Which longevity/aging focused organizations are most effective to contribute to?

672

Ṁ1.4K

resolved Jun 6

ALL

32%10%

SENS

20%7%

Rejuvenome

17%6%

American Federation for Aging Research (AFAR)

14%5%

Methuselah Foundation

12%4%

Any Basic Boring Healthcare Research Dealing with Health Habits (e.g. reduction of smoking, obesity, diabetes, etc.)

4%1.4%

Longevity Science Foundation

65%

Ante / discussion thread

1.4%

Rejuvenome

0.1%

Methuselah Fund

Aging kills and impairs a huge number of people, and research to prevent or mitigate this could potentially be highly impactful. I'm creating this market to learn recommendations for organizations in the area that would be best to contribute to. Resolution: This market resolves to the top organization(s) weighted by assessed expected impact, based on a combination of market consensus and my own research (or if there is any expert who volunteers to take over resolution I'll defer to them). I will examine the top suggestions put forward by the market and probably spend only a small amount of time guesstimating potential impact at each (I expect to spend more time researching this area in the future but I want this market to resolve quickly). I will rely on any analysis suggested by the market. This market can consider both nonprofits and for-profits, and can also take a broad view of contributions including donations, investments, and direct work. Some articles on the cause area: - https://www.openphilanthropy.org/research/cause-reports/scientific-research/mechanisms-aging - https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/aging-research Close date updated to 2022-05-22 11:59 pm Close date updated to 2022-05-29 11:59 pm Extending the close date because I haven't had time to do even a cursory amount of research for resolution. Close date updated to 2022-06-05 11:59 pm

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Thanks for the great suggestions! I took a quick look at these, lot of potentially promising organizations and research directions. Resolving to market probabilities, except there were a couple duplicate answers, in both cases one of them was both earlier and more bet on, so I left out the duplicate.

Thanks for the great suggestions and comments here. Further comments comparing them are definitely welcome. As mentioned in the description, I'll plan to spend a little time researching these and resolve mostly based on market consensus. If any expert in the area wants to provide input, that would be great!

answered

Longevity Science Foundation

bought Ṁ10

https://longevity.foundation/ Seems respectable: they focus on making the biomedical technology for life extension more accessible. Given the economic makeup of the world's population, this opportunity could be particularly effective by some definitions, assuming they're well-run and competent.

answered

American Federation for Aging Research (AFAR)

bought Ṁ40

https://www.afar.org/ This seems like a very serious, established charity in the field of biomedical research of causes of and treatments for aging.

bought Ṁ10 of Any Basic Boring Hea...

@Patrick That's a really good point and definitely worth looking into. I agree that the effect sizes should be easier to reason about because it's more near-term, but on the other hand this sort of research also suffers from a lot of uncertainty because it seems very unclear how to translate the research into changing people's habits, and on some topics like diet there's so much conflicting research. Research that allowed motivated readers to change their habits to improve health would also be at least selfishly valuable to the community even if it's hard to get it widely adopted by the public, so I'd give some points for that too. The big question for me here is how to separate signal vs noise. @David thanks for linking that. I've come across these databases before and it's really nice to get data on the landscape, but I have no idea how to pick out the most promising companies in them. As I mentioned in the market rules, I do think it's a good idea to include for-profit companies in our consideration.

I think these are all companies, not charities, but fwiw: https://agingbiotech.info/companies/ https://longevitylist.com/longevity-industry-database/

bought Ṁ10 of Any Basic Boring Hea...

Most people start from the assumption that they are already going to live 100 years or so or whatever, and they are interested in how they can extend that 100 years into 150 years or 200 years, but the fact is only about 1% of people live to be 95 in the US, and that number is going down principally because we're just so unhealthy. So the most *effective* anti-aging research, from a purely probabilistic standpoint, for the entire population at this time, would be focusing on moving that 1% up to 2%, getting a greater number of people over the age of 90 with better health outcomes through already known and proven strategies like improve diet over a lifetime, rather than gambling on a slight chance that you could have a much smaller number of people living to 150 by some with what now may be best described as an, "unknown chance," or "null set chance."

Most *Effective*? Just Healthcare Research, Which Involves Human Behavior (e.g. Reduction of Smoking, Obesity, etc.) - Anything involving advanced research, we have no clue if it will ever have an impact. It's not as flashy to say, "people need to not drink gallons of soda per year and know that periodontal health effects your heart health, etc.," as it is to say, "we have revolutionary telomere-enhancing research which will make us immortal," but simple, hard to keep and boring public health initiatives don't grab attention as much.

Oh - I'd raise the bonus to M$ 1000 if you create the Github Pull Request to add in the charity yourself! For an example, see https://github.com/manifoldmarkets/manifold/commit/1fa214ed48a2e5f5a3daf5559a5ef858ec81aade

To be clear: it's a M$ 500 bonus for the first referral to a unique charity; there's no limit on the number of times any individual can claim this bonus, and no current limit to the number of bonuses we're willing to award (as long as we like the charities)~

bought Ṁ1,000 of Ante / discussion th...

Thanks for posting this question, @Jack! We'll be monitoring this market for suggestions on good candidates to add to https://manifold.markets/charity (We're also offering a referral bonus of M$ 500 to the first person who suggests a charity that we add in -- including through any market like this one or https://manifold.markets/JackC/which-of-manifolds-supported-charit )