I have just donated $10,000 to the Immortality Bus, which was the most rational decision of my life

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.

"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%.

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. However, there is basically no funding for this research, as publicly evidenced by the fact that BPF's two largest donations over the past two years have been for $1000 each.

What do you think the probabilty is of Zoltan getting elected? I'd put it lower than 5%.

I hope you have signed up for cryonics.

I am confused. Since you know he has a very, very low chance of winning, what is the expected return on investment in the almost certain not winning case? Do you think the campaign will have an effect anyway, "raising awareness" and similar things?

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-striken countries in Africa. If China enlarges their middle class, you will already feel the world resources being absorbed to one huge country. We will be in trouble with our population. It is still growing and the spectrum of inequality still makes pursuit of immortality a selfish choice.

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.

TIME TO GET RELIGION: AI WILL TORTURE AND ENSLAVE HUMANS TO LEARN FROM AND DOMINATE US https://medium.com/@MexConex/endgame-for-human-race-ai-will-enslave-humans-to-learn-from-and-dominate-us-215ed602a66b

What is the point of Transhumanism? If you are determined to live for ever, who else should die so that you can have enough resources for a comfortable life? Anyone who is too poor to have costly technologies for a longevity? This idea of Transhumanism and a discussion of Effective Altruism mingled in this LW community always confused me.