Your "global common goods" are just going to help "individual rich people" once they're developed
I expect the treatment would be affordable to the working class, once economies of scale are established.
and they're almost certainly going to cost more per-person than the interventions that top charities are working to deploy.
True, though the costs will be offset by by a dramatic decrease in cost of health care related to coping with the diseases of aging. It's not clear to me what the net cost would be.
you want to work on technologies that hope to increase the life expectancy and quality of life of a different portion of the world's population by 30 years
A 30 year increase in life span would be a low-end consolation prize if SENS doesn't completely succeed. The actual stakes are potentially unbounded life span.
I have a hard time believing that SENS will be short of funding. It has the ultimate pitch for rich donors: we can make [i]your[/i] life longer.
That is a nice theory, but we can observe if rich people are funding SENS and they aren't. Instead Bill Gates and Warren Buffet are donating to typical "help the poor" charities. Possible explanations are that rich people, like other people generally, don't think that indefinite lifespan is possible or desirable. See also this explanation of similar issues in cryonics, some of which generalizes.
How could that be underfunded, especially as the technology gets closer to market?
Maybe the situation will change as the technology gets closer to market. But it doesn't make sense to make current decisions as if that hypothetical future is occurring now.
True, though the costs will be offset by by a dramatic decrease in cost of health care related to coping with the diseases of aging. It's not clear to me what the net cost would be.
That's a good point. Aging is very expensive, so I'd hope the interventions would eventually be at least cost-neutral.
A 30 year increase in life span would be a low-end consolation prize if SENS doesn't completely succeed. The actual stakes are potentially unbounded life span.
The "potentially unbounded life span" part is so far off we can't reliably estimate whe...
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.