I tend to think GiveWell beats SENS in terms of adding expected lifespan to the lives of current people, because of the incredibly low cost of reducing 3rd world infectious disease (and a culture of efficient charity will improve aging research too), but it's not entirely obvious to me. Some points that make aging research look more plausible:
-China and India are aging, and if trends continue for another decade the desperately poor will be concentrated almost wholly in Africa, a smallish minority of world population, with the great majority of deaths owing to diseases of aging and wealth; surprisingly, in the Copenhagen Consensus's recent reports heart disease treatment in developing countries has ranked highly for cost-effectiveness
-if you develop aging therapies that work, developed countries will pay for the production themselves; if you develop new treatments for the desperately poor, you also need charity to pay for production
--pushing forward effective therapies for aging forward by a day could avert 100,000+ deaths, which would be worth $100 million at $1,000/life
-SENS is supposed to be in part a way to kickstart/lobby for research with various feasibility proofs, mobilizing a much larger pool of funds, similar to GiveWell, and so could plausibly compound to push research forward by one or more days
-the Gates Foundation has shifted the ratio of research effort going into 3rd world diseases vs aging (the NIH institute of aging is relatively small, anyway) to put them within an order of magnitude of each other
-humanitarian foreign aid budgets greatly exceed aging-specific research budgets
-there are real taboos and social barriers to openly calling for research aimed at aging, creating a plausible niche
-SENS might actually reduce the pace of aging research by attracting backlash (I doubt this, having an "extreme" flank for triangulation often helps to legitimize less extreme arguments)
Update: I should've said "non-existential risk charity", rather than specifically exclude SIAI. I'm having trouble articulating why I don't want to give to an existential risk charity, so I'm going to think more deeply about it. This post is close to my source of discomfort, which is about the many highly uncertain assumptions necessary to motivate existential risk reduction. However, I couldn't articulate this argument properly before, so it might not be the true source of my discomfort. I'll keep thinking.
I received my first pay-cheque from my first job after getting my degree, so it's time to start tithing. So I've been evalating which charity to donate to. I'd like to support the SIAI but I'm not currently convinced it's the best-value charity in a dollars-per-life sense, once time-value of money discounting is applied. I'd like to discuss the best non-SIAI charity available.
By far the best source of information I've found is www.givewell.org. It was started by two hedge fund managers who were struck by the absence of rational charity evaluations, so decided that this was the most pressing problem they could work on.
Perhaps the clearest, deepest finding from the studies they pull together and discuss is that charity is hard. Spending money doesn't automatically translate to doing good. It's not even enough to have smart people who care and know a lot about the problem think of ideas, and then spend money doing them. There's still a good chance the idea won't work. So we need to be evaluating programs rigorously before we scale them up, and keep evaluating as we scale.
The bad news is that this isn't how charity is usually done. Very few charities make convincing evaluations of their activities public, if they carry them out at all. The good news is that some of the programs that have been evaluated are very, very effective. So choosing a charity rationally is absolutely critical.
Let's say you're interested specifically in HIV/AIDS relief.[1] You could fund a program that mainly distributes Anti-Retroviral Therapy to HIV/AIDS patients, which has been estimated conservatively to cost $1494 per disability adjusted life-year (DALY). Alternatively, you could fund a condom distribution program, which has been estimated conservatively to cost $112 per DALY. Or, you could fund a program to prevent mother-to-child transmission, which has been estimated conservatively to cost $12 per DALY. So even within HIV/AIDS, funding the right program can make your donation two orders of magnitude more effective. By tithing 10% of my income every year for the next thirty years, I could have a bigger impact than a $25 million donation, if the person who placed that donation only did an okay job of choosing a charity.
GiveWell currently gives its top recommendation to VillageReach, a charity that seeks to improve logistics for vaccine delivery to remote communities. The evidence is less cut-and-dried than you'd ideally want, but it's still compelling. They took vaccine rates up to 95%, and had very low stock-out rates for vaccines during the 4 year pilot project in Mozambique. They're estimated to have spent about $200usd per life saved. Even if future projects are two or three times less efficient, you're still saving a life for $600. Think about how little money that is. If you tithe, you can probably expect to save 10 lives a year. That's massive.
Instead of donating directly to VillageReach, I'm going to just donate to GiveWell. They pool the funds they get and distribute them to their top charities, and I trust their analytic, evidence-based, largely utilitarian approach. Mostly, however, I think the work they're doing gathering and distributing information about charities is critically important. If more charities actually competed on evidence of efficacy, the whole endeavour might be a lot different. Does anyone have any better suggestions?
[1] I don't understand why people would want to help sufferers of one disease or condition specifically, instead of picking the lowest-hanging fruit, but apparently they do.