The world’s rich stay rich while the poor struggle to prosper

I'll bite.

> there is this thing called "diminishing returns" that somehow does not apply to being rich

Once you hit a certain amount of money, investments begin to drive your income. Unlike salary which is additive, investments tend to be multiplicative in their wins and losses. So you stand to make (or lose, if you are bad at it) money faster.

> Also, wouldn't "spend" be a more appropriate description than "give away" here?

Semantics. Credit and debits are all i am referring to.

The author is literally arguing that poor places are not getting richer fast enough. Money alone does not make for better living conditions. There are environmental constraints, infrastructure additions, and countless logistical issues. The author provides no solutions that i saw, and instead spends his time ranting about comparison between developed vs developing countries.

Big SENS fan here. Good question.

A lot of the reason is that people do philanthropy to gain various types of status and reputation. It's often a social action. Investing in SENS wouldn't impress their friends in the right way, while various other causes optimize for social signaling.

Yachts and social media companies are a bit different. The yachts are for fun in addition to being a social signal that impresses some people. The social media companies are usually either to make money or to hang out in certain circles, but they do also have some signaling possibilities (you can tell your old stodgy rich friends that you're involved in more hip investments than them).

I wish this was how all billionaires thought. I hope it's how I would think, if I were a billionaire. They probably think[1] however that there's realistically little they can do even with their billions to significantly lengthen their life within their lifetime. So they'd rather make their life better instead.

There might also be some (perhaps cultural) selection bias - people who want yachts try to become billionaires, people who want to improve the world focus on improving the world themselves rather than on becoming rich.

[1] I wrote "realise" first, but I have no way to know if they are right or not.

Interestingly, living forever is not a common desire among humans. As we age, our desire for longevity generally diminishes. Having children also seems to satiate some kind of internal biological self-preservation instinct, reducing the fear of death. (Which makes biological sense.)

The simple fact is that we only fear death because our genes want to survive. Once that is accomplished -- or once we pass the age of reproduction -- the alien goddess of biology stops whispering that terror into our hindbrains. Myths of hells and grave-monsters and rotting corpses cease to haunt us so deeply. The desire to just be here becomes less intense.

I would like to extend my life, but not because I fear death. I have children. It doesn't scare me all that much, really, though I would of course be afraid if it were staring me in the face. But I'd like to extend my life so that I could experience a kind of extended late-life in order to pursue intellectual ventures of high value and long-term focus. I'd love it if after kids, after ordinary biological life, I could basically become a monk-academic-entrepreneur and dedicate a century or two to art, science, philosophy, etc.

Edit:

In addition, through Gates' philanthropy, his selfish genes are in fact increasing their fitness. All those people in Africa are walking around with 99.999999% the same genetic material that's inside Bill Gates. He is them from a genetic point of view. So his actions are "genetically rational" from a perspective of selfish-gene self-preservation.

Lots of human behavior makes more sense through this lens. Why, for example, do we exercise moderation in war? Because the enemy carries our genes. The whole point of war is probably evolutionary stimulation from a perspective of selfish-gene logic. My guess is that if we went to war against hostile aliens there would be absolutely no mercy or moderation. It would be all-out war, no holds barred.

I do not disagree with the parent poster though. Such investments would have follow-on benefits and the technology would trickle down to us eventually, so I wish there was more money being put into those areas.

I wanted to point out that investing in AI research could be viewed by many as more lucrative than investing in anti-ageing research and life extension technology. If we solve AGI, we will have a super-human intelligence capable of solving health and ageing problems for us (and hopefully inclined to do so).