Interesting overall, but I’ll never be tired of repeating that the majority of impact of aging research comes from making Longevity Escape Velocity come faster. This puts aging research in a much better position as a cause area than short or medium term causes. Not sure why literally everyone in the EA movement continues to ignore this metric completely. It just doesn’t make sense.
Well… I disagree with the claim that aging is on par with love or malaria prevention. This is the beginning of your post:
Making it possible for people to deliberately fall in love seems like a high priority, competitive with good short- and medium-term causes such as malaria prevention and anti-aging.
I thought you were going to mention LEV in the “Scope and direct impact” section, or at least in “Direct chage in average quality of life” section. Instead, in the first, you proceed to say:
Overall, nearly everyone will be affected by these interventions, so scope doesn’t give much reason to favor either one.
In making this claim you completely overlook the fundamental quantitative reasoning you need to make to tackle the question of impact. Ending malaria and “solving” love will give everyone a better life for at best 80 years, solving aging for… 1000 years as a lower bound. Moreover you need to keep in mind that it’s not giving people extra 1000 years of healthy life the source of impact. The source of impact is changing the date in which this will happen. Sorry if this seems nitpicking, but it changes everything.
In “Direct chage in average quality of life”, instead, you say:
Stopping aging would make the actual experience of dying rare; natural deaths could theoretically be made indefinitely rare or nonexistent. Morbidities associated with aging could be greatly reduced or ended. See this post for details.
You almost arrived at my conclusion with the first phrase:
Stopping aging would make the actual experience of dying rare; natural deaths could theoretically be made indefinitely rare or nonexistent.
But then you proceed to talk about reduction of morbidity at the end of life and you link my post titled “Impact of aging research besides LEV”. (Thank you for quoting me though, I think you are the first one to do that here, and it made me happy to know that at least someone digested something that I wrote.)
To wrap up:
You didn’t mention LEV, you didn’t mention 1000 years lifespans, and you didn’t mention that shifting the date of LEV is what counts. You made the case that aging research was on par with short and medium term causes in terms of impact, which can be credible only if you account for all the other measures of impact besides LEV, but not for shifting the date of LEV.
In making this claim you completely overlook the fundamental quantitative reasoning you need to make to tackle the question of impact.
Those issues are addressed in different sections. Scope just refers to what % of the future people are affected.
Ending malaria and “solving” love will give everyone a better life for at best 80 years, solving aging for… 1000 years as a lower bound.
This is reasoning from the lifetime utility of a given individual. I think that’s incorrect. Assume population size remains the same; if there are 10 people living 100 years, that’s comparable to one person living 1000 years, save for the unfortunate experiences surrounding death. OTOH, if we imagine 10 people living 1000 years, the principal advantage is not to be understood as improved quality of life, but rather as an increase in population size over time. So I give credit to anti-aging both for making mortality/morbidity very rare, and for increasing the population size.
I’ve only skimmed your part 1 LEV post so I may be missing something. But the way I see it, if you assign full QALYs for the 1000 years, you are doing one of two things: 1) assuming that the fertility rate (births per person per year) will not decline as a result of the greater population, or 2) not worried about the foregone births. I presume the population will grow as a result of solving aging, but not to the extent that is naively implied by assuming that fertility remains constant.
I implicitly assumed that both of these interventions are going to happen at some point anyway, and early research can just shift them forwards.
Yes, I addressed everything you wrote over and over in multiple comments and in my posts. You should read part 1 carefully and also Aging Research and Population Ethics.
Interesting overall, but I’ll never be tired of repeating that the majority of impact of aging research comes from making Longevity Escape Velocity come faster. This puts aging research in a much better position as a cause area than short or medium term causes. Not sure why literally everyone in the EA movement continues to ignore this metric completely. It just doesn’t make sense.
I don’t see what your disagreement is. Reaching LEV means we end greatly reduce or end natural deaths, which is what I discussed above.
I don’t think there’s a huge benefit of going from, say, 1000 year lifespans to infinite lifespans.
Well… I disagree with the claim that aging is on par with love or malaria prevention. This is the beginning of your post:
I thought you were going to mention LEV in the “Scope and direct impact” section, or at least in “Direct chage in average quality of life” section. Instead, in the first, you proceed to say:
In making this claim you completely overlook the fundamental quantitative reasoning you need to make to tackle the question of impact. Ending malaria and “solving” love will give everyone a better life for at best 80 years, solving aging for… 1000 years as a lower bound. Moreover you need to keep in mind that it’s not giving people extra 1000 years of healthy life the source of impact. The source of impact is changing the date in which this will happen. Sorry if this seems nitpicking, but it changes everything.
In “Direct chage in average quality of life”, instead, you say:
You almost arrived at my conclusion with the first phrase:
But then you proceed to talk about reduction of morbidity at the end of life and you link my post titled “Impact of aging research besides LEV”. (Thank you for quoting me though, I think you are the first one to do that here, and it made me happy to know that at least someone digested something that I wrote.)
To wrap up:
You didn’t mention LEV, you didn’t mention 1000 years lifespans, and you didn’t mention that shifting the date of LEV is what counts. You made the case that aging research was on par with short and medium term causes in terms of impact, which can be credible only if you account for all the other measures of impact besides LEV, but not for shifting the date of LEV.
Those issues are addressed in different sections. Scope just refers to what % of the future people are affected.
This is reasoning from the lifetime utility of a given individual. I think that’s incorrect. Assume population size remains the same; if there are 10 people living 100 years, that’s comparable to one person living 1000 years, save for the unfortunate experiences surrounding death. OTOH, if we imagine 10 people living 1000 years, the principal advantage is not to be understood as improved quality of life, but rather as an increase in population size over time. So I give credit to anti-aging both for making mortality/morbidity very rare, and for increasing the population size.
I’ve only skimmed your part 1 LEV post so I may be missing something. But the way I see it, if you assign full QALYs for the 1000 years, you are doing one of two things: 1) assuming that the fertility rate (births per person per year) will not decline as a result of the greater population, or 2) not worried about the foregone births. I presume the population will grow as a result of solving aging, but not to the extent that is naively implied by assuming that fertility remains constant.
I implicitly assumed that both of these interventions are going to happen at some point anyway, and early research can just shift them forwards.
Yes, I addressed everything you wrote over and over in multiple comments and in my posts. You should read part 1 carefully and also Aging Research and Population Ethics.
Read both and still don’t see anything to contradict my post, unless you are assuming “person-affecting” ethics.