emanuele ascani

• emanuele ascaniFeb 5, 2021, 4:42 PM

  1 point

  in reply to: emanuele ascani’s comment on: Cry­on­ics signup guide #1: Overview

  Nvm, I received confirmation and the answer was yes :)

• emanuele ascaniFeb 3, 2021, 2:18 PM

  2 points

  on: Cry­on­ics signup guide #1: Overview

  From the Alcor Associate Member page:

  To become an Associate Member use our Associate Membership Form to send a check, money order, or credit card information ($5 per month or $60 per year) to Alcor Life Extension Foundation, 7895 E. Acoma Dr., Suite 110, Scottsdale, Arizona 85260, or call Marji Klima at (480) 905-1906 ext. 101 with your credit card information.

  Or you can pay online via PayPal using the Join button below (quarterly option is not available this way). Please note that this will set up automatic recurring charges of either $5 per month or $60 per year. You do not need a PayPal account to make a payment to Alcor (however, your browser will need to accept a harmless PayPal cookie or you will get an error message). If you want to receive Cryonics magazine, be sure to include your name and mailing address.

  From what is written I gather that setting up the PayPal payment is enough to become an associate member and compiling the form is not necessary, correct?
  
  Btw, thanks A LOT for this sequence. I currently live in Italy, my home country, but this is still HUGELY useful for me. I plan to move to the US eventually and even if I decide to postpone my real subscription for when I’ll be there and I will have an actual income, this sequence will guide my decisions moving forward.

• emanuele ascaniJan 6, 2021, 11:56 PM

  1 point

  in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Anti-Aging: State of the Art

  I dont’t know actually (for both questions). And I’m not sure how many billionaires like this there are.

• emanuele ascaniJan 6, 2021, 11:02 PM

  1 point

  in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Anti-Aging: State of the Art

  The thing that’s very unclear to me is why SENS has so little funding if that’s framework is now consensus

  Because they choose the most neglected (long-term/​difficult/​high-risk high-reward) projects within the Hallmark framework (I talked extensively about this in my posts if you want to take a peek).

• emanuele ascaniDec 4, 2020, 10:48 AM

  6 points

  on: In Ad­di­tion to Rage­bait and Doomscrolling

  This reminds me of the sentiment Eliezer expresses here:

  
  
  When someone politely presents themselves with a careful argument, does your cultural software tell you that you’re supposed to listen and make a careful response, or make fun of the other person and then laugh about how they’re upset? What about when your own brain tries to generate a careful argument? Does your cultural milieu give you any examples of people showing how to really care deeply about something (i.e. debate consequences of paths and hew hard to the best one), or is everything you see just people competing to be loud in their identification?

• emanuele ascaniDec 3, 2020, 8:49 AM

  14 points

  on: The LessWrong 2018 Book is Available for Pre-order

  I really really love this initiative. Reading LW in book form is just better for me. Online I get distracted and I read stuff as procrastination instead of deliberate effort. I’ve read the first two books of the sequences and HPMOR on Kindle and the experience is not even comparable with reading with a browser.

• emanuele ascaniDec 1, 2020, 11:34 AM

  1 point

  on: Prize: In­ter­est­ing Ex­am­ples of Evaluations

  My posts here are basically all evaluations or considerations useful for cost-effectiveness evaluations. They are crossposted from the EA Forum. The most interesting ones for your purpose are probably:
  
  - A general framework for evaluating aging research. Part 1: reasoning with Longevity Escape Velocity
  - Why SENS makes sense
  - Evaluating Life Extension Advocacy Foundation

• emanuele ascaniOct 7, 2020, 4:46 PM

  2 points

  on: Covid 10/​1: The Long Haul

  I don’t know if this has already been discussed, but why the daily deaths in every European country are 1/​10th or less of lockdown levels but daily cases are two or three times higher? In the rest of the world daily deaths still seem to follow daily cases but in the US and Japan (to a lesser extent), in which daily deaths are about half of what they were in May (which is still not as extreme as Europe). I may be unaware of other countries in which this is the case.

• emanuele ascaniOct 1, 2020, 9:06 PM

  1 point

  in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Eval­u­at­ing Life Ex­ten­sion Ad­vo­cacy Foundation

  I think your point was valid though, I changed the title to be less strong

• emanuele ascaniOct 1, 2020, 8:56 PM

  3 points

  in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: Eval­u­at­ing Life Ex­ten­sion Ad­vo­cacy Foundation

  This is an interesting comment, I think you bring up good points.
  
  One reason why I didn’t focus much on crowdfunding is that the money that goes in there is not really LEAF’s, and it’s just one among many focuses they have. If an EA decides to give money to LEAF (through the recurring campaign, or through a grant, for example) that money will probably not go to a crowdfunding campaign, and would probably not make much of an impact on how they decide who to crowdfund. It would go to their other projects. When donating to a campaign you donate to the specific org who benefits from the project of the campaign and not to LEAF. LEAF, unlike other orgs like Open Phil for example, doesn’t make grants directly, but only organizes campaigns so that people can bring money to a project.
  
  You probably already knew all in the paragraph above, so: I think your point is correct. Where exactly they bring money by choosing who to finance is important in order to ascertain if the research which wouldn’t otherwise have happened is actually making an impact (an impact at all, given the characteristics of this field, yes). A plus to them from my POV is that they seem internally sympathetic to SENS’ approach (it’s obvious by reading their introductory articles), although they also financed different approaches (one campaign is for a project involving NMN supplementation led by David Sinclair, a couple of others on biomarkers...). But I admit it’s not much and a more detailed look would be ideal. For now, if you are more concerned about the science than YouTube/​internet advocacy, policy influencing, etc. it is probably best to donate directly to orgs doing specific scientific research.

  Not being able to evaluate much by looking at crowdfunding alone I followed the methodology of trying to gauge the ratio donations : money brought to the field, which I’ve seen used a lot for evaluating advocacy charities inside EA.
  
  Maybe we’ll be able to ascertain their decision-making regarding crowdfunding better (although probably not a lot better) after the interview, since the first question is about that.
  
  
  

• emanuele ascaniOct 1, 2020, 8:39 AM

  2 points

  in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Eval­u­at­ing Life Ex­ten­sion Ad­vo­cacy Foundation

  In the past, I’ve donated to them and supported them in Project4Awesome, but I’m not inside the org. Basically, this is a post trying to evaluate it from an EA standpoint, in a similar way I did for SENS. Their budget should be the recurring campaign and single donations (which I don’t expect to be much), the interview should probably make it clearer I hope.
  
  Edit: the post is probably not very on topic for LW, but since I crossposted my analysis of aging research from an EA standpoint I wanted to put this here too for completeness.

Eval­u­at­ing Life Ex­ten­sion Ad­vo­cacy Foundation

• emanuele ascaniJun 26, 2020, 11:02 AM

  1 point

  on: GPT-3 Fic­tion Samples

  I searched if there was a funny cat video called “what do you mean, Fetch?” and I found this. (Not that it was necessary for meaning though—sorry if this is noise).

• emanuele ascaniJun 22, 2020, 8:12 AM

  1 point

  in reply to: crl826’s comment on: [Per­sonal Ex­per­i­ment] One Year with­out Junk Me­dia: Six-Month Update

  Yes, I would find out, but later.

  I’m inclined to think that if junk media (social media, news) were only useful for news, completely disregarding them would be probably the best action. Considering every other use though, I’m inclined to think the optimal is being able to reach a compromise of 20m per day maximum, although I’m not sure if it is possible without getting addicted. If it isn’t it just might be best to get away, but I’m unsure.

• emanuele ascaniJun 21, 2020, 8:42 AM

  1 point

  in reply to: crl826’s comment on: [Per­sonal Ex­per­i­ment] One Year with­out Junk Me­dia: Six-Month Update

  There haven’t been historical events that prompted me to react earlier than everyone else for now (not even covid, my city has never been the center of a big enough outbreak and I just abided to the lockdown rules. I can imagine that an earlier reaction could have been better if I lived in another country/​city). The historical events that are important to react early to are probably the ones that would put me/​my family/​everyone else around in relatively sudden danger: war, political instability, coups, dangerous diseases, and probably other stuff. Things that happened just a handful of times in now developed countries during the twentieth century (maybe they won’t happen again, but...).

• emanuele ascaniJun 20, 2020, 8:49 AM

  1 point

  in reply to: crl826’s comment on: [Per­sonal Ex­per­i­ment] One Year with­out Junk Me­dia: Six-Month Update

  I wouldn’t have been this nervous 5 years ago, but it seems to me that the world is socially evolving faster now, and I think it’s possible not to react fast enough on a historical event. But maybe I just have become more anxious? One other thing is: many times my life changed due to great fucking information I found while farting around the Internet, but at the same time this comes with all the drawbacks Isusr rightly identified. There is also the feeling that I have witnessed society and even art evolve by staying consistently online, and stopping feels like jumping out of a train. I’m not sure how I should act.

• emanuele ascaniJun 20, 2020, 8:42 AM

  1 point

  in reply to: lsusr’s comment on: [Per­sonal Ex­per­i­ment] One Year with­out Junk Me­dia: Six-Month Update

  Did you discover COVID-19 earlier just due to keeping up with papers?

• emanuele ascaniJun 19, 2020, 10:10 PM

  3 points

  on: [Per­sonal Ex­per­i­ment] One Year with­out Junk Me­dia: Six-Month Update

  Do you keep up with news of any kind? If so, how? Don’t you have fear of missing out something important which you should act upon (both good news or bad news or not even news but simply information)? Not necessarily politics or general news of course.

• emanuele ascaniMay 22, 2020, 10:40 AM

  6 points

  on: What are ob­jects that have made your life bet­ter?

  Comply’s foam tips: they replace the more common tips for in-ear earphones and isolate you from the outside world much more than noise canceling. It’s basically having earphones + earplugs, thanks to the foam. If you live in a noisy environment they may radically change your life for the better. You need to learn the correct procedure to fit them properly (it’s easy, you can find videos on how to do it for earplugs. It is the same procedure). I recommend them for watching movies or reading/​studying while listening to nature sounds.

  A gaming console: I bought a PS4 a couple of years ago and it has been one of the best decisions in the last four years. This is valid if you already plan to allocate some time to gaming and if you manage not to get addicted to it.

  A beach chair or a big chair with the same inclination to read more comfortably and not fall asleep (this is the problem if you read on the bed). I can’t recommend a specific chair, because I don’t know exactly where you can find my own.

  Tablet: much better for reading anything on the internet. I find it strains my eyes much less. I can’t recommend a particular one… I owned two and both were great.

  A Kindle e-reader: much cheaper to read, easier due to less weight and having many books in the same place. As a result you will probably read more.

  A big desk with adjustable height with a big chair with adjustable height.

  I probably have left something out.

• emanuele ascaniMay 10, 2020, 10:46 AM

  9 points

  on: Pro­ject Pro­posal: Gears of Aging

  I really like this post. I think it is probably also relevant from an Effective Altruism standpoint (you identify a tractable and neglected approach which might have a big impact). I think you should probably crosspost this on the EA Forum, and think about if your other articles on the topic are apt to be published there. What do you think?

  If you read my profile both here and on the EA Forum you’ll find a lot of articles in which I’m trying to evaluate aging research. I’m making this suggestion because I think you are adding useful pieces.