[FRIAM] Friday AM

[glen]

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.
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