I think your point was valid though, I changed the title to be less strong
This is an interesting comment, I think you bring up good points.
One reason why I didn't focus much on crowdfunding is that the money that goes in there is not really LEAF's, and it's just one among many focuses they have. If an EA decides to give money to LEAF (through the recurring campaign, or through a grant, for example) that money will probably not go to a crowdfunding campaign, and would probably not make much of an impact on how they decide who to crowdfund. It would go to their other projects. When donating to a campaign you donate to the specific org who benefits from the project of the campaign and not to LEAF. LEAF, unlike other orgs like Open Phil for example, doesn't make grants directly, but only organizes campaigns so that people can bring money to a project.
You probably already knew all in the paragraph above, so: I think your point is correct. Where exactly they bring money by choosing who to finance is important in order to ascertain if the research which wouldn't otherwise have happened is actually making an impact (an impact at all, given the characteristics of this field, yes). A plus to them from my POV is that they seem internally sympathetic to SENS' approach (it's obvious by reading their introductory articles), although they also financed different approaches (one campaign is for a project involving NMN supplementation led by David Sinclair, a couple of others on biomarkers...). But I admit it's not much and a more detailed look would be ideal. For now, if you are more concerned about the science than YouTube/internet advocacy, policy influencing, etc. it is probably best to donate directly to orgs doing specific scientific research.
Not being able to evaluate much by looking at crowdfunding alone I followed the methodology of trying to gauge the ratio donations : money brought to the field, which I've seen used a lot for evaluating advocacy charities inside EA.
Maybe we'll be able to ascertain their decision-making regarding crowdfunding better (although probably not a lot better) after the interview, since the first question is about that.
In the past, I've donated to them and supported them in Project4Awesome, but I'm not inside the org. Basically, this is a post trying to evaluate it from an EA standpoint, in a similar way I did for SENS. Their budget should be the recurring campaign and single donations (which I don't expect to be much), the interview should probably make it clearer I hope.
Edit: the post is probably not very on topic for LW, but since I crossposted my analysis of aging research from an EA standpoint I wanted to put this here too for completeness.
I searched if there was a funny cat video called "what do you mean, Fetch?" and I found this. (Not that it was necessary for meaning though - sorry if this is noise).
Yes, I would find out, but later.
I'm inclined to think that if junk media (social media, news) were only useful for news, completely disregarding them would be probably the best action. Considering every other use though, I'm inclined to think the optimal is being able to reach a compromise of 20m per day maximum, although I'm not sure if it is possible without getting addicted. If it isn't it just might be best to get away, but I'm unsure.
There haven't been historical events that prompted me to react earlier than everyone else for now (not even covid, my city has never been the center of a big enough outbreak and I just abided to the lockdown rules. I can imagine that an earlier reaction could have been better if I lived in another country/city). The historical events that are important to react early to are probably the ones that would put me/my family/everyone else around in relatively sudden danger: war, political instability, coups, dangerous diseases, and probably other stuff. Things that happened just a handful of times in now developed countries during the twentieth century (maybe they won't happen again, but...).
I wouldn't have been this nervous 5 years ago, but it seems to me that the world is socially evolving faster now, and I think it's possible not to react fast enough on a historical event. But maybe I just have become more anxious? One other thing is: many times my life changed due to great fucking information I found while farting around the Internet, but at the same time this comes with all the drawbacks Isusr rightly identified. There is also the feeling that I have witnessed society and even art evolve by staying consistently online, and stopping feels like jumping out of a train. I'm not sure how I should act.
Did you discover COVID-19 earlier just due to keeping up with papers?
Do you keep up with news of any kind? If so, how? Don't you have fear of missing out something important which you should act upon (both good news or bad news or not even news but simply information)? Not necessarily politics or general news of course.
I don't know if this has already been discussed, but why the daily deaths in every European country are 1/10th or less of lockdown levels but daily cases are two or three times higher? In the rest of the world daily deaths still seem to follow daily cases but in the US and Japan (to a lesser extent), in which daily deaths are about half of what they were in May (which is still not as extreme as Europe). I may be unaware of other countries in which this is the case.