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gwern comments on Open Thread, June 2-15, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion
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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:
17twxmShN3p6rsAyYC6UsERfhT5XFs9fUG(existing activity)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:
pickup lines & icebreakers; eg. Wittle to another person considering selling their soul:
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.
Just increased my subjective probability that John Wittle is Satan.
I am really disappointed in you, gwern. Why would you use an English auction when you can use an incentive-compatible one (a second price auction, for example)? You're making it needlessly harder for bidders to come up with valuations!
(But I guess maybe if you're just trying to drive up the price, this may be a good choice. Sneaky.)
Having read about auctions before, I am well-aware of the winner's curse and expect coordination to be hard on bidding for this unique item.
Bwa ha ha! Behold - the economics of the damned.
applause
Note that if you can get a high price from Satan on your own soul (e.g. rulership of a country), this is a no-lose arbitrage deal since souls are fungible goods.
Reference?
I tried to find that "all are equal in the eyes of God" verse, but apparently there isn't one. Curious.
Because they don't exist?
A tactic that almost definitely should be referred to as "Gabriel's Horn."
Not sure how much I can trust the word of a damned. After all, lying is no more of a mortal sin than apostasy. And for an atheist there is no extra divine punishment for lying.
Ah, but can we take your word for it? IIRC, you are one of my fellow damned...
I am not sure. I have never been baptized, so where my soul ends up depends on whether exclusivism, inclusivism, conditionalism or universalism is true.
I'm pretty sure that by Catholic dogma, you would count as definitely damned due to lack of baptism and knowing of the Church but refusing to convert to it.
Huh, reading this made me realize that there's apparently still a small bit of my brain that doesn't alieve in atheism. For a moment I considered whether I should try to get some profit out of selling my soul as well, and then felt uncomfortable over the idea, thinking "I should hold onto it, just in case..."
I actually really decided to do the auction when I thought about the topic and realized that it didn't bother me at all. Might as well profit from my lack of belief/alief.
One person who did this years ago spun the event into a book, a popular blog, and endless speaking gigs.
That's an interesting comparison, but I'm selling my soul, and it looks like he was just selling his time:
Oh right, I was misremembering what he did.
The quitclaim doesn't help here. It merely quits your claim, which is relevant if ownership is disputed, but it doesn't give any more rights to the buyer than to anyone else (just more documentation of the quit). You should have been suspicious when taterbizkit mentioned that you can sell quitclaim deeds for a single item to multiple buyers.
conversely, if Satan insists on my soul, I can let Satan have my soul and use yours instead.
Sorry to ruin the fun but I'm afraid this sale is impossible. Gwern lacks the proprietary rights to his own soul. As the apostle St Paul writes in his letter to the Corinthians (chapter 6), "Or know you not, that your members are the temple of the Holy Ghost, who is in you, whom you have from God; and you are not your own? For you are bought with a great price. Glorify and bear God in your body." It clearly states that "you are not your own" which at least applies to baptized Christians (and as a confirmed Catholic, it may even apply to a higher degree). Unless gwern provides some scriptural basis for this sale, it cannot proceed. Even when Satan tempted Christ, the only proferred exchange was worship in return for temporal power. There are no cases (even hypothetical ones) of a direct sale of one's soul in the Church's Tradition.
In exchange for ruining this sale, I'll pray for your soul for free.
That's because Satan knows there's no such thing as a soul, and he is disinclined to lie.
This seems inapplicable to me; I haven't agreed to sell my soul yet, and so far the bidding hasn't been too active so it will hardly be for 'a great price'.
I believe the "great price" is referring to God sacrificing Jesus to redeem the souls of all humanity, including (presumably) you.
But I'm hardly a biblical scholar; see below, lol.
Sure, but presumably I still have control over the disposition of my soul, otherwise that's basically a Calvinist theology, no?
I'd like to ruin gwern's sale too, but my misspent youth as a philosophy major just came back to haunt me.
[EDIT: This paragraph is completely wrong; see below. The end of 1 Corin 6:19 does not say "you are not your own"; it literally says "and [it] is not your own" (= καὶ οὐκ ἐστε ἑαυτῶν) with an omitted subject. The only real possibility is the subject of the previous phrase, which you rendered as "your members." (= τὸ σῶμα ὑμῶν) I find this problematic (and not "clearly stated"), because σῶμα means both the Church as a group (usually in the form, "the body of Christ") and the physical body, as it does in e.g. Mat 10:28: "Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell."]
Since in context 1 Corin 6:12-20 is about sexual immorality, I find the latter interpretation more compelling.
Regarding the Catholic tradition, time was when the Church claimed the authority to discharge sin from the soul in exchange for money.
You are wrong about this - here's the inflection of the word: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%B5%E1%BC%B0%CE%BC%CE%AF#Ancient_Greek
"ἐστε" is second person plural ("you are") NOT third person singular ("it is").
Oh, blast. My biblical Greek is obviously too old. Retracting paragraph.
What? This is lame. The definition of the soul as used by 16th century Catholic theology, which is friendly to information theory, is clearly the common sense interpretation and assumed among reasonable people. Sure some moderns love the definition you use but they are mostly believers of moralistic therapeutic deism, one hardly needs more evidence of their lack of theological expertise.
None of that seems true to me, although I'll admit I don't know what revolution happened in the 1500s in Catholic theology re souls.
You definitely should auction it off in other places, where prospective buyers value such things much higher.
What other forums might value my soul? As a purchase, it's really most useful for atheists willing to do a simple expected-value calculation and hedge against a tail risk (theism); but for most people, buying a soul is largely otiose.
Wait.... it seems you're suggesting that the expected value of a soul to an atheist exceeds the otiosity threshold. Did I read that right? I'm interested in your reasoning, if so.
Either way: the expected entertainment value to me of purchasing your soul far exceeds the expected value of the soul itself, and I suspect that's not uncommon, so I doubt the theological implications are a primary factor.
It depends on one's subjective uncertainty. I know there are atheists who have been persuaded by visions or Pascal's wager that they were wrong, so the risk would seem to be real, and given the stakes, $120 seems like chump change for insurance - even if you try to defeat a Pascal's wager by bounded utility, the bound would have to be extremely large to be plausible...
If atheists thinks that there's a small chance that they will turn into theists and be glad to be in possession of a spare soul, then they must think that theists value spare souls. So it would seem more valuable to theists, who don't have to multiply the value of the transaction by the small chance.
There are some differences between typical theists and the hypothetical atheist-turned-theist. In particular, the theist has had a lifetime to keep a clean soul. But many theists think they do a bad job. If the spare soul has tail risk value to an atheist, it should have more value to the bad theists. The other difference is that the atheist is not a believer at the time of the transaction. Perhaps the belief of the theist makes it a greater sin to trade in souls.
But it seems like a lot of details have to go right for it to be a better deal for the atheist than the theist.
Mm. Are you suggesting that the subjective uncertainty of a typical atheist on this question causes expected value to exceed the otiosity threshold? Or merely that there are some atheists for whom this is true? I'll agree with the latter.
Though, thinking about this, surely this would be much more likely for theists, no? So wouldn't the maximum expected value of your soul likely be higher, thereby securing you a higher sale price, in a theist community? (Preferably one with a sense of humor about theology.)
What if these are in fact the same thing, in extension if not intention? Then you would be selling your computational pattern, in contradiction with
I think that's unlikely enough that I'm willing to risk a tort of fraud if that turns out to be the case and I cannot convey my soul without also selling my personal copyright.
FYI, according to galactic law, transactions like this are valid only to the extent that the implicit metaphysics of the contract is correct. If you wish to guarantee the property rights of your soul's new owner, you should add a meta clause indicating valid interpretive generalizations of content and intent.
I'm afraid I can't afford a barrister admitted to the Trantor bar to look over the contractual details, but thanks for the advice.
Heh, I would have bid 0.5btc if I had known I would be the only bidder...
This makes this exchange all the more amusing.
I'm obviously missing something, but tally ho, I'll find out eventually!
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!
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.
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.
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)?
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.
Ah. (nods) That makes sense.
If I were going to do that, I would simply have set a reserve price.
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.
Hindus and some other groups may disagree with that. ;)
If you can find evidence that they are correct, you could have a fraud claim. However, the contract defines the soul being sold as that described by the Judeo-Christian philosophers.
What do you intend to do with your soul(s) as defined by other schools of philosophy?
By Plato's theory of Ideal Forms, selling your soul would be tantamount to selling bits of the gods - and man has no claim to the gods. I'd advise against this lest you wish to become fate-brothers with Prometheus.
What? Citation needed.
Phaedo 80b.
Ah, Socrates supposes there that the soul is "like the divine" as opposed to the body which is like mortal things. He means that the soul is in the class of things that are unchanging, immutable, invisible, and grasped by the intellect rather than the senses, He doesn't say anything about the soul being a 'part of the gods'. And it doesn't sound like he's thinking of anything like the Prometheus myth, given the things he associates with the soul (ideal, invisible, immutable, etc.).
If you asked Plato about selling your soul, I think he would think you were just being silly.
If something was divine, then it was under the domain of the gods; I was making a simple extrapolation.
Yeah, but that's not a sound inference, given the context. No mention is made there of the gods, and the context pulls wide away from reading 'divine' in terms of traditional Greek mythology. I see no reason to think Socrates (or Plato) thinks any of that stuff was real.
Are you accepting bids in things other than currencies commonly used for exchange? I would like to offer a finely crafted narrative instead of bitcoins.
Hm, is your narrative so compelling that I would accept jam tomorrow instead of bitcoin today?
Upvoted for the multilayered pun
I offer no guarantees regarding the quality, completeness, or any other details of said narrative (save that it will be a narrative, delivered within 90 days of acceptance of terms, with payment in full due immediately on receipt), although I will accept your input, if you want me to, on length, theme, setting, genre and/or other details.
As for the relative value of narratives and btc, I can say only that I have not written for any commonly recognized currency.
Accepting this offer would subject you to a considerable amount of downside risk, as well as a considerable amount of upside risk. However, people who auction their soul are not typically averse to these types of risk.
Mm, I'm afraid that due to the hyperinflation over the past few decades of narrative and subsequent debasement (>3.2m on FanFiction.net alone), I can't accept any amount of it without guarantees of its quality. Nothing personal - it's the law.
What would you accept as sufficient evidence of quality?
A Hugo Award, I presume. </snark>
Or a Nebula, Locus, or World Fantasy Award. I'd also accept a Nobel or Man Booker (for magical realism).
Which one do you want? I can have a crack team of ninja liberate it from the current owner and deliver it to you, but that will cost significantly more than your soul.
Well then, I'm afraid we would be unable to reach a mutually beneficial agreement - I would be better off retaining my soul under such a sale.
I flashed back to Bill Wilingham's Proposition Player. Highly recommended for an amusing fantasy take on this particular deal.
I laughed out loud when I read this. I'm not incredibly surprised someone would bid, but at the same time, disappointed.