Thanks for the bullet points and thoughtful inquiry!
I’ve taken this as an opportunity to lay down some of my thoughts on the matter; this turned out to be quite long. I can expand and tidy this into a full post if people are interested, though it sounds like it would overlap somewhat with what Matthew’s been working on.
I am very interested in a full post, as right now I think this area is quite neglected and important groundwork can be completed.
My guess is that most people who think about the effects of anti-aging research don’t think very seriously about it because they are either trying to come up with reasons to instantly dismiss it, or come up with reasons to instantly dismiss objections to it. As a result, most of the “results” we have about what would happen in a post-aging world come from two sides of a very polarized arena. This is not healthy epistemologically.
In wild animal suffering research, most people assume that there are only two possible interventions: destroy nature, or preserve nature. This sort of binary thinking infects discussions about wild animal suffering, as it prevents people from thinking seriously about the vast array of possible interventions that could make wild animal lives better. I think the same is true for anti-aging research.
Most people I’ve talked to seem to think that there’s only two positions you can take on anti-aging: we should throw our whole support behind medical biogerontology, or we should abandon it entirely and focus on other cause areas. This is crazy.
In reality, there are many ways that we can make a post-aging society better. If we correctly forecast the impacts to global inequality or whatever, and we’d prefer to have inequality go down in a post-aging world, then we can start talking about ways to mitigate such effects in the future. The idea that not talking about the issue or dismissing anti-aging is the best way to make these things go away is a super common reaction that I cannot understand.
Apart from technological stagnation, the other common worry people raise about life extension is cultural stagnation: entrenchment of inequality, extension of authoritarian regimes, aborted social/moral progress, et cetera.
I’m currently writing a post about this, because I see it as one of the most important variables affecting our evaluation of the long-term impact of anti-aging. I’ll bring forward arguments both for and against what I see as “value drift” slowed by ending aging.
Overall, I see no clear arguments for either side, but I currently think that the “slower moral progress isn’t that bad” position is more promising than it first appears. I’m actually really skeptical of many of the arguments that philosophers and laypeople have brought forward about the necessary function of moral progress brought about by generational death.
And as you mention, it’s unclear why we should expect better value drift when we have an aging population, given that there is evidence that the aging process itself makes people more prejudiced and closed-minded in a number of ways.
Most people I’ve talked to seem to think that there’s only two positions you can take on anti-aging: we should throw our whole support behind medical biogerontology, or we should abandon it entirely and focus on other cause areas. This is crazy.
I’m not sure it’s all that crazy. EA is all about prioritisation. If something makes you believe that anti-ageing is 10% less promising as a cause area than you thought, that could lead you to cut your spending in that area by far more than 10% if it made other cause areas more promising.
I’ve spoken to a number of EAs who think anti-ageing research is a pretty cool cause area, but not competitive with top causes like AI and biosecurity. As long as there’s something much more promising you could be working on it doesn’t necessarily matter much how valuable you think anti-ageing is.
Now, some people will have sufficient comparative advantage that they should be working on ageing anyway: either directly or on the meta-level social-science questions surrounding it. But it’s not clear to me exactly who those people are, at least for the direct side of things. Wetlab biologists and bioinformaticians could work on medical countermeasures for biosecurity. AI/ML people (who I expect to be very important to progress in anti-ageing) could work on AI safety (or biosecurity again). Social scientists could work on the social aspects of X-risk reduction, or on some other means of improving institutional decision-making. There’s a lot competing with ageing for the attention of well-suited EAs.
I’m not saying ageing will inevitably lose out to all those alternatives; it’s very neglected and (IMO) quite promising, and some people will just find it more interesting to work on than the alternatives. But I do generally back the idea of ruthless prioritisation.
Right, I wasn’t criticizing cause priortization. I was criticizing the binary attitude people had towards anti-aging. Imagine if people dismissed AI safety research because, “It would be fruitless to ban AI research. We shouldn’t even try.” That’s what it often sounds like to me when people fail to think seriously about anti-aging research. They aren’t even considering the idea that there are other things we could do.
Thanks for the bullet points and thoughtful inquiry!
I am very interested in a full post, as right now I think this area is quite neglected and important groundwork can be completed.
My guess is that most people who think about the effects of anti-aging research don’t think very seriously about it because they are either trying to come up with reasons to instantly dismiss it, or come up with reasons to instantly dismiss objections to it. As a result, most of the “results” we have about what would happen in a post-aging world come from two sides of a very polarized arena. This is not healthy epistemologically.
In wild animal suffering research, most people assume that there are only two possible interventions: destroy nature, or preserve nature. This sort of binary thinking infects discussions about wild animal suffering, as it prevents people from thinking seriously about the vast array of possible interventions that could make wild animal lives better. I think the same is true for anti-aging research.
Most people I’ve talked to seem to think that there’s only two positions you can take on anti-aging: we should throw our whole support behind medical biogerontology, or we should abandon it entirely and focus on other cause areas. This is crazy.
In reality, there are many ways that we can make a post-aging society better. If we correctly forecast the impacts to global inequality or whatever, and we’d prefer to have inequality go down in a post-aging world, then we can start talking about ways to mitigate such effects in the future. The idea that not talking about the issue or dismissing anti-aging is the best way to make these things go away is a super common reaction that I cannot understand.
I’m currently writing a post about this, because I see it as one of the most important variables affecting our evaluation of the long-term impact of anti-aging. I’ll bring forward arguments both for and against what I see as “value drift” slowed by ending aging.
Overall, I see no clear arguments for either side, but I currently think that the “slower moral progress isn’t that bad” position is more promising than it first appears. I’m actually really skeptical of many of the arguments that philosophers and laypeople have brought forward about the necessary function of moral progress brought about by generational death.
And as you mention, it’s unclear why we should expect better value drift when we have an aging population, given that there is evidence that the aging process itself makes people more prejudiced and closed-minded in a number of ways.
I’m not sure it’s all that crazy. EA is all about prioritisation. If something makes you believe that anti-ageing is 10% less promising as a cause area than you thought, that could lead you to cut your spending in that area by far more than 10% if it made other cause areas more promising.
I’ve spoken to a number of EAs who think anti-ageing research is a pretty cool cause area, but not competitive with top causes like AI and biosecurity. As long as there’s something much more promising you could be working on it doesn’t necessarily matter much how valuable you think anti-ageing is.
Now, some people will have sufficient comparative advantage that they should be working on ageing anyway: either directly or on the meta-level social-science questions surrounding it. But it’s not clear to me exactly who those people are, at least for the direct side of things. Wetlab biologists and bioinformaticians could work on medical countermeasures for biosecurity. AI/ML people (who I expect to be very important to progress in anti-ageing) could work on AI safety (or biosecurity again). Social scientists could work on the social aspects of X-risk reduction, or on some other means of improving institutional decision-making. There’s a lot competing with ageing for the attention of well-suited EAs.
I’m not saying ageing will inevitably lose out to all those alternatives; it’s very neglected and (IMO) quite promising, and some people will just find it more interesting to work on than the alternatives. But I do generally back the idea of ruthless prioritisation.
Right, I wasn’t criticizing cause priortization. I was criticizing the binary attitude people had towards anti-aging. Imagine if people dismissed AI safety research because, “It would be fruitless to ban AI research. We shouldn’t even try.” That’s what it often sounds like to me when people fail to think seriously about anti-aging research. They aren’t even considering the idea that there are other things we could do.