shminux comments on The Apocalypse Bet - Less Wrong

25 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 09 August 2007 05:23PM

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Comment author: shminux 23 September 2012 09:42:49PM 0 points [-]

what should you do if you have no clue whatsoever what will happen?

Comment author: gwern 23 September 2012 10:20:00PM *  2 points [-]

My best thought is a Pascalian thought about what the quasi-dominant option is:

  1. if the singleton Singularity happens, then your investment is just wasted and your loss is bounded at whatever that money could have bought you pre-Singularity;
  2. if the Hanson Singularity happens, your gains are potentially huge over the long-term (assuming property rights are respected...);
  3. if no Singularity at all happens, then your early all-equity investments (for a young person) was a good-to-great way to save for retirement (or a post-death bequest or expense, like cryonics) and you gain a lot.

So in 2 out of the 3 outcomes, you are much better off investing heavily in equities, and in the first you are not that badly off.

Comment author: Desrtopa 23 September 2012 10:23:13PM 1 point [-]

I think judging on the basis of those three possibilities is a premature narrowing of the hypothesis space.

Comment author: gwern 23 September 2012 10:26:54PM 1 point [-]

One has to start somewhere. And the possibility-space isn't that large: the investments will be valuable or not, some sort of Singularity will happen or not, etc.

Comment author: johnsonmx 24 September 2012 02:26:20AM 2 points [-]

I would suggest that a breakdown in social order (without a singularity occurring) is another scenario that might be roughly as probable as the others you mentioned. In such case, it would seem the manner by which you invest in equities would matter. I.e.., the value of most abstract investments may vanish, and the value of equities held in trust by various institutions (or counterparties) may also vanish.

Comment author: gwern 24 September 2012 02:42:33AM 1 point [-]

Which falls in the 'not valuable'/'not Singularity' cell of the 2x2 table.

Comment author: shminux 23 September 2012 10:27:53PM 0 points [-]

So one should carry on disregarding the possibility of God existing... err... Singularity happening?

Comment author: gwern 23 September 2012 10:40:41PM 0 points [-]

Dunno. What do you think of the thumbnail analysis?

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