Another good article. I certainly agree that curing age-related diseases will save prevent a lot of end of life suffering.
To judge the impact of age related diseases on life satisfaction, it would be good to compare life satisfaction between people aged match groups of the elderly (within a few countries across the GDP range) that are: in good health, have physical disabilities, or mental disabilities. The reason I suggest this is that, although life satisfaction is positively correlated to life expectancy, most respondents from each country were probably relatively young (although I didn’t check the study methodology), and they may report an increase in life satisfaction from knowing that they will live longer, or having their grandparents around. This would be valuable data as getting a life satisfaction curve from 20 to 90 year old that don’t have age related-disabilities could indicate how to extrapolate life satisfaction to life spans that are only possible through LEV (and let you know how much life satisfaction is gained by removing age related disease).
This also presents an interesting issue with self-reported life satisfaction—people with dementia (or another neurological disorder) could report high-life satisfaction while an immediate carer might perceive they have low-life satisfaction. Who are we to believe?
You mention part of the longevity dividend could also be to allow people to make discoveries that require a large amount of experience to work on (also touched on in Part 2 with the intellectual luminaries). If longer lived people also care more about longer term issues this could be of particular benefit for EA related work in mid- to far-future X-risks if vastly more experienced people are able to make substantially more research progress than people who usually stop working at 65. Although, this cuts both ways as the extra experience might progress to be made hard problems than create X-risks, like AGI.
Also, I commented on Part 2 of the series that reducing the economic burden of supporting an aged population could would also be positive for younger people (before they have had theirs lives saved by LEV) under person affecting population ethics.
Thanks for the comments :) I basically agree with everything. The only thing I would add is this:
Getting a life satisfaction curve from 20 to 90 year old that don’t have age related-disabilities could be a step in the right direction for understanding how to extrapolate life satisfaction to life spans that are only possible through LEV. It has to be kept into account, though, that a healthy old person (or a healthy middle aged person) is still in worse health than a healthy young person. In fact, yesterday, it was suggested to me to add to the post the subtler effects of aging that aren’t counted as diseases. Things like, for example, loss of neuroplasticity and fluid intelligence. Another person reminded me of the fact that physical appearance also degrades very fast with age. Maybe it would turn out to be correct to extrapolate the life satisfaction curve you get from healthy old people, but I’m not sure how much. I think it’s at least very probable that doing that would fail for lives longer than a couple of centuries, although maybe we could still try to do a rough estimate while accounting for uncertainty. There are a lot of things to take into consideration that would complicate such an extrapolation. Examples: A possible different relationship with death and risk, higher possibility to try new things and take financial risks, more time for doing everything, being able to choose different life paths and careers, being able to experience new transformative technologies and human progress, experiencing the death of other people much more rarely and generally never seeing them lose their qualities. These things probably count as subtler possible benefits of aging research, although I didn’t list them in the post. There are probably many others.
That’s true, many aspects physical/mental aspects naturally decline with age and summing up many small improvements (appearance, neuroplasticity) could add up to a substantial extra benefit for LEV.
Still because aging tends to come with age related diseases, age and health are still covarying predictors of life satisfaction. Another good comparison would be the relative reduction in life satisfaction in healthy vs. disabelled between different age groups. I would go out on a limb and say that an elderly person is less bothered by being disabled than a younger person, but I may be wrong. Combined with a healthy life satisfaction curve across age, this could then be helpful in making the case for treating aging vs. treating age related diseases. The first piece of information extrapolates to (tentative) gain in life satisfaction just from living longer, the second predicts life satisfaction gained from curing the age-related diseases (which could also be done without curing aging).
This would be useful in prioritising LEV research between the hallmarks of aging that are most likely to result in the largest reduction in age-related diseases (if the hallmarks do not uniformly effect disease burden) rather than those that extend life the most. All the hallmarks should be addressed, but if likely gains in satisfaction from disease alleviation outweigh satisfaction from extended life (that still has a high probability of disease), the former should be our focus.
I think in general It would make most sense to prioritise research that would impact the date of LEV the most, because LEV results in both living healthier and longer. Also, it would be probably easier to do, since it’s difficult to know what hallmark/aspect of aging impacts healthspan the most, and they impact each other a lot. Instead, we probably can estimate the relative impact on the date of LEV using neglectedness (more on this in the next post). As a strategy, prioritising the short-term to have a bigger immediate effect I suspect would be less cost-effective.
Also note: therapies improving age-related diseases the most would also be the ones extending life the most. Curing aging and age-related diseases is the same thing. If aging is not cured some disease will always remain, because otherwise why would you die?
Good point, it does seem best just to work on the most life extending therapy when phrased that way. Then the trade of between living longer and suffering from diseases less would probably just be considered by somebody looking to rank LEV relative to short-term causes.
Another good article. I certainly agree that curing age-related diseases will save prevent a lot of end of life suffering.
To judge the impact of age related diseases on life satisfaction, it would be good to compare life satisfaction between people aged match groups of the elderly (within a few countries across the GDP range) that are: in good health, have physical disabilities, or mental disabilities. The reason I suggest this is that, although life satisfaction is positively correlated to life expectancy, most respondents from each country were probably relatively young (although I didn’t check the study methodology), and they may report an increase in life satisfaction from knowing that they will live longer, or having their grandparents around. This would be valuable data as getting a life satisfaction curve from 20 to 90 year old that don’t have age related-disabilities could indicate how to extrapolate life satisfaction to life spans that are only possible through LEV (and let you know how much life satisfaction is gained by removing age related disease).
This also presents an interesting issue with self-reported life satisfaction—people with dementia (or another neurological disorder) could report high-life satisfaction while an immediate carer might perceive they have low-life satisfaction. Who are we to believe?
You mention part of the longevity dividend could also be to allow people to make discoveries that require a large amount of experience to work on (also touched on in Part 2 with the intellectual luminaries). If longer lived people also care more about longer term issues this could be of particular benefit for EA related work in mid- to far-future X-risks if vastly more experienced people are able to make substantially more research progress than people who usually stop working at 65. Although, this cuts both ways as the extra experience might progress to be made hard problems than create X-risks, like AGI.
Also, I commented on Part 2 of the series that reducing the economic burden of supporting an aged population could would also be positive for younger people (before they have had theirs lives saved by LEV) under person affecting population ethics.
Thanks for the comments :) I basically agree with everything. The only thing I would add is this:
Getting a life satisfaction curve from 20 to 90 year old that don’t have age related-disabilities could be a step in the right direction for understanding how to extrapolate life satisfaction to life spans that are only possible through LEV. It has to be kept into account, though, that a healthy old person (or a healthy middle aged person) is still in worse health than a healthy young person. In fact, yesterday, it was suggested to me to add to the post the subtler effects of aging that aren’t counted as diseases. Things like, for example, loss of neuroplasticity and fluid intelligence. Another person reminded me of the fact that physical appearance also degrades very fast with age. Maybe it would turn out to be correct to extrapolate the life satisfaction curve you get from healthy old people, but I’m not sure how much. I think it’s at least very probable that doing that would fail for lives longer than a couple of centuries, although maybe we could still try to do a rough estimate while accounting for uncertainty. There are a lot of things to take into consideration that would complicate such an extrapolation. Examples: A possible different relationship with death and risk, higher possibility to try new things and take financial risks, more time for doing everything, being able to choose different life paths and careers, being able to experience new transformative technologies and human progress, experiencing the death of other people much more rarely and generally never seeing them lose their qualities. These things probably count as subtler possible benefits of aging research, although I didn’t list them in the post. There are probably many others.
That’s true, many aspects physical/mental aspects naturally decline with age and summing up many small improvements (appearance, neuroplasticity) could add up to a substantial extra benefit for LEV.
Still because aging tends to come with age related diseases, age and health are still covarying predictors of life satisfaction. Another good comparison would be the relative reduction in life satisfaction in healthy vs. disabelled between different age groups. I would go out on a limb and say that an elderly person is less bothered by being disabled than a younger person, but I may be wrong. Combined with a healthy life satisfaction curve across age, this could then be helpful in making the case for treating aging vs. treating age related diseases. The first piece of information extrapolates to (tentative) gain in life satisfaction just from living longer, the second predicts life satisfaction gained from curing the age-related diseases (which could also be done without curing aging).
This would be useful in prioritising LEV research between the hallmarks of aging that are most likely to result in the largest reduction in age-related diseases (if the hallmarks do not uniformly effect disease burden) rather than those that extend life the most. All the hallmarks should be addressed, but if likely gains in satisfaction from disease alleviation outweigh satisfaction from extended life (that still has a high probability of disease), the former should be our focus.
I think in general It would make most sense to prioritise research that would impact the date of LEV the most, because LEV results in both living healthier and longer. Also, it would be probably easier to do, since it’s difficult to know what hallmark/aspect of aging impacts healthspan the most, and they impact each other a lot. Instead, we probably can estimate the relative impact on the date of LEV using neglectedness (more on this in the next post). As a strategy, prioritising the short-term to have a bigger immediate effect I suspect would be less cost-effective.
Also note: therapies improving age-related diseases the most would also be the ones extending life the most. Curing aging and age-related diseases is the same thing. If aging is not cured some disease will always remain, because otherwise why would you die?
Good point, it does seem best just to work on the most life extending therapy when phrased that way. Then the trade of between living longer and suffering from diseases less would probably just be considered by somebody looking to rank LEV relative to short-term causes.
Oops, commented my own post.