Thanks for donating towards longevity research!
For future donations, I might consider donating directly to medical research targeted at aging, like the SENS Research Foundation. Political donations seem to be high variance, with a sizable amount of the potential value actually being negative, because good ideas that get associated with 'bad' people become bad ideas (politically, at least). Consider the satellite Gore proposed to monitor the Earth's climate from the L1 point; it was ready to launch by 2003, but sat ignored in a warehouse possibly because of animosity of the Bush administration towards Gore.
Likewise, we don't want any longevity institutes at the NIH to be like the NCCIH. A firm scientific backing and ongoing research with successes along the way will likely go farther than political fiat.
I agree that SENS is likely the best place to send donations to promote longevity research.
Actually, it's a shame that longevity research doesn't get mentioned by the Effective Altruism movement very often. I'm just now casually wondering if there might be enough value in having a Givewell-like nonprofit evaluation organization focused on longevity research to justify creating such an organization. Note that Animal Charity Evaluators is an animal-based Givewell-like nonprofit evaluation organization-- which means that this sort of thing has been done before.
This having been said, Aubrey de Grey already seems incentivized to fund the most cost-effective anti-aging research first, so directly funding SENS might be everyone's best bet.
"Appearing as a 40-foot coffin, the Immortality Bus will roll down American highways stopping at rallies and events, instigating the kind of clashes and debates that this country (and the world) needs to challenge archaic cultural ideals that are holding science, technology, and medicine back."
"To do all we hope to do, we need to buy the bus and make it look like a coffin. But we need more too: We want a life-sized, interactive robot on board, drones following us, a biohacking lab for experimenting on ourselves, Virtual Reality equipment, lots of public event materials, and, of course, fuel."
"We'll continue in the Bible Belt and visit megachurches, hoping to covert the religious to reason and transhumanism (and showing that formal religion and greatly extended lifespans can happily co-exist). In Detroit, we'll visit factories where robots have taken jobs (and ask our own trainable robot Jethro Knights, what he thinks). In Massachusetts, we'll stop at MIT and get chip implants"
... ... this is a bad reality show for personal promotion, nothing more and nothing less. It's not even a good one. I just showed the indiegogo page to a friend who literally called it 'facepunch worthy'.
Unless your situation is far from typical, your probability of death within a year at age 42 is far less than 1%.
live in a country with medium man life expectancy around 60-65
Assuming that you live in Russia (since you wrote you are signed up with Cryorus) you have to keep in mind that the low male life expectancy of your country is probably related to high alcohol consumption, which is a risk factor that you can control.
If you think that there is promise in brain preservation (e.g., cryonics), your money may also be highly leveraged if you donate to the Brain Preservation Foundation (disclosure: I'm a volunteer for BPF). Cryonics is not a static technology -- this is the #1 lesson from Mike Darwin's blog, who is probably the most knowledgeable person about cryonics alive. And other technologies for brain preservation, such as aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation, are possible. BPF has a track record of providing grants that has already led to promising research avenues. H... (read more)
Lower than .00005%.
You can pretty easily think of "apocalyptic" scenarios in which Zoltan would end up getting elected in a fairly normal way. Picking a president at random from the adult population would require even more improbable events.
I hope you have signed up for cryonics.
Thanks for donating to a longevity-related cause. Yay for living longer!
This comment is followed by my previous one. I can't make a chain comment due to multiple downvotes. I am not trying to be disrespectful. I was raising a genuine question. I thought Effective Altruism was all about humanity saving people from diseases and famine. I am still trying to understand what Transhumanism is for. If you seek immortality while others try to save miserable lives from poverty, diseases, lack of water, and so on, are you assuming that the resources we have on our earth is limitless? They are not. We don't even have to go to poverty-st... (read more)
Longevity research has improved at a rate of about 1 year longer every 10 years. The probability of a major breakthrough in the next 30 years is quite low, but the existence of an FAI substantially increases that probability. I would argue the probability of a superintelligence being created multiplied by the probability of that entity increasing human lifespan beyond current research trajectories is greater than the same result occurring in the absence of a superintelligence. FAI isn't just important because of the need to preserve the human race; it increases the growth rate of all other technologies.
We haven't cured aging, we've just improved treatment for a lot of specific diseases. A cure for aging would massively improve life expectancy almost overnight. And it wouldn't be predictable from previous trends of increased vaccinations or whatever.
This is wrong - The body isn't a closed system, but an ongoing exporter of entrophy. There is no fundamental reason why "better repair mechanisms" wouldn't result in an permanent health. I don't like calling this immortality, because.. well, mishap and violence will still get you eventually, but the whole decay and slow dying thing isn't written into the laws of physics or even biology. It's just that Azathoth never had a reason to fix it.
I have non-zero probability to die next year. In my age of 42 it is not less than 1 per cent, and probably more. I could do many investment which will slightly lower my chance of dying – from healthy life style to cryo contract. And I did many of them.
From economical point of view the death is at least loosing all you capital.
If my net worth is something like one million (mostly real estate and art), and I have 1 per cent chance to die, it is equal to loosing 10 k a year. But in fact more, because death it self is so unpleasant that it has large negative monetary value. And also I should include the cost of lost opportunities.
Once I had a discussion with Vladimir Nesov about what is better: to fight to immortality, or to create Friendly AI which will explain what is really good. My position was that immortality is better because it is measurable, knowable, and has instrumental value for most other goals, and also includes prevention of worst thing on earth which is the Death. Nesov said (as I remember) that personal immortality does not matter as much total value of humanity existence, and more over, his personal existence has no much value at all. All what we need to do is to create Friendly AI. I find his words contradictory because if his existence does not matter, than any human existence also doesn’t matter, because there is nothing special about him.
But later I concluded that the best is to make bets that will raise the probability of my personal immortality, existential risks prevention and creation of friendly AI simultaneously. Because it is easy to imagine situation where research in personal immortality like creation technology for longevity genes delivery will contradict our goal of existential risks reduction because the same technology could be used for creating dangerous viruses.
The best way here is invest in creating regulating authority which will be able to balance these needs, and it can’t be friendly AI because such regulation needed before it will be created.
That is why I think that US needs Transhumanist president. A real person whose value system I can understand and support. And that is why I support Zoltan Istvan for 2016 campaign.
Me and Exponential Technologies Institute donated 10 000 USD for Immortality bus project. This bus will be the start of Presidential campaign for the writer of “Transhumanist wager”. 7 film crews agreed to cover the event. It will create high publicity and cover all topics of immortality, aging research, Friendly AI and x-risks prevention. It will help to raise more funds for such type of research.