I agree. I’ve been donating $10k-50k per year for the past decade or so. I determined a couple years ago that it was better for me to acquire money at my current job and spend it hiring professionals, than to go into fundamental research myself.
Most of my hobby time these days goes toward biochem and biomedical research, so that I can be at the cutting edge if it becomes necessary. Being able to get treatments from 5-10 years beyond the official approval timelines may very well make the difference between life and death.
I do much the same, plus a fair bit of effort on preserving my health more thoroughly than those around me do. Obvious stuff like aerobic exercise, eschewing smoking, eschewing alcohol, eschewing highly processed foods, but also less obvious stuff like going substantially out of my way to avoid dust inhalation, reducing driving time or rescheduling driving for lower-risk times.
Keeping up with current medical research has been surprisingly fruitful. I did a micro-dose self-experiment based on the results of this paper, and it appears to both work in humans and have the authors’ briefly-mentioned hoped-for effect of reversing age-related mental decline in “healthy” individuals. Apart from that, simply knowing how well things are going has been very emotionally uplifting. I sense that you, too, see the incredible progress, else “50% of death within the next 4 decades” seems like a weirdly-low estimate. My current hope is that AGI capabilities basically halt soon, because it’s my impression that a business-as-usual future solves aging in time for me and the younger generations.
May I ask where specifically you’re donating? I haven’t reconsidered where I give my money in over a decade, and it occurs to me that maybe I ought to.
I agree. I’ve been donating $10k-50k per year for the past decade or so. I determined a couple years ago that it was better for me to acquire money at my current job and spend it hiring professionals, than to go into fundamental research myself.
Most of my hobby time these days goes toward biochem and biomedical research, so that I can be at the cutting edge if it becomes necessary. Being able to get treatments from 5-10 years beyond the official approval timelines may very well make the difference between life and death.
I do much the same, plus a fair bit of effort on preserving my health more thoroughly than those around me do. Obvious stuff like aerobic exercise, eschewing smoking, eschewing alcohol, eschewing highly processed foods, but also less obvious stuff like going substantially out of my way to avoid dust inhalation, reducing driving time or rescheduling driving for lower-risk times.
Keeping up with current medical research has been surprisingly fruitful. I did a micro-dose self-experiment based on the results of this paper, and it appears to both work in humans and have the authors’ briefly-mentioned hoped-for effect of reversing age-related mental decline in “healthy” individuals. Apart from that, simply knowing how well things are going has been very emotionally uplifting. I sense that you, too, see the incredible progress, else “50% of death within the next 4 decades” seems like a weirdly-low estimate. My current hope is that AGI capabilities basically halt soon, because it’s my impression that a business-as-usual future solves aging in time for me and the younger generations.
May I ask where specifically you’re donating? I haven’t reconsidered where I give my money in over a decade, and it occurs to me that maybe I ought to.
Nice!