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Vaniver comments on Saving for the long term - Less Wrong Discussion
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I'm putting perhaps 7% of my income into long-term retirement savings, and significantly more than that into generic investments. This is mostly to take full advantage of various subsidies offered to me to incentivize retirement savings, but if there weren't a sharp cutoff to use as an anchor I'm not sure what exact value I'd settle on. (I haven't run the numbers, but it looks like the tax ramifications of investing in a retirement account and then pulling the money out early are bothersome enough to not make it a good idea unless you're subsidized in some fashion or have a very high probability you won't want to pull the money out until you're old enough.)
It seems to me like hedging arguments should be most convincing. That is, in the case where there's an egalitarian singularity, it doesn't matter how much wealth you have saved, but in the case where there's an inegalitarian singularity, it matters a lot how much wealth you have saved. So it makes more sense to structure your savings in light of an inegalitarian singularity / you burn out early or have some medical issue / tech growth plateaus or slows.
Thank you for the data point.
Would you mind commenting a bit more on what you think the likelihoods of the various possibilities are? In particular, what do you think the likelihood of !1 && !2 && !3 is? Because that's what I'd be saving for if I put money in a 401k or something where I can't take it out until I'm 59. (The opportunity cost to me saving for retirement is spending more time working on startups and increasing my knowledge.)
You're welcome!
I don't feel like I have any special knowledge, and don't want to put where my gut points now down in writing.
My hedging point is that I don't think that number is very relevant, though: it seems like you should condition on no x-risks and not being in the !1 && !2 && !3 state, because both of those states are ones where the actions you take now don't meaningfully impact your position, relative to their impact in the other alternative.
But there are strong counterarguments to that: you might think that you can nudge the x-risk number, or that it matters to you how soon a positive singularity happens, or so on.
Most retirement funds allow you to pull it out early with a minor penalty--I think it's 10%? If you have access to matching funds, I think you could put money into a retirement fund, get the match, and then pull it out and be ahead. You would have to look at the particulars of your match and fund, though.