[Eliezer]

> "My question for reddit: what would you do if you had $20M in the bank?"

Fight death.

- Fight death of individuals:

Cryonic preservation: http://www.cryonics.org/ -- see also http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Cryonics

Basic research on aging and fighting it: http://mprize.org/

- Prevent the extinction of Earth-originating intelligent life:

Oxford Future of Humanity Institute - academic research on global catastrophic risks. http://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/

Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence - http://singinst.org/

- 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/

[tsally]

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.

[xenophanes]

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.

[MikeCapone]

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.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/39

and

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8554766938711591377&...

and

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0312367066

for background info.

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.

[tsally]

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.

I will do that. Thanks for your informed post.

[tsally]

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.

[MikeCapone]

> 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.

[tsally]

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.

[mnemonicsloth]

I'm not sure we're capable of devising a governmental system...

From the perspective of our ancestors, birth control is just as weird, arguably weirder.

Human beings are strongy predisposed to believe that the way we do things right now is the only correct/justifiable way they could be done:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Status_quo_bias

[MikeCapone]

Not immortality, you can still get hit by a truck. Just indefinite lifespan.

At the rate at which fertility is dropping, and at the rate at which technology is progressing, it would probably be pretty sustainable. But even if it causes problems, these would probably be much smaller than the problem of aging we have right now; besides, we can't make that choice for the future. If people decide they want to die of aging, they can stop taking the therapies. But if they want to live, they'll have to figure how to make it work.

edit: I'll add that the main motivator of many people working on this is curing horrible diseases (cancer, alzheimer's, diabetes, etc), and living a really really long time is a side-effect of not becoming decrepit and frail.

[xenophanes]

If you get good at anti-aging research, you get to the point where you extend lifespans by more than 1 year per year of research. And that is immortality, like it or not (minus accidents, murders, etc).

[cglee]

<sarcasm> Embrace constraints. Basecamp was built in 10hrs/week. You can do something great in ~60-80 years</sarcasm>

[ido]

> 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.

[almost]

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.

[kls]

Actually, I think most people would chose themselves over the idea of an infant in a far off land. impersonal association usual leave one with a stronger self-preservation response, over electing to sacrifice oneself for someone else. Most are either more tactful or self-delusional to not voice it out-loud.

[ramchip]

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.

[Vitaly]

by this logic outlawing condoms will be even better :)

the idea is not to make more people to productive age, but to increase the span of this productive age. and decrease/prevent the suffering at the end.

[jules]

You should watch this video about Aubrey de Grey: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3329065877451441972...

[ewjordan]

preparing for AI that may never be invented...

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).

[rms]

You missed the part where he listed an organization focusing on general catastrophic risk.

[crystalis]

As far as these comments are concerned, pretty much your entire comment has the least amount of reasoned argument per claim made.

[fuelfive]

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).

[rw]

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.

[Eliezer]

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.

[rms]

I think the answer is that we can worry about those problems once we solve the problem of not accidentally destroying humanity.

[jodrellblank]

Then what?

;)

[nandemo]

Then you would have a whole new set of social problems to try to solve.

[radu_floricica]

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.

[maxklein]

What about robots who talk and feel like humans, but are made of metal? Are they life originating from earth?