Anti-aging seems like a plausible area for effective altruists to consider giving to, so thank you for raising this thought. It looks like GiveWell briefly looked into this area before deciding to focus its efforts elsewhere.
I’ve seen a few videos of Aubrey de Grey speaking about how SENS could make use of $100 million per year to fund research on rejuvenation therapies, so presumably SENS has plenty of room for more funding. SENS’s I-990 tax forms show that the organization’s assets jumped by quite a lot in 2012, though this was because of de Grey’s donations during this year, and though I can’t find SENS’s I-990 for 2013, I would naively guess that they’ve been able to start spending the money donated in 2012 during the last couple of years. I still think that it would be worthwhile to ask someone at SENS where the marginal donation to the foundation would go in the short term—maybe a certain threshold of donations needs to be reached before rejuvenation research can be properly begun in the most cost-effective way.
I agree with Aubrey that too much money is spent researching cures to specific diseases, relative to the amount spent researching rejuvenation and healthspan-extension technology. I’ve focused this response on SENS because, as a person with a decent science background, I feel like Aubrey’s assertion that (paraphrased from memory) “academic research is constrained in a way that rewards low expected value projects which are likely to yield results quickly over longer term, high expected value projects” is broadly true, and that extra research into rejuvenation technologies is, on the margin, more valuable than extra research into possible treatments for particular diseases.
Thanks, lots of useful things here. I absolutely agree with your last paragraph.
I agree that looking more carefully at SENS would be the right move for a deeper investigation of the area. I think before that step it’s worth having some idea of roughly how valuable the area is (which is what I was very crudely doing).
I don’t put too much stock in the particular numbers I produced here. They make anti-ageing look just slightly less promising than the best direct health interventions we know of (hence indeed better than a lot of medical research), but the previous time I came up with numbers for this problem—for a conference talk—I must have been in a more optimistic mood, because my estimate was a couple of orders of magnitude better. I wouldn’t be surprised if the truth is somewhere in the middle.
I would like to see more people provide estimates, even if not carefully justified, as I think we can get some wisdom of the crowds coming through, and to understand which figures are the most controversial or would benefit most from careful research.
Anti-aging seems like a plausible area for effective altruists to consider giving to, so thank you for raising this thought. It looks like GiveWell briefly looked into this area before deciding to focus its efforts elsewhere.
I’ve seen a few videos of Aubrey de Grey speaking about how SENS could make use of $100 million per year to fund research on rejuvenation therapies, so presumably SENS has plenty of room for more funding. SENS’s I-990 tax forms show that the organization’s assets jumped by quite a lot in 2012, though this was because of de Grey’s donations during this year, and though I can’t find SENS’s I-990 for 2013, I would naively guess that they’ve been able to start spending the money donated in 2012 during the last couple of years. I still think that it would be worthwhile to ask someone at SENS where the marginal donation to the foundation would go in the short term—maybe a certain threshold of donations needs to be reached before rejuvenation research can be properly begun in the most cost-effective way.
I agree with Aubrey that too much money is spent researching cures to specific diseases, relative to the amount spent researching rejuvenation and healthspan-extension technology. I’ve focused this response on SENS because, as a person with a decent science background, I feel like Aubrey’s assertion that (paraphrased from memory) “academic research is constrained in a way that rewards low expected value projects which are likely to yield results quickly over longer term, high expected value projects” is broadly true, and that extra research into rejuvenation technologies is, on the margin, more valuable than extra research into possible treatments for particular diseases.
Thanks, lots of useful things here. I absolutely agree with your last paragraph.
I agree that looking more carefully at SENS would be the right move for a deeper investigation of the area. I think before that step it’s worth having some idea of roughly how valuable the area is (which is what I was very crudely doing).
I don’t put too much stock in the particular numbers I produced here. They make anti-ageing look just slightly less promising than the best direct health interventions we know of (hence indeed better than a lot of medical research), but the previous time I came up with numbers for this problem—for a conference talk—I must have been in a more optimistic mood, because my estimate was a couple of orders of magnitude better. I wouldn’t be surprised if the truth is somewhere in the middle.
I would like to see more people provide estimates, even if not carefully justified, as I think we can get some wisdom of the crowds coming through, and to understand which figures are the most controversial or would benefit most from careful research.