Clearly the SENS Research Foundation, as a 501c3 charity that gives you the 80/20 win for a good expectation value for your dollars to do the most good in speeding up progress towards ending age-related disease. If you want to do better than the SRF at assigning dollars to speeding up progress towards ending age-related disease, you're going to have to spend some years reading research and making connections. (I wish more people would, actually, no such thing as too much help here).
Age-related disease kills ~100,000 people every day, and causes horrible day to day suffering for hundreds of millions of others. Nothing else comes even close as a single presently addressable cause of terrible things in the world, and lack of money is the greatest obstacle to progress towards meaningful treatments that address the root causes of aging and thus all age-related disease.
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.
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.
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), and so on and so forth.
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%.
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.
>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
That seems rather dubious. It would be wonderful if society were organised to maximally channel the efforts of all the warm bodies available, but (bizarrely in my view) "not enough jobs to go around" is seemingly a thing. Also, "more people alive" certainly does not equal "cheaper healthcare" no matter how you slice it.
That aside, it seems to me that a more immediately realizable method of achieving that goal would be to redistribute wealth to the enormous fraction of the world that cannot afford even basic medical care - even in the United States.
It seems highly likely to me that even if it were possible to extend human lifespan by some substantial degree with no ill effects, this technology would probably not be used on everybody in the world, or on every social class. This would come with grave destabilising effects. You'd struggle to find a better way to foment resentment and revolution than today's super-powerful and mega-rich becoming immortal as well.
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...
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).
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!*
A trillion dollars every 3 years. Simply trying to make every dollar more effective would go a long way. We probably need fewer, but more effective charities, for example. Identify the best ways to fund medical research.
SENS Research Foundation is made for relatively wealthy people who already have money and health who want to live longer. Do they have any successes or measures of efficiency? It seems like science fiction pie in the sky research by a small group of true believers.
Who suffers the most from age-related disease? The rich or the poor? Are novel medical treatments forever only available to the rich, or do they become ever cheaper, more widespread, and more effective over time? How much of your own personal future are you willing to sacrifice to spite rich people who might get access to early, inefficient technologies before you do? How much of everyone else's future are you willing to sacrifice to make yourself feel better? Think about it before answering.
What products has this SENS group ever produced besides a bunch of talk? Have they even produced one research result paper in a top journal? Or is it just a bunch of talk.
I guess maybe you can argue that funding people to advocate for anti-aging research can encourage more people to engage in it? Is that your argument on why this is a useful charity to fund?
There's a website out there you can go look at, you know. With annual reports, links to published research papers, explanations of the research programs they conduct in collaboration with noted laboratories around the world, records from the scientific conferences held, news and press, and so on. It's no big secret - you don't have to ask me.
Reading and research is something wealthy people try to guilt you into doing! We want you to spell it out here so we don't have to spend any of our own effort discrediting our preconceived notions.
> SENS Research Foundation is made for relatively wealthy people who already have money and health who want to live longer.
Ignoring the fact that you're pulling statements out of a hat, and assuming what you said is true, which one of the following two scenarios would you rather be in:
- A world where fundamental research on aging hasn't been done and people get sick and start to die between the ages of 60-90.
- A world where, as a result of some secretive research and development of medical technology, a handful of people (the rich ones) seem to be living a healthy life all the way up to 180-210, and the public starts demanding that such research be made available to everyone.
I see no reason to believe the second scenario is anywhere close to occurring. The gains we've seen in life expectancy over the past century or so have been due to things like reducing child mortality and better treatments for disease so less people die younger. The maximum life expectancy of a human is about the same now as it was several thousand years ago.
That's actually a very interesting question. And it's actually not clear that the second scenario would be better. A lot of problems would come along with people living twice as long. And who's to say that the other people would be able to afford that tech, even if it were freely available?
Actually, SENS-like repair therapies would be mass-produced infusions for the most part. They'd be the same for everyone, a mix of small molecule drugs targeting metabolic waste (amyloids, cross-links, lipofuscin, etc) and gene therapies (allotopic expression of mitochondrial genes). Some replacement of stem cell populations most likely, which would be a tissue sample, send to the clinic, get back cells for injection.
If you look at comparable technologies today, autologous stem cell transplant is the most expensive, and you can get that for a few tens of thousands of dollars via medical tourism. Other points of comparison are, say, biologics for autoimmune conditions, which are enormously finicky to mass-produce at the moment and presently run to a few thousand dollars per shot or infusion. They'll get cheaper. Generic drugs, widely produced and past their legal protections, on the other hand cost a few cents to a few dollars for a dose.
For SENS-like repair technologies you're looking at one treatment every few decades if it's very efficient at clearing damage, or perhaps every few years if it isn't.
That sounds nice, but there are a few problems with it. 1) You can't predict the future, so you don't know that those treatments will work or will actually be inexpensive. 2) Patents, greed, lawyers, etc. 3) Since the treatments don't exist yet, you don't know how often they would need to be done.
Bottom line is that you seem to be awfully confident about predicting the future of things that don't exist yet.
> Age-related disease kills ~100,000 people every day
People die. In other news water is wet.
Now, I'm all for making people live longer, with quality of life
> and causes horrible day to day suffering for hundreds of millions of others
Because doctors prop up the sick (often with family support) and artificially extend their life while costing a lot of money in 'treatments' for unrecoverable conditions.
If you're looking to keep people alive for long periods of time you necessarily have to work to address frailty because frailty kills. The sort of last ditch treatments to keep someone alive for another year or month you describe aren't really related to SENS's goals except in the broad sense that they're both keeping people alive.
I think you misunderstood the person you're replying to. They meant that people's lives should end well (not propped up on life support) and that we should focus more on quality of life than on life extension. There was a great article that went around a few years ago called "How Doctors Die"[1] that showed the difference between medical professionals approach death and how normal people approach it.
There is a long history of people suggesting various solutions to aging. The SENS Research Foundation has little to suggest it's better than any of the other wastes of cash.
Step 1: Drugs, invasive procedures, and diet are completely off the table as viable solutions.
Step 2: ? (Nanite/Magic)
Because we really don't have many other options right now.
PS: A lesser goal involving tradeoffs may be possible with drugs, but flow out slow aging so you keep a 25 year old body for longer that's not going to happen from drugs.
> Age-related disease is simply not an issue for the billions of young people suffering.
Cancer is closely related to the processes of aging, and aging research is highly likely to overlap with cancer prevention and treatment. (If only because the processes that cause cell aging and death are also the ones that prune potential cancer cells from the body.) So, aging research is also quite likely to help prevent childhood cancer or other early-onset cancers.
(That said, people always act shocked and appalled when cancer strikes those in their teens, 20s, and 30s, as though that's somehow worse than it hitting someone in their 40s, 50s, 60s, or older. I can't stand the phrase "before their time"; all deaths are too soon.)
There are +$5 billion invested in cancer research each year, this SENS charity has a budget of $4M a year. Basically $4M a year is not able to fund much at all.
I'm currently working on fixing that, both personally and via fundraising.
Cancer gets more attention because it's the thing written down under "cause of death" next to a loved one's name. But that's a proximate cause; the underlying cause is usually "aging".
Age-related disease is simply not an issue for the billions of young people suffering.
Actually, it is. A huge amount of resources is spent on trying to treat the symptoms of aging, and much of that comes out of the pockets of younger people.
Is cancer rolled into those age related disease numbers? Heart disease?
If so, do you happen to know how it breaks out? Cancer and heart disease get quite a lot of medical and funding attention (which doesn't necessarily mean they get enough).
Yes and yes. In both cases most funding goes towards intervening in much more ineffective ways than addressing root causes or common efficiently addressed mechanisms, however. Most of it all about trying to mess with proximate causes. Bailing out the boat rather than plugging the leak. Making better piston lubricants rather than fixing the worn components of the combustion engine. That sort of thing.
Could death have evolved by natural selection as a method of favouring the new generation's adaptations over the old? Is a society collectively fitter when there is less resource competition between old and new generations, and new mutations have a better chance at a fair trial - a way of jumping out of local maxima?
What indication is there that living longer would serve the greater good? People living longer = fewer births assuming stable population, and a greater percentage of life spent in older years. Even if you can make those older years healthy, you'll never be able to capture the uncomplicated wonder and joy of childhood and adolescence. You'd literally be trading a teenager's first crush for an 80-year old's third marriage. The aggregate joy of society will go down if SENS is successful.
I'm just going to have to guess that you aren't very old. I'm only 47, but I have to tell you that at least for me life just keeps getting better every year. I wouldn't trade this year for another year of my teens. I wouldn't trade this year for 10 more years in my teens.
Gradually losing health is unfortunate. I have to watch what I eat and be careful with my lifestyle due to chronic illness. My vision has degraded pretty badly and I'm forced to use a really gigantic font when I'm programming (you don't want to know how much time I spend fiddling with my colours!). These things pale in comparison to simply knowing what makes me happy.
I've worked hard to learn to be happy. Again, at least for me, I don't think happiness is something that is given to you. It's something that you make yourself. I suppose some people have a talent for it, like everything else, but it's something that you can work on and get better at. Without trying to sound arrogant there is no way that a child can have the kind of happiness that I have every day, because they simply do not have the experience to do it. They have a tumble of conflicting emotions which they have no control over. You couldn't pay me to do that again.
This. I enjoyed my childhood, and I wouldn't trade it for anything, but adulthood is so much more fun in a hundred different ways. If yours isn't, consider what it would take to fix that.
(If possible. I realize that isn't an option for everyone, and some people are working as hard as they can just to reach a secure position in life where they don't have to worry about basic needs. But this applies for those groups as well: if you had a thousand extra years to work with, as a start, you'd have a lot more time to enjoy the secure lifestyle you've worked so hard for, not just to pass that more secure position on to your children.)
I'm 31, with a toddler. I can't compare anything I do with the joy she gets out of the most mundane things. The first time she tasted chocolate? Blows me going to Alinea out of the water.
I'm not trying to disagree with you, I have a 7 month old son, but what about the joy you felt seeing her being born? I know that isn't a mundane thing and that you likely won't have it but a few more times but there are experiences that children can't have, that are, at least, as transcendent as a child's first taste of chocolate.
But that's precisely the thing. In a stable population, births per year are inversely proportional to life expectancy. So whatever joy seeing a child born brings to people, there will necessarily be less of that per year aggregated over the whole society. A society where everyone lives longer is necessarily one with a smaller proportion of joyful idealistic children and a higher percentage of cynical jaded older people.
> People living longer = fewer births assuming stable population
That's a big assumption, and one that seems rather unlikely to hold or to suddenly change.
> You'd literally be trading a teenager's first crush for an 80-year old's third marriage.
If you're going to blatantly invoke imagery like that, then how about preserving the wisdom of experience? How much more might we advance the state of the art in every field if the experts in those fields are still around, healthy, and making new discoveries?
And there are plenty of 80-year-olds still enjoying their first marriage.
Youth is a wonder largely because of aging; eliminate aging and you get the pleasures of youth when you're a hundred.
Personally, I'm satisfied with "death is bad; stopping death would be good". Simplistic yet still incredibly true.
>How much more might we advance the state of the art in every field if the experts in those fields are still around..
That will also keep bad guys around indefinitely. I think we can agree that things can be better. (I mean things like, environmental issues, corruption and foreign policies). But one cannot really hope to change the viewpoints/values/priorities of people already in power. Our only hope is the new generations, which we can hope to bring up with better values, which will eventually replace them.
Imagine if Hitler could live indefinitely or created an army of clones. Imagine every corrupt/powerful person in the world right, has the capability for doing this.
The point I am trying to make, is good cannot do good, when evil forces are in power. And the only thing that prevents evil forces in power indefinitely, is natural death. (We can all agree that things like democracy are not really doing a good job at that, right?)
Uh, that's the whole point of caring about the greater good: to help people live longer. If you're having some sort of existential crisis wherein you honestly can't see any reason people should live, then take some time to reassess your priorities in depth.
Because you're questioning the only real moral principle humanity has.
It depends on what you believe. If you believe that there is life after death, and it's a better one, then living longer on earth isn't necessarily better. I think if you talked to a lot of people who are actually elderly and actually nearing natural death, some of them would wish for another lifetime's worth of years (if it came with renewed health), but some of them would be ready to move on.
No, it doesn't depend on what you believe, it depends on what is actually true. There is no rational justification for believing things that are not true, so there's no way to effectively argue for them.
In your knee-jerkiness you have missed the point. The point is that people who believe in life after death may not desire to live longer. Regardless of whether there actually is life after death, what people believe about it affects their decisions.
This is probably not the place to argue about the existence of God, but I will say this: your reasoning is circular. "There's no rational justification for it, so it's not true; and since it's not true, there's no rational justification for it." You have made up your mind already, so you don't even realize when you beg the question. In fact, many people do see rational arguments in favor; just because you disagree with them doesn't make them irrational. And your stated arguments are, in fact, irrational.
Age-related disease kills ~100,000 people every day, and causes horrible day to day suffering for hundreds of millions of others. Nothing else comes even close as a single presently addressable cause of terrible things in the world, and lack of money is the greatest obstacle to progress towards meaningful treatments that address the root causes of aging and thus all age-related disease.