But also, how do you feel about donating to the relevant orgs (e.g. SENS), working in a related or adjacent area, and advocating for this cause?
I think of myself as having two parts to my utility function (really just, what I care about). There’s a selfish part, and a non-selfish part. As for the selfish component, I’m happy to pursue personal strategies to delay my aging and death. Indeed, I feel that my personal life extension strategies are extreme even by the standards of conventional life extension enthusiasts.
I don’t see a compelling selfish reason to donate to or work for life extension organizations. Even if I was a highly skilled biologist (and I’m not), the number of hours or days I could realistically hope to hasten the end of aging would be a low number. In that amount of time, I could have pursued better strategies aimed at helping myself alone.
While delaying death by one day gives a combined sum of millions of years of extra life across everyone, to me it’s just one day. That’s hardly worth switching careers over.
On the other hand, the non-selfish part of my utility function prefers to do what’s best for the world generally, and I don’t find life extension research particularly competitive across this axis. In the past, I’ve contemplated volunteering to help life extension advocacy, but it was more of a personal emotional thing than what I thought would actually be effective.
I have considered whether life extension could turn out to be extremely important for non-selfish reasons in this post. Ultimately, I do not find the arguments very compelling. Not only am I skeptical that life extension is coming any time soon, but I suspect that by the time it arrives, something even more important (such as AGI) will be here already.
I personally believe exactly the right kind of advocacy may be extremely effective, but that’s really a story for a post. Otherwise yeah, AGI is probably higher impact for those who can and want to work there. However, in my observation the majority of rationalists do not in fact work in AGI, and imao life extension and adjacent areas have a much wider range of opportunities and so could be a good fit for many of those people.
I think of myself as having two parts to my utility function (really just, what I care about). There’s a selfish part, and a non-selfish part. As for the selfish component, I’m happy to pursue personal strategies to delay my aging and death. Indeed, I feel that my personal life extension strategies are extreme even by the standards of conventional life extension enthusiasts.
I don’t see a compelling selfish reason to donate to or work for life extension organizations. Even if I was a highly skilled biologist (and I’m not), the number of hours or days I could realistically hope to hasten the end of aging would be a low number. In that amount of time, I could have pursued better strategies aimed at helping myself alone.
While delaying death by one day gives a combined sum of millions of years of extra life across everyone, to me it’s just one day. That’s hardly worth switching careers over.
On the other hand, the non-selfish part of my utility function prefers to do what’s best for the world generally, and I don’t find life extension research particularly competitive across this axis. In the past, I’ve contemplated volunteering to help life extension advocacy, but it was more of a personal emotional thing than what I thought would actually be effective.
I have considered whether life extension could turn out to be extremely important for non-selfish reasons in this post. Ultimately, I do not find the arguments very compelling. Not only am I skeptical that life extension is coming any time soon, but I suspect that by the time it arrives, something even more important (such as AGI) will be here already.
I personally believe exactly the right kind of advocacy may be extremely effective, but that’s really a story for a post. Otherwise yeah, AGI is probably higher impact for those who can and want to work there. However, in my observation the majority of rationalists do not in fact work in AGI, and imao life extension and adjacent areas have a much wider range of opportunities and so could be a good fit for many of those people.