JohnWittle comments on Open Thread, June 2-15, 2013 - Less Wrong

5 Post author: TimS 02 June 2013 02:22AM

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Comment author: gwern 06 June 2013 09:14:51PM *  49 points [-]

Per a discussion on IRC, I am auctioning off my immortal soul to the highest bidder over the next week. (As an atheist I have no use for it, but it has a market value and so holding onto it is a foolish endowment effect.)

The current top bid is 1btc ($120) by John Wittle.

Details:

  1. I will provide a cryptograpically-signed receipt in explicit terms agreeing to transfer my soul to the highest bidder, signed with my standard public key. (Note that, as far as I know, this is superior to signing in blood since DNA degrades quickly at room temperature, and a matching blood type would both be hard to verify without another sample of my blood and also only weak evidence since many people would share my blood type.)
  2. Payment is preferably in bitcoins, but I will accept Paypal if really needed. (Equivalence will be via the daily MtGox average.) Address: 17twxmShN3p6rsAyYC6UsERfhT5XFs9fUG (existing activity)
  3. The auction will close at 4:40 PM EST, 13 June 2013
  4. My soul is here defined as my supernatural non-material essence as specified by Judeo-Christian philosophers, and not my computational pattern (over which I continue to claim copyright); transfer does not cover any souls of gwerns in alternate branches of the multiverses inasmuch as they have not consented.
  5. There is no reserve price. This is a normal English auction with time limit.
  6. I certify that my soul is intact and has not been employed in any dark rituals such as manufacturing horcruxes; I am also a member in good standing of the Catholic Church, having received confirmation etc. Note that my soul is almost certainly damned inasmuch as I am an apostate and/or an atheist, which I understand to be mortal sins.
  7. I further certify that the transferred soul is mine, has never been anyone else's, has not been involved in any past transactions, sales, purchases, etc. However, note that, despite rich documentation that this is doable, I cannot certify that any supernatural or earthly authorities will respect my attempt to sell my soul or even that I have a soul. It may be better for you to think of this as purchasing a quitclaim to my soul.
  8. Bids can be communicated as replies to this comments, emails to gwern@gwern.net, comments on IRC, or replies on Google+. I will update this comment with the current top bid if/when a new top bid is received.

Suggested uses for my soul include:

  • novelty value
  • pickup lines & icebreakers; eg. Wittle to another person considering selling their soul:

    JohnWittle> ______: "You know, I own gwern's soul.
    You know, gwern of LessWrong and gwern.net" is a
    great ice breaker at rationalist meetups and I anticipate
    it increasing my chances of getting laid by a nonzero amount.
    Can your soul give me similar results?
    
  • supererogatory ethics: purchasing a soul to redeem it
  • making extra horcruxes
  • as a speculative play on my future earnings or labor in case I reconvert to any religion with the concept of souls and wish to repurchase my soul at any cost. This would constitute a long position with almost unlimited upside and is a unique investment opportunity.

    (Please note that I hold an informational advantage over most/all would-be investors and so souls likely constitute a lemon market.)

  • hedging against Pascal's Wager:

    presumably Satan will accept my soul instead of yours since damnation does not seem to confer property rights inasmuch as the offspring of dictators continue to enjoy their ill-gotten gains and are not evicted by his agents; similarly, one can expect him to honor his bargain with you since, as an immortal he has an infinite horizon of deals he jeopardizes if he welshes on your deal.

    Note that if he won't agree to a full 1:1 swap, you still benefit infinitely by bargaining him down to an agreement like torturing you every day via a process that converges on an indefinitely large but finite total sum of torture while still daily torturing you & fulfilling the requirements of being in Hell.

EDIT: Congratulations to Mr. Wittle.

Comment author: JohnWittle 10 June 2013 12:48:07AM 2 points [-]

Heh, I would have bid 0.5btc if I had known I would be the only bidder...

Comment author: Vaniver 10 June 2013 12:58:45AM 4 points [-]

This makes this exchange all the more amusing.

Comment author: FourFire 10 June 2013 01:47:18AM 1 point [-]

I'm obviously missing something, but tally ho, I'll find out eventually!

Comment author: Vaniver 10 June 2013 03:04:09AM *  5 points [-]

A second-bid auction is one where all bidders submit their maximum willingness to pay, and then the bidder willing to pay the most pays what the second-highest bidder was willing to pay. An English auction is where bidders submit bids which they will have to pay, with the idea that once the second-highest bidder will stop raising the bid once they pass their threshold.

There's a lot of theoretical work showing that second-bid auctions are all-around more efficient. English auctions can encourage the highest bidder to overbid, and the winner's curse refers to the phenomenon that the winner of an auction is generally the person who overestimated its value by the most. Second bid auctions mitigate that by making them pay only the second highest estimate.

If JohnWittle is the only bidder in the auction, then in a second-bid auction he would receive gwern's soul for free, but because this is an English auction, he has to pay his full bid, and so loses out for dramatically overestimating its market value- like gwern planned all along!

Comment author: badger 10 June 2013 01:49:38PM 1 point [-]

There's a lot of theoretical work showing that second-bid auctions are all-around more efficient.

I'm don't specialize in auctions, but this sounds wrong. A second-price auction and an English auction are strategically equivalent in most formal models. Nearly all auctions yield identical revenue and allocations when bidders are risk-neutral expected utility maximizers with independent values. Experimentally, the second-price auction tends to generate more revenue than an English auction, at least in the case of private values.

With common or correlated values (where the winner's curse shows up), I'd think sealed bid auctions would lead to more winner overbidding than English or Dutch auctions. In these cases though, you really don't have to worry about efficiency since everyone values the item equally.

Comment author: Vaniver 10 June 2013 09:01:12PM *  0 points [-]

I'm don't specialize in auctions, but this sounds wrong. A second-price auction and an English auction are strategically equivalent in most formal models.

I should have been clearer by 'all-around'; I meant that the incentives are lined up correctly, the costs are lower (every person only needs to submit one bid, and does not need to expend any effort monitoring the auction), gets exact results without requiring massive numbers of bids, and more information is conveyed by the end of the auction.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 10 June 2013 04:49:10PM 0 points [-]

If JohnWittle is the only bidder in the auction, then in a second-bid auction he would receive gwern's soul for free,

Well, yes, technically that's true... but what prevents/discourages gwern (or his accomplice) from submitting an $N-1 bid (where N is the current sole bid amount)?

Comment author: Vaniver 10 June 2013 08:40:22PM 3 points [-]

Typically, second-bid auctions are sealed, and all opened at once at the end of the auction, so it won't be known that JohnWittle has bid, or how much he has bid, until the auction is over.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 10 June 2013 09:06:49PM 0 points [-]

Ah. (nods) That makes sense.

Comment author: gwern 10 June 2013 05:20:07PM 0 points [-]

If I were going to do that, I would simply have set a reserve price.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 10 June 2013 06:49:57PM 0 points [-]

Not the same thing, surely? Submitting an N-1 bid causes the top bidder to pay effectively their bid... in effect turning a second-bid auction into an English auction as defined above. Setting a reserve price sets a floor that has no relationship to the top bidder's bid.

But sure, the fact that you didn't set a reserve price also suggests that you wouldn't take advantage of this loophole in your counterfactual second-bid auction.