Steve Jobs' medical leave, riches and longevity

I am pretty sure that SENS and de Grey are not underestimating the role of other types of biology research. Part of their strategy for getting research done is to identify research that could apply to the problem of longevity (even where the researcher may not have had that application in mind) and to provide grants for relevant follow up research.

Regarding the example of curing cancer, the maintenance approach endorsed by SENS may prevent a lot of cancer, and keep healthy the body's natural immune response to stop cancer early. It seems to me that it would make more sense, to achieve the goal of healthy longevity, to put more resources into longevity research now, and then see what cancers and other diseases still threaten us, so we can focus our efforts on those specifically.

Isn't the unpleasant part of eugenics the "killing "bad" people" part? In the Howard Families sense, it was more of a cross between an arranged marriage, a marriage of convenience, and surrogate mothering. A choice with a financial incentive, nobody was killed for being too short lived (!) or raped and forced into it.

it's a bit tricky to breed from people who are already old

The Howard Foundation's method [1] was to look for people with four centenarian grandparents, and make it known to them that if they chose to marry and have children with someone else on their list, they would receive a large financial reward.

[1] The fictional organisation described in Heinlein's Methuselah's Children, not any real-world foundation, of which there is at least one, that happens to have that name.

I don't think sfb is saying that they should do the same thing as the Howard Foundation. He does discuss doing "research" and so the Howard Foundation is simply a tag to get the reader interested.

(This brings up a separate issue: Is LW turning off potential rationalists by the large number of scifi/nerd references that we pack into things?)

In this case, the relevant issue isn't research

The fact that it is an existing technology does increase the relative importance of infrastructure and adoption versus research. But for a certain class of scenarios, research into damage-prevention is just as relevant as any other anti-aging tech (perhaps more relevant because it has a higher chance of being a factor in one's own survival). This happens to be the class of scenarios popular among people who haven't drunk the singularity Kool-Aid, so to speak.

If you talk to a typical biologist today, someone like Andrea Andreadis or PZ Myers, they will most likely tell you stuff like:

• Cryopreservation damages too many cells for reanimation to be likely.
• Ischemia does enough damage during the first few minutes to be very concerned about.
• Uploading to a computer is probably not possible because human minds are not analogous enough to computers.
• The brain is so tied in with other body systems that you'll probably lose your identity if you only save the brain.

We folks with a computer science or engineering background tend to regard these claims with suspicion -- maybe that indicates that there's something we get that they don't. But they are there, and probably for a reason. A billionaire not specializing in any science might be more rational to take these biologists at face value even if they are wrong.

I do believe singularity style events have significant probability. We certainly may well be uploading humans, designing FAI, and/or using molecular nanotech well within the next century. But I think it bears emphasis that we might not. And even if we do, significant information loss from suboptimal preservations may still be irreversible.

I think you're underestimating how gut level / instinctive people's revulsion of cryonics is.

whether an area of research is saturated

What does this mean? More groups working independently on solving a problem will not increase the probability of a solution being found in a given timeframe?

Bill Gates also hasn't had great success in the medical area: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/21/health/21gates.html

I don't know, what particularity impressed you about their foundation?

I used them as a contrast with leaving money to non-alleviating-suffering causes (Trump letting his children inherit it) or speculative-future-suffering causes (It's probably easier to convince someone to leave their money to a charity gets results today rather than one which tries to increase the chance of getting results tomorrow).

It's not really important to my point whether they are an effective charity or not, just that there aren't many single organizations with enough scale to handle Warren Buffet leaving all of several billion dollars to, and there aren't many examples of a Bill-Gates-rich person doing something quite like that.