Your “global common goods” are just going to help “individual rich people” once they’re developed
I expect the treatment would be affordable to the working class, once economies of scale are established.
and they’re almost certainly going to cost more per-person than the interventions that top charities are working to deploy.
True, though the costs will be offset by by a dramatic decrease in cost of health care related to coping with the diseases of aging. It’s not clear to me what the net cost would be.
you want to work on technologies that hope to increase the life expectancy and quality of life of a different portion of the world’s population by 30 years
A 30 year increase in life span would be a low-end consolation prize if SENS doesn’t completely succeed. The actual stakes are potentially unbounded life span.
I have a hard time believing that SENS will be short of funding. It has the ultimate pitch for rich donors: we can make [i]your[/i] life longer.
That is a nice theory, but we can observe if rich people are funding SENS and they aren’t. Instead Bill Gates and Warren Buffet are donating to typical “help the poor” charities. Possible explanations are that rich people, like other people generally, don’t think that indefinite lifespan is possible or desirable. See also this explanation of similar issues in cryonics, some of which generalizes.
How could that be underfunded, especially as the technology gets closer to market?
Maybe the situation will change as the technology gets closer to market. But it doesn’t make sense to make current decisions as if that hypothetical future is occurring now.
True, though the costs will be offset by by a dramatic decrease in cost of health care related to coping with the diseases of aging. It’s not clear to me what the net cost would be.
That’s a good point. Aging is very expensive, so I’d hope the interventions would eventually be at least cost-neutral.
A 30 year increase in life span would be a low-end consolation prize if SENS doesn’t completely succeed. The actual stakes are potentially unbounded life span.
The “potentially unbounded life span” part is so far off we can’t reliably estimate when it might be achieved. I’d guess that’s also why they’re having trouble getting funding for it.
The poverty we have today is a massive inefficiency that we can solve, and be better off for having done so. We can have a larger, better global economy, generating more surplus for this kind of research. Or we can continue to let a great portion of the world’s population suffer, and let money continue to be wasted on ineffective interventions.
The poverty we have today is a massive inefficiency that we can solve, and be better off for having done so. We can have a larger, better global economy, generating more surplus for this kind of research.
Yes, as I mentioned in the last paragraph here, I take a more favorable view of “helping poor people” charities that actually achieve this. Validating this requires more than just counting lives saved, though.
Right. Well I think that’s our critical differing assumption.
My view of these charities would be different if I didn’t think the gains appreciated. I’d donate to a science or technology endeavour if I thought that the next generation would be exactly the same, and all a donation could do was provide an anaesthetic.
The general opinion seems to be that foreign aid has saved lives from disease, holding per capita income fixed, and gains in life expectancy and infant survival have probably increased total (but not per capita) GDP through larger populations, but there is very little evidence of a positive effect on GDP per capita, i.e. reducing poverty.
Analyses tend to find weak effects of aid, which disappear when replicated on new datasets, and effect sizes tend to shrink as sample size and data quality increase. The literature also shows the usual signs of data mining and publication bias like spikes around the significance threshold, disproportionate reporting of positive results, etc. See this article, for instance.
The Gates Foundation, GiveWell, and many others seem to buy the basic model that public goods (agricultural and medical research for Gates, vaccines) work, and public health can generate welfare/save lives, but are not great for economic development.
I don’t want to claim that we now understand how to do aid without making mistakes. But I do want to say that decades of bad aid have not accomplished as much as they might have if they were actually designed to help the poor (rather than win the Cold War, support American farmers, or other political goals.) I think it’s reasonable to expect that evidence-based aid will do better than aid as a whole has so far.
It seems that knowing if and to what extent a charity helps people become productive participants in the economy would be valuable to you. As near as I can tell, GiveWell does not rate charities on this criteria. As it sounds like you are planning to donate a substantial amount, you should consider contacting them about making an earmarked donation (I don’t know if they actually do this, but it is worth trying) for a research project to establish such ratings.
GiveWell has an economic empowerment category, but says that the efficacy and transparency of interventions and charities in that sector are too poor to recommend anything in the category in comparison with public health.
I expect the treatment would be affordable to the working class, once economies of scale are established.
True, though the costs will be offset by by a dramatic decrease in cost of health care related to coping with the diseases of aging. It’s not clear to me what the net cost would be.
A 30 year increase in life span would be a low-end consolation prize if SENS doesn’t completely succeed. The actual stakes are potentially unbounded life span.
That is a nice theory, but we can observe if rich people are funding SENS and they aren’t. Instead Bill Gates and Warren Buffet are donating to typical “help the poor” charities. Possible explanations are that rich people, like other people generally, don’t think that indefinite lifespan is possible or desirable. See also this explanation of similar issues in cryonics, some of which generalizes.
Maybe the situation will change as the technology gets closer to market. But it doesn’t make sense to make current decisions as if that hypothetical future is occurring now.
That’s a good point. Aging is very expensive, so I’d hope the interventions would eventually be at least cost-neutral.
The “potentially unbounded life span” part is so far off we can’t reliably estimate when it might be achieved. I’d guess that’s also why they’re having trouble getting funding for it.
The poverty we have today is a massive inefficiency that we can solve, and be better off for having done so. We can have a larger, better global economy, generating more surplus for this kind of research. Or we can continue to let a great portion of the world’s population suffer, and let money continue to be wasted on ineffective interventions.
Yes, as I mentioned in the last paragraph here, I take a more favorable view of “helping poor people” charities that actually achieve this. Validating this requires more than just counting lives saved, though.
Right. Well I think that’s our critical differing assumption.
My view of these charities would be different if I didn’t think the gains appreciated. I’d donate to a science or technology endeavour if I thought that the next generation would be exactly the same, and all a donation could do was provide an anaesthetic.
The general opinion seems to be that foreign aid has saved lives from disease, holding per capita income fixed, and gains in life expectancy and infant survival have probably increased total (but not per capita) GDP through larger populations, but there is very little evidence of a positive effect on GDP per capita, i.e. reducing poverty.
Analyses tend to find weak effects of aid, which disappear when replicated on new datasets, and effect sizes tend to shrink as sample size and data quality increase. The literature also shows the usual signs of data mining and publication bias like spikes around the significance threshold, disproportionate reporting of positive results, etc. See this article, for instance.
The Gates Foundation, GiveWell, and many others seem to buy the basic model that public goods (agricultural and medical research for Gates, vaccines) work, and public health can generate welfare/save lives, but are not great for economic development.
I don’t want to claim that we now understand how to do aid without making mistakes. But I do want to say that decades of bad aid have not accomplished as much as they might have if they were actually designed to help the poor (rather than win the Cold War, support American farmers, or other political goals.) I think it’s reasonable to expect that evidence-based aid will do better than aid as a whole has so far.
It seems that knowing if and to what extent a charity helps people become productive participants in the economy would be valuable to you. As near as I can tell, GiveWell does not rate charities on this criteria. As it sounds like you are planning to donate a substantial amount, you should consider contacting them about making an earmarked donation (I don’t know if they actually do this, but it is worth trying) for a research project to establish such ratings.
GiveWell has an economic empowerment category, but says that the efficacy and transparency of interventions and charities in that sector are too poor to recommend anything in the category in comparison with public health.