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.
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.