Hey, regarding aging: you might be interested to know I’m writing a series of articles to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of any project related to aging research. I’ve found that the cost-effectiveness of aging research might be much higher, in certain cases, than what Sarah Constantin found. That’s mostly because I’m also accounting for the fact that new aging research brings the date of Longevity Escape Velocity closer in time, and this increses the scope by many orders of magnitude. Each single year “buyed” means averting 36,500,000,000QALYs, using a conservative estimate (36,500,000 deaths by aging per year multiplied by 1000 estimated years free of disability after LEV). Check out my profile for all the articles I’ve written.
Regarding your proposal of prizes: I think prizes for a general-purpose cure for aging should involve prizes for intermediate steps, that may look… less than incredible. All of the intermediary steps, even inside “paradigm-shift-like” plans like Aubrey de Grey’s will look similar on the outside: they will delay aging. Unless you are measuring if tissues are actually rejuvenated and you have a robust theoretical framework you won’t recognize what will be necessary in the long-term. For cancer, the picture looks much better, but the incremental steps, even for a general-purpose cure, will probably belong to many different groups.
You will probably be pleased to know that recently Peter Diamandis’ XPrize Foundation started a similar project: to give prizes for specific innovations identified as important in aging research and adjacent areas.
With almost all of those proposed intermediate goals, it’s substantially harder to evaluate whether the goal will produce much value. In most cases, it will be tempting to define the intermediate goal in a way that is easy to measure, even when doing so weakens the connection between the goal and health.
E.g. good biomarkers of aging would be very valuable if they measure what we hope they measure. But your XPrize link suggests that people will be tempted to use expert acceptance in place of hard data. The benefits of biomarkers have been frequently overstated.
It’s clear that most donors want prizes to have a high likelihood of being awarded fairly soon. But I see that desire as generally unrelated to a desire for maximizing health benefits. I’m guessing it indicates that donors prefer quick results over high-value results, and/or that they overestimate their knowledge of which intermediate steps are valuable.
A $10 million aging prize from an unknown charity might have serious credibility problems, but I expect that a $5 billion prize from the Gates Foundation or OpenPhil would be fairly credible—they wouldn’t actually offer the prize without first getting some competent researchers to support it, and they’d likely first try out some smaller prizes in easier domains.
Hey, regarding aging: you might be interested to know I’m writing a series of articles to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of any project related to aging research. I’ve found that the cost-effectiveness of aging research might be much higher, in certain cases, than what Sarah Constantin found. That’s mostly because I’m also accounting for the fact that new aging research brings the date of Longevity Escape Velocity closer in time, and this increses the scope by many orders of magnitude. Each single year “buyed” means averting 36,500,000,000QALYs, using a conservative estimate (36,500,000 deaths by aging per year multiplied by 1000 estimated years free of disability after LEV). Check out my profile for all the articles I’ve written.
Regarding your proposal of prizes: I think prizes for a general-purpose cure for aging should involve prizes for intermediate steps, that may look… less than incredible. All of the intermediary steps, even inside “paradigm-shift-like” plans like Aubrey de Grey’s will look similar on the outside: they will delay aging. Unless you are measuring if tissues are actually rejuvenated and you have a robust theoretical framework you won’t recognize what will be necessary in the long-term. For cancer, the picture looks much better, but the incremental steps, even for a general-purpose cure, will probably belong to many different groups.
You will probably be pleased to know that recently Peter Diamandis’ XPrize Foundation started a similar project: to give prizes for specific innovations identified as important in aging research and adjacent areas.
With almost all of those proposed intermediate goals, it’s substantially harder to evaluate whether the goal will produce much value. In most cases, it will be tempting to define the intermediate goal in a way that is easy to measure, even when doing so weakens the connection between the goal and health.
E.g. good biomarkers of aging would be very valuable if they measure what we hope they measure. But your XPrize link suggests that people will be tempted to use expert acceptance in place of hard data. The benefits of biomarkers have been frequently overstated.
It’s clear that most donors want prizes to have a high likelihood of being awarded fairly soon. But I see that desire as generally unrelated to a desire for maximizing health benefits. I’m guessing it indicates that donors prefer quick results over high-value results, and/or that they overestimate their knowledge of which intermediate steps are valuable.
A $10 million aging prize from an unknown charity might have serious credibility problems, but I expect that a $5 billion prize from the Gates Foundation or OpenPhil would be fairly credible—they wouldn’t actually offer the prize without first getting some competent researchers to support it, and they’d likely first try out some smaller prizes in easier domains.