You want prizes to be ways to attract people who get scared when you talk about science for more than ten seconds. So the language has to be very glitzy and superficial and populist. Whereas, a foundation that’s trying to get money to put toward research, you want to look really knowledgeable and responsible and low-key.

A ten second soundbite may be very important for the prize to get a widespread reputation, but there’s more to attracting large donors than that.

Aubrey later says a major hurdle to getting large donations for his research is

3) You’ve got to believe the organization you’re thinking of giving the money to actually has the ability to execute [a promising plan]

Anyone familiar with the difficulty of funding technology startups can see that even people who enjoy talking about science usually fail to predict how well an organization will implement a plan. This is exactly why wise people who understand Aubrey’s vision will mostly prefer to donate to prizes rather than his research. The knowledge required to predict whether the Methuselah Foundation will reward progress at slowing senescence is much less than the knowledge required to evaluate a research project. The prize should at least partly transfer the responsibility for spending the money wisely to the researchers who are most informed about their projects.

Many of the prize criteria are well thought out, especially the ones concerning quality of preservation. But there a few criteria for which it’s hard to predict how the judges would evaluate a proposed technique, and they will significantly impair the effectiveness of the prize.

The requirement that it have the potential to be performed for less than $20,000 requires a number of subjective judgments, such as the cost of training the necessary personnel (which will be affected by the quality of the trainers and trainees).

The requirement that it “be absolutely safe for the personnel involved” would seem to be prohibitive if I try to interpret it literally. A somewhat clearer approach would be to require that it be at least as safe as some commonly preformed procedure. But the effort required to compare risks will be far from trivial.

The requirement that we have reason to expect the preserved brains to remain stable for 100 years depends on some assumptions that aren’t well explained, such as why a shorter time period wouldn’t be enough (which depends on the specific goals of preservation and on predictions about how fast technology progresses), and what we should look at to estimate the durability – I suspect the obstacles to long-term stability are different for different techniques.

(I noticed this prize in connection with the ASIM 2010 conference, although I didn’t get much out of the part of the conference that I was able to attend).

At lunch on Sunday I was in a group dominated by a discussion between Robin Hanson and Eliezer Yudkowsky over the relative plausibility of new intelligences having a variety of different goal systems versus a single goal system (as in a society of uploads versus Friendly AI). Some of the debate focused on how unified existing minds are, with Eliezer claiming that dogs mostly don’t have conflicting desires in different parts of their minds, and Robin and others claiming such conflicts are common (e.g. when deciding whether to eat food the dog has been told not to eat).

One test Eliezer suggested for the power of systems with a unified goal system is that if Robin were right, bacteria would have outcompeted humans. That got me wondering whether there’s an appropriate criterion by which humans can be said to have outcompeted bacteria. The most obvious criterion on which humans and bacteria are trying to compete is how many copies of their DNA exist. Using biomass as a proxy, bacteria are winning by several orders of magnitude. Another possible criterion is impact on large-scale features of Earth. Humans have not yet done anything that seems as big as the catastrophic changes to the atmosphere (”the oxygen crisis”) produced by bacteria. Am I overlooking other appropriate criteria?

Kartik Gada described two humanitarian innovation prizes that bear some resemblance to a valuable approach to helping the world’s poorest billion people, but will be hard to turn into something with a reasonable chance of success. The Water Liberation Prize would be pretty hard to judge. Suppose I submit a water filter that I claim qualifies for the prize. How will the judges test the drinkability of the water and the reusability of the filter under common third world conditions (which I suspect vary a lot and which probably won’t be adequately duplicated where the judges live)? Will they ship sample devices to a number of third world locations and ask whether it produces water that tastes good, or will they do rigorous tests of water safety? With a hoped for prize of $50,000, I doubt they can afford very good tests. The Personal Manufacturing Prizes seem somewhat more carefully thought out, but need some revision. The “three different materials” criterion is not enough to rule out overly specialized devices without some clear guidelines about which differences are important and which are trivial. Setting specific award dates appears to assume an implausible ability to predict how soon such a device will become feasible. The possibility that some parts of the device are patented is tricky to handle, as it isn’t cheap to verify the absence of crippling patents.

There was a debate on futarchy between Robin Hanson and Mencius Moldbug. Moldbug’s argument seems to boil down to the absence of a guarantee that futarchy will avoid problems related to manipulation/conflicts of interest. It’s unclear whether he thinks his preferred form of government would guarantee any solution to those problems, and he rejects empirical tests that might compare the extent of those problems under the alternative systems. Still, Moldbug concedes enough that it should be possible to incorporate most of the value of futarchy within his preferred form of government without rejecting his views. He wants to limit trading to the equivalent of the government’s stockholders. Accepting that limitation isn’t likely to impair the markets much, and may make futarchy more palatable to people who share Moldbug’s superstitions about markets.