One issue is that you seem to be equivocating between increasing your personal income to more-than-a-base-level-of-$90000 and increasing your personal income to help solve immortality. I think we can safely say that achieving clinical-immortality is something that will take significant amounts of resources—trillions of dollars worth at the bare minimum. (Cancer research seems to be about $50B/yr right now and that’s only one small part of achieving clinical immortality.) Suppose I stress myself for the rest of my non-immortal life (say, for 50 years) to earn $190,000/yr, in the hopes of achieving immortality before I die of old age. This is a stretch in a lot of cases. Taking out the base level of income for happiness, this gives a total lifetime extra income of $5M.
Assuming that all of that is donated towards the cause of developing immortality, what effect does that extra income have towards achieving personal immortality? This is impossible to calculate, but I’d assume a very small effect, since it is only about one one-millionth of the funding needed. As a rough estimate, I’ll assume that donating all of that toward immortality research gets you an extra one one-millionth chance of becoming clinically immortal, which seems possibly too generous since if the research finishes the year after you die, you get nothing (modulo cryonics). If you assume that an immortal person will live for a million years on average, then this means that dedicating your life to immortality research donation gets you one extra expected year of lifespan. Of course, all of these numbers of very arbitrary and include assumptions, but I think it gives the right magnitude of expected value.
Contributing toward solving immortality is a wonderful and noble thing, but the personal benefit to an extra donation seems to be low—significantly lower than the personal cost of giving that donation.
That’s not what “equivocation” means. Equivocation is the fallacy of changing the definition of a term mid-argument. What you’re describing is me using multiple arguments in support the thesis (that “you need more money”), which is perfectly valid. For a broad range of worthy goals, including some you might not realize are “needs”, more resources (such as money) will improve your chances of success. Personal income and clinical immortality were just two examples. There could be others.
I think we can safely say that achieving clinical-immortality is something that will take significant amounts of resources—trillions of dollars worth at the bare minimum
Aubrey de Gray is not nearly so pessimistic. In this 80,000 Hours interview he suggested that $50 million per year might be sufficient for the SENS program. That was in 2012 though.
That’s still more than I can individually afford, even if I were (barely) rich, but if more of the rationalist/EA community were a lot wealthier and agreed it was a priority, this seems more achievable.
The idea isn’t to cure aging overnight, but to achieve escape velocity: for rejuvenation to buy enough lifetime for the next intervention to be developed.
One issue is that you seem to be equivocating between increasing your personal income to more-than-a-base-level-of-$90000 and increasing your personal income to help solve immortality. I think we can safely say that achieving clinical-immortality is something that will take significant amounts of resources—trillions of dollars worth at the bare minimum. (Cancer research seems to be about $50B/yr right now and that’s only one small part of achieving clinical immortality.) Suppose I stress myself for the rest of my non-immortal life (say, for 50 years) to earn $190,000/yr, in the hopes of achieving immortality before I die of old age. This is a stretch in a lot of cases. Taking out the base level of income for happiness, this gives a total lifetime extra income of $5M.
Assuming that all of that is donated towards the cause of developing immortality, what effect does that extra income have towards achieving personal immortality? This is impossible to calculate, but I’d assume a very small effect, since it is only about one one-millionth of the funding needed. As a rough estimate, I’ll assume that donating all of that toward immortality research gets you an extra one one-millionth chance of becoming clinically immortal, which seems possibly too generous since if the research finishes the year after you die, you get nothing (modulo cryonics). If you assume that an immortal person will live for a million years on average, then this means that dedicating your life to immortality research donation gets you one extra expected year of lifespan. Of course, all of these numbers of very arbitrary and include assumptions, but I think it gives the right magnitude of expected value.
Contributing toward solving immortality is a wonderful and noble thing, but the personal benefit to an extra donation seems to be low—significantly lower than the personal cost of giving that donation.
That’s not what “equivocation” means. Equivocation is the fallacy of changing the definition of a term mid-argument. What you’re describing is me using multiple arguments in support the thesis (that “you need more money”), which is perfectly valid. For a broad range of worthy goals, including some you might not realize are “needs”, more resources (such as money) will improve your chances of success. Personal income and clinical immortality were just two examples. There could be others.
Aubrey de Gray is not nearly so pessimistic. In this 80,000 Hours interview he suggested that $50 million per year might be sufficient for the SENS program. That was in 2012 though.
That’s still more than I can individually afford, even if I were (barely) rich, but if more of the rationalist/EA community were a lot wealthier and agreed it was a priority, this seems more achievable.
The idea isn’t to cure aging overnight, but to achieve escape velocity: for rejuvenation to buy enough lifetime for the next intervention to be developed.