I’m in support of anti-aging research, and think we should fund it more highly, specifically because the long-term benefits are so high once we get it right. Does anyone have any comments on whether SENS is the best place to put money if you’re interested in donating to anti-aging?
As a side note, my experience working with complex codebases has led me to disbelieve your optimism for how quickly we can find reliable ways to get more than a decade of increased healthspan. The human body is vastly, vastly, vastly more complex than nearly any codebase humans have developed, and less well factored by far. And working to make notable improvements to complex codebases that are well-factored still takes years of dedicated effort, with much better tooling than we have for modifying the body.
You need to differentiate the question of how law is managed from who has commit rights. Managing law as code, with patches and such, is an implementation detail. Current laws are actually written similar to git hashes—changes to the existing code that are then applied. That all of this is manual is not at all interesting, and automating it with git would not in any way change the fundamental power structures at play.
On the other hand, proposing that anyone can change the law would clearly be insane, just as large open source projects must have maintainers or go entirely off the rails. Currently you can call up your representative and propose a change to the law, they just will very very rarely bother to listen to you. Just like an open source project where the maintainer cares about their particular concerns, not yours. So the question is who has commit rights and how to manage them—in other words, it’s fundamentally a question of political power and deciding who has it.