The Real Secret of Youth Is Complexity | Hacker News Reader

The Real Secret of Youth Is Complexity

nautil.us

41 pointsdnetesn13 comments

This seems pretty silly at first glance. It is just as easy to argue for increased complexity due to stochastic mutational damage and proteopathy followed by a sudden enormous cellular diversity of individual responses to that damage, and responses to the responses by nearby cells. When you can easily pull out data points to argue both sides of an overarching vision that's usually a good sign that the wrong tree is being barked up.

I find it hard to reconcile the general message of the text with this statement about heartbeats:

   The simpler the signal, the higher 
   the likelihood of abnormal rhythms,

Clearly, abnormal rhythms, almost by definition, mean a more complex signal.

Actually the heart rate during arrhythmias (abnormal rhythms), is actually a less complex signal in the information theoretic sense. This was noticed about 30 years ago and has been widely studied in the heart rate variability literature. Healthy heart rate signals are complex in the sense that it has structural richness and correlations across multiple time scales. However arrhythmias appear as either random patterns in heart rate, such as in the case of atrial fibrillation; or as repeating, somewhat deterministic patterns, such as in common ventricular arrhythmias like bigeminy or trigemeny or in congestive heart failure where the heart rate become abnormally regular.

I haven't read the article yet; but I interpret this quote as youth feels bad when things are too simple at a low level; which would explain why they seek wild and chaotic so often and with enjoyment. A calibration toward learning the environment.

The quote is about heartbeats.

It seems the argument holds somewhat - healthy and long life needs lots of stimuli and eg January learning in old age is known to delay dementia. That tai chi helps micro movements is interesting, but is this a point about complexity or just actively training ones sensory neurons and muscles to react?

But the unnecessary excursion to fractals and their complexity is just odd.

Maybe the author made the article intentionally complex to follow his own advice?

To me taichi is more than micro moves. It's about holistic perception of your body mechanics. You shift your center of gravity and accelerate boundaries trying not to cancel the internal momentum. The blend of high acceleration on limbs with reduced energy consumption is very soothing.

Seems like complexity would lend itself to greater resiliency, less opportunity for catastrophic failure.

Sort of interesting but also sort of pseudoscience. If you are inrerested in aging or rejuvenation research take a look at http://www.sens.org.

Oh come on, you're calling this pseudoscience and then pulling out SENS? Aubrey de Grey is in the "not even wrong" category, mainly making broad and vague claims which cannot really be tested.

There was a paper on SENS in EMBO reports [1], titled "Science fact and the SENS agenda", which concluded

"none of de Grey's therapies have ever been shown to extend the lifespan of any organism, let alone humans."

If you want to actually talk about research into aging, stay far away from SENS, as it's not research.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1371037/

Agreed. Lots more fluff and detours than substance.

When they say "simplicity" what they mean is something more like "deterministic processes."

Deterministic is a side effect/quality of simple processes, but that's not the point. The point is "a single break in the chain will undermine its entire function"

To use the brain example. Imagine crossing a forest, daily, every day of your whole life. At first you're bushwhacking randomly. Eventually you build a trail. And the brush is allowed to grow thicker around the trail, as it's untrodden. That trail which aids you now is also a weakness of the system. If it were to get washed out or obstructed, you wouldn't know/have no where else to go.

Likewise with neural pathways.

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