5 ms·

Even if you assume that ending age-related disease is the best cause, you also have to estimate the likelihood of them actually being successful and weight your

by baddox 11y ago

Even if you assume that ending age-related disease is the best cause, you also have to estimate the likelihood of them actually being successful and weight your recommendations by that likelihood.

kijin 11y ago
This is very important. The chance of being able to eliminate nearly all age-related diseases in the foreseeable future is very small. The chance of any single donation making a difference there is also fairly small, whereas other donations go more directly toward saving lives. If I had to choose between contributing 0.1% of the cost of a project that has a 1% chance of saving 100,000 lives a day (effectively saving 1.0 lives a day), versus contributing 0.2% of the cost of a project that has a 60% chance of saving 1,000 lives a day (effectively saving 1.2 lives a day), I might choose the latter.
- reasonattlm 11y ago
  The trouble is you'll never know what the actually numbers were until after the fact - the best you can do is make some educated investments at an 80/20 point. So either you learn yourself or you rely on consensus and authority, etc. You give to a middleman charity that has people who spend the time or do the work based on a theory of what should be done. You're relying on their expertise, and the expertise of those who say that, yes, you should put your money with charity A rather than charity B. But you'll never know if you could have got that 0.2% doing something else. Really, the best you should expect is that you can make a good enough choice to do good versus wasting your donation. I started supporting SENS pretty early, so I had to actually go read the primary literature and take a few years to figure out that yes, I think that this is the best fulcrum to make progress in changing the research community, building the right tech, etc. Nowadays, you can actually rely upon more distributed middle man expertise. E.g. that Peter Thiel invested millions in SENS, or that the SRF advisory board includes numerous researchers who are at the tops of their fields, names appearing in the media, all of whom endorse the SENS approach (http://sens.org/about/leadership/research-advisory-board http://sens.org/about/leadership/research-advisory-board), and so on and so forth.
  - danielharan 11y ago
    I don't think you know the numbers even after the fact. Knowing what worked doesn't tell you what probabilities you should have assigned.
  - cdcarter 11y ago
    Thiel investing in an aging-related organization is no shock. What is telling and makes it clear that this organization (not going to discuss the cause, but this specific organization) is that there are NO people of color on the advisory board and only one person of color on the board of directors. The board of directors also is entirely startup founders, venture capitalists, and other entrepreneurs. Without diversity at the leadership level, it is fairly easy to assume (externally) that this organization is working to solve aging related illnesses for the 1%.
fizixer 11y ago
Just the way we should've estimated the likelihood of curing cancer before we started pouring money in it. Probably we did, and then based on the importance of the matter, poured in billions of dollars anyway. SENS approach is essentially suggesting something better than that. According to them, pouring billions of dollars into individual age-related diseases (e.g., age-related onset of cancer) is the wrong way to go, because age-related diseases are a symptom of the root cause, which is aging itself, defined to be molecular and cellular damage through out the body. If that is tackled head on, there would enourmous savings in health care costs (both maintenance and research) and a positive impact on the economy as a result of more healthy people being available for work.
- alphapapa 11y ago
  It's amazing how some people are trying to reduce the population and others are trying to help people live longer. Wouldn't it be interesting to get them all in a room together...
  - schoen 11y ago
    But people are working to reduce the population by reducing fertility rates. I haven't met anyone who was openly working to reduce the population by increasing mortality rates or even by campaigning against efforts to decrease mortality rates. It's possible that if mortality rates were reduced really dramatically, some population activists would get upset (and I've seen indications of that in other threads here).
    - alphapapa 11y ago
      People who advocate euthanasia and socialist health care programs are effectively increasing mortality rates. In countries where euthanasia is legalized, mentally ill people are already being killed. When a bureaucrat sitting behind a desk can use a rubber-stamp to tell an elderly person, "Nope, no treatment for you this time, you're done," there's nothing to stop more and more people from being denied treatment. Eventually even younger people with mental illnesses or genetic disorders will be eliminated--all to avoid overcrowding and overloading of the health care system, of course. It's for the greater good. Don't you want to be a good citizen? Reduce your burden on society, today!* *Cremation fees not included.

by baddox 11y ago

Even if you assume that ending age-related disease is the best cause, you also have to estimate the likelihood of them actually being successful and weight your recommendations by that likelihood.

kijin 11y ago

This is very important. The chance of being able to eliminate nearly all age-related diseases in the foreseeable future is very small. The chance of any single donation making a difference there is also fairly small, whereas other donations go more directly toward saving lives. If I had to choose between contributing 0.1% of the cost of a project that has a 1% chance of saving 100,000 lives a day (effectively saving 1.0 lives a day), versus contributing 0.2% of the cost of a project that has a 60% chance of saving 1,000 lives a day (effectively saving 1.2 lives a day), I might choose the latter.

reasonattlm 11y ago
The trouble is you'll never know what the actually numbers were until after the fact - the best you can do is make some educated investments at an 80/20 point. So either you learn yourself or you rely on consensus and authority, etc. You give to a middleman charity that has people who spend the time or do the work based on a theory of what should be done. You're relying on their expertise, and the expertise of those who say that, yes, you should put your money with charity A rather than charity B. But you'll never know if you could have got that 0.2% doing something else. Really, the best you should expect is that you can make a good enough choice to do good versus wasting your donation. I started supporting SENS pretty early, so I had to actually go read the primary literature and take a few years to figure out that yes, I think that this is the best fulcrum to make progress in changing the research community, building the right tech, etc. Nowadays, you can actually rely upon more distributed middle man expertise. E.g. that Peter Thiel invested millions in SENS, or that the SRF advisory board includes numerous researchers who are at the tops of their fields, names appearing in the media, all of whom endorse the SENS approach (http://sens.org/about/leadership/research-advisory-board http://sens.org/about/leadership/research-advisory-board), and so on and so forth.
- danielharan 11y ago
  I don't think you know the numbers even after the fact. Knowing what worked doesn't tell you what probabilities you should have assigned.
- cdcarter 11y ago
  Thiel investing in an aging-related organization is no shock. What is telling and makes it clear that this organization (not going to discuss the cause, but this specific organization) is that there are NO people of color on the advisory board and only one person of color on the board of directors. The board of directors also is entirely startup founders, venture capitalists, and other entrepreneurs. Without diversity at the leadership level, it is fairly easy to assume (externally) that this organization is working to solve aging related illnesses for the 1%.

fizixer 11y ago

Just the way we should've estimated the likelihood of curing cancer before we started pouring money in it. Probably we did, and then based on the importance of the matter, poured in billions of dollars anyway. SENS approach is essentially suggesting something better than that. According to them, pouring billions of dollars into individual age-related diseases (e.g., age-related onset of cancer) is the wrong way to go, because age-related diseases are a symptom of the root cause, which is aging itself, defined to be molecular and cellular damage through out the body. If that is tackled head on, there would enourmous savings in health care costs (both maintenance and research) and a positive impact on the economy as a result of more healthy people being available for work.

alphapapa 11y ago
It's amazing how some people are trying to reduce the population and others are trying to help people live longer. Wouldn't it be interesting to get them all in a room together...
- schoen 11y ago
  But people are working to reduce the population by reducing fertility rates. I haven't met anyone who was openly working to reduce the population by increasing mortality rates or even by campaigning against efforts to decrease mortality rates. It's possible that if mortality rates were reduced really dramatically, some population activists would get upset (and I've seen indications of that in other threads here).
  - alphapapa 11y ago
    People who advocate euthanasia and socialist health care programs are effectively increasing mortality rates. In countries where euthanasia is legalized, mentally ill people are already being killed. When a bureaucrat sitting behind a desk can use a rubber-stamp to tell an elderly person, "Nope, no treatment for you this time, you're done," there's nothing to stop more and more people from being denied treatment. Eventually even younger people with mental illnesses or genetic disorders will be eliminated--all to avoid overcrowding and overloading of the health care system, of course. It's for the greater good. Don't you want to be a good citizen? Reduce your burden on society, today!* *Cremation fees not included.