The anti-aging field is going great as far as I can see, with billion-dollar investements happening regularly, clinical trials are ongoing and the field as a whole has started to attract the attention it deserves. I think rationalists are not especially worried because they (or rather, I do) believe that the problem is already well on its way to being solved. If we don’t all die from misaligned AI / nuclear war / biological weapon in the next 20 years, I don’t think we’ll have to worry about aging too much.
I wish this was the case. However those large scale investments you speak of are mostly being put into things which address the symptoms of growing old, but not the underlying causes. There are very, very few researchers working on permanently ending aging or at least full rejuvenation, and they are chronically underfunded.
I agree that the amount of funding that goes into explicitly anti-aging research is often greatly exaggerated. That said, as you may have heard, Altos Labs recently got started, and rumors indicate that it’s being well funded by Jeff Bezos and maybe a few others. My general impression is that anti-aging researchers think this is a big deal.
Karl Pfleger has tried to catalog companies that are trying to address aspects of aging, and his list is quite long, possibly a great deal longer than you might expect. Biological research in fields related to aging, especially stem cell research and cancer research, is not underfunded (at least, in my estimation).
It is a big deal. It is also not as big a deal as work towards full rejuvenation would be. Altos Labs, like Calico and others before it, is attempting to cure diseases of aging. They are not, to my knowledge, attempting to achieve full rejuvenation that would prevent age-related disease by means of eternally maintained youth.
It is, in principle, easier to prevent cancer than to cure it. And the strategies you would use for each are different. There aren’t many people outside of SENS who are working on the rejuvenation-as-prevention approach.
Thanks for the answer, that wasn’t one of my top guesses! Based on your experience, do you think it’s widely held in the community?
And I totally see how it kinda makes sense from the distance because it’s what the most vocal figures of the anti-aging community often claim. The problem is that it has also been the case 20 years ago—see Methuselah Foundation “make 90 the new 50 by 2030”—and probably 20 years before that. And, to the best of my understanding, while substantial progress has been made, there hasn’t been any revolutions comparable with e.g. revolution in ML over the same period. And ironically, if you talk to the rank-n-file folks in the longevity community, many of them are stocked about AGI coming and saving us all from death, because they see it as the only hope for aging to be solved within their lifetime. It is certainly possible that we solve aging in the next 20 years, but it’s nowhere near guaranteed, and my personal estimate of this happening (without aligned AGI help) is well below 50%. Are you saying your estimates of it happening soon enough are close to 100%?
I also wouldn’t call billion-dollar investments uncommon, the only example I can think of is Altos Labs, and it’s recent and so far nobody seems to know wtf exactly are they doing. And AI safety also has billion-dollar range players, namely OpenAI.
Most importantly, throwing more money at the problem isn’t the only possible approach. Consider how early in the COVID pandemic there was a lot of effort put into figuring out what exactly is the right strategy on the individual level. Due to various problems, longevity advice suffers from similar levels of uncertainty. There’s a huge amount of data gathered, but it’s all confusing and contradictory and models are very incomplete, and there’s various sources of bias etc—and it’s a hugely important problem to get right for ~everyone. Sounds like a perfect use case for the methods of rationality to me, yet there’s very little effort in this direction, nothing to compare with COVID—which is nowhere nearly as lethal! And just like with COVID, even if someone is young and optimistic so they are confident they’ll be able to jump on the LEV train, almost everyone has friends or loved ones who are much older.
The anti-aging field is going great as far as I can see, with billion-dollar investements happening regularly, clinical trials are ongoing and the field as a whole has started to attract the attention it deserves. I think rationalists are not especially worried because they (or rather, I do) believe that the problem is already well on its way to being solved. If we don’t all die from misaligned AI / nuclear war / biological weapon in the next 20 years, I don’t think we’ll have to worry about aging too much.
I wish this was the case. However those large scale investments you speak of are mostly being put into things which address the symptoms of growing old, but not the underlying causes. There are very, very few researchers working on permanently ending aging or at least full rejuvenation, and they are chronically underfunded.
I agree that the amount of funding that goes into explicitly anti-aging research is often greatly exaggerated. That said, as you may have heard, Altos Labs recently got started, and rumors indicate that it’s being well funded by Jeff Bezos and maybe a few others. My general impression is that anti-aging researchers think this is a big deal.
Karl Pfleger has tried to catalog companies that are trying to address aspects of aging, and his list is quite long, possibly a great deal longer than you might expect. Biological research in fields related to aging, especially stem cell research and cancer research, is not underfunded (at least, in my estimation).
It is a big deal. It is also not as big a deal as work towards full rejuvenation would be. Altos Labs, like Calico and others before it, is attempting to cure diseases of aging. They are not, to my knowledge, attempting to achieve full rejuvenation that would prevent age-related disease by means of eternally maintained youth.
It is, in principle, easier to prevent cancer than to cure it. And the strategies you would use for each are different. There aren’t many people outside of SENS who are working on the rejuvenation-as-prevention approach.
Thanks for the answer, that wasn’t one of my top guesses! Based on your experience, do you think it’s widely held in the community?
And I totally see how it kinda makes sense from the distance because it’s what the most vocal figures of the anti-aging community often claim. The problem is that it has also been the case 20 years ago—see Methuselah Foundation “make 90 the new 50 by 2030”—and probably 20 years before that. And, to the best of my understanding, while substantial progress has been made, there hasn’t been any revolutions comparable with e.g. revolution in ML over the same period. And ironically, if you talk to the rank-n-file folks in the longevity community, many of them are stocked about AGI coming and saving us all from death, because they see it as the only hope for aging to be solved within their lifetime. It is certainly possible that we solve aging in the next 20 years, but it’s nowhere near guaranteed, and my personal estimate of this happening (without aligned AGI help) is well below 50%. Are you saying your estimates of it happening soon enough are close to 100%?
I also wouldn’t call billion-dollar investments uncommon, the only example I can think of is Altos Labs, and it’s recent and so far nobody seems to know wtf exactly are they doing. And AI safety also has billion-dollar range players, namely OpenAI.
Most importantly, throwing more money at the problem isn’t the only possible approach. Consider how early in the COVID pandemic there was a lot of effort put into figuring out what exactly is the right strategy on the individual level. Due to various problems, longevity advice suffers from similar levels of uncertainty. There’s a huge amount of data gathered, but it’s all confusing and contradictory and models are very incomplete, and there’s various sources of bias etc—and it’s a hugely important problem to get right for ~everyone. Sounds like a perfect use case for the methods of rationality to me, yet there’s very little effort in this direction, nothing to compare with COVID—which is nowhere nearly as lethal! And just like with COVID, even if someone is young and optimistic so they are confident they’ll be able to jump on the LEV train, almost everyone has friends or loved ones who are much older.