It's not the accumulation of damage and the fault/disease risk associated with 
such damage that seems like pseudoscience. That's actual science. But it starts 
to feel pseudo- when used to refine from a big data population size to 
individual humans (or demographics). The idea you can hop down to the lab, get 
the panel taken, and get a low enough variance estimate of your biological age 
is pseudoscience.

Take a look at Panel A of Figure 3 here:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5940111/

Precision medicine is a grand challenge in most medical domains. We haven't 
achieved it anywhere as far as I can tell. Eric's right, though, that *where* a 
causal mechanism can be identified (e.g. in developmental diseases), it can be 
targeted. But when you increase the number of markers and nonlinear effects 
arise, you end up relying on comparisons to an over-simplified aggregator (mean 
or median or whatever). And any therapy becomes treatment to the lowest common 
denominator.

Maybe pseudoscience is too strong a word... since my focus is on the word 
"premature" as opposed to statistical estimates of mortality, maybe I can 
simply call it hyperbole? I guess it's akin to all the hype around LLMs.

On 1/3/23 12:08, Steve Smith wrote:
What part of telomeric erosion/degradation/consumption and/or accumulated 
genetic damage via toxins and ionizing radiation (over a lifetime)seems like 
pseudoscience?  I'm probably missing your point.

On 1/3/23 11:01 AM, glen wrote:
Biological age just seems like pseudoscience to me, the flip side of Vampirism. 
I'd welcome an education, though.
--
ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ
-. --- - / ...- .- .-.. .. -.. / -- --- .-. ... . / -.-. --- -.. .
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe   /   Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom 
https://bit.ly/virtualfriam
to (un)subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
archives:  5/2017 thru present https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/
  1/2003 thru 6/2021  http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/

Reply via email to