I tend to think GiveWell beats SENS in terms of adding expected lifespan to the lives of current people, because of the incredibly low cost of reducing 3rd world infectious disease (and a culture of efficient charity will improve aging research too), but it’s not entirely obvious to me. Some points that make aging research look more plausible:
-China and India are aging, and if trends continue for another decade the desperately poor will be concentrated almost wholly in Africa, a smallish minority of world population, with the great majority of deaths owing to diseases of aging and wealth; surprisingly, in the Copenhagen Consensus’s recent reports heart disease treatment in developing countries has ranked highly for cost-effectiveness
-if you develop aging therapies that work, developed countries will pay for the production themselves; if you develop new treatments for the desperately poor, you also need charity to pay for production
--pushing forward effective therapies for aging forward by a day could avert 100,000+ deaths, which would be worth $100 million at $1,000/life
-SENS is supposed to be in part a way to kickstart/lobby for research with various feasibility proofs, mobilizing a much larger pool of funds, similar to GiveWell, and so could plausibly compound to push research forward by one or more days
-the Gates Foundation has shifted the ratio of research effort going into 3rd world diseases vs aging (the NIH institute of aging is relatively small, anyway) to put them within an order of magnitude of each other
-humanitarian foreign aid budgets greatly exceed aging-specific research budgets
-there are real taboos and social barriers to openly calling for research aimed at aging, creating a plausible niche
-SENS might actually reduce the pace of aging research by attracting backlash (I doubt this, having an “extreme” flank for triangulation often helps to legitimize less extreme arguments)
I tend to think GiveWell beats SENS in terms of adding expected lifespan to the lives of current people, because of the incredibly low cost of reducing 3rd world infectious disease (and a culture of efficient charity will improve aging research too), but it’s not entirely obvious to me. Some points that make aging research look more plausible:
-China and India are aging, and if trends continue for another decade the desperately poor will be concentrated almost wholly in Africa, a smallish minority of world population, with the great majority of deaths owing to diseases of aging and wealth; surprisingly, in the Copenhagen Consensus’s recent reports heart disease treatment in developing countries has ranked highly for cost-effectiveness
-if you develop aging therapies that work, developed countries will pay for the production themselves; if you develop new treatments for the desperately poor, you also need charity to pay for production
--pushing forward effective therapies for aging forward by a day could avert 100,000+ deaths, which would be worth $100 million at $1,000/life
-SENS is supposed to be in part a way to kickstart/lobby for research with various feasibility proofs, mobilizing a much larger pool of funds, similar to GiveWell, and so could plausibly compound to push research forward by one or more days
-the Gates Foundation has shifted the ratio of research effort going into 3rd world diseases vs aging (the NIH institute of aging is relatively small, anyway) to put them within an order of magnitude of each other
-humanitarian foreign aid budgets greatly exceed aging-specific research budgets
-there are real taboos and social barriers to openly calling for research aimed at aging, creating a plausible niche
-SENS might actually reduce the pace of aging research by attracting backlash (I doubt this, having an “extreme” flank for triangulation often helps to legitimize less extreme arguments)