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owencb comments on Make your own cost-effectiveness Fermi estimates for one-off problems - Less Wrong Discussion

9 Post author: owencb 11 December 2014 12:00PM

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Comment author: owencb 14 December 2014 02:23:29PM 1 point [-]

My estimates.

R(0): The SENS Foundation has an annual budget of around $4m, plus extra resources in the form of labour. Stem cell research has a global annual budget probably in the low billions, although it's not all directly relevant. Some basic science may be of relevance, but this is likely to be fairly tangential. Overall I will estimate $1b here, although this could be out by an order of magnitude in either direction.

B: Around 100m people die every year. It's unclear exactly what the effects of success would be on this figure, but providing a quarter of them with an extra 10 years of life seems conservative but not extremely so. So I estimate 250m QALYs/year

y/z: Real head-scratching time. I think 10 times historical resources wouldn't get us up to a 20% chance of success, but 10,000 times historical resources would be more than enough. I'm going to split the difference and say 300.