I know this conversation is very old and Holden has matured his outlook on the subject (see Open Philanthropy’s grants to aging research, and Open Philanthropy’s analysis of aging research, although still dismissive of SENS), but I still want to point out what I think were the mistakes he made here.
Holden didn’t seem to get how different in scope the SENS’ plan is from the kind of research that a single brilliant researcher can bring forward in the traditional way. SENS needs a plethora of different therapies that would require an entire NIA for themselves to be developed… and this would be enough only for the first phases of research and not for clinical trials. I don’t get how he could be confused about this. Quoting Holden:
You [Aubrey] state that you have a high-expected-value plan that the academic world can’t recognize the value of because of shortcomings such as “balkanisation” and risk aversion. I believe it may be true that the academic world has such problems to a degree; however, I also believe that there are a lot of extremely talented people in academia and that they often (though not necessarily always) find ways to move forward on promising work.
Also, I’m confused about why Holden put so much weight on Dario Amodei’s opinion over Aubrey’s. Dario is an AI researcher.
[...] And as my summary of our conversation shows, he [Dario] acknowledges that the world of biomedical research may have certain suboptimal incentives, but didn’t seem to think that these issues are leaving specific, visible outstanding research programs on the table the way that your email implies. [...]
Thankfully, the Open Phil Holden obviously doesn’t think this is the case.
I know this conversation is very old and Holden has matured his outlook on the subject (see Open Philanthropy’s grants to aging research, and Open Philanthropy’s analysis of aging research, although still dismissive of SENS), but I still want to point out what I think were the mistakes he made here.
Holden didn’t seem to get how different in scope the SENS’ plan is from the kind of research that a single brilliant researcher can bring forward in the traditional way. SENS needs a plethora of different therapies that would require an entire NIA for themselves to be developed… and this would be enough only for the first phases of research and not for clinical trials. I don’t get how he could be confused about this. Quoting Holden:
Also, I’m confused about why Holden put so much weight on Dario Amodei’s opinion over Aubrey’s. Dario is an AI researcher.
Thankfully, the Open Phil Holden obviously doesn’t think this is the case.