Look who's posting on LessWrong

A recent post:

Is it too late for me to apologize for that story?

Comments

[Wanderer D]

*Eats raw steak.* I'll stick to my healthy diet and the presumption that I am immortal until proven otherwise.

[Bad Horse]

3322615 Did you notice who the author of that post is?

[Wanderer D]

Yes. Hence why I'm eating her cow friend. Or his pretend cow-friend.

[Bradel]

Oh God.

"I have four data points. Let me fit a curve to them!"

I literally could not read past that part.

[Jordan179]

Did she write this soon after the events of the original chapters of the Humanoid worlds version of Fluttershy's Night Out

[Admiral Biscuit]

My conclusion from skimming the article is that young, testosterone-fueled men do dumb shit which is likely to reduce their lifespan. A simple perusal of YouTube gives me the same results.

Still, looking at the shape of the curve on that life expectancy graph . . . geldings must live forever.

So, a reasonable conclusion is that Prince Blueblood traded his balls for a long lifespan.
img1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20130103042742/mlp/images/7/70/Prince_Blueblood_%22one_would_hate_to_slip%22_S01E26.png

[Bad Horse]

3322636 3322645 I did not mean to recommend the contents of the article. I haven't even read it.

[Admiral Biscuit]

3322652
I just skimmed it

[Bad Horse]

3322645 I don't think the "stupid young men" theory accounts for the big difference between castration before and after 14 years of age. There are lots of reasons for believing testosterone reduces lifespan. The most-obvious is that it increases muscle mass, and increased mass reduces lifespan.

[Axis of Rotation]

Why, Fluttershy, I didn't expect you to be knowledgeable of such a, ah, academic topic.

Should I be worried?

[Honeycomb]

What about if you've lost one testicle?

[Trick Question]

Stop trying to trick me into reading your stories.

[Bad Horse]

3322697 I didn't read the article, but I'd guess no effect, unless you were abnormally small. My guess is that increased size is the causative factor.

[Admiral Biscuit]

3322677
I dunno. I seem to recall doing some really dumb shit before I was 14.

[Georg]

3322734 You can remember that stuff? I have people tell me things I supposely did.

[Admiral Biscuit]

3322742
I'd just turned fourteen when I started high school, so that was a nice dividing line between the dumb shit I did before I was 14 and the dumb shit I did after.

[iisaw]

I think that study will be impossible to reproduce!

Ba-dum-tish!

[kalash93]

"This is what it feels like to be an animal," thought Fluttershy as she swung the boning knife through the drugged, unsuspecting stallion's scrotum, giving him two fewer reasons to consider himself a stallion.

[JustBrowsing]

3322788

Not enough in the world.

But have a like anyway.

[Titanium Dragon]

3322636
Should anyone really be surprised? This is Less Wrong, after all.

3322645
While more aggressive people have higher levels of testosterone, giving people testosterone doesn't make them more aggressive. If people believe they've received testosterone, they will act more aggressively, regardless of whether or not they received any.

[Bradel]

3322700
I want to upvote this comment because I really like it.
...but I want to downvote it, because I totally endorse Bad Horse tricking people into reading his stories.

Darn it, Fimfiction, why can't I do both?

[livinthelife]

3323083

[equestrian.sen]

3322636
Well if you read on, you would have noticed that there were actually four curves fit through those four data points.

www4b.wolframalpha.com/Calculate/MSP/MSP5821c7eigg2358166c1000056egbh0haa6568f1?MSPStoreType=image/gif&s=47&w=264.&h=222.&cdf=Animation
Source: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=fluttershy-like+curve
Fluttershy really like curve.

[TheJediMasterEd]

3322697

You develop a tendency to annex the Sudetenland.

[Nyerguds]

My god, the comments on that thing. This "Fluttershy" comes straight from the extremist Tumblr crowd.

Once again proving Poe's law, someone makes a rather clearly sarcastic comment about castration maybe increasing intelligence, and "Fluttershy" gives it a completely serious response

[Luminous Lead]

3322636 Gotta love "science", and "statistics".

Well, maybe I should actually read the article and give it a fair shot.

[Bad Horse]

3323621 I didn't mean to recommend or make fun of the article. I just thought the combination of title and author was funny.

[TheJediMasterEd]

3323638

If someone were to make this argument to me I'd have to say "Seems plausible. You first."

[Solitair]

Huh, weird. I was just reading a thread on Something Awful making fun of LessWrong and then I saw this.

[iisaw]

3327433
"...on the ball..." *ohhhh*

[Bradel]

3327433

Actually, survival data from exactly 200 individuals were binned together to determine those four points.

This... has nothing to do with the problem. The plot is still using four points to fit a model that will always provide a perfect fit on any set of three data points.

[equestrian.sen]

3327433
Disregarding the curve-fitting issue, there are problems with using such drastic binning. By reducing 200 points to 4, you've effectively treated 98% of your data as "noise".

Try drawing one random point from each bin and see if you can reliably draw the same conclusions. If you can't, then you need more bins. If your conclusions hold true only when you bin the points, then you have a gerrymandering problem.

[equestrian.sen]

3328589
I have another question. Under the section on females, it looks like about 700 of 1000 intact females lived to be at least 50. Even if the other 300 died as infants, the mean lifespan of the intact females would be at least 35 years, which is higher than the quoted mean of 33.9 years. Do you know what the actual mean age is?

I don't think there was any way I could have gotten my hands on the raw data-- many scientists are reluctant to share even data which isn't protected for confidentiality reasons, and both of the two authors of the relevant paper are dead, anyways.

That's unfortunate. I guess if they're hiding the underlying data, they better be really careful not to make any mistakes when presenting statistics in the paper.

[Bad Horse]

I'm not interested in castration itself for life-extension. I wouldn't do it, I'm too old anyway, and I wouldn't do it to anybody else, particularly not a 10-year old. Besides, somebody who's 10 years old today will probably live into the 22nd century, and they'll come up with something better than castration.

It is interesting if it causes life-extension. We'd like to know how it does. But I suspect we already do.

There are 2 large, opposing pathways in every cell of every multicellular animal and more things besides, from yeast all the way to humans, the TOR and FOXO pathways. TOR stands for Target Of Rapamycin. It's the thing rapamycin inhibits. FOXO stands for Forkhead box class O. A forkhead box is a transcription gene, one that, when transcribed, causes other genes to be (or not be) transcribed.

mTOR causes growth, cell proliferation, stem cell differentiation, cell cycle promotion, muscle growth, bone growth, wound healing. It also increases DNA damage, diabetes, cancer, and just about every other major cause of aging.

FOXO up-regulation causes DNA repair, restoration of insulin response, apoptosis (cancer suppression), mitochondrial biogenesis, and a wide variety of cell protectant effects.

Every known mechanism of life-extension activates FOXO and suppresses TOR. Rapamycin, resveratrol, caloric restriction, exercise, nearly every genetic mutation that extends life, and, yes, castration.

So it's probably better to take rapamycin.

3328315 It's a meta-review. He doesn't have the original data.