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
Karma: 350
Why SENS makes 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.
Could be, or could be the usual causation=/=correlation problem, or the usual study that doesn’t replicate. What study are you referring to?
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.
Would it be possible and cost-effective to release video courses at a much lower cost?
EDIT: Going to ask on LW, since the AMA is there.
EDIT 2: Oh no, I’m late
Hey, regarding aging: you might be interested to know I’m writing a series of articles to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of any project related to aging research. I’ve found that the cost-effectiveness of aging research might be much higher, in certain cases, than what Sarah Constantin found. That’s mostly because I’m also accounting for the fact that new aging research brings the date of Longevity Escape Velocity closer in time, and this increses the scope by many orders of magnitude. Each single year “buyed” means averting 36,500,000,000QALYs, using a conservative estimate (36,500,000 deaths by aging per year multiplied by 1000 estimated years free of disability after LEV). Check out my profile for all the articles I’ve written.
Regarding your proposal of prizes: I think prizes for a general-purpose cure for aging should involve prizes for intermediate steps, that may look… less than incredible. All of the intermediary steps, even inside “paradigm-shift-like” plans like Aubrey de Grey’s will look similar on the outside: they will delay aging. Unless you are measuring if tissues are actually rejuvenated and you have a robust theoretical framework you won’t recognize what will be necessary in the long-term. For cancer, the picture looks much better, but the incremental steps, even for a general-purpose cure, will probably belong to many different groups.
You will probably be pleased to know that recently Peter Diamandis’ XPrize Foundation started a similar project: to give prizes for specific innovations identified as important in aging research and adjacent areas.
Yes, looking back at this, I should have just said that on average, if someone dies with a probability of 1/1000, then he will live 999 years and die in the 1000th. And then I should have linked him the “Expectation” section of the Wikipedia page of the negative binomial distribution.
Thanks, great info. This post is officially outdated :)
Great post, I really appreciate the solutions you propose. I often fear some english mistakes could harm how my arguments are perceived. I think keeping personal written notes with solutions could help people in putting the conscious effort of evaluating arguments in virtue of their content. It could even help the comprehension of arguments made by natives speakers…
I have a fear that, even knowing all this, if the conscious effort is lacking, the effect remains the same. I don’t feel very optimistic given what I’ve seen in similar contexts, but I hope I’m wrong. Note that there are many areas in which knowledge doesn’t really help without conscious effort. Rationality as a whole may qualify as one of these areas.
It’s not a matter of fairness. It’s a matter of reducing the probability of not hearing good ideas because of stupid reasons.
I agree.
I used “Counterintuitive”, because people tend to think the person-affecting view generates more cost-effectiveness than the impersonal view (see comments under my first post), regardless of how the views affect the comparison with other causes. But yes, adopting the person-affective view seems to make aging research look better in comparison to the other causes you mention, since it negates a lot of their impact. Instead, adopting the impersonal view makes the comparison favour prevention of x-risks that could wipe out literally all of humanity (otherwise aging research looks far better), and probably some interventions regarding non-human animals, also depending on how much you value animals.
Note that this doesn’t make aging research worthless to evaluate from an EA perspective. Many people and orgs (eg. Open Philanthropy) donate to more than just two top causes… and aging research seems to be second or third place, probably depending on how much you value non-human animals. Mathematically, it makes sense to differentiate between various top causes in order to reduce risk. Differentiating also makes sense when there are single specific interventions, in a seemingly worse causa area, that may nonetheless be more cost-effective than available interventions in a cause-area that overall looks better, which includes cases in which the more cost-effective interventions in the top cause-areas are funded, or if there are particularly cost-effective interventions in the seemingly worse cause-area.
I think I upvote mostly like this (I’ll edit this answer if I remember more reasons):
Strong upvote: correct (if applicable) and important.
Upvote: correct (if applicable) and slightly important, or not completely correct but interesting/potentially important (In this case I usually also reply). I also tend to upvote comments under my own posts much more because I feel the need to thank the person who took the time to write the comment somehow.
I don’t always follow these rules exactly, but mostly. For example, sometimes I upvote to close the gap between two comments I consider equally important under a post.
Relevant people involved in potential top cause areas.
For me there is a strong “what the world could be if I did this, so it would be a huge waste if I didn’t do this” sense that motivates me, although in the past I used to overestimate the potential good effects of my actions. I think it is probably similar to the need for efficiency you mention, but it also generates an unpleasant but correct sense of urgency, because usually if I don’t do things fast, the effect could not be the same. There’s also wanting to have a good impact in the world, which is more core and generates meaning.
I’m not sure if these considerations would change how aging research looks from an EA perspective. It’s one of the many “rounding errors” that could be considered as side effects, besides the main purpose of buying QALYs and freedom. Moreover, all of these additional considerations, both positive and negative, might be made irrelevant by new disrupting tech and societal/political/organisational change. Examples: cognitive enhancements, AI, research funding management.
I’m not sure if there’s a definite answer about how much cognitive decline influences this kind of stuff, but I wouldn’t be surprised if “being stuck in old ways” or not being able to understand new developments and innovate are symptoms of neurological old age more than accumulated bias.
There are also other factors that are less related to aging (but which could still benefit from rejuvenation) that play into how superstar researchers hinder the careers of younger scientists (see Gavintaylor’s comment). These problems, though, don’t need people to die in order to be solved. Organisational improvements would be sufficient.
Population capacity gets larger as technology improves, so it’s not obvious we’ll reach maximum capacity in the near future (next centuries). Regardless of this, even if we reached it, the impact of aging research wouldn’t be impacted, because impact comes from making LEV closer, not from guaranteeing LEV’s existence. You will find answers in the second post of the framework: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/uR4mEzMR7fiQzb2c7/aging-research-and-population-ethics
Notice that the post you are commenting under is just the first in a series. I already published four of them! Here the second, third and fourth. There are more to come, and I also plan to do some interviews with organizations. I suggest you read what I wrote so far and get back if you have more doubts and still want more pieces of information or a primer on the field. It will be probably useful for you to subscribe to my posts through the “Subscribe to this user’s posts” option in my profile.
How to evaluate neglectedness and tractability of aging research
The fact that no new hallmark has been discovered in decades is probably telling. But I think it is reasonable to believe that there are different hallmarks that will be visible in longer-than-human lifespans.
Yes! What Hallmarks to prioritise is an extremely important thing to figure out. The next post is coming out soon, and this topic is a central part of it. In short, I think we should keep an eye on two things when trying to prioritise in this area: if a given research is necessary for achieving LEV, and how neglected it is. Neglectedness seems to be particularly important because the hardest research is often the most neglected (too long term for private investment, too risky for public funding). The hardest hallmarks will be cracked later, so they will more or less constitute the lat “bastions” before LEV. If we speed up progress on them, then we should impact the date of LEV the most. A way to measure neglectedness could be to browse papers by keyword and see what hallmarks have the least number of entries. Another useful preliminary tool could be this roadmap, by lifespan.io. The most neglected/hardest hallmarks are probably the ones currently in the earliest stages of research.
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.