idea that popped into their heads. The thought they had while standing in the subway. Why they want to reverse aging.

What could be better than a bite-sized gem of ideas from people I really respect? I found myself actually reaching out to these type of people (it is a small list) and asking them to consider Twittering. Talk about the zealotry of the recently converted.

I don’t think tweets (that’s a twitter message as I’ve now learned) will replace emails, blogs, phone calls, lunches or existing communications. I think it is another way to interact, collaborate, and share.

My feed is at my feed is at http://twitter.com/kevindewalt if you want to follow my ramblings.

As I said, the jury is still out. Maybe my recent obsession with Twitter is just a techie’s version of mid-life crisis, a desperate attempt to show the world I still have it.

I get it, really I do…

I discovered a great thread at the Volokh Conspiracy Blog with a few folks bringing some fresh (and some not-so-fresh) perspectives to the Cato Debate between Aubrey de Grey and others on curing aging and radical life extension therapies.

Curing human aging will save 100,000 people a day from dying at the end of a period of prolonged suffering. Will saving this many people create other problems? Maybe, maybe not.

But the onus is squarely and firmly on those opposed to saving the lives of old people to give me a rock-solid argument why we should not pursue these therapies as fast as possible. I have yet to see it.

These ‘ethical’ debates are important to raise awareness of Aubrey’s work and the goals of the Methuselah Foundation, but the reality is that these technologies WILL ultimately happen. The relevant discussion is WHEN.

Will the therapies to reverse and end human aging be here for us, our parents, our children, or our children’s children? The answer largely depends on the resources and will we apply towards developing them. Every day we debate and delay we lose another 100K lives to the diseases of aging.

Well I for one am not going to debate the inevitable but will instead do what I can to bring the future here as soon as possible. I urge those of you in agreement to join me in supporting Aubrey and the Methuselah Foundation. If you don’t want to donate your money, consider taking my YouTube challenge and donating some of mine.

Thanks for the emails and feedback on my End Aging Challenge. Folks are starting to reply on YouTube. This personal element of support is fantastic. Two quick comments that I make in a reply video:

1. For those of you thinking about replying with a video I encourage you to have some fun and get creative with it. Why do you want to cure aging and live a few hundred more years? Do you want to visit the moon? Bring about world peace? Start a new career? Or perhaps you don’t care at all about yourself and just want to help relieve the suffering of others.
2. If you have the means, I hope that you’ll join me with a matching challenge. Just agree to donate a small amount of money to the Methuselah Foundation for every video response to my challenge. 50 cents per video, $1, $5, $500 - whatever you feel is appropriate. Collectively we can make a big impact by lots of small gifts. And please feel free to put an upper-limit on your donations. “I’ll donate $1 to the Methuselah Foundation for the first 50 video responses…” You get the idea.

Consider the following discussion, not dissimilar from that at Cato Unbound:

Person #1: “Every day 100,000 people die a horrible death after a period of prolonged suffering. I want to stop this from happening.”
Person#2: “That may not be a good idea. It might lead to some unintended consequences.”

And that, my friends, is basically the crux of the debate at Cato Unbound between Aubrey de Grey and a few others.

I don’t know about you, but the glaring next step in the debate between Persons #1 and #2 is as follows: Person#2 is on the hook to provide a very, very compelling reason to say why saving 100,000 lives a day is a bad idea. This brings me to the point of this post:

Don’t want to cure aging? The onus is on you - not us - to explain why.

Take a step back in time to the discovery of antibiotics, sanitation, or child mortality prevention and any one of us could develop an argument - some of which could be repackaged for debate at Cato Unbound - for why these discoveries are bad ideas. Heck, I’ll try one.  Imagine the following statement made by a gentleman in 1900:
“Alas, our good friends of science now believe they can achieve an infant mortality rate of 5 per 1000 by the end of the 20th century. Assuming this was even remotely possible (in the United States infant mortality rates currently range between 100 and 300 per 1000), is it desirable? It seems that once again science wants to interfere with Nature’s plan. Is it inconceivable that preventing these natural deaths from occurring will only weaken the whole genetic foundation of our race? Can anyone of us envision a world where we have ANOTHER 500,000 of these “saved” babies every year? Who will feed them all? Rather than seriously debate these hard questions, science seems happy to change the natural order and ignore the potential consequences.”

In retrospect it is hard to imagine this discussion happening between serious people. Why? Because these arguments are not compelling enough to convince us that we shouldn’t save lives. Oh, and because we have the benefit of historical hindsight [infant mortality is under 5 per 1000 in some countries].

Seriously, is there any difference between this argument at that at Cato Unbound? At the risk of repeating myself…

We may have an opportunity in the next several decades to develop treatments to end the suffering and death for 100,000 people EVERY DAY on this planet. If you think solving this problem is a bad idea, you had better come up with both some very compelling arguments and some facts to support your position. The onus is on you.

And that, my friends, should end most of these discussions. So when you find yourself engaged into (yet another) one of these absurd discussions with someone who may be more eloquent, more educated, or better read than yourself, fear not because you have a safety net:

The onus is on them to explain why we shouldn’t reverse aging. It really is that simple.

My End Aging Challenge is simple: Create and post a reply to this video on YouTube explaining why you support Dr. Aubrey de Grey’s and the Methuselah Foundation’s mission to end aging. I will donate $10 to the Methuselah Foundation for every video response.

If you have the means, I also suggest that you offer in your video response to match me with a donation of your own for every video.

After you shoot your video, follow this link to post your video reply.

The fine print…

• I (and those who also agree to match my challenge) reserve the right to donate more or less money than the number of video responses and stop the challenge any time.
• I reserve the right to pull any videos or responses in bad taste.

This is the fourth episode in my serious on refuting arguments against developing cures to reverse aging:

Part 1 - Foundation
Part 2 - Overpopulation
Part 3 - Eternal Frailty

If you read my foundation argument, you’ll probably conclude that the discussion by this point is starting to get a bit silly.

Won’t life be boring if we “live forever”?

To start with, I’m not making any arguments about Immorality in these essays. I’m talking about curing a specific set of biologic human conditions that lead to the diseases that currently kill 90% of people in the developed world. If nothing else changes, we will still ultimately die from accidents, homicide, or suicide. As far as I know nobody has presented a rationale argument for our probability of dying to become 0%. So let’s ignore the questions of eternity.

Personally, I love life. I love being young (enough) and living each day to its fullest. I can’t recall a single instance of a person in good mental and physical health telling me that he or she is ready to die.

So, no, I don’t see the potential issue of boredom being a reason to not cure aging.

To review our previous groundwork: aging is a really, really bad problem that we need to solve unless it creates other problems that are (1) Worse and (2) Unsolvable. Noone has yet presented a rational argument that overpopulation - if it does become a problem - is sufficient reason to not pursue solutions to aging.

Let’s now dispense with the misconception so common that it has a name: the infamous Tithonus Error, the assumption that radically extending human lifespan equates to a state of prolonged misery of decades in nursing homes. (Tithonus is a figure from Greek mythology).

Aging IS ghastly. After only 15-20 years of optimal health, human beings begin a slow, steady decline that eventually leads to years or decades of suffering for them, their loved ones, and society. It is only natural that all of us would fear extending this period of misery and frailty.

Fortunately, this is not the future we are pursuing. By reversing aging we hope to keep all of us in a state of optimal health for eternity. Moreover, the possibility of extending the period of infirmity seems very, very unlikely because aging kills us as a result of accumulated damage. Unless we figure out a way to undo this damage, we probably won’t survive much longer than we already do.  Chris Lawson has dealt with this subject at length.

Sadly enough, this misconception is wide-spread.  We need to challenge Tithonus Error assumptions at every opportunity and dispel the myth of eons of lonely despair in nursing homes.

If you read my last post on Podiobooks, you’ll know that I’m a fan of the new distribution medium for listening to books. It seems that I’m joining the chorus of people who want to be entertained constantly in day-to-day life. Whenever I engage in a mundane household task I try to catch up on my “reading”.

Scott Sigler pretty much created this space and continues to break new ground. His latest novel, Nocturnal, is once again both terrifying and addicting. His novel takes place in San Francisco and you can follow the plot online with Google Maps.

Yet another example of how the creation and consumption of content is changing so quickly.

Ok, based on my last essay, hopefully we agree that aging is a really bad problem - one that we need to solve. Now we’ll address a common question that surfaces every time the question of curing aging comes up:

If people don’t die, won’t we have an overpopulation problem?

or alternatives that run along the following line of logic:

Won’t these additional people just accelerate the destruction of our fellow earthly-inhabitants and the earth itself?

Aubrey de Grey has a great analysis of this issue, but here are my thoughts.

Ok, reversing aging may cause new problems. We just need to evaluate whether these problems are (1) worse than the horrible death of 100,000 people a day and (2) unsolvable.

I’ve been trained by our education system and media to worry about the dangers of human population explosion. I’ve been told that we will soon have billions more people than the Earth can support. Humanity is an inevitable time-bomb of exploding population that will outstrip our available resources.

Fortunately, like most doomsday predictions, the facts don’t support this conclusion. Human overpopulation may well be a total myth. Consider how we could choose to use the Earth differently, and I think you’ll conclude that how we use the available resources at our disposal is more influential than the total number of people using them.

Likewise, we could support many more people on Earth through different choices.

But ultimately curing the problem of aging might cause an excess population that will cause other problems. Left unchecked, we could be faced with the choice of killing people or having fewer children. Of course this situation may not happen for centuries or longer. Or perhaps we will figure out how to colonize the Earth’s interior or space. In any case, the facts and reasonable analysis does not suggest that potential overpopulation is both (1) worse than 100,000 people a day dying of aging, or (2) unsolvable. If we don’t want to restrict the birth rate, the worst possible solution is that some people may have to leave earlier than they expected - pretty much what we already have today.

But if you’re still not convinced, let’s analyze this situation differently. I think we can both agree that some problems would probably be mitigated or solved by a smaller population. For instance, we would probably produce fewer greenhouse gases if we had 50% fewer people on Earth. Is is reasonable, therefore, to suggest we ban antibiotics to help reduce greenhouse gases?

This logic borders on lunacy simply because we all recognize that restricting technology that alleviates human suffering and early death is worse than greenhouse gas emissions. (Personally speaking, I would give up my car before giving up access to antibiotics.)

The logic for restricting access to antibiotics based on overpopulation concerns is no different than choosing not to cure aging based on overpopulation concerns.
Before I conclude this topic, let’s not forget the foundation argument: curing aging is inevitable. It is up to us to decide if we care enough about saving lives to get there as soon as possible.

In my next several blog posts I’m going to discuss some often-cited reasons against aggressive pursuit Aubrey de Grey’s SENS proposal to reverse human aging. Let me begin by saying that I won’t generate an original thought in these discussions as others more eloquent than I have traveled this road before.

But before I begin, let’s set the foundation for the discussion.

I’ve got some bad news for you. If you are reading this essay I can predict with 90% certainty how you will die if nothing changes. After a long, exponential accumulation of bodily damage that slowly robs you of everything you currently take for granted, you will succumb to the diseases that result from this damage. The wisdom, knowledge, and collective experiences of your life will be lost as well.

The suffering will be quite bad for both you and your family as they try against hope to prevent you from dying. In your last year, society will spend more on your health care than your entire life before that. I know this because this is how 90% of the people in the developed world currently die.

This happens to approximately 100,000 people a day - more than 30 times those killed in the 9/11 attacks.

Malaria was a problem. Death from infections was a problem. And I offer that this is a problem too. A really, really bad problem. Maybe the worst problem of all. For our entire existence as a species, we have been slowly working towards a solution to this problem. Solving this problem may create (or enhance) other problems. But for now, let’s agree that this is a problem.

But there is some good news. Amazingly, we’ve had some good results in the very recent history as technologies like sanitation and antibiotics have helped us survive this accumulated damage longer. Our technologies are going to keep getting better and ultimately we will solve this problem.

That’s right. Ultimately we will figure out a way to undue this accumulated damage and prevent the diseases that will kill 90% of us. Whether we solve this problem in time to save the lives of our parents, us, our children, or our children’s children depends on how difficult these problems ultimately prove to be and how hard we work to solve them.

So with this foundation, it seems that we really don’t have to continue the debate unless you believe that solving this problem will create other problems that are both (a) Worse and (b) Unsolvable.

Although this reality can seem surprising at first, that’s basically it. If you strip away your emotional reactions to this issue - your cognitive dissonance - you’ll see that this discussions are rather silly. Reversing aging solves a huge, horrible problem, and it makes every sense to pursue it as fast as we can to make sure that we and the people we love will be able to take advantage of it.

But your mind is probably still racing with questions and concerns about reversing aging:

1. Is the most important problem to solve?
2. Will we be able to solve this problem for everyone?
3. How soon will we be able to solve this problem and is it even worth discussing at this point?
4. How will society change when we solve this problem?

So let’s keep this discussion going for a few more posts and explore these issues. I welcome your feedback.