Vaniver comments on Leaving LessWrong for a more rational life - Less Wrong
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SENS is fundamentally in competition with dozens or hundreds of profit seeking organizations in the world. Donations to SENS are like donations to a charity researching better plastic surgery techniques. They will get invented no matter what, and the amount of money you can throw at it is trivial compared to the potential customer base of said techniques. If you cure aging, billionaires everywhere will fall over themselves to give you money.
Sort of. It might be nice if, say, a cure for diabetes was owned by a non-profit that released it into the public domain rather than by a corporation that would charge for it. (Obviously forcing corporations to be non-profits has predictably terrible side effects, and so the only proper way to do this is by funding participants in the race yourself.) From the perspective of the for-profits, a single non-profit competitor only slightly adjusts their environment, and so may not significantly adjust their incentive structure.
It would seem that the sooner a treatment is developed / cure found, the less people will suffer or die from the disease. Moving that sooner seems like a valuable activity.