Nicholas Agar

Something on the War and social media thepost.co.nz/world-news/360…

If this is the First AI War, what will the next one be like? abc.net.au/religion/nicho…

Something on Anthropic, Australia, Drones and World War Three. abc.net.au/religion/anthr…

Get better value from medical specialists by bullying them with AI abc.net.au/religion/nicho…

Why not a Social Media ban for Kiwi under 16s?thepost.co.nz/politics/36094…

A TEDx talk on the future of the humanities. youtube.com/watch?v=c8X9xG…

Something written for the New Zealand Post on a Supreme Court ruling sustaining four Uber drivers' request to counted as employees not contractors. Can New Zealand resist the enshittification of Uber? thepost.co.nz/nz-news/360894…

@PhilipLaughlin Thanks Phil. Don't worry I will be sure to purge typos in the book I'm writing for you!

@AgarNicholas I believe there is a typo in the first line. (steep change?) Good article though.

something published by ABC Religion and Ethics on the tension between writing for Big Academic Publishing and punishing students for using AI abc.net.au/religion/how-a…

something on Big Tech, harming kids, and bad arguments that effectively evade responsibility. thepost.co.nz/nz-news/360850…

Just the opening for a fuller discussion on 11 and 12 June 2026,  “Existential Risks and Other Disasters,” in Paris  organized by the Center for the Study of Bioethics,  Hastings Center,  Centre for Bioethics at  Chinese University of Hong Kong, and Master of Bioethics Columbia.

Something on the advantage of a 65,000 year time-frame. abc.net.au/religion/65000…

A philosopher looks at the decision-making process behind the decision to found New Zealand's third medical school. thepost.co.nz/nz-news/360766…

Something on how Australia polices indigenous people abc.net.au/religion/nicho…

Something written for the ABC on how human frailty might be the only thing that saves us from nuclear apocalypse. Respect for Leonid Brezhnev's shaking hand! abc.net.au/religion/human…

Something written for Aporia on the tragic error of conflating fluency and intelligence aporiamagazine.com/p/ais-original…

@DrPatrickLinden @AporiaMagazine @KristerKauppi But you will agree that it's our safety culture that's at fault. The best data on anti-aging interventions comes at autopsy. That's the approach that gave us safe aviation. Elon will surely take that approach to settling Mars.

@AgarNicholas @AporiaMagazine Bryan stopped taking Rapamycin on September 28, 2024. @KristerKauppi is still continuing and recording his results. He doesn’t mind merging with technology—possibly also with nanobots developed by Musk or someone else, if they ever become a reality.

The Immortality Gladiators, by @AporiaMagazine aporiamagazine.com/p/the-immortal…

@KristerKauppi That's proper science. The next step would be to randomise and double blind. The biased self-reporting of longevity influencers is inherently bad for that. How might my self-report of the rejuvenating effect of an all M&M diet (only green ones!) go on Instagram?

Randomized clinical trials are the ones we want for getting high level scientific data around different potential longevity interventions. One big problem is that they are very costly. But there are quite many people in the longevity community who self-experiment with different interventions. The scientific value of these experiments are very low or no value at all. For many years I have been thinking on how to increase the value of these self-experiments and one way is to start grouping them and by that we can start to get hints on what direction things may lean towards. It will of course not be high level scientific data but I think it may give some hints on for example what interventions that may be effective and for which specific individual phenotypes. We are in an exploration phase when it comes to the longevity field. There are so many unknowns and discoveries that have not been done. So the thing that lies close to my heart is to see if we can better navigate in the unknown and to speed up the discoveries in the field. One thing that I’m currently sketching on is to create a model, like a rough visual map, which I hope will help us to better structure individual data. This visual map can give hints on what areas to avoid because of high risks for adverse effects and what areas that may be interesting to explore further. In this model I’m using the pharmaceutical drug Rapamycin as an example but the model is possible to use for all types of interventions. It would be very interesting to have these maps for different interventions and that they are updated in real time as new individual data is added. I will see if a web applications can be developed for this purpose. One other thing I like with this model is that it gives us a reminder that we should not just listen to what one person shares about their experiences around one intervention. Things are often more complex than one data point. Like the case with the biohacker Bryan Johnson who revealed that he had stopped taking rapamycin because of adverse side effects. It’s great that he shared his experiences with the longevity community but the reaction in the community was interesting. Many thought that the result of this one self-experimentat around Rapamycin was almost the truth for everyone. But Bryan Johnson’s data point in the matrix is just one data point (S1:5) and as we see there exist also other data points with different response profiles. It will be very interesting to see how this matrix will develop when we start to add just anonymous individual data to it and skip overall group data like the rapamycin survey data (pubmed: 37191826). This will improve the heatmap accuracy. My assumption is that probably most people who self-experiment with a low intermittent dose of Rapamycin will either be non-responders or good-responders. Let’s see what hints we will get when new data is added to the matrix. Curious question, where would you plot yourself in the matrix?

@DrPatrickLinden @AporiaMagazine If we are serious about progress in anti-aging medicine don't we want him to take more risks? How do we get him back on Rapamycin? If caution had dominated the thinking of aviation pioneers we'd probably still be flying propellor driven biplanes

@AgarNicholas @AporiaMagazine A small critique: I think it is too early to describe what Bryan is doing as "self-destructive". He is measuring himself carefully, a far cry from the "elixir poisoning" of the Chinese immortality pioneers :) Nice comparison with the aviation gladiators/pioneers.

@DrPatrickLinden @AporiaMagazine I guess when he himself describes it as an "aggressive" protocol that was on the cards. Is he up for Musk-designed nanobots?

@AgarNicholas @AporiaMagazine A small thing: Bryan has quit his Rapamycin protocol.