6 ms·

$250K Longevity Prize Announced

48 points by dannyobrien 4y ago

klelatti 4y ago
Really surprised that it's only $250K in total. I would have thought that there would be enough widespread interest in this to raise a lot more. Also some of this is a bit confusing 'the longevity prize' (singular) but multiple prizes apparently? Only a $20k prize mentioned on front page?
- echelon 4y ago
  Because it's almost entirely funded by bitcoin and DAO projects. Half the page is crypto.
  - klelatti 4y ago
    You mean earlier this year it was $25 million? More seriously though, its small change for some of the donors listed here.
  - quickthrower2 4y ago
    "Sponsored by marks"
  - erikVan 4y ago
    created by VitaDAO. $20M Market Cap & 20+ projects funded. Vita(lik)DAO wink wink https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/vitadao https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/vitadao
- popotamonga 4y ago
  Was gonna ask the same, why are these things so low? With the current super high salaries many people should have 250k in the bank i assume, so an organization should have 50x as much?
- oefrha 4y ago
  An average NIH grant is >$500k.[1] I fail to see how a $20k prize is going to motivate anyone. It’s not like a rando can do longevity research in their garage. [1] https://report.nih.gov/nihdatabook/report/155 https://report.nih.gov/nihdatabook/report/155
  - karamanolev 4y ago
    The $20k prize is specifically, from what I read, for randos who can trawl through past research and find forgotten ideas, with the goal to resurface them. To quote: "Over a century of all the world’s biological knowledge is available to anyone taking the time to read the literature."
    - fuzzfactor 4y ago
      That's basically $20K for an idea. That's very good money if you already have the right idea. Or can come up with one real easy.
    - oefrha 4y ago
      If you read the details at https://www.longevityprize.com/prizes/hypothesis https://www.longevityprize.com/prizes/hypothesis, it's really aimed mainly at people with relevant training who's already working in the area of their submission or ready to do follow-up hands-on research, rather than being a public suggestion box. I agree it doesn't preclude randos from winning though.
JohnJamesRambo 4y ago
$250k will barely pay for kimwipes and pipet tips in 2022. :(
bjarneh 4y ago
> “I hope to see the concept of watching your parents and grandparents die, disappear from the public consciousness as a thing that happens over the course of half a century.” — Vitalik Buterin A storage problem on the horizon...
- shafyy 4y ago
  This guy is super cringe. So are rich people that are so afraid of dying and becoming irrelevant that they invest billions in trying to achieve immortality. It's a good thing for society and humanity that people die. It ensures change, innovation and the flow of new ideas. Don't get me wrong: I think we should invest money and resources that help people live healthy lifes. But the idea of stopping aging or wanting to live to hundreds of years just seems that it comes from people who have deep psychological problems with themselves.
  - panosfilianos 4y ago
    The issue of death is the deepest lying human trait. It defines the human condition. Hardly a "deep psychological problem".
    - naniwaduni 4y ago
      Not dying is a pretty major goal of most life, even.
    - rob74 4y ago
      More generally, the main trait that differentiate humans from any other animal (including apes) is the ability to look into the future, which makes us capable of planning ahead and recognizing the significance of history, but also leads to us knowing that we will one day die, which, combined with the self-preservation instinct that every animal has, leads to a very bad feeling. So we spend our lives either doing our best not to think about it, or making up and (trying to) believe in stories about what happens after death (=religion).
  - Majestic121 4y ago
Normille 4y ago
Winner to collect their prize money at a ceremony in 3022
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  That would be the XKCD image hover text.
- bryanrasmussen 4y ago
  so basically they've put 20 bucks in a savings account and are relying on compound interest to pay off the prize.
Cryptoclidus 4y ago
How about we work on the solved problem of infant mortality instead...
- karamanolev 4y ago
  Talk about "whataboutism". Regardless of the discourse of whether extending your lifespan is a worthwhile goal, working on one problem doesn't preclude us from working on other, more or less important ones. In this case, the OA is about longevity.
lelag 4y ago
It looks similar to the Methuselah Mouse Prize that used to be offered by the Methuselah Foundation. I don't know if those low prize amounts have really an effect on research interest. They should rather set a prize over a million usd to generate additional interest from the research community, otherwise it's just beer money for researchers that are already deeply invested in the topic.
- teruakohatu 4y ago
  The Methuselah Foundation is kicking in $50,000, so 20% of the total prize pool.
camillomiller 4y ago
Rich people are OBSESSED by the idea of leaving their possessions.
- Majestic121 4y ago
  People are obsessed with not dying, yes. I'd go as far as to say "obsession with not dying" is a, if not the most, common behavior for living things in general
  - Xenoamorphous 4y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conatus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conatus
  - chinathrow 4y ago
    > People are obsessed with not dying, yes. I'd say it's more like "People are obsessed with not dying early."
- stn_za 4y ago
  Happy and successful people want to keep being happy and successful for longer. How evil of them!
  - karamanolev 4y ago
    Some of them are surely happy and successful. I'd like to think (no citation whatsoever), that a nontrivial portion of them have the mindset of "I'm currently building this empire and then I will reap the benefits of this vast wealth". They are not happy per se in the moment, but have some future vision of happiness away from the grind of being "successful". At some point, they realize that they don't have that much time left to actually enjoy life outside of amassing money/possessions, so they get obsessed with extending their life.
  - agent008t 4y ago
    Ironically, happiness and success often don't go together. Someone who is happy has no need of working towards success (defined conventionally, as getting close to the top of the wealth/career/peer ranking). It is often unhappiness that drives people towards success. And then, due to hedonic adaptation, they find they are not necessarily much happier, there is always someone ahead of them on some metric so there is always more success to strive for to alleviate unhappiness. It only really works when what you call success comes as a byproduct of something else, not as a goal, of an activity that makes one happy regardless of peer ranking or any other such 'success' metric. Feynman comes to mind, who seemed to be mostly driven by curiosity and the joy of finding out how things work. In fact, according to his own writings (or my interpretation of them), he was most unproductive and miserable when he was trying to be 'successful'.
t_mann 4y ago
And to think that Musk wanted to (and might have to) spend $44bn on Twitter. That's over 100k such prizes.
dsign 4y ago
The problem with longevity research and its funding is not so much the research or the science, but the cultural stigma[^1]. Secretly, everybody wants to feel, look and be healthy and young. But as virtue-signaling and because otherwise we would go mad, we tend to say that we are happy with our time in the world. Also, I can't remember a single mainstream book[^1], movie or tv-series where the guys who want to live beyond their natural lifespans are not the antagonists. We need mainstream movies, tv-series and books where the guys who want to live longer are the good guys and they do it through science. That instead of, say, a dramatization of the life of Elizabeth Báthory, or another vampire movie. In other words, we are very much in need of a cultural movement that makes socially acceptable to fund and to work in these types of projects. ---- [^1]: Somebody already commented here that it's better to put that money into fighting infant mortality. As often the case with moonshots, it's easy to find more "rational" things to allocate the money to. [^2]: I guess there are some people in the Bible that live for a long time. Maybe priests talk about them at mass sometimes?
- nicolashahn 4y ago
  Not "mainstream" but still fairly popular on the internet is Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality: http://www.hpmor.com/ http://www.hpmor.com/. Yudkowski's Harry Potter makes a pretty good case for seeking immortality.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- ETH_start 4y ago
  >>We need mainstream movies, tv-series and books where the guys who want to live longer are the good guys and they do it through science. In that respect, Vitalik Buterin is a great role model, in presenting the case for longevity front and center on his Twitter profile: https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin
  - klelatti 4y ago
    The Dragon Fable? Seems more like the case for moonshots rather than longevity explicitly.
Sol- 4y ago
Looking forward to 200 year old heads of state, so that the status quo changes even less than it does with the gerontocracy we already have.
nachos13 4y ago
Gonna ape in with $100k. Is Vitalik involved in VitaDAO?
erfgh 4y ago
Insofar as longevity is correlated with reducing suffering due to chronic pain and old-age disease, I think it's great. But there is one problem with longevity: Boredom is a thing. When you are a toddler even a small piece of paper or a string can excite you. But then you get bored and you need to find something else. I am almost 40 years old now and pretty much all my drive in life is my two kids. If I didn't have them I doubt I would find reason to get up from bed every morning. If I had to live forever or for a very great number of years I believe life would become a burden. It's always been possible to be old and sick and thus unable to do things you crave. But I fear one day it will be possible to be young (in body) and healthy and unwilling to do things because you've done them all before too many times.
- pcthrowaway 4y ago
  I'm almost 40 as well, with no kids, and I'm never bored. Sometimes I wish life slowed down enough to allow me to be bored, but there's a neverending stream of entertainment, information, and educational materials to draw from
dr_kiszonka 4y ago
One of the companies behind the prize is VitaDAO: https://www.vitadao.com/ https://www.vitadao.com/ I know close to nothing about decentralized finance, coins, etc., but this caught my eye because I am interested in longevity research and tech. Does anybody know more about VitaDAO? Are they successful? Reputable?
Balgair 4y ago
Related: My family has been through a lot of death in the last few years. We've had 6 fairly close members die since the pandemic started, accounting for ~15% of the family. Most were unexpected, some weren't. It's been real rough. So, I think I have a bit of a 'fresh' perspective on how people view death and dying. This is going to sound strange, but you know how to die. Some of my family has been lucky enough to pass with all their marbles in a 'comfortable' place. Their deaths seemed to have taken the same paths. It's as if the body knows what is coming and knows how to do it. It's not painless, by any means, but it's predictable. Food and water refusal, organ failure, death, those kids of things. It's not panicked; your loved ones sure are, but not you. Also, your time here on Earth is very very short. With some family, we were lucky enough to have the time to play old VHS movies of old Christmases and other holidays. (ProTip: Take more pictures and movies of people you love) But it's just amazing to see how short it all is. Our lives are a flash, a few days of a few movies, a picture book, old baseball games, memories, nothing more. But, they really can't be more. Pain is where most of my family took the dive. They could endure and hold on for a long time. But when the pain came, that was the end of the line. Have plans for when that happens. One family member was obsessed with life extension and health. They forbid microwaves and cell phones near them. They kinda mostly ate supplements and nootropics and kale. They ran miles everyday. Lots of podcasts on life extension. Maybe they had a premonition, but cancer took them pretty quick and pretty young for nowadays. Again, life is short, eat the fries, or not. Just don't worry about death so much that you don't live and love. You're remembered by your loved ones. One family member was very well regarded in their field. Lots of people came by to say their goodbyes. You may know a few of them as minor intellectual-ish celebrities. Now that they died, those people will talk to us and try to remember and commiserate. It's stunning to see how little they knew of them. You may have good work friends, but your true loved ones know you much better. Fortunately, you can have as many true loved ones as you'd like. Get a death-doula. For those family members that passed in 'comfort', it was anything but. Your family has to take over your bodily functions for a lot longer than you'd think. And you are very heavy as nearly-dead weight. Just keeping your urine away from your skin and not making more open sores is really time consuming and difficult, let alone fecal matter, bed sores, etc. Sure, hospice says that they'll be by daily, but the realities of the staffing shortage can't be avoided these days. Pay someone to help out your family in helping you. I know this is super jumbled and doesn't read well. Sorry about that.

48 points by dannyobrien 4y ago

Really surprised that it's only $250K in total. I would have thought that there would be enough widespread interest in this to raise a lot more. Also some of this is a bit confusing 'the longevity prize' (singular) but multiple prizes apparently? Only a $20k prize mentioned on front page?

echelon 4y ago
Because it's almost entirely funded by bitcoin and DAO projects. Half the page is crypto.
- klelatti 4y ago
  You mean earlier this year it was $25 million? More seriously though, its small change for some of the donors listed here.
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  "Sponsored by marks"
- erikVan 4y ago
  created by VitaDAO. $20M Market Cap & 20+ projects funded. Vita(lik)DAO wink wink https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/vitadao https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/vitadao
popotamonga 4y ago
Was gonna ask the same, why are these things so low? With the current super high salaries many people should have 250k in the bank i assume, so an organization should have 50x as much?
oefrha 4y ago
An average NIH grant is >$500k.[1] I fail to see how a $20k prize is going to motivate anyone. It’s not like a rando can do longevity research in their garage. [1] https://report.nih.gov/nihdatabook/report/155 https://report.nih.gov/nihdatabook/report/155
- karamanolev 4y ago
  The $20k prize is specifically, from what I read, for randos who can trawl through past research and find forgotten ideas, with the goal to resurface them. To quote: "Over a century of all the world’s biological knowledge is available to anyone taking the time to read the literature."
  - fuzzfactor 4y ago
    That's basically $20K for an idea. That's very good money if you already have the right idea. Or can come up with one real easy.
  - oefrha 4y ago
    If you read the details at https://www.longevityprize.com/prizes/hypothesis https://www.longevityprize.com/prizes/hypothesis, it's really aimed mainly at people with relevant training who's already working in the area of their submission or ready to do follow-up hands-on research, rather than being a public suggestion box. I agree it doesn't preclude randos from winning though.

JohnJamesRambo 4y ago

$250k will barely pay for kimwipes and pipet tips in 2022. :(

bjarneh 4y ago

> “I hope to see the concept of watching your parents and grandparents die, disappear from the public consciousness as a thing that happens over the course of half a century.” — Vitalik Buterin A storage problem on the horizon...

shafyy 4y ago
This guy is super cringe. So are rich people that are so afraid of dying and becoming irrelevant that they invest billions in trying to achieve immortality. It's a good thing for society and humanity that people die. It ensures change, innovation and the flow of new ideas. Don't get me wrong: I think we should invest money and resources that help people live healthy lifes. But the idea of stopping aging or wanting to live to hundreds of years just seems that it comes from people who have deep psychological problems with themselves.
- panosfilianos 4y ago
  The issue of death is the deepest lying human trait. It defines the human condition. Hardly a "deep psychological problem".
  - naniwaduni 4y ago
    Not dying is a pretty major goal of most life, even.
  - rob74 4y ago
    More generally, the main trait that differentiate humans from any other animal (including apes) is the ability to look into the future, which makes us capable of planning ahead and recognizing the significance of history, but also leads to us knowing that we will one day die, which, combined with the self-preservation instinct that every animal has, leads to a very bad feeling. So we spend our lives either doing our best not to think about it, or making up and (trying to) believe in stories about what happens after death (=religion).
- Majestic121 4y ago

Normille 4y ago

Winner to collect their prize money at a ceremony in 3022

quickthrower2 4y ago
That would be the XKCD image hover text.
bryanrasmussen 4y ago
so basically they've put 20 bucks in a savings account and are relying on compound interest to pay off the prize.

Cryptoclidus 4y ago

How about we work on the solved problem of infant mortality instead...

karamanolev 4y ago
Talk about "whataboutism". Regardless of the discourse of whether extending your lifespan is a worthwhile goal, working on one problem doesn't preclude us from working on other, more or less important ones. In this case, the OA is about longevity.

lelag 4y ago

It looks similar to the Methuselah Mouse Prize that used to be offered by the Methuselah Foundation. I don't know if those low prize amounts have really an effect on research interest. They should rather set a prize over a million usd to generate additional interest from the research community, otherwise it's just beer money for researchers that are already deeply invested in the topic.

teruakohatu 4y ago
The Methuselah Foundation is kicking in $50,000, so 20% of the total prize pool.

camillomiller 4y ago

Rich people are OBSESSED by the idea of leaving their possessions.

Majestic121 4y ago
People are obsessed with not dying, yes. I'd go as far as to say "obsession with not dying" is a, if not the most, common behavior for living things in general
- Xenoamorphous 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conatus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conatus
- chinathrow 4y ago
  > People are obsessed with not dying, yes. I'd say it's more like "People are obsessed with not dying early."
stn_za 4y ago
Happy and successful people want to keep being happy and successful for longer. How evil of them!
- karamanolev 4y ago
  Some of them are surely happy and successful. I'd like to think (no citation whatsoever), that a nontrivial portion of them have the mindset of "I'm currently building this empire and then I will reap the benefits of this vast wealth". They are not happy per se in the moment, but have some future vision of happiness away from the grind of being "successful". At some point, they realize that they don't have that much time left to actually enjoy life outside of amassing money/possessions, so they get obsessed with extending their life.
- agent008t 4y ago
  Ironically, happiness and success often don't go together. Someone who is happy has no need of working towards success (defined conventionally, as getting close to the top of the wealth/career/peer ranking). It is often unhappiness that drives people towards success. And then, due to hedonic adaptation, they find they are not necessarily much happier, there is always someone ahead of them on some metric so there is always more success to strive for to alleviate unhappiness. It only really works when what you call success comes as a byproduct of something else, not as a goal, of an activity that makes one happy regardless of peer ranking or any other such 'success' metric. Feynman comes to mind, who seemed to be mostly driven by curiosity and the joy of finding out how things work. In fact, according to his own writings (or my interpretation of them), he was most unproductive and miserable when he was trying to be 'successful'.

t_mann 4y ago

And to think that Musk wanted to (and might have to) spend $44bn on Twitter. That's over 100k such prizes.

dsign 4y ago

The problem with longevity research and its funding is not so much the research or the science, but the cultural stigma[^1]. Secretly, everybody wants to feel, look and be healthy and young. But as virtue-signaling and because otherwise we would go mad, we tend to say that we are happy with our time in the world. Also, I can't remember a single mainstream book[^1], movie or tv-series where the guys who want to live beyond their natural lifespans are not the antagonists. We need mainstream movies, tv-series and books where the guys who want to live longer are the good guys and they do it through science. That instead of, say, a dramatization of the life of Elizabeth Báthory, or another vampire movie. In other words, we are very much in need of a cultural movement that makes socially acceptable to fund and to work in these types of projects. ---- [^1]: Somebody already commented here that it's better to put that money into fighting infant mortality. As often the case with moonshots, it's easy to find more "rational" things to allocate the money to. [^2]: I guess there are some people in the Bible that live for a long time. Maybe priests talk about them at mass sometimes?

nicolashahn 4y ago
Not "mainstream" but still fairly popular on the internet is Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality: http://www.hpmor.com/ http://www.hpmor.com/. Yudkowski's Harry Potter makes a pretty good case for seeking immortality.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ETH_start 4y ago
>>We need mainstream movies, tv-series and books where the guys who want to live longer are the good guys and they do it through science. In that respect, Vitalik Buterin is a great role model, in presenting the case for longevity front and center on his Twitter profile: https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin
- klelatti 4y ago
  The Dragon Fable? Seems more like the case for moonshots rather than longevity explicitly.

Sol- 4y ago

Looking forward to 200 year old heads of state, so that the status quo changes even less than it does with the gerontocracy we already have.

nachos13 4y ago

Gonna ape in with $100k. Is Vitalik involved in VitaDAO?

erfgh 4y ago

Insofar as longevity is correlated with reducing suffering due to chronic pain and old-age disease, I think it's great. But there is one problem with longevity: Boredom is a thing. When you are a toddler even a small piece of paper or a string can excite you. But then you get bored and you need to find something else. I am almost 40 years old now and pretty much all my drive in life is my two kids. If I didn't have them I doubt I would find reason to get up from bed every morning. If I had to live forever or for a very great number of years I believe life would become a burden. It's always been possible to be old and sick and thus unable to do things you crave. But I fear one day it will be possible to be young (in body) and healthy and unwilling to do things because you've done them all before too many times.

pcthrowaway 4y ago
I'm almost 40 as well, with no kids, and I'm never bored. Sometimes I wish life slowed down enough to allow me to be bored, but there's a neverending stream of entertainment, information, and educational materials to draw from

dr_kiszonka 4y ago

One of the companies behind the prize is VitaDAO: https://www.vitadao.com/ https://www.vitadao.com/ I know close to nothing about decentralized finance, coins, etc., but this caught my eye because I am interested in longevity research and tech. Does anybody know more about VitaDAO? Are they successful? Reputable?

Balgair 4y ago

Related: My family has been through a lot of death in the last few years. We've had 6 fairly close members die since the pandemic started, accounting for ~15% of the family. Most were unexpected, some weren't. It's been real rough. So, I think I have a bit of a 'fresh' perspective on how people view death and dying. This is going to sound strange, but you know how to die. Some of my family has been lucky enough to pass with all their marbles in a 'comfortable' place. Their deaths seemed to have taken the same paths. It's as if the body knows what is coming and knows how to do it. It's not painless, by any means, but it's predictable. Food and water refusal, organ failure, death, those kids of things. It's not panicked; your loved ones sure are, but not you. Also, your time here on Earth is very very short. With some family, we were lucky enough to have the time to play old VHS movies of old Christmases and other holidays. (ProTip: Take more pictures and movies of people you love) But it's just amazing to see how short it all is. Our lives are a flash, a few days of a few movies, a picture book, old baseball games, memories, nothing more. But, they really can't be more. Pain is where most of my family took the dive. They could endure and hold on for a long time. But when the pain came, that was the end of the line. Have plans for when that happens. One family member was obsessed with life extension and health. They forbid microwaves and cell phones near them. They kinda mostly ate supplements and nootropics and kale. They ran miles everyday. Lots of podcasts on life extension. Maybe they had a premonition, but cancer took them pretty quick and pretty young for nowadays. Again, life is short, eat the fries, or not. Just don't worry about death so much that you don't live and love. You're remembered by your loved ones. One family member was very well regarded in their field. Lots of people came by to say their goodbyes. You may know a few of them as minor intellectual-ish celebrities. Now that they died, those people will talk to us and try to remember and commiserate. It's stunning to see how little they knew of them. You may have good work friends, but your true loved ones know you much better. Fortunately, you can have as many true loved ones as you'd like. Get a death-doula. For those family members that passed in 'comfort', it was anything but. Your family has to take over your bodily functions for a lot longer than you'd think. And you are very heavy as nearly-dead weight. Just keeping your urine away from your skin and not making more open sores is really time consuming and difficult, let alone fecal matter, bed sores, etc. Sure, hospice says that they'll be by daily, but the realities of the staffing shortage can't be avoided these days. Pay someone to help out your family in helping you. I know this is super jumbled and doesn't read well. Sorry about that.