Thanks for this post, strongly upvoted. The amount of attention (and funding) aging research gets within EA is unbelievably low. That’s why I wrote an entire series of posts on this cause-area. A couple of comments:
1) Remember: if a charity finances aging research, it has the effect of hastening it, not enabling it. Aging will be brought under medical control at some point, we are only able to influence when. This translates into the main impact factor of hastening the arrival of Longevity Escape Velocity.
2) Now look again at your bulleted list of “big” indirect effects, and remember that you can only hasten them, not enable them. To me, this consideration make the impact we can have on them seem no more than a rounding error if compared to the impact we can have due to LEV (each year you bring LEV closer by saves 36,500,000 lives of 1000QALYS. This is a conservative estimate I made here.)
Small correction: Aubrey de Grey only estimates a 50⁄50 chance of LEV within 17 years. This is also conditional on funding, because before the private money started to pour in five years ago, his estimate had been stuck for many years at 50⁄50 chance of LEV within 20-22 years.
Now look again at your bulleted list of “big” indirect effects, and remember that you can only hasten them, not enable them. To me, this consideration make the impact we can have on them seem no more than a rounding error if compared to the impact we can have due to LEV (each year you bring LEV closer by saves 36,500,000 lives of 1000QALYS. This is a conservative estimate I made here.)
This isn’t clear to me. In Hilary Greaves and William MacAskill’s paper on strong longtermism, they argue that unless what we do now impacts a critical lock-in period, then most of the stuff we do now will “wash out” and have a low impact on the future.
If a lock-in period never comes, then there’s no compelling reason to focus on indirect effects of anti-aging, and therefore I’d agree with you that these effects are small. However, if there is a lock-in period, then the actual lives saved from ending aging could be tiny compared to the lasting billion year impact that shifting to a post-aging society lead to.
What a strong long-termist should mainly care about are these indirect effects, not merely the lives saved.
Thanks for this post, strongly upvoted. The amount of attention (and funding) aging research gets within EA is unbelievably low. That’s why I wrote an entire series of posts on this cause-area. A couple of comments:
1) Remember: if a charity finances aging research, it has the effect of hastening it, not enabling it. Aging will be brought under medical control at some point, we are only able to influence when. This translates into the main impact factor of hastening the arrival of Longevity Escape Velocity.
2) Now look again at your bulleted list of “big” indirect effects, and remember that you can only hasten them, not enable them. To me, this consideration make the impact we can have on them seem no more than a rounding error if compared to the impact we can have due to LEV (each year you bring LEV closer by saves 36,500,000 lives of 1000QALYS. This is a conservative estimate I made here.)
Small correction: Aubrey de Grey only estimates a 50⁄50 chance of LEV within 17 years. This is also conditional on funding, because before the private money started to pour in five years ago, his estimate had been stuck for many years at 50⁄50 chance of LEV within 20-22 years.
This isn’t clear to me. In Hilary Greaves and William MacAskill’s paper on strong longtermism, they argue that unless what we do now impacts a critical lock-in period, then most of the stuff we do now will “wash out” and have a low impact on the future.
If a lock-in period never comes, then there’s no compelling reason to focus on indirect effects of anti-aging, and therefore I’d agree with you that these effects are small. However, if there is a lock-in period, then the actual lives saved from ending aging could be tiny compared to the lasting billion year impact that shifting to a post-aging society lead to.
What a strong long-termist should mainly care about are these indirect effects, not merely the lives saved.