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I am a guy who sold his startup and I have like $20M in the bank. AMA.

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Re: I am a guy who sold his startup and I have like $20M in the bank. AMA.

#71

Post by [deleted] »

lambda wrote: post #60
tsally wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right so let's violate the privacy of every interesting person who posts things online. Oh wait, that's what was done with _why. Seemed to work out well, didn't it? I don't even want to think about how many interesting Ruby innovations were lost as a result. Bottom line: the information is meant to be read but decency and common sense should prevent you from probing deeper. If you don't follow these guidelines, inter…

You know, AMA stands for "Ask Me Anything", which generally implies that any question is fair game (with obvious caveats for off-topic privacy-invasive questions). People who don't want to answer any question should probably write "AMAA" ("Ask Me Almost Anything").

[deleted]

Re: I am a guy who sold his startup and I have like $20M in the bank. AMA.

#73

Post by Eliezer »

rw wrote: post #55
Eliezer wrote: post #27

> "My question for reddit: what would you do if you had $20M in the bank?" Fight death. - Fight death of individuals: Cryonic preservation: http://www.cryonics.org/ -- see also http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Cryonics Basic research on aging and fighting it: http://mprize.org/ - Prevent the extinction of Earth-originating intelligent life: Oxford Future of Humanity Institute - academic research on global catastrophic…

Eliezer, to you, how does the fight against aging compare with the fight against poverty or the fight against war? Is it just a matter of scale? These concerns of yours, while pressing to us lucky few, seem to sidestep the urgent problems faced by the rest of the world: insecure access to food, shelter, healthcare, and education.

One must acquire the habit of thinking on the margins. If there are millions of people and billions of dollars attacking problem A which kills millions of people, and dozens of people and hundreds of thousands of dollars attacking problem B which kills millions of people, ceteris paribus your next marginal dollar is likely to have a bigger impact on B.

With that said, my own efforts are going into AI, not aging; the negative side of AI (recursive self-improvement by an agent with non-human-aligned goals) is something that, for all we know in this epistemic state, could happen at literally any time (hidden NSA lab finally achieved AI a month ago, it improved to superintelligence a week ago, cracked the protein folding problem, emailed some DNA strings to protein synthesis labs, got nanotechnology an hour ago, whoops we're all dead).

So if you're one of those people for whom problems don't exist unless they at least might destroy your self of tomorrow and not just your self of thirty years from now, I actually am spending my time on one of those problems.

But mostly I regard immediate temporal proximity as an invalid constraint on philanthropy.

Re: I am a guy who sold his startup and I have like $20M in the bank. AMA.

#74

Post by ido »

tsally wrote: post #43
xenophanes wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have stats showing anti-aging research has low benefit per dollar spent? Or do you just have some kind of prejudice against life? Aubrey de Grey says it's cheap, as these things go.

Just an intuitive understanding that if we decrease infant mortality we will net the human race many more years of life than anti-aging research. Spare a few cents for a vaccine anyone? As opposed to dumping a bunch of money into theoretical anti-aging efforts. Now you might argue that one additional year for an adult is more valuable to society than one additional year for a child, but I'd rather not quibble over th…

> Just an intuitive understanding that if we decrease infant mortality we will net the human race many more years of life than anti-aging research. Spare a few cents for a vaccine anyone? As opposed to dumping a bunch of money into theoretical anti-aging efforts.

I will most likely never be an infant in Africa, but am very probable to eventually become an old person in the industrialized world.

It might sounds cold-hearted, but for me infant mortality in the third world is someone else's problem.

Re: I am a guy who sold his startup and I have like $20M in the bank. AMA.

#75

Post by icey »

gxs wrote: post #49
rms wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go for it

I like reddit. In fact, it is in my rotation of sites I check at least once daily. I visit HN mainly for the technical/startup articles. I would prefer, personally, for general interest items to remain on reddit, since I check both. It's not good vs. evil! We can have both.

I'm a redditor too; but don't you think that the questions here would be a different nature than the ones you see on reddit? Especially if it was someone like the author of this AMA; I get the feeling there would be a lot more advice seeking questions here (and far less begging for money).

Re: I am a guy who sold his startup and I have like $20M in the bank. AMA.

#76

Post by maxklein »

Eliezer wrote: post #27

> "My question for reddit: what would you do if you had $20M in the bank?" Fight death. - Fight death of individuals: Cryonic preservation: http://www.cryonics.org/ -- see also http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Cryonics Basic research on aging and fighting it: http://mprize.org/ - Prevent the extinction of Earth-originating intelligent life: Oxford Future of Humanity Institute - academic research on global catastrophic…

What about robots who talk and feel like humans, but are made of metal? Are they life originating from earth?

Re: I am a guy who sold his startup and I have like $20M in the bank. AMA.

#77

Post by fuelfive »

Eliezer wrote: post #27

> "My question for reddit: what would you do if you had $20M in the bank?" Fight death. - Fight death of individuals: Cryonic preservation: http://www.cryonics.org/ -- see also http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Cryonics Basic research on aging and fighting it: http://mprize.org/ - Prevent the extinction of Earth-originating intelligent life: Oxford Future of Humanity Institute - academic research on global catastrophic…

I like your thinking, but I believe this would be more effectively approached from a position of greater leverage. One person's $10M helps LE research, but we could do a hundred times more if we instead collected $10 from 100M people. Why do most people not care about this and other important issues?

If we are to invest in basic science, it seems like more could be accomplished by understanding how beliefs are formed, and how beliefs map to behavior. With this understanding, we could shape society so that people grow up to be more rational and altruistic, and thus far more interested in spending $10 on life extension than on lottery tickets.

From another angle, most premature death in the US occurs from diseases of behavior. We could extend a lot of lives if we understood why most people pick short term payoffs (McDonalds, TV) instead of long term payoffs (vegetables, exercise).

Re: I am a guy who sold his startup and I have like $20M in the bank. AMA.

#79

Post by Sukotto »

brown9-2 wrote: post #13
Sukotto wrote: post #11

If he wanted people to know who he is, he wouldn't have used a throwaway account. Give the guy some privacy.

If he didn't want people to read his "ask me anything" post, he would not have made one on reddit.

I greatly appreciate his reddit post and hope to see more from people like him. My comment was directed at those people here and in the reddit thread trying to figure out who he really is.

Stop and think for a moment... Here's someone who made it! He's got what most of us want. And he's offering to talk about how he got where he is and how he thinks about his future direction. He's asking for comments on that direction... sure... but he's also giving us a gift.

Since he values his privacy, he asks that people respect that and not reveal who he really is.

So... instead of taking part in the real discussion, some people want to out the OP. which would effectively kill the interesting conversation and chill any potential other people out there who might be willing to to post the same kind of thread.

Re: I am a guy who sold his startup and I have like $20M in the bank. AMA.

#80

Post by MikeCapone »

tsally wrote: post #58
MikeCapone wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just an intuitive understanding that if we decrease infant mortality we will net the human race many more years of life than anti-aging research. If we accept that there's no reason why we couldn't defeat aging (mostly with periodical repair of the molecular damage that accumulates as a by-product of metabolism -- not need to understand how everything work, just keep damage under a certain threshold) and that we wi…

100-200k deaths per day. All those that die won't come back. Lifes saved by curing aging are actually saved for real, we don't just delay their death by a few years/decades. So you're talking about immortality? I'm not sure we're capable of devising a governmental system capable of surviving such an invention. When I read anti-aging, I assume the extension of lifespan, not immortality. I really like your posts on thi…

Not immortality, you can still get hit by a truck. Just indefinite lifespan.

At the rate at which fertility is dropping, and at the rate at which technology is progressing, it would probably be pretty sustainable. But even if it causes problems, these would probably be much smaller than the problem of aging we have right now; besides, we can't make that choice for the future. If people decide they want to die of aging, they can stop taking the therapies. But if they want to live, they'll have to figure how to make it work.

edit: I'll add that the main motivator of many people working on this is curing horrible diseases (cancer, alzheimer's, diabetes, etc), and living a really really long time is a side-effect of not becoming decrepit and frail.

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