Why rationalists are not much concerned about mortality?

My impression is that it's more than most people do! [Although full disclosure, myself I'm signed up with CI and following what I believe is the right pattern of diet and exercise. I'll probably start some of the highest benefit/risk ratio compounds (read: rapamycin and/or NAD+ stuff) in a year or two when I'm past 30.]

But also, how do you feel about donating to the relevant orgs (e.g. SENS), working in a related or adjacent area, and advocating for this cause?

>I'm pretty concerned, I'm trying to prevent the AI catastrophe happening that will likely kill me.

That was one of my top guesses, and I'm definitely not implying that longevity is higher or equal priority than AI alignment - it's not. I'm just saying that after AI alignment and maybe rationality itself, not dying [even if AGI doesn't come] seems like a pretty darn big deal to me. Is your position that AGI in our lifetime is so inevitable that other possibilities are irrelevant? Or that other possibilities are non-trivial (say above 10%) but since AGI is the greatest risk all resources should be focused on it? If the latter, do you believe it should be the strategy of the community as a whole or just those working on AGI alignment directly?

[Exercising 30 min few times a week is great, and I'm glad your housemate pushes you to do it! But, well, it's like not going to big concerts in Feb 2020 - it's basic sanity most regular people would also know to follow. Hell it's literally the FDA advice and has been for decades.]

I'm pretty concerned, I'm trying to prevent the AI catastrophe happening that will likely kill me.

On a personal level, it seems quite unlikely that any individual can meaningfully alter the risk of an existential catastrophe enough for their own efforts to be justified selfishly. Put another way, I think it makes sense to focus on preventing existential risks, but not as a means of preventing one's own death.

One optimistic explanation is that rationalists care more about AI risk because it's an altruistic pursuit. That's one possible way of answering OP's question. 

Maybe I am misreading this, but when they say "using the mortality rates for 2019", I think they are assuming that there won't be increases in life expectancy. Like, we're currently observing that people born in the 1930s living ~80 years, and so we'll assume that people born in eg. the 1980s will also live ~80 years. But that seems like [LW · GW] a very bad assumption to me.

Attributing magical capabilities to AGI seems to be a common cognitive failure mode :( is there not some way we can encourage people to be more grounded in their expectations?

There are plenty of people who have AGI timelines that suggest to them that either AGI will kill them before they reach their natural mortality or AGI will be powerful enough to prevent their natural mortality by that point. 

True but there's also plenty of people who think otherwise, other comments being an example.

I'm not a biologist, but I'm reasonably sure that fascia getting tenser would be downstream of the hallmarks of aging, if that's what you're talking about. It's kinda like asking why "going to a boardgame party in San Francisco" isn't on the list of covid transmission vectors. And in any case, SENS is far from being the only organization, there's many others with different approaches and focus areas, probably one of them covers fascia even if SENS doesn't.

The way I see it, when we're talking about non-me humans, the vast majority of them will be replaced with people I probably like roughly the same amount, so my preference for longevity in general is mild.

Am I reading this incorrectly or are you saying that you don't care about your friends and loved ones dying?

There's at least two currently ongoing clinical trials with an explicit goal of slowing aging in humans (TAME and PEARL), that's just the most salient example. At some point I'll definitely make a post with a detailed answer to the question of "what can I do". As for the problem not being solvable in principle, I don't believe I've ever seen an argument for this which didn't involve a horrendous strawman or quasi-religion of some sort.

I wish this was the case. However those large scale investments you speak of are mostly being put into things which address the symptoms of growing old, but not the underlying causes. There are very, very few researchers working on permanently ending aging or at least full rejuvenation, and they are chronically underfunded.

Thanks for the answer, that wasn't one of my top guesses! Based on your experience, do you think it's widely held in the community?

And I totally see how it kinda makes sense from the distance because it's what the most vocal figures of the anti-aging community often claim. The problem is that it has also been the case 20 years ago - see Methuselah Foundation "make 90 the new 50 by 2030" - and probably 20 years before that. And, to the best of my understanding, while substantial progress has been made, there hasn't been any revolutions comparable with e.g. revolution in ML over the same period. And ironically, if you talk to the rank-n-file folks in the longevity community, many of them are stocked about AGI coming and saving us all from death, because they see it as the only hope for aging to be solved within their lifetime. It is certainly possible that we solve aging in the next 20 years, but it's nowhere near guaranteed, and my personal estimate of this happening (without aligned AGI help) is well below 50%. Are you saying your estimates of it happening soon enough are close to 100%?

I also wouldn't call billion-dollar investments uncommon, the only example I can think of is Altos Labs, and it's recent and so far nobody seems to know wtf exactly are they doing. And AI safety also has billion-dollar range players, namely OpenAI.

Most importantly, throwing more money at the problem isn't the only possible approach. Consider how early in the COVID pandemic there was a lot of effort put into figuring out what exactly is the right strategy on the individual level. Due to various problems, longevity advice suffers from similar levels of uncertainty. There's a huge amount of data gathered, but it's all confusing and contradictory and models are very incomplete, and there's various sources of bias etc - and it's a hugely important problem to get right for ~everyone. Sounds like a perfect use case for the methods of rationality to me, yet there's very little effort in this direction, nothing to compare with COVID - which is nowhere nearly as lethal! And just like with COVID, even if someone is young and optimistic so they are confident they'll be able to jump on the LEV train, almost everyone has friends or loved ones who are much older.

Smallpox is also a very old problem, and lots of smart people had spent lots of time thinking about it, until they've figured out a way to fix it. In theory, you could make an argument that no viable approaches exist today or in the foreseeable future and so harm reduction is the best strategy (from the purely selfish standpoint, working on the problem would still help the people in the future in this scenario). However, I don't think in practice it would be a very strong argument, and in any case you are not making it.

If you're say 60+ than yes, anti-aging is not a realistic option and all you have is cryonics, but most of the people in the community are well below 60. And even for a 60+ years old, I'd say that using the best currently available interventions to get cryopreserved a few years later and have a slightly higher chance for reanimation would be a high priority.

Dangerous proposition in what sense? Someone may die? Everyone may die? I have, um, not very good news for you...

I can think of 100 billion reasons death is bad. I struggle to come up with a single reason why it is good that my grandma was forced to die. Are you sure you are not subject to motivated reasoning here?