Two quick stories for you, which I hope will give you some perspective:
1. I knew a billionaire with cancer. Imagine having all the money in the world and being unable to eat.
2. I knew a super millionaire with half a dozen properties all over the world who lived next to another super millionaire with half a dozen properties all over the world; they were locked into a multi-million dollar argument over 6 feet of beachfront between them.
This is actually very relevant to my life. My medical condition can seriously interfere with the ability to eat and can cost hundreds of thousands per year in medical expenses. My oldest son has the same diagnosis. So, by getting me and my kids well, I am literally saving millions of dollars over the course of our lives, even though my income is probably a lot less than most members of this forum and the quality of life aspect of it is worth way more than money to us.
That helps keep me sane in the face of serious financial issues. :-) I also like to think that if I ever do have serious money, this perspective/experience will continue to keep me grounded and keep my priorities straight.
That sounds really rough. I had some relatively minor digestive issues this year and lost 20 lbs in 1 month. I felt, for almost an entire month, as if I would get sick at any moment (yet only did twice).
It really sucked, though it's largely over and I can't imagine what someone with serious issues goes through.So good luck with getting well!
I don't know for sure. I think it was high stress, lack of sleep, poor diet and exercise. I fixed the last three (the stress I am stuck with) and am close to normal again.
Interesting. I am still mildly worried that it could pop up again at any time and I had a relatively good diet and exercise regime when it occurred. Sleep and stress are tougher to solve.
Glad to hear you have had success getting better - stay healthy.
- Where to hang out with other people interested in rational philanthropy with maximum utilitarian impact per marginal dollar: http://lesswrong.com/ and http://felicifia.com/
Where to hang out with other people interested in rational philanthropy with maximum utilitarian impact per marginal dollar
As far as the human race is concerned, pretty much everything you listed (cryonics, anti-aging, preparing for AI that may never be invented, etc) has the least amount of utility per dollar spent.
Do you have stats showing anti-aging research has low benefit per dollar spent? Or do you just have some kind of prejudice against life? Aubrey de Grey says it's cheap, as these things go.
Indeed, the diseases of aging kill in the range of 100-200k people every single day, while making life miserable for hundreds of millions and negatively impacting the people around these senescent individuals (who here enjoys seeing family and friends get sick and die?). It represents a huge loss of human capital (what if Paul Erdos was still around?), and it costs a huge amount in palliative care that we know ain't going to cure people.
When that is taken into account, the fight against the diseases of aging (actually reversing aging, not just making people live a couple of years more in a senescent state) is incredibly under-funded compared to all kinds of other things.
Vaccines are important, but they're already getting attention. What about saving that kid's life when he's 80 years old? Your dollars make a bigger difference when used doing research in fields that are currently overlooked because aging isn't considered a disease by most (yet).
SENS.org is where I donate most of my charity money.
Please at least read/see those before making the same "it won't work/wouldn't be a good thing" arguments that everybody has made a thousand times when first introduced to this. Thank you.
Please at least read/see those before making the same "it won't work/wouldn't be a good thing" arguments that everybody has made a thousand times when first introduced to this. Thank you.
Just an intuitive understanding that if we decrease infant mortality we will net the human race many more years of life than anti-aging research. Spare a few cents for a vaccine anyone? As opposed to dumping a bunch of money into theoretical anti-aging efforts.
Now you might argue that one additional year for an adult is more valuable to society than one additional year for a child, but I'd rather not quibble over the exact value of a year of life. There are counterarguments; how many genius do you think we lose in Africa because of inadequate medicine and education?
EDIT: If it's cheaper than optimizing on the low end, then of course I would support optimizing on the high end. But given the large number of human beings that die young for stupid reasons, I can't imagine that the high end is cheaper. Thanks for pointing out Aubrey de Grey, though. I'll do some reading.
> Just an intuitive understanding that if we decrease infant mortality we will net the human race many more years of life than anti-aging research.
If we accept that there's no reason why we couldn't defeat aging (mostly with periodical repair of the molecular damage that accumulates as a by-product of metabolism -- not need to understand how everything work, just keep damage under a certain threshold) and that we will some day do it, we should do everything to bring that day closer;
100-200k deaths per day. All those that die won't come back. Lifes saved by curing aging are actually saved for real, we don't just delay their death by a few years/decades.
This would be one of the most important things that humanity ever did, and once we do, we'll look back at our current lack of enthusiasm in curing aging as a great sin of omission (we could have did it sooner, but just took our time).
I'm all for vaccines, but right now it's not anti-aging research that is taking money away from vaccines. There are a billion other places to cut first.
If you're looking for a very important field that is dramatically under-funded, it's hard to get more marginal utility than in curing human senescence.
100-200k deaths per day. All those that die won't come back. Lifes saved by curing aging are actually saved for real, we don't just delay their death by a few years/decades.
So you're talking about immortality? I'm not sure we're capable of devising a governmental system capable of surviving such an invention.
When I read anti-aging, I assume the extension of lifespan, not immortality.
I really like your posts on this issue though, I'm going to check out the links you provided.
> Just an intuitive understanding that if we decrease infant mortality we will net the human race many more years of life than anti-aging research. Spare a few cents for a vaccine anyone? As opposed to dumping a bunch of money into theoretical anti-aging efforts.
I will most likely never be an infant in Africa, but am very probable to eventually become an old person in the industrialized world.
It might sounds cold-hearted, but for me infant mortality in the third world is someone else's problem.
It doesn't just sound cold-hearted, it is quite cold hearted but most people's standards. That's up to you of course, it's not like you're actively killing babies in Africa, but it does mean that conclusions you reach are not necessarily ones which other people will reach, even assuming good logical thought between the two points.
Except that if you look at it from a utility point of view: a child in the middle of Africa, as he ages, is going to produce a lot less value than someone in a developed country. In one year a programmer makes perhaps $150k's worth of product, including a large amount of taxes which the government can allocate as he pleases, while an African farmer doing survival farming is going to make a tiny fraction of that, and not one that can easily be allocated to worthy projects. Beans and bananas can buy microscopes or vaccines, but you need a lot of them.
Considering that the value produced by the programmer (or whoever) can be reinvested or dedicated eventually to fighting infant mortality, I think there's a balance to be reached. It's not as simple as saying that infant mortality must have priority over anti-aging.
I think it's a mistake to let the zealotry of the singularity weirdos cast doubt on everything that they're predicting; yes, they've got some pseudo-religious delusions about what AI will do for us, but I don't think they're far off when they say that it's coming, fairly soon, and there's nothing anyone can do about it.
There are some very clear numerical reasons that AI has failed thus far (we simply don't have the computing power right now - people hoped that we were clever enough to find algorithmic workarounds, but apparently we weren't), and whatever happens in the actual field of AI research, we're all but guaranteed to succeed at brute force AI some time over the next 50 years or so. The only real question is whether someone is able to figure out a hack that makes brute force unnecessary and bumps the timetable forward, but as I mentioned above, so far nobody has, so we may just have to wait for full brain simulation to be feasible.
Apart from that, I'd agree with you: with a few notable exceptions, most Singularity inspired "work" has been very low ROI, amounting to little more than speculation about the future and how great it will be rather than actually doing something to ensure a good outcome. There also seems to be a common delusion (again, with a few important exceptions) that AI will automatically be friendly without us needing to spend significant efforts towards that goal, which is very misguided.
...especially since a lot of the best funded and most focused AI research is taking place in China right now. In the rest of the world the past failures of AI have made people assume that it's a fool's errand, so there's not a lot of money going towards it, which could be a real disaster - regardless of how friendly AI can be made in principle, it's pretty much assured that if the Chinese government gets there first, we're going to see some pretty nasty stuff (though an argument could be made that once any government gets there we're all screwed).
I like your thinking, but I believe this would be more effectively approached from a position of greater leverage. One person's $10M helps LE research, but we could do a hundred times more if we instead collected $10 from 100M people. Why do most people not care about this and other important issues?
If we are to invest in basic science, it seems like more could be accomplished by understanding how beliefs are formed, and how beliefs map to behavior. With this understanding, we could shape society so that people grow up to be more rational and altruistic, and thus far more interested in spending $10 on life extension than on lottery tickets.
From another angle, most premature death in the US occurs from diseases of behavior. We could extend a lot of lives if we understood why most people pick short term payoffs (McDonalds, TV) instead of long term payoffs (vegetables, exercise).
Eliezer, to you, how does the fight against aging compare with the fight against poverty or the fight against war? Is it just a matter of scale? These concerns of yours, while pressing to us lucky few, seem to sidestep the urgent problems faced by the rest of the world: insecure access to food, shelter, healthcare, and education.
One must acquire the habit of thinking on the margins. If there are millions of people and billions of dollars attacking problem A which kills millions of people, and dozens of people and hundreds of thousands of dollars attacking problem B which kills millions of people, ceteris paribus your next marginal dollar is likely to have a bigger impact on B.
With that said, my own efforts are going into AI, not aging; the negative side of AI (recursive self-improvement by an agent with non-human-aligned goals) is something that, for all we know in this epistemic state, could happen at literally any time (hidden NSA lab finally achieved AI a month ago, it improved to superintelligence a week ago, cracked the protein folding problem, emailed some DNA strings to protein synthesis labs, got nanotechnology an hour ago, whoops we're all dead).
So if you're one of those people for whom problems don't exist unless they at least might destroy your self of tomorrow and not just your self of thirty years from now, I actually am spending my time on one of those problems.
But mostly I regard immediate temporal proximity as an invalid constraint on philanthropy.
Rational philanthropy? It's a very healthy concept but I have to ask, are there any studies about the per dollar value of the above? I love the basic idea of the Copenhagen Consensus. You may or may not agree with its conclusions, but as far as process goes they're the only ones I know of who try to do things in a scientific, falsifiable way.
"My question for reddit: what would you do if you had $20M in the bank?"
Thats a hard question, with that kind of money I can't think of any obvious ideas that would have a big impact on humanity.
If he had said I have $20 billion heres my ideas:
- Make Creative Commons text books. Hire a group of editors and staff that over see super star teachers who write the books. Release them under the CC licence.
- Startup Apartment Complex in San Fransisco. Build a large building in San Fransisco with small apartments. Small on size big on quality. Some floors would be modular office space. Subsidize the rent for equity in Startups that move in.
- Rethink college: Start a college a new college. It would be like a start up but instead of starting a business your creating a new college.
- Create an ethical version of Best Buy. An consumer electronics store that actually puts the customer first and treats it's employees well. The same for an ethical version of Kmart.
Thats a hard question, with that kind of money I can't think of any obvious ideas that would have a big impact on humanity.
Hypothetically supposing you were to automate a labor-intensive process in the field of your choice, and market that successfully to 100,000 people saving them each one hour a year, you'd have contributed essentially fifty full-time workers of your chosen profession to the community. Those could be nurses or teachers or priests or what have you.
That is very doable on dollar amounts much, much smaller than $20 million. Plus, the Internet chews up numbers like 100,000 for breakfast.
> - Make Creative Commons text books. Hire a group of editors and staff that over see super star teachers who write the books. Release them under the CC licence.
The problem being that no one will use them. There was an article a while back about how all the textbooks' content is basically controlled by some Christian 'watchdog' group in Texas.
Question: Do your kids know how much money you have?
His answer: My oldest is 11, and I think she is figuring it out. It's hilarious, because over the last couple of years she comes home and says "My friend is totally rich - can we be rich someday? They live in a mansion!"
I saw this early, and it was killed. Not sure why...this is right up HN's alley. Not many people talk about this stuff publicly, so it's pretty interesting to hear someone talk honestly and openly about it.
I'm pretty curious too. The affiliate marketing IAMA was not killed. this is pretty good and useful to the community here. let's just keep the "lets guess who it is" commentary to a minimum.
Right so let's violate the privacy of every interesting person who posts things online. Oh wait, that's what was done with _why. Seemed to work out well, didn't it? I don't even want to think about how many interesting Ruby innovations were lost as a result.
Bottom line: the information is meant to be read but decency and common sense should prevent you from probing deeper. If you don't follow these guidelines, interesting people will stop posting online. Unrestrained curiosity in these situations leads to everyone losing.
You know, AMA stands for "Ask Me Anything", which generally implies that any question is fair game (with obvious caveats for off-topic privacy-invasive questions).
People who don't want to answer any question should probably write "AMAA" ("Ask Me Almost Anything").
You seem to have misunderstood Sukotto's comment. He's not protesting linking to the thread. He's protesting a comment posted earlier by a user here on HN that speculated as to the identity of the AMA poster.
I think you need to know going into posting an AMA that people will want to know who you are. I think if you use a pseudonym for anything people will want to know who you are. Just because _why couldn't handle it (as you say), doesn't mean everyone else is to blame for that.
Couldn't handle it? Where the fuck do you get off?
We have this vision, we goddamned assholes, of _why as an entity that existed entirely online. He was TryRuby and Shoooes and the Poignant Guide and his Twitter account and his URLs and his Wikipedia page. Then one day he disappears and we treat him like he's a dead man or a ghost, never to appear again. That's pathetic enough without us actively treating it like some kind of tragic event.
Here's what happened with _why. He realized that his persona was limiting him in some ways. He was busy working to help people he never met who weren't grateful for his work, who expected him to remain some static unchanging persona. And _why, bless him, is a stable man with some reason about him, and he decided that all he'd amassed — all the fame, all the reputation, all the fans — wasn't worth it to him anymore. So he deliberately disappeared himself, so thoroughly that all the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't even figure out amongst themselves if they'd found the right name to call him by. Now he can do whatever the hell he wants, and none of it ever gets tied down to him. He's a free man. Still got the wit, the talent, the verbal alacrity, the art and the music and the smile, but now he can have an off day without the world knowing.
I'd call that pretty fucking handled. Much more handled than the guy that slowly crushes himself maintaining images and aspects that he personally can't be bothered with. When he left we saw so many people ranting and hailing him as if he were some sort of mystical, incomprehensible being, and nobody whatsoever saying that perhaps he'd quit his job like anybody else working long hours for no pay. For _why, leaving a job meant killing your alias. Nothing incomprehensible there.
But, Mr. Human, you've got to have some nerve to accuse somebody else of something just because he stopped working very, very hard in the public eye for little reward.
What part of Just because _why couldn't handle it (AS YOU SAY) didn't you understand? I wasn't accusing _why of not being able to handle it, I was referring to what I thought the parent meant.
Honestly, I never cared for the drama of the whole concept of _why and I still don't, and I wasn't trying to dig on him since I really don't care about it at all.
I greatly appreciate his reddit post and hope to see more from people like him. My comment was directed at those people here and in the reddit thread trying to figure out who he really is.
Stop and think for a moment... Here's someone who made it! He's got what most of us want.
And he's offering to talk about how he got where he is and how he thinks about his future direction. He's asking for comments on that direction... sure... but he's also giving us a gift.
Since he values his privacy, he asks that people respect that and not reveal who he really is.
So... instead of taking part in the real discussion, some people want to out the OP. which would effectively kill the interesting conversation and chill any potential other people out there who might be willing to to post the same kind of thread.
I like reddit. In fact, it is in my rotation of sites I check at least once daily.
I visit HN mainly for the technical/startup articles. I would prefer, personally, for general interest items to remain on reddit, since I check both. It's not good vs. evil! We can have both.
I'm a redditor too; but don't you think that the questions here would be a different nature than the ones you see on reddit? Especially if it was someone like the author of this AMA; I get the feeling there would be a lot more advice seeking questions here (and far less begging for money).
If it where me, I would rebuild a 74 ford Bronco from the frame up, with my son. Then, I would rebuild a 44 ft. Sportfisher and start competition sport fishing in the Florida Keys.
More importantly though, when my kids where a little older, I would disappear for a year, roaming as a drifter, I would find individuals and families in need, not broke people, but people who have a tragic life story to tell. I would personally help them one by one to overcome their adversity by becoming their true friend as well as helping them financially and psychologically repair their and their families life.
When I returned from my travels I would use my journal to write a novel and then produce a film titled "the man who purchased friends" or "buying friends" I can't decide. Obviously I would change my friends names as well as my own so that it could be construed as potentially fictitious accounts, leaving people to wonder always makes for a better tale.
Honestly, I think this kind of thing is interesting, but it's totally for the benefit of the ego of the poster. And I think it's fine to speculate about his identity too. That's part of the ego stroking.
- try to help others(less fortunate). Setup/contribute to charities, teach, cure, feed...
- try to change the world. promote democracy in russia, try to figure out how gravity works, actively support/participate on a team that does something visionary such as new energy initiatives or space exploration.
- defer the question for some time. Try to turn 20 into 200.
Two quick stories for you, which I hope will give you some perspective:
1. I knew a billionaire with cancer. Imagine having all the money in the world and being unable to eat.
2. I knew a super millionaire with half a dozen properties all over the world who lived next to another super millionaire with half a dozen properties all over the world; they were locked into a multi-million dollar argument over 6 feet of beachfront between them.
This is actually very relevant to my life. My medical condition can seriously interfere with the ability to eat and can cost hundreds of thousands per year in medical expenses. My oldest son has the same diagnosis. So, by getting me and my kids well, I am literally saving millions of dollars over the course of our lives, even though my income is probably a lot less than most members of this forum and the quality of life aspect of it is worth way more than money to us.
That helps keep me sane in the face of serious financial issues. :-) I also like to think that if I ever do have serious money, this perspective/experience will continue to keep me grounded and keep my priorities straight.