How we fight death
What do we do, depending on how difficult we believe ageing is?
How should our strategy change depending on how complex we believe ageing to be?
The decision this question informs
Decide what kind of problem we are trying to solve
Make the assumptions behind each longevity programme explicit. Different accounts of the difficulty call for different work; keep alternatives available until evidence distinguishes them.
Working direction · editorial reasoning, open to revision.
What follows from this?A proposed answer
The Spectrum of the Fight Against Death
Read it ↗From the question to action
What should happen next?
Unresolved: Which obstacles are failures of implementation, which require new methods, and which require a different account of ageing?
Next work: Use the spectrum to state the assumption behind a programme, then identify one observation that would make us change that assumption.
What would change the direction: A repeatable result that a simpler approach cannot explain, or a simpler intervention that achieves the required function, would change where effort belongs.
Proposed agenda, not a statement that a study is underway.
The main obstacle is implementation
Then the priority changes: Prioritise testing whether an existing approach can deliver the intended function under the conditions that matter.
Next work: Specify the missing demonstration and its failure criteria before expanding the programme.
What this does not establish: This is an assumption to test. Availability of a drug or technique does not establish a longevity benefit.
Conditional reasoning · changing the assumption explores a possible strategy; it does not record a finding.
Continue the reasoning