xyience

There are some people who find the concept of quantum physics philosophically displeasing and try however they can to ignore all the experimental evidence and say we're really in a classical universe. This isn't a case of one of those.

I think a lot of tech people lean libertarian, which is a strange double-think ground of left and right views, because the role of a technologist has inherently anti-left and anti-right components. Technology is upstream of culture, upstream of society, to work on it implies defying authority whether in the form of a single sovereign or public opinion. While much of the world is still the same, much has been remade according to man's desire, through technology, and there is still much more to be remade. And often not a collective mankind, but an individual, often male, or a small group of individuals, often male. That kind of influence is inherently anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian, but anti-authoritarian as it is highly individualistic. Yet its benefits can be made private (until someone else figures out how to do the same, anyway) or open to all according to the whim of the creator, because it's fundamentally just knowledge that once derived can be shared endlessly.

The comments about techies not going out of their domain to try and solve things is just nonsense, as cross domain work happens all the time. Applied technology is often the catalyst (and money source) that brings multiple disciplines together who otherwise would be perfectly content sitting around in academia pursuing their narrow focuses for all time (this isn't to say that such narrow pursuing can't bring great fruits). Ok, it's not the only catalyst, and maybe a lot of technologists have that habit and viewpoint of being able to do better than narrow field experts, but either they succeed and are shown to be right all along that they didn't need outside help, or they are wrong, and they fail, or they change their minds as they realize they're failing and study up and get consultants. I don't know anything about Google's anti-aging prospects but if they aren't already in contact with Aubrey DeGrey and the other biologists and doctors he's in contact with they soon will be once they realize how hard the problem is.