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Vaniver comments on I have just donated $10,000 to the Immortality Bus, which was the most rational decision of my life - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (79)
Thanks for donating towards longevity research!
For future donations, I might consider donating directly to medical research targeted at aging, like the SENS Research Foundation. Political donations seem to be high variance, with a sizable amount of the potential value actually being negative, because good ideas that get associated with 'bad' people become bad ideas (politically, at least). Consider the satellite Gore proposed to monitor the Earth's climate from the L1 point; it was ready to launch by 2003, but sat ignored in a warehouse possibly because of animosity of the Bush administration towards Gore.
Likewise, we don't want any longevity institutes at the NIH to be like the NCCIH. A firm scientific backing and ongoing research with successes along the way will likely go farther than political fiat.
I agree that SENS is likely the best place to send donations to promote longevity research.
Actually, it's a shame that longevity research doesn't get mentioned by the Effective Altruism movement very often. I'm just now casually wondering if there might be enough value in having a Givewell-like nonprofit evaluation organization focused on longevity research to justify creating such an organization. Note that Animal Charity Evaluators is an animal-based Givewell-like nonprofit evaluation organization-- which means that this sort of thing has been done before.
This having been said, Aubrey de Grey already seems incentivized to fund the most cost-effective anti-aging research first, so directly funding SENS might be everyone's best bet.
It's both a research intensive area and one that has traditionally used up weirdness points/not garnered much interest from the usual philanthropy crowd. Probably of interest once EA is significantly bigger.
Another good non-profit research institution that funds a lot of good aging research is the Buck Institute for Research on Aging.
http://www.thebuck.org/
It probably depends on if you think the SENS approach or more mainstream types of aging research are more likely to produce more significant results. It's worth mentioning that Google's "Calico" company has recently announced a partnership with Buck.
Animal Charity Evaluators makes sense because of a values difference: they provide recommendations for people who prioritize animals much more than is typical. I don't think there's something similar with anti-aging; it's just that GiveWell's not yet in a position to evaluate more researchy organizations, though this is changing as the Open Philanthropy Project progresses.
(I do think a GiveWell competitor would be valuable, but in the cause-neutral sense of one looking at all the potential funding-constrained altruistic options and picking the best ones.)
Aubrey de Grey has a fairly specific road map and is going to fund project on that road map. If you disagree with his road map you can think that Antiaging money should be spend differently.
It's also interesting to note that the NCCIH isn't the result of presidential action.
Politically focusing on getting a congressman or senator elected is much easier than running for president.
You often see third parties putting fourth a candidates for president, not because they expect to win, but just as a way to try to get more attention for their specific issues.
If I will donate to any actual research organisation I would do it for Buck institute. But general luck of donations to any of such organisation mean that the cause is not well enough popularized.
Interesting, I'm curious why--it looks to me like they're adequately funded for the foreseeable future. Do you think their research plan is better / their prestige is higher / something else?
What does "adequately funded" mean in this context? Certainly labs at the Buck Insitute could easily expand in personal or experiments given more money. Importantly, SENS and BI also collaborate, and many SENS grant dollars are awarded to scientists at BI (I don't know the exact numbers, but last time I looked into it, this was the case).
Looking into a little less shallowly, I overestimated the amount of their funding that comes from the Buck Trust Fund, but that amount still seems larger than the total budget of SENS. (I don't think SENS has any permanent support on nearly the same scale.)