[FRIAM] Friday AM

[Steve Smith]

> 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.
Good clarification...  I *was* missing your point...  as I expected I was!
>
> 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.
My very limited experience with western medicine (professional and 
amateur) seems highly biased toward this (LCD).  Like smearing all the 
colors together from your big box of crayons just gives you mud...
>
> 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.

There is certainly no end of naive interpretation of statistics in our 
popular descriptions of just about anything...   unto superstition.  I 
know many people who very literally get very squirmy when they approach 
the age that their same-sex parent died... especially if it was some 
genetically influenced thing, but it could even have been a car-accident?!

I think watching the 'Publicans thrash on the House Floor over 
McCarthy-or-not/bust today lowered my BP by at least 10 points... 
nothing does my heart more good than watching the obstructors get in one 
another's way for a change...   especially watching Boebert's and 
Greene's rants and Jordan's and Gaetz's and Biggs', and McCarthy's 
smarmy attempts to normalize what is going on... while the usually 
"litter-of-puppies" styled Dems all lined up with a smile behind Jeffries...

Soon enough it will get old though...

>
> 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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