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Robin Hanson's avatar

Nick's summary seems completely accurate to me.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

What I also heard was that the scientists we had invited felt that they already found it difficult to get funding for work in this area, independently of how it was labeled. Some of them hoped that we might create a community or in some other way help build support for the kind of work they want to do. It seemed that some thought that explaining the larger goal would help them get more funding, while others worried that doing that would instead make it more difficult for them. I understand that a parallel debate is going on among biogerontologists.

I should note that the objective for the workshop was not to promote the area or help the scientists get more funding, but to better understand the state of the art, the rate of progress, and the remaining difficulties, as a basis for making better projections about how long it might take before WBE becomes possible (if ever) and how such a technology might develop. We deliberately did not discuss the desirability of this research or its wider implications - setting aside those issues for a future occasion. (For those who might be interested in the content of the workshop, we are hoping to produce a whitepaper eventually; we will also try to make available powerpoints from the workshop and some other materials.)

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