When writing the post, I was imagining these as mostly-analysis projects, using already-existing data. They shouldn’t be a huge amount of work; the first two in particular could easily be spare-time projects or big class projects, and the third is probably limited more by having the right insight on how to tackle it rather than on time investment. If you wanted to pay someone for that sort of project, basically all the work would be in finding the right person. I could easily imagine paying an undergrad with good analysis and literature search skills $5000 to spend the summer on one of these; that should be enough time to produce a very thoroughly-executed product. I could also imagine paying an undergrad a couple hundred bucks to do one of the first two as a class project, rather than whatever else they might have done as a class project (bearing in mind that it would probably take a bit more background reading and literature search than a typical analysis-focused class project).
(In fact, I originally wrote these up when someone on LW asked me for recommendations for an aging-related project for a probabilistic modelling class. That person is giving the senescence-induced senescence problem a shot, and is welcome to leave a comment here if they want to advertise the project. I could imagine that they might be willing to put in more marginal time/effort for a reasonable number of dollars.)
If you really wanted to throw money at a project, then funding experiments on the same questions might be easier, just because it’s easier to find competent experimentalists already in the field. That would take a lot more money, though; I’d estimate hundreds of thousands. For that approach, we’re talking a lab and full-time researchers.
I’m the person starting to work on the senescence-induced senescence problem. Happy to chat more about current thoughts / plan (I am open to trading marginal time for relatively small amounts of $ but also happy to just talk about what I plan to do anyway). Feel free to DM me.
Depends on the approach.
When writing the post, I was imagining these as mostly-analysis projects, using already-existing data. They shouldn’t be a huge amount of work; the first two in particular could easily be spare-time projects or big class projects, and the third is probably limited more by having the right insight on how to tackle it rather than on time investment. If you wanted to pay someone for that sort of project, basically all the work would be in finding the right person. I could easily imagine paying an undergrad with good analysis and literature search skills $5000 to spend the summer on one of these; that should be enough time to produce a very thoroughly-executed product. I could also imagine paying an undergrad a couple hundred bucks to do one of the first two as a class project, rather than whatever else they might have done as a class project (bearing in mind that it would probably take a bit more background reading and literature search than a typical analysis-focused class project).
(In fact, I originally wrote these up when someone on LW asked me for recommendations for an aging-related project for a probabilistic modelling class. That person is giving the senescence-induced senescence problem a shot, and is welcome to leave a comment here if they want to advertise the project. I could imagine that they might be willing to put in more marginal time/effort for a reasonable number of dollars.)
If you really wanted to throw money at a project, then funding experiments on the same questions might be easier, just because it’s easier to find competent experimentalists already in the field. That would take a lot more money, though; I’d estimate hundreds of thousands. For that approach, we’re talking a lab and full-time researchers.
I’m the person starting to work on the senescence-induced senescence problem. Happy to chat more about current thoughts / plan (I am open to trading marginal time for relatively small amounts of $ but also happy to just talk about what I plan to do anyway). Feel free to DM me.