Fighting Aging as an Effective Altruism Cause: A Model of the Impact of the Clinical Trials of Simple Interventions
Abstract: The effective altruism movement aims to save lives in the most cost-effective ways. In the future, technology will allow radical life extension, and anyone who survives until that time will gain potentially indefinite life extension. Fighting aging now increases the number of people who will survive until radical life extension becomes possible. We suggest a simple model, where radical life extension is achieved in 2100, the human population is 10 billion, and life expectancy is increased by simple geroprotectors like metformin by three more years on average, so an additional 250 million people survive until “immortality”. The cost of clinical trials to prove that metformin is a real geroprotector is $60 million. In this simplified case, the price of a life saved is around 24 cents, 10 000 times cheaper than saving a life from malaria by providing bed nets. However, fighting aging should not be done in place of fighting existential risks, as they are complementary causes.
Highlights:
● Aging and death are the main causes of human suffering now.
● Simple interventions could extend human lives until aging is defeated.
● These interventions need to be clinically tested before FDA approval.
● A trial of the life extension drug metformin is delayed by lack of funds.
● Starting trials now will save 250 million people from death, at a cost of $0.24 for each life saved.
Please comment on the preprint of the article here: https://goo.gl/WaEYt5
These claims about life extension's impact on the economy, finances and resource shortages are controversial and uncited. You also aren't applying sound counterfactual reasoning, instead you are appealing to a generic sense of "well, lots of people will live wonderful lives ANYWAY, so there is no opportunity cost!!" which clearly doesn't address my concerns. Moreover, no one is talking about killing people, we are talking about being more accurate about the value of saving people's lives.
My point is not to keep arguing about this here, but to say that these things should be properly addressed in the paper. With these points and the optimizer's curse especially, you're still not doing real work to improve the argument. You're just taking comments from yourself and other users, and including them in the paper. A paper for cause prioritization cannot be a list of comments, it must be a structured argument.
I updated the section about unborn people and I am going to read and add more links on the topic. Currently it is:
2) Life extension will take resources and fewer new people will be born, thus unborn people will lose the opportunity to be alive. It is not easy to measure value of unborn people without some ethical axioms. If this value is very high, we may try to increase population as much as possible, which seems absurd as in would decrease the quality of life.
While life extension seems to mean fewer new people born each century, the total number of n... (read more)