When I came to know the Effective Altruism movement in 2016 I was immediately captured. I currently have a CS degree and an interest in longevity, among many other things. I would like to make a positive impact.
Emanuele_Ascani
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It seems to me that the EV of financing cellular reprogramming research and aging clocks dropped significantly. There are many other very neglected and promising areas.
That said, the case that “billionaires are going to finance all this anyway” did seem to get stronger regardless, because now there’s a higher chance that other neglected areas will be included in such funding.How much higher though? This is not the first billionaire-led longevity initiative. What makes me more hopeful compared to other past initiatives is that this new company might be more focused on getting translational research done given the choice of topics and people involved. And also I wonder if the time is riper than in 2013 for other billionaires to start imitating these efforts, although it seems to be more of a PR risk for billionaires to take than in the past.
PR risk is just perceived though, I wonder how real of a problem it is for billionaires in this case. It seems to me that billionaires are hated regardless, and longevity research is an excuse to be more vocal about it. I wonder if they are realizing this. The PR damage might be to research rather than to billionaires. See AppliedDivinityStudies’ comment.
I answered you here:
1. Yes, this is probably true. But see longtermist considerations of effects of anti-aging research. They might be in the same ballpark. Or not.
2. There are three ways in which the impact of anti-aging research is evaluated: DALYs averted and other short-term considerations, LEV being brought closer in time, and effects relevant to the long-term future. All three don’t suffer from this objection.
Quick thoughts on what needs to be done regarding anti-aging and EA
Yeah, seriously, William MacAskill just change your surname already. It’s basic SEO for Singer’s sake.
I’m surprised that “cost-effectiveness evaluation” doesn’t exist yet.
Some others that it’s weird enough that they don’t exist yet: “meta-charities”, “advocacy”, “pandemic preparedness”.
A couple of tags that would apply to all of my posts: “aging research”, “scientific research”.
Evaluating Life Extension Advocacy Foundation
How much time do you spend on forecasting, including researching the topics?
Also 80k Hours, which is all about multiplying the impact of their effort by influencing the direction of other people’s careers.
I will only write a comment and not an answer because I think other people will probably give better answers. The thinking probably includes that 1) the world was unprepared, therefore even if there is a massive effort going on, cheap opportunities to do good might arise. 2) This situation might somewhat change the equilibriums between cause-areas and within EA, also changing how the world responds to risk, which may influence what is neglected and what is not, for example. Here a good post by Peter Hurford.
About the lockdown: I find it difficult to evaluate the short term effects, but thinking about the very long term effects is also probably interesting. On the one hand, under the longtermist view, slowing down technological progress has enormous negative consequences for the far future if the slope of progress continues to be positive. On the other, a lockdown means that the world will take pandemic preparedness more seriously, which in turn diminishes the probability of existential risk, which should lead to a greater positive impact… so, maybe the answer should be “enough lockdown for this situation to improve our chances to face greater threats”? I recognize this is not exactly what you asked though.
This is one of the best posts I’ve read here, wow.
One of the main things that concern me is that malevolent people could appropriate the concept of malevolence itself and start a witch hunt for people who have nothing to do with malevolence. This was passingly mentioned when acknowledging that political leaders could brand their opponents as malevolent. Overall I think this post makes a good job of outlining the pros and cons, but I just wanted to write this consideration in a comment because it has been somewhat prominent in my mind.
Interview with Aubrey de Grey, chief science officer of the SENS Research Foundation
You are correct. I will also add a question about how much time he estimates will need to pass between one treatment and its repetition. This could be fairly calculable from the informations the scientific community already has (the rate of damage in the elderly). I will get back to you with another reply in case I come up with other questions in light of your comment and if I modify or add something to your questions.
Thanks Gavin, there are some great questions in here.
I’m only able to answer two of them pretty conclusively:
For instance, if we treat an 80 year olds telomere attrition, are we going to need to treat them again in the future? Are consecutive treatments going to need to occur at more regular intervals?
The answer is simply: absolutely, yes.
If you condense the most crucial questions I will add them in the interview, and we will see what Aubrey de Grey has to say.
Edited my comment slightly before yours appeared. Wanted to specify the reasons more but resolved to delete them since I was going to modify the post anyway. The rationale was that 7-KC, even if not a protein, is still an aggregate that overwhelms lysosomes and actively causes their dysfunction (loss of function of lysosomes and other degradation mechanisms being accounted for in the loss of proteostasis paragraphs in the Hallmarks).
Yep, seems like for some reason I, err… aggregated extracellular matrix stiffening and extracellular aggregates together. Mistake corrected.
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.
SENS doesn’t consider telomere attrition as a significant type of damage, and in fact, SENS advocates removing the ability of all cells to extend their telomeres as a strategy to prevent cancer.
I think SENS doesn’t consider telomere attrition because the solution would be the same as the one for cell loss (and telomere attrition is a direct cause of cell loss). Also note that at SRF they consider the strategy against cancer less and less likely to be necessary (and I hope so, since it is the most far fetched and difficult).
Edit: categorization mistakes corrected :)
3) If you point out what categories I got wrong and why, I can correct if needed.
4) It seems to me that the biggest point of difference is the genomic instability hallmark, which is not present in SENS because de Grey believes it acts more slowly and probably belongs to a “SENS 2” panel of therapies. The others either mostly overlap or they are closely causally related. Do you agree?
From hearing de Grey speak, you might get the impression that the scientific community has deftly avoided studying ageing. This is not the case; it has been studied for some time.
It’s weird that you got this impression, because in many TED Talks de Grey explicitly mentions that biogerontology has more than a century of history. It’s his approach to be new, together with the attitude of aging research as translational research instead of just basic non-translational biology research. When, for example, The Buck Institute was founded 20 years ago, it was frowned upon to think about aging research as a translational field, and the whole discipline was much smaller.
Regarding antagonistic pleiotropy: be careful not to mix theories explaining different causal levels of aging. Antagonistic pleiotropy explains some of the processes that lead to damage, but doesn’t say anything about damage itself. Aubrey de Grey’s categorization of damage is actually more accepted than ever. The scientific consensus is settled on something very close to it, described in the landmark paper “The Hallmarks of Aging”, from 2013.
I don’t know who you heard criticizing de Grey so harshly, but that’s very uncommon now. It happened in the early 2000s but not now. SENS Research Foundation, in fact, works with many universities and established institutions.
I highly suggest to read my new post about SENS Research Foundation that I just published here. I delve deep in these topics and more. I also plan to interview Dr. de Grey, and you will find some potential interview questions.
Relatedly, here’s another example of the kind of headlines you mention: https://futurism.com/neoscope/aging-unstoppable-youth
The fact that it’s on an online newspaper called “Futurism” is even more eye-popping.
One positive thing this might lead to is if people on the fence start to be actually more positive about weird future-related stuff given the hysteria of such headlines. But I have no idea. Might be wishful thinking.