[ExI] Stem cell breakthrough

[Anders Sandberg]

Again, while progress is annoyingly slow it is *also* fast. Ulcers went from chronic to easily curable in a jiffy. When my dad got MS there was not much anybody can do; today a close relative is getting immune treatments and things look very good. Same thing with preventing HIV turning into AIDS. IVF went from outrageous to standard in a decade. Same thing for heart transplants. 
Predictions in medicine for when we will have a cure for X are likely bad unless we have figured out the cause of X and found a worthwhile method in the lab. The reason is that there is not much expertise to be found for predicting cures: there is no good feedback making the proclaimer learn from their mistakes and successes, there is no underlying theory to guide them, and the problem is not decomposable into any manageable chunks that can be analysed. Plus of course a fair deal of optimism bias. Looking at a group is unlikely to give much extra information. (See the Armstrong-Sotala AI prediction papers for more on this applied to AI).

Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University


Brent Allsop <brent.allsop at canonizer.com> , 2/2/2014 8:12 PM:
                   
       I've been diabetic for over 30 years now.  The entire time, more       now than ever, I constantly hear: "They'll probably have a cure       for diabetes in about 5 years.
       
       On 2/2/2014 11:53 AM, John Clark wrote:
                 
         On Thu, Jan 30, 2014 at 7:13 PM, Anders           Sandberg <anders at aleph.se>           wrote:
                        
                            > the stretch between "awesome in the lab" to "in                 a clinic near you" is very long.                           
                          Boy is that ever true! We know astronomically more               biology than we did in 1960, but medicine has advanced               only very very slightly in all that time. The biggest               "recent" advance in medicine, antibiotics,  happened over               50 years ago, and improved sanitation and anesthesia over               a century ago. After that it's mostly been a few slight               tweaks here and there. Very disappointing.   
               
                          John K Clark
                          
                          
                                   
                       
              
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