How We Think About Aging
From Reason’s post The Way People Think About Aging:
When talking about progress over decades, the most important part of that progress is not the year in which scientific progress reaches a tipping point - although that helps - but it is the year in which advocacy and education reaches a tipping point. Significant progress occurs when a large number of people want it to occur: up until that point matters tends to move slowly. This means that we should pay more attention to the way we used to think, back in the day. How did we wake from our pro-aging trances? That event has to be repeated many millions of times over the next decade if a large community and effective community of supporters, researchers, and fundraisers is to arise.
I think that distinction between technical tipping point and advocacy tipping point is an important one. At some point, more and more people are going to think, “Hey, this is possible and worth pursuing.” But we’ll need some sort of critical mass before the general consensus is, “Let’s go for it.” It’s a critical mass that we’d be better off reaching sooner rather than later.
