The audio is very appreciated, I ended up listening instead of reading.
emanuele ascani
Why SENS makes sense
A general framework for evaluating aging research. Part 1: reasoning with Longevity Escape Velocity
Aging research and population ethics
Impact of aging research besides LEV
Interview with Aubrey de Grey, chief science officer of the SENS Research Foundation
[Question] Why is my (our?) reasoning process noisy?
Thanks a lot for writing this.
These disagreements mainly concern the relative power of future AIs, the polarity of takeoff, takeoff speed, and, in general, the shape of future AIs. Do you also have detailed disagreements about the difficulty of alignment? If anything, the fact that the future unfolds differently in your view should impact future alignment efforts (but you also might have other considerations informing your view on alignment).
You partially answer this in the last point, saying: “But, equally, one could view these theses pessimistically.” But what do you personally think? Are you more pessimistic, more optimistic, or equally pessimistic about humanity’s chances of surviving AI progress? And why?
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.
Evaluating Life Extension Advocacy Foundation
This is utterly deranged and I’m not sure if it was meant as a joke or not, but fuck I enjoyed it, and holy shit that WebMD link is absolutely crazy. Thanks for posting.
In all seriousness: I suspect we should explore such crazy ideas at least intellectually, just because we never know where the mind could turn after having considered them.
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?
I know this conversation is very old and Holden has matured his outlook on the subject (see Open Philanthropy’s grants to aging research, and Open Philanthropy’s analysis of aging research, although still dismissive of SENS), but I still want to point out what I think were the mistakes he made here.
Holden didn’t seem to get how different in scope the SENS’ plan is from the kind of research that a single brilliant researcher can bring forward in the traditional way. SENS needs a plethora of different therapies that would require an entire NIA for themselves to be developed… and this would be enough only for the first phases of research and not for clinical trials. I don’t get how he could be confused about this. Quoting Holden:
You [Aubrey] state that you have a high-expected-value plan that the academic world can’t recognize the value of because of shortcomings such as “balkanisation” and risk aversion. I believe it may be true that the academic world has such problems to a degree; however, I also believe that there are a lot of extremely talented people in academia and that they often (though not necessarily always) find ways to move forward on promising work.
Also, I’m confused about why Holden put so much weight on Dario Amodei’s opinion over Aubrey’s. Dario is an AI researcher.
[...] And as my summary of our conversation shows, he [Dario] acknowledges that the world of biomedical research may have certain suboptimal incentives, but didn’t seem to think that these issues are leaving specific, visible outstanding research programs on the table the way that your email implies. [...]
Thankfully, the Open Phil Holden obviously doesn’t think this is the case.
Thanks for your service, Mingyuan. 10⁄10.
How to evaluate neglectedness and tractability of aging research
True. Thanks for the good tip. I might actually implement it now that the weather and temperature are nicer.
Berkeley people have it good. At least they are doing this together. Imagine being a Berkeley person at heart and being in a completely anti-Berkeley environment.
He would probably say that he doesn’t care (he works for others, not for himself) and that alchool doesn’t affect him, since people already kind of noted this and the answers were these. But tbh, this whole thing is not that interesting to me, and I would classify it as weak evidence for what he belives or not. Usually it is mainly gossip.
Terence Tao even talked about this in his Google+ profile.
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.