I’d especially welcome criticism from folks not interested in human longevity. If your priority as a human being isn’t to improve healthcare or to reduce catastrophic/existential risks, what is it? Why?
Personally, I am interested in longevity and I think governments (and other groups, although perhaps not EA grantmakers) should be funding more aging research. Nevertheless, some criticism!
I think there are a lot of reasonable life goals other than improving healthcare or reducing x-risks. These things are indeed big, underrated threats to human life. But the reason why human life is so worthwhile and in need of protection, is because life is full of good experiences. So, trying to create more good experiences (and conversely, minimize suffering / pain / sorrow / boredom etc) is also clearly a good thing to do. “Create good experiences” covers a lot of things, from mundane stuff like running a restaurant that makes tasty food or developing a fun videogame, to political crusades to reduce animal suffering or make things better in developing countries or prevent wars and recessions or etc, to anti-aging-like moonshot tech projects like eliminating suffering using genetic engineering or trying to build Neuralink-style brain-computer interfaces or etc. Basically, I think the Bryan Johnson style “the zeroth rule is don’t-die” messaging where antiaging becomes effectively the only thing worth caring about, is reductive and will probably seem off-putting to many people. (Even though, personally, I totally see where you are coming from and consider longevity/health a key personal priority.)
This post bounces around somewhat confusingly among a few different justifications for / defenses of aging research. I think this post (or future posts) would be more helpful if it had a more explicit structure, acknowledging that there are many reasons one could be skeptical of aging research. Here is an example outline:
Some people don’t understand transhumanist values at all, and think that death is essentially good because “death gives life meaning’ or etc silliness.
Other people will kinda-sorta agree that death is bad, but also feel uncomfortable about the idea of extending lifespans—people are often kinda confused about their own feelings/opinions here simply because they haven’t thought much about it.
Some people totally get that death is bad, insofar as they personally would enjoy living much longer, but they don’t think that solving aging would be good from an overall societal perspective.
Some people think that a world of extended longevity would have various bad qualities that would mean the cure for aging is worse than the disease—overpopulation, or stagnant governments/culture (including perpetually stable dictatorships), or just a bunch of dependent old people putting an unsustainable burden on a small number of young workers, or conversely that if people never got to retire this would literally be a fate worse than death. (I think these ideas are mostly silly, but they are common objections. Also, I do think it would be valuable to try and explore/predict what a world of enhanced longevity would look like in more detail, in terms of the impact on culture / economy / governance / geopolitics / etc. Yes, the common objections are dumb, and minor drawbacks like overpopulation shouldn’t overshadow the immense win of curing aging. But I would still be very curious to know what a world of extended longevity would look like—which problems would indeed get worse, and which would actually get better?)
Most of this category of objections is just vague vibes, but a subcategory here is people actually running the numbers and worrying that an increase in elderly people will bankrupt Medicare, or whatever—this is why, when trying to influence policy and public research funding decisions, I think it’s helpful to address this by pointing out that slowing aging (rather than treating disease) would actually be positive for government budgets and the economy, as you do in the post. (Even though in the grand scheme of things, it’s a little absurd to be worried about whether triuphing over death will have a positive or negative effect on some CBO score, as if that should be the deciding factor of whether to cure aging!!)
Other people seem to think that curing death would be morally neutral from an external top-down perspective—if in 2024 there are 8 billion happy people, and in 2100 there are 8 billion happy people, does it really matter whether it’s the same people or new ones? Maybe the happiness is all that counts. (I have a hard time understanding where people are coming from when they seem to sincerely believe this 100%, but lots of philosophically-minded people feel this way, including many utilitarian EA types.) More plausibly, people won’t be 100% committed to this viewpoint, but they’ll still feel that aging and death is, in some sense, less of an ongoing catastrophe from a top-down civilization-wide perspective than it is for the individuals making up that civilization. (I understand and share this view.)
Some people agree that solving aging would be great for both individuals and society, but they just don’t think that it’s tractable to work on aging. IMO this has been the correct opinion for the vast majority of human history, from 10,000 B.C. up until, idk, 2005 or something? So I don’t blame people for failing to notice that maybe, possibly, we are finally starting to make some progress on aging after all. (Imagine if I wrote a post arguing for human expansion to other star systems, and eventually throughout the galaxy, and made lots of soaring rhetorical points about how this is basically the ultimate purpose of human civilization. In a certain sense this is true, but also we obviously lack the technology to send colony-ships to even the nearest stars, so what’s the point of trying to convince people who think civilization should stay centered on the Earth?)
I really like the idea of ending aging, so I get excited about various bits of supposed progress (rapamycin? senescent cell therapy? idk). Many people don’t even know about these small promising signs (eg the ongoing mouse longevity study).
Some people know about those small promising signs, but still feel uncertain whether these current ideas will pan out into real benefits for healthy human lifespans. Reasonable IMO.
Even supposing that something like rapamycin, or some other random drug, indeed extends lifespan by 15% or something—that would be great, but what does that tell me about the likelihood that humanity will be able to consistently come up with OTHER, bigger longevity wins? It is a small positive update, but IMO there is potentially a lot of space between “we tried 10,000 random drugs and found one that slows the progression of alzheimers!” and “we now understand how alzheimers works and have developed a cure”. Might be the same situation with aging. So, even getting some small wins doesn’t necessarily mean that the idea of “curing aging” is tractable, especially if we are operating without much of a theory of how aging works. (Seems plausible to me that humanity might be able to solve, like, 3 of the 5 major causes of aging, and lifespan goes up 25%, but then the other 2 are either impossible to fix for fundamental biological reasons, or we never manage to figure them out.)
A lot of people who appear to be in the “death is good” / “death isn’t a societal problem, just an individual problem” categories above, would actually change their tune pretty quickly if they started believing that making progress on longevity was actually tractable. So I think the tractability objections are actually more important to address than it seems, and the earlier stuff about changing hearts and minds on the philosophical questions is actually less important.
Probably instead of one giant comprehensive mega-post addressing all possible objections, you should tackle each area in its own more bite-sized post—to be fancy, maybe you could explicitly link these together in a structured way, like Holden Karnofsky’s “Most Important Century” blog posts.
I don’t really know anything about medicine or drug development, so I can’t give a very detailed breakdown of potential tractability objections, and indeed I personally don’t know how to feel about the tractability of anti-aging.
Of course, to the extent that your post is just arguing “governments should fund this area more, it seems obviously under-resourced”, then that’s a pretty low bar, and your graph of the NIH’s painfully skewed funding priorities basically makes the entire argument for you. (Although I note that the graph seems incorrect?? Shouldn’t $500M be much larger than one row of pixels?? Compare to the nearby “$7B” figures; the $500M should of course be 1/14th as tall...) For this purpose, it’s fine IMO to argue “aging is objectively very important, it doesn’t even matter how non-tractable it is, SURELY we ought to be spending more than $500m/year on this, at the very least we should be spending more than we do on Alzheimers which we also don’t understand but is an objectively smaller problem.”
But if you are trying to convince venture-capitalists to invest in anti-aging with the expectation of maybe actually turning a profit, or win over philanthropists who have other pressing funding priorities, then going into more detail on tractability is probably necessary.
Personally, I am interested in longevity and I think governments (and other groups, although perhaps not EA grantmakers) should be funding more aging research. Nevertheless, some criticism!
I think there are a lot of reasonable life goals other than improving healthcare or reducing x-risks. These things are indeed big, underrated threats to human life. But the reason why human life is so worthwhile and in need of protection, is because life is full of good experiences. So, trying to create more good experiences (and conversely, minimize suffering / pain / sorrow / boredom etc) is also clearly a good thing to do. “Create good experiences” covers a lot of things, from mundane stuff like running a restaurant that makes tasty food or developing a fun videogame, to political crusades to reduce animal suffering or make things better in developing countries or prevent wars and recessions or etc, to anti-aging-like moonshot tech projects like eliminating suffering using genetic engineering or trying to build Neuralink-style brain-computer interfaces or etc. Basically, I think the Bryan Johnson style “the zeroth rule is don’t-die” messaging where antiaging becomes effectively the only thing worth caring about, is reductive and will probably seem off-putting to many people. (Even though, personally, I totally see where you are coming from and consider longevity/health a key personal priority.)
This post bounces around somewhat confusingly among a few different justifications for / defenses of aging research. I think this post (or future posts) would be more helpful if it had a more explicit structure, acknowledging that there are many reasons one could be skeptical of aging research. Here is an example outline:
Some people don’t understand transhumanist values at all, and think that death is essentially good because “death gives life meaning’ or etc silliness.
Other people will kinda-sorta agree that death is bad, but also feel uncomfortable about the idea of extending lifespans—people are often kinda confused about their own feelings/opinions here simply because they haven’t thought much about it.
Some people totally get that death is bad, insofar as they personally would enjoy living much longer, but they don’t think that solving aging would be good from an overall societal perspective.
Some people think that a world of extended longevity would have various bad qualities that would mean the cure for aging is worse than the disease—overpopulation, or stagnant governments/culture (including perpetually stable dictatorships), or just a bunch of dependent old people putting an unsustainable burden on a small number of young workers, or conversely that if people never got to retire this would literally be a fate worse than death. (I think these ideas are mostly silly, but they are common objections. Also, I do think it would be valuable to try and explore/predict what a world of enhanced longevity would look like in more detail, in terms of the impact on culture / economy / governance / geopolitics / etc. Yes, the common objections are dumb, and minor drawbacks like overpopulation shouldn’t overshadow the immense win of curing aging. But I would still be very curious to know what a world of extended longevity would look like—which problems would indeed get worse, and which would actually get better?)
Most of this category of objections is just vague vibes, but a subcategory here is people actually running the numbers and worrying that an increase in elderly people will bankrupt Medicare, or whatever—this is why, when trying to influence policy and public research funding decisions, I think it’s helpful to address this by pointing out that slowing aging (rather than treating disease) would actually be positive for government budgets and the economy, as you do in the post. (Even though in the grand scheme of things, it’s a little absurd to be worried about whether triuphing over death will have a positive or negative effect on some CBO score, as if that should be the deciding factor of whether to cure aging!!)
Other people seem to think that curing death would be morally neutral from an external top-down perspective—if in 2024 there are 8 billion happy people, and in 2100 there are 8 billion happy people, does it really matter whether it’s the same people or new ones? Maybe the happiness is all that counts. (I have a hard time understanding where people are coming from when they seem to sincerely believe this 100%, but lots of philosophically-minded people feel this way, including many utilitarian EA types.) More plausibly, people won’t be 100% committed to this viewpoint, but they’ll still feel that aging and death is, in some sense, less of an ongoing catastrophe from a top-down civilization-wide perspective than it is for the individuals making up that civilization. (I understand and share this view.)
Some people agree that solving aging would be great for both individuals and society, but they just don’t think that it’s tractable to work on aging. IMO this has been the correct opinion for the vast majority of human history, from 10,000 B.C. up until, idk, 2005 or something? So I don’t blame people for failing to notice that maybe, possibly, we are finally starting to make some progress on aging after all. (Imagine if I wrote a post arguing for human expansion to other star systems, and eventually throughout the galaxy, and made lots of soaring rhetorical points about how this is basically the ultimate purpose of human civilization. In a certain sense this is true, but also we obviously lack the technology to send colony-ships to even the nearest stars, so what’s the point of trying to convince people who think civilization should stay centered on the Earth?)
I really like the idea of ending aging, so I get excited about various bits of supposed progress (rapamycin? senescent cell therapy? idk). Many people don’t even know about these small promising signs (eg the ongoing mouse longevity study).
Some people know about those small promising signs, but still feel uncertain whether these current ideas will pan out into real benefits for healthy human lifespans. Reasonable IMO.
Even supposing that something like rapamycin, or some other random drug, indeed extends lifespan by 15% or something—that would be great, but what does that tell me about the likelihood that humanity will be able to consistently come up with OTHER, bigger longevity wins? It is a small positive update, but IMO there is potentially a lot of space between “we tried 10,000 random drugs and found one that slows the progression of alzheimers!” and “we now understand how alzheimers works and have developed a cure”. Might be the same situation with aging. So, even getting some small wins doesn’t necessarily mean that the idea of “curing aging” is tractable, especially if we are operating without much of a theory of how aging works. (Seems plausible to me that humanity might be able to solve, like, 3 of the 5 major causes of aging, and lifespan goes up 25%, but then the other 2 are either impossible to fix for fundamental biological reasons, or we never manage to figure them out.)
A lot of people who appear to be in the “death is good” / “death isn’t a societal problem, just an individual problem” categories above, would actually change their tune pretty quickly if they started believing that making progress on longevity was actually tractable. So I think the tractability objections are actually more important to address than it seems, and the earlier stuff about changing hearts and minds on the philosophical questions is actually less important.
Probably instead of one giant comprehensive mega-post addressing all possible objections, you should tackle each area in its own more bite-sized post—to be fancy, maybe you could explicitly link these together in a structured way, like Holden Karnofsky’s “Most Important Century” blog posts.
I don’t really know anything about medicine or drug development, so I can’t give a very detailed breakdown of potential tractability objections, and indeed I personally don’t know how to feel about the tractability of anti-aging.
Of course, to the extent that your post is just arguing “governments should fund this area more, it seems obviously under-resourced”, then that’s a pretty low bar, and your graph of the NIH’s painfully skewed funding priorities basically makes the entire argument for you. (Although I note that the graph seems incorrect?? Shouldn’t $500M be much larger than one row of pixels?? Compare to the nearby “$7B” figures; the $500M should of course be 1/14th as tall...) For this purpose, it’s fine IMO to argue “aging is objectively very important, it doesn’t even matter how non-tractable it is, SURELY we ought to be spending more than $500m/year on this, at the very least we should be spending more than we do on Alzheimers which we also don’t understand but is an objectively smaller problem.”
But if you are trying to convince venture-capitalists to invest in anti-aging with the expectation of maybe actually turning a profit, or win over philanthropists who have other pressing funding priorities, then going into more detail on tractability is probably necessary.