Brain Preservation Foundation President Kenneth Hayworth just wrote a synopsis of the recent ongoings from the major two competitors for the BPF prizes. Here is the summary: 

Brain Preservation Prize competitor Shawn Mikula just published his whole mouse brain electron microscopy protocol in Nature Methods (paper, BPF interview), putting him close to winning the mouse phase of our prize.

Brain Preservation Prize competitor 21st Century Medicine has developed a new “Aldehyde-Stabilized Cryopreservation” technique–preliminary results show good ultrastructure preservation even after storage of a whole rabbit brain at -135 degrees C.

This work was funded in part from donations from LW users. In particular, a grant to support the work of LW user Robert McIntyre at 21st Century Medicine that the BPF was able to provide has been instrumental. 

In order to continue this type of research and to bolster it, BPF welcomes your support in a variety of different ways, including awareness-raising, donations, and volunteering. Please reach out if you would like to volunteer, or you can PM me and I will help put you in touch. And if you have any suggestions for the BPF, please feel free to discuss them in the comments below. 

I'm in Lagos, Nigeria till the end of May and I'd like to hold a LessWrong/EA meetup while I'm here. If you'll ever be in the country in the future (or in the subcontinent), please get in touch so we can coordinate a meetup. I'd also appreciate being put in contact with any Nigerians who may not regularly read this list.

My e-mail address is oge@nnadi.org. I hope to hear from you.

Transcribed from maxikov's posted videos.

Verbal filler removed for clarity.

Audience Laughter denoted with [L], Applause with [A]

Eliezer: So, any questions? Do we have a microphone for the audience?


Guy Offscreen: We don't have a microphone for the audience, have we?


Some Other Guy: We have this furry thing, wait, no that's not hooked up. Never mind.


Eliezer: Alright, come on over to the microphone.


Guy with 'Berkeley Lab' shirt: So, this question is sort of on behalf of the HPMOR subreddit. You say you don't give red herrings, but like... He's making faces at me like... [L] You say you don't give red herrings, but while he's sitting during in the Quidditch game thinking of who he can bring along, he stares at Cedric Diggory, and he's like, "He would be useful to have at my side!", and then he never shows up. Why was there not a Cedric Diggory?


Eliezer: The true Cedrics Diggory are inside all of our hearts. [L] And in the mirror. [L] And in Harry's glasses. [L] And, well, I mean the notion is, you're going to look at that and think, "Hey, he's going to bring along Cedric Diggory as a spare wand, and he's gonna die! Right?" And then, Lestath Lestrange shows up and it's supposed to be humorous, or something. I guess I can't do humor. [L]


Guy Dressed as a Witch: Does Quirrell's attitude towards reckless muggle scientists have anything to do with your attitude towards AI researchers that aren't you? [L]


Eliezer: That is unfair. There are at least a dozen safety conscious AI researchers on the face of the earth. [L] At least one of them is respected. [L] With that said, I mean if you have a version of Voldemort who is smart and seems to be going around killing muggleborns, and sort of pretty generally down on muggles... Like, why would anyone go around killing muggleborns? I mean, there's more than one rationalization you could apply to this situation, but the sort of obvious one is that you disapprove of their conduct with nuclear weapons. From Tom Riddle's perspective that is.

I do think I sort of try to never have leakage from that thing I spend all day talking about into a place it really didn't belong, and there's a saying that goes 'A fanatic is someone who cannot change his mind, and will not change the subject.' And I'm like ok, so if I'm not going to change my mind, I'll at least endeavor to be able to change the subject. [L] Like, towards the very end of the story we are getting into the realm where sort of the convergent attitude that any sort of carefully reasoning person will take towards global catastrophic risks, and the realization that you are in fact a complete crap rationalist, and you're going to have to start over and actually try this time. These things are sort of reflective of the story outside the story, but apart from 'there is only one king upon a chessboard', and 'I need to raise the level of my game or fail', and perhaps, one little thing that was said about the mirror of VEC, as some people called it.

Aside from those things I would say that I was treating it more as convergent evolution rather than any sort of attempted parable or Professor Quirrell speaking form me. He usually doesn't... [L] I wish more people would realize that... [L] I mean, you know the... How can I put this exactly. There are these people who are sort of to the right side of the political spectrum and occasionally they tell me that they wish I'd just let Professor Quirrell take over my brain and run my body. And they are literally Republicans for You Know Who. And there you have it basically. Next Question! ... No more questions, ok. [L] I see that no one has any questions left; Oh, there you are.


Fidgety Guy: One of the chapters you posted was the final exam chapter where you had everybody brainstorm solutions to the predicament that Harry was in. Did you have any favorite alternate solution besides the one that made it into the book.


Eliezer: So, not to give away the intended solution for anyone who hasn't reached that chapter yet, though really you're just going to have the living daylight spoiled out of you, there's no way to avoid that really. So, the most brilliant solution I had not thought of at all, was for Harry to precommit to transfigure something that would cause a large explosion visible from the Quidditch stands which had observed no such explosion, thereby unless help sent via Time-Turner showed up at that point, thereby insuring that the simplest timeline was not the one where he never reached the Time-Turner. And assuring that some self-consistent set of events would occur which caused him not to carry through on his precommitment. I, you know, I suspect that I might have ruled that that wouldn't work because of the Unbreakable Vow preventing Harry from actually doing that because it might, in effect, count as trying to destroy that timeline, or filter it, and thereby have that count as trying to destroy the world, or just risk destroying it, or something along those lines, but it was brilliant! [L] I was staring at the computer screen going, "I can't believe how brilliant these people are!" "That's not something I usually hear you say," Brienne said. "I'm not usually watching hundreds of peoples' collective intelligence coming up with solutions way better than anything I thought of!" I replied to her.

And the sort of most fun lateral thinking solution was to call 'Up!' to, or pull Quirinus Quirrell's body over using transfigured carbon nanotubes and some padding, and call 'Up!' and ride away on his broomstick bones. [L] That is definitely going in 'Omake files #5: Collective Intelligence'! Next question!


Guy Wearing Black: So in the chapter with the mirror, there was a point at which Dumbledore had said something like, "I am on this side of the mirror and I always have been." That was never explained that I could tell. I'm wondering if you could clarify that.


Eliezer: It is a reference to the fanfic 'Seventh Horcrux' that *totally* ripped off HPMOR despite being written slightly earlier than it... [L] I was slapping my forehead pretty hard when that happened. Which contains the line "Perhaps Albus Dumbledore really was inside the mirror all along." Sort of arc words as it were. And I also figured that there was simply some by-location effect using one of the advanced settings of the mirror that Dumbledore was using so that the trap would always be springable as opposed to him having to know at what time Tom Riddle would appear before the mirror and be trapped. Next!


Black Guy: So, how did Moody and the rest of them retrieve the items Dumbledore threw in the mirror of VEC?


Eliezer: Dumbledore threw them outside the mirrors range, thereby causing those not to be sealed in the corresponding real world when the duplicate mode of Dumbledore inside the mirror was sealed. So wherever Dumbledore was at the time, probably investigating Nicolas Flamel's house, he suddenly popped away and the line of Merlin Unbroken and the Elder Wand just fell to the floor from where he was.


Asian Guy: In the 'Something to Protect: Severus Snape', you wrote that he laughed. And I was really curious, what exactly does Severus Snape sound like when he laughs. [L]


Person in Audience: Perform for us!


Eliezer: He He He. [L]


Girl in Audience: Do it again now, everybody together!


Audience: He He He. [L]


Guy in Blue Shirt: So I was curious about the motivation between making Sirius re-evil again and having Peter be a good guy again, their relationship. What was the motivation?


Eliezer: In character or out character?


Guy in Blue Shirt: Well, yes. [L]


Eliezer: All right, well, in character Peter can be pretty attractive when he wants to be, and Sirius was a teenager. Or, you were asking about the alignment shift part?


Guy in Blue Shirt: Yeah, the alignment and their relationship.


Eliezer: So, in the alignment, I'm just ruling it always was that way. The whole Sirius Black thing is a puzzle, is the way I'm looking at it. And the canon solution to that puzzle is perfectly fine for a children's book, which I say once again requires a higher level of skill than a grown-up book, but just did not make sense in context. So I was just looking at the puzzle and being like, ok, so what can be the actual solution to this puzzle? And also, a further important factor, this had to happen. There's a whole lot of fanfictions out there of Harry Potter. More than half a million, and that was years ago. And 'Methods of Rationality' is fundamentally set in the universe of Harry Potter fanfiction, more than canon. And in many many of these fanfictions someone goes back in time to redo the seven years, and they know that Scabbers is secretly Peter Pettigrew, and there's a scene where they stun Scabbers the rat and take him over to Dumbledore, and Head Auror, and the Minister of Magic and get them to check out this rat over here, and uncover Peter Pettigrew. And in all the times I had read that scene, at least a dozen times literally, it was never once played out the way it would in real life, where that is just a rat, and you're crazy. [L] And that was the sort of basic seed of, "Ok, we're going to play this straight, the sort of loonier conspiracies are false, but there is still a grain of conspiracy truth to it." And then I introduced the whole accounting of what happened with Sirius Black in the same chapter where Hermione just happens to mention that there's a Metamorphmagus in Hufflepuff, and exactly one person posted to the reviews in chapter 28, based on the clue that the Metamorphmagus had been mentioned in the same chapter, "Aha! I present you the tale of Peter Pettigrew, the unfortunate Metamorphmagus." [L] See! You could've solved it, you could've solved it, but you didn't! Someone solved it, you did not solve that. Next Question!


Guy in White: First, [pulls out wand] Avada Kedavra. How do you feel about your security? [L] Second, have you considered the next time you need a large group of very smart people to really work on a hard problem, presenting it to them in fiction?


Eliezer: So, of course I always keep my Patronus Charm going inside of me. [Aww/L] And if that fails, I do have my amulet that triggers my emergency kitten shield. [L] And indeed one of the higher, more attractive things I'm considering to potentially do for the next major project is 'Precisely Bound Djinn and their Behavior'. The theme of which is you have these people who can summon djinn, or command the djinn effect, and you can sort of negotiate with them in the language of djinn and they will always interpret your wish in the worst way possible, or you can give them mathematically precise orders; Which they can apparently carry out using unlimited computing power, which obviously ends the world in fairly short order, causing our protagonist to be caught in a groundhog day loop as they try over and over again to both maybe arrange for conditions outside to be such that they can get some research done for longer than a few months before the world ends again, and also try to figure out what to tell their djinn. And, you know, I figure that if anyone can give me an unboundedly computable specification of a value aligned advanced agent, the story ends, the characters win, hopefully that person gets a large monetary prize if I can swing it, the world is safer, and I can go onto my next fiction writing project, which will be the one with the boundedly specified [L] value aligned advanced agents. [A]


Guy with Purple Tie: So, what is the source of magic?


Eliezer: Alright, so, there was a bit of literary miscommunication in HPMOR. I tried as hard as I could to signal that unraveling the true nature of magic and everything that adheres in it is actually this kind of this large project that they were not going to complete during Harry's first year of Hogwarts. [L] You know, 35 years, even if someone is helping you is a reasonable amount of time for a project like that to take. And if it's something really difficult, like AIs, you might need more that two people even. [L] At least if you want the value aligned version. Anyway, where was I?

So the only way I think that fundamentally to come up with a non-nitwit explanation of magic, you need to get started from the non-nitwit explanation, and then generate the laws of magic, so that when you reveal the answer behind the mystery, everything actually fits with it. You may have noticed this kind of philosophy showing up elsewhere in the literary theory of HPMOR at various points where it turns out that things fit with things you have already seen. But with magic, ultimately the source material was not designed as a hard science fiction story. The magic that we start with as a phenomenon is not designed to be solvable, and what did happen was that the characters thought of experiments, and I in my role of the universe thought of the answer to it, and if they had ever reached the point where there was only one explanation left, then the magic would have had rules, and they would have been arrived at in a fairly organic way that I could have felt good about; Not as a sudden, "Aha! I gotcha! I revealed this thing that you had no way of guessing."

Now I could speculate. And I even tried to write a little section where Harry runs into Dumbledore's writings that Dumbledore left behind, where Dumbledore writes some of his own speculation, but there was no good place to put that into the final chapter. But maybe I'll later be able... The final edits were kind of rushed honestly, sleep deprivation, 3am. But maybe in the second edit or something I'll be able to put that paragraph, that set of paragraphs in there. In Dumbledore's office, Dumbledore has speculated. He's mostly just taking the best of some of the other writers that he's read. That, look at the size of the universe, that seems to be mundane. Dumbledore was around during World War 2, he does know that muggles have telescopes. He has talked with muggle scientists a bit and those muggle scientists seem very confident that all the universe they can see looks like it's mundane. And Dumbledore wondered, why is there this sort of small magical section, and this much larger mundane section, or this much larger muggle section? And that seemed to Dumbledore to suggest that as a certain other magical philosopher had written, If you consider the question, what is the underlying nature of reality, is it that it was mundane to begin with, and then magic arises from mundanity, or is the universe magic to begin with, and then mundanity has been imposed above it? Now mundanity by itself will clearly never give rise to magic, yet magic permits mundanity to be imposed, and so, this other magical philosopher wrote, therefore he thinks that the universe is magical to begin with and the mundane sections are imposed above the magic. And Dumbledore himself had speculated, having been antiquated with the line of Merlin for much of his life, that just as the Interdict of Merlin was imposed to restrict the spread an the number of people who had sufficiently powerful magic, perhaps the mundane world itself, is an attempt to bring order to something that was on the verge of falling apart in Atlantis, or in whatever came before Atlantis. Perhaps the thing that happened with the Interdict of Merlin has happened over and over again. People trying to impose law upon reality, and that law having flaws, and the flaws being more and more exploited until they reach a point of power that recons to destroy the world, and the most adapt wielders of that power try to once again impose mundanity.

And I will also observe, although Dumbledore had no way of figuring this out, and I think Harry might not have figured it out yet because he dosen't yet know about chromosomal crossover, That if there is no wizard gene, but rather a muggle gene, and the muggle gene sometimes gets hit by cosmic rays and ceases to function thereby producing a non-muggle allele, then some of the muggle vs. wizard alleles in the wizard population that got there from muggleborns will be repairable via chromosomal crossover, thus sometimes causing two wizards to give birth to a squib. Furthermore this will happen more frequently in wizards who have recent muggleborn ancestry. I wonder if Lucius told Draco that when Draco told him about Harry's theory of genetics. Anyway, this concludes my strictly personal speculations. It's not in the text, so it's not real unless it's in the text somewhere. 'Opinion of God', Not 'Word of God'. But this concludes my personal speculations on the origin of magic, and the nature of the "wizard gene". [A]

Cross-posted on my blog here. Partially inspired by some slatestarcodex discussion here.

Summary: Human Capital Contracts would allow people sell a certain % of their future income in return for upfront cash, as opposed to taking out a loan. This would be less risky for them, would give them valuable information about different college majors, and would help give people de facto ‘mentors’, among other advantages. Adverse selection could reduce the benefits, and reducing inter-state competition poses a major possible disadvantage. We also discuss two niche applications: parents and divorce.

Readers with an economics background might like to jump to the sections on 'Education' and 'Mentors - Incentive Alignment'

Debt vs equity financing

There are two methods of financing for companies; debt and equity.

Debt is fundamentally very simple. I give the company $100 now; it promises to give me $105 in a year’s time. They owe me a fixed amount in return. Hopefully in the meantime the company has invested that $100 in a project or piece of equipment that produces more than $105; if so they made a profit on the transaction as a whole. Here the risk is borne by the company; they have no choice but to pay me back, even if they didn’t make a profit this year. This form of financing is familiar to most people, as they personally use savings accounts, credit cards, mortgages, auto loans and so on.

Equity, unlike debt, does not represent a fixed level of obligation. Instead the company owes you a certain fraction of future profits. If you give a company $100 in return for a 10% share, and they made a $50 profit, your share of the profit is $5. Hopefully they will make growing profits for many years, in which case your portion will grow to $6, to $7, and so on. Here the risk is borne by you; if they don’t make a profit, you get nothing. This form of financing is much less familiar to most people; about the only experience they are likely to have would be investing in the stock market, but that is now highly abstract so the underlying mechanics are obscured.

Equity: Less Risky than Debt

One of the biggest advantages of this system is it moves the risk from the individual borrower to the investor. When you borrow money, you put yourself at substantial risk. What if you struggle to find a good job after college? You’re still obliged to make repayments, which could be very difficult if you only have to accept a very low-paying job. Or if you borrow money after college, what if you lose your job? Or have a family emergency? Your circumstances have deteriorated, but you’re still obliged to make the same level of payments – meaning your post-debt income falls by even more than your pre-debt income.

With equity, on the other hand, you don’t have the risk. If you don’t find a job after college, your income will be zero, so your repayments will be X% of 0 – namely 0. If you find a low-paying job, your repayments will be low. The investors will be made whole by the people who instead find high-paying jobs – who can also afford to repay more. So equity investments better match up your repayment obligations with your ability to repay.

Here is an chart showing the difference, in terms of the % of income you’d be spending on repayment, from an example worked out later in the article:

The risk is transferred to the investor, who now loses out if you don’t have much income. But they are in a much better position to deal with the risk – they can diversify, investing in many different people, and also in other asset classes. Some human capital contracts could be a good diversifying addition to a conventional portfolio of stocks and bonds.

Education

Funding higher education is perhaps the best application for Human Capital Contracts.

Firstly, this is an extremely risky investment. There are countless stories of people who took out huge student loans to fund an arts degree and then have their lives dominated by the struggle to repay. Alternatively, if people could discharge education debts through bankruptcy, the risk to the lender would be too great, as the borrowers typically lack collateral, so loans would be available only at prohibitively high interest rates, if at all. Selling equity shares would avoid this problem; people who did badly after school would only have to repay a minimal amount, but lenders could afford to offer relatively generous terms because the average would be pulled up by the occasional very successful student.

The other appeal is the information such a market would provide students. It is fair to say that many students don’t really understand the long-term consequences of their choices. The information available on the future paths opened up by different majors is poor quality – at best, it tells you how well people who studied that major years ago have done, but the labor market has probably changed substantially over time. What students really want is forecasts of future returns to different colleges and majors, but this is very difficult! And many people are not even aware of the backwards-looking data. The situation isn’t improved by professors, who generally lack experience outside academia, and sometimes simply lie! I remember being told by a philosophy professor that philosophers were highly in demand due to the “transferable thinking skills” – despite the total lack of evidence for such an effect. Human Capital Contracts would largely solve this problem.

TIPs markets provide a forecast of future inflation. Population-linked bonds would provide similar forecasts of future population growth. Similarly, Human Capital Contracts could provide forecasts of the future returns to future degrees. Lenders would expect higher returns to some colleges and majors (Stanford Computer Science vs No-Name Communications Studies), and so would be willing to accept lower income shares for people who chose those majors. As such, being offered financing for a small percentage would indicate that the market expected this to be a profitable degree. Being offered financing only for a large percentage would be a sign that the degree would not be very profitable. Some people would still want to do it for love rather than money, but many would not – saving them from spending four years and a lot of money on a decision they’d subsequently regret.

What could make clearer the difference in expected outcomes than being offered the choice between Engineering for 1% or Fine Art for 3%?

Certainly I think I would have benefited from having this information available. Most people probably know that Computer Science pays better than English Literature, but that’s probably not a pair many people are choosing from. I was considering between Physics, Math, Economics or History for my major. I knew that History would probably pay less, but didn’t have a strong view on the relative earnings of the others. I probably would have guessed that math beat physics, for example, but in retrospect I think physics probably actually beats math.

Astute readers might object here that I am conflating the benefits of the type of financing (debt vs equity) with the mechanism for pricing the financing (free market or price fixed). If there was a free market in debt financing, lenders could charge different interest rates, and these would provide information to the students. This is true, except that 1) the interest rate would only tell you about the risk you’d end up super-poor, rather than providing information about the full distribution of outcomes, and 2) as student loans cannot be discharged through bankruptcy, there’s not really much reason for lenders to differentiate between candidates. If student loans could be discharged through bankruptcy, the interest rates charged would be informative but also probably very high. Perhaps this would be a good thing!

Education Funding – some illustrative examples.

Because it can be hard to think about these things in the abstract, I’ve tried to produce some worked-out examples. Suppose someone borrows $100,000, and then starts out earning $50,000 when they graduate. Their income grows over time, as they gain experience (maturity) and the economy grows (NGDP/capita). If we assume a 6% return for investors and a 20 year duration, they would have to give up just over 5% of their income of this time period. The repayments would be much more manageable – in year one, it would represent just 5% of their income, as opposed to 17% if they used debt.

(click for larger image)

Now, investors might demand a higher rate of return for equity investments, as they’re riskier than debt ( but then again maybe not . Here’s the same calculations, but assuming equity investors require a 10% return vs 6% on debt:

What happens if the student runs into financial difficulty later in life? Here’s what happens if their income falls by 50% and never really recovers:

with equity, the hit is affordable, but with debt they have to pay 20% of their income in debt repayments – perhaps at the same time as having medical problems.

And what about the information value? Well, the investors would be willing to offer them $100,000 for just a 5.6% share, instead of 7.85%, if they took a major that would offer a $70,000 starting salary instead.

Mentors – Incentive Alignment

The modern world is very complicated, and we can’t expect people to understand all of it. Which is fine, except when it comes to understanding contracts, or credit cards, or multi-level-marketing schemes. At times the complexity of the modern world allows people to be taken advantage of, even in transactions which would be perfectly legitimate had the participants been better informed.

Equity investments have the potential to help a lot here. All of a sudden I have a third party who is genuinely concerned with maximizing my income. I could ask them for advise about looking for a job. Perhaps they could negotiate a raise for me. Indeed, they might even line up new jobs for me! Obviously their incentives are not totally aligned with me. Except insomuch-as happy workers are more productive, they might not put much weight on how pleasant the job is. But true incentive alignment is rare in general; even your parents or your spouse’s incentives aren’t perfectly aligned, and the government’s certainly aren’t. Even better, it’s very clear exactly how and to what degree my inventor’s incentives are aligned with mine: I don’t need to try and work out their angle. I can trust them on monetary affairs, and ignore their advice (if they offered any) with regards hobbies or friendships or whatever else.

Indeed, you could imagine schools that funded themselves entirely through equity investments in their students, and advertised this as a strength: their incentives are well aligned with their students. They would teach only the most useful skills, as efficiently as possible, and actively support your future career progression. This is basically the model App Academy uses:

App Academy is as low-risk as we can make it.

App Academy does not charge any tuition. Instead, you pay us a placement fee only if you find a job as a developer after the program. In that case, the fee is 18% of your first year salary, payable over the first 6 months after you start working.

source

Compare this to current universities, which actively push minority students out of STEM majors to maintain graduation rates.

Progressive

A clear implication of equity financing is that people who go on to earn more for ex ante unpredictable reasons will pay more than those who are ex post unlucky. As such, this system is mildly redistributive in a manner many people find attractive – like a sort of idealized social insurance that Luck Egalitarians like talking about. The lucky rich pay more and the unlucky poor pay less. Even better, it manages to do so in a voluntary way.

Taxation

The idea of human capital contracts may sound very strange. But we actually already have something similar in taxation. Governments invest in the education, health etc. of their citizens, and then levy taxes upon them. These taxes tend to be proportional to one’s ability to pay; they are some fraction of income, or expenditures (sales taxes). So Human Capital Contracts should feel familiar to socialists and the like.

There are of course a few differences between Human Capital Contracts and taxation. For example,

• Human Capital Contracts are optional, whereas taxation is mandatory.
• Human Capital Contracts give you more choice about what you spend the money on, whereas governments typically give you little choice.
• Finally, Human Capital Contracts are customizable; you could negotiate different terms with the lender (like the % share you’re selling, or the income level at which you start repaying, or the timing of repayments), whereas individuals rarely get much choice about the taxes they will be made to pay.

Indeed, the advantages of human capital contracts suggest a new way of doing taxation: the state could simply claim a certain % ownership of its citizens. Perhaps it might demand a higher % for those who use public education or public healthcare.

The idea of the state literally owning (a stake in) its citizens, without their consent, might sound evil. But this is basically what the government already does with taxation – it claims a certain fraction of your income, leaving you no recourse. Even renouncing your citizenship will not persuade the IRS to let its property go. Human Capital Contracts just make it more explicit that the governments of most countries effectively own somewhere between 30% – 60% of their populations. Worse, if they want to they can increase their ownership stake without the consent of those affected. Compared to this, it is hard to make voluntary Human Capital Contracts sound problematic.

However, this suggests a danger with equity investments in people. At the moment you can escape most governments by fleeing abroad. The couple of exceptions are largely viewed as immoral aberrations, not the rightful state of affairs. This exit-right provides a vital check on their power, and forces them to compete to some degree. Without it they can descend to the most abusive tyranny. If equity investments became widely recognized, however, governments might start to recognize each other’s ownership of its population to a greater degree than now, which would make them harder to escape. Of course, virtually any innovation can be opposed by pointing out they make it easier for governments to oppress ‘their’ populace, from coinage to maps to cell phones. Perhaps a more powerful government would be a more benign one, as many different people have argued – though perhaps not.

Mechanics

Operationally this would be slightly more complicated than taking out a standard loan, because the amount owed to the lender would be variable. As such, they need to verify my income so they can check I’m repaying the correct amount. There are many ways this could be done, but an obvious one would be through the tax system; I would submit to the lender a copy of my tax return to show my annual income. Perhaps this could be automated through TurboTax. An even easier option would be if the payments were deducted from my paychecks – this is how English student loans work.

Possible Regulations

One option for regulating the system would be to impose a maximum amount of equity an individual could sell. This would prevent people from selling 100% of themselves, which might be a bad idea! Though for-profit investors would probably be uninterested in buying up to 100%, as the individual would lack any reason to actually work. Probably the only people interested in buying 100% ownership would be cults, communist co-ops and terrorist movements.

Another would be to regulate the contingencies that could be attached to such contracts.

A third would be to prohibit the investor from employing the investee, or vice versa.

Adverse Selection

One of the biggest impediments to such a system might be adverse selection. Students have ‘insider information’ about their future prospects – they know about their career plans. The less you expect to earn, the more attractive selling equity is over the fixed payments of debt. Conversely, the more you expect to earn, the less attractive equity is vs debt. As such, the students who opted for equity financing might be disproportionately the students with the lowest expected outcomes. This would increase the % investors would demand in return for funding, further deterring the higher-expectation students, until eventually only the very lowest-expectation students would remain in the pool.

We could imagine this being a big issue in some subjects, like physics, where there is a large variance in income for the different exit routes – grad school vs industry vs quant finance. For others it’s less of an issue; if you go to law school you’re probably aiming to become a lawyer, though even there you might choose between criminal or corporate law.

However, there are several factors which would mitigate against such an outcome. Firstly, the risk aversion we discussed earlier means students would probably be willing to pay a substantial amount to avoid the risk associated with debt. Adverse selection would mean it would be even more attractive to students pessimistic about their long-term earnings, but so long as it is attractive enough for the optimistic ones, it would still work.

Indeed, this is basically how it works for health insurance. In theory adverse selection is a problem for private health insurance; but in practice there is not much evidence this is actually a problem; healthy people still buy health insurance.

The effect would also be substantially reduced by students own lack of knowledge about their futures. Many students change their mind over the course of their studies about what they want to go on to do. So some low-expectation students might take out equity financing, thinking they were being cunning… and then change to a high paying career track! This seems to be the more common direction of travel in general; students go to college planning on becoming human rights lawyers, or engineers, or artists, but instead end up as corporate lawyers, investment bankers and advertisers.

So this is a problem I’d expect the bond/equity/insurance market to be more than capable of dealing with.

Addendum: Speculative Extensions

Here are some more ideas where equity investments in people could be useful. The idea could still be valuable even without these though; education is probably the best use-case.

Parents

Once upon a time the land was rich and fruitful, and the people were fecund with beautiful offspring.

… maybe that never happened, but fertility rates definitely have fallen over time, probably to our detriment. Future people matter, a lot! And even if they didn’t, we still need someone to fund social security.

One guess as to why fertility has dropped is once upon a time your children could be relied upon to live near you, following your customs, and supporting you in your old age, though its unclear if this ever made strictly economic sense. Now, however, children feel much less moved by filial piety, and frequently move far away. As such, parents seem much less value in having children, and only do so out of charity – raising a child takes a lot of effort, and the modern world is full of super-stimuli to distract you from productive procreation. Giving parents a small equity stake in their children would go some way towards recognizing the investment parents put into their children, and hopefully boost fertility rates.

It would also encourage parents to support their children and their careers; now the high-flying child is not merely a source of pride but also a source of retirement. A friend I discussed this with suggested that first-generation immigrants tended to give their children very practical advice about school, careers and relationships, whereas whites tend to be more wishy-washy; perhaps this would promote a return to reality-based parenting.

Divorce settlement

Another niche case where these could be useful would be divorce settlements. The classic feminist argument about divorce settlements was that the woman had invested in domestic and family labor, which was disrupted by the divorce, while the man had invested in his career, which he kept. Partly as a result of arguments like this, we now see divorce settlements where one party gets a claim to some of the resources of the other.

However, a fixed sum is not a very natural way of dealing with this. The woman, in entering marriage, assumed she would be benefiting from a certain share of the man’s output. If he were successful, this would be more; if he came upon poor fortune, this would be less – rather than taking a costly and messy court case to adjust the payments.  Human Capital Contracts would allow a divorce settlement to recognize this: in a divorce were the man were at fault, the woman might be granted a 1% equity share for each year of marriage.

Obviously if you thought permitting divorce was a mistake – “til death do us part” – then you’d have little interest in this application.

Further Reading

Further Reading: Risk-Based Student Loans

Cross-posted on my blog here. Partially inspired by some slatestarcodex discussion here.

The Sequences are being released as an eBook, titled Rationality: From AI to Zombies, on March 12.

We went with the name "Rationality: From AI to Zombies" (based on shminux's suggestion) to make it clearer to people — who might otherwise be expecting a self-help book, or an academic text — that the style and contents of the Sequences are rather unusual. We want to filter for readers who have a wide-ranging interest in (/ tolerance for) weird intellectual topics. Alternative options tended to obscure what the book is about, or obscure its breadth / eclecticism.

The book's contents

Around 340 of Eliezer's essays from 2009 and earlier will be included, collected into twenty-six sections ("sequences"), compiled into six books:

1. Map and Territory: sequences on the Bayesian conceptions of rationality, belief, evidence, and explanation.
2. How to Actually Change Your Mind: sequences on confirmation bias and motivated reasoning.
3. The Machine in the Ghost: sequences on optimization processes, cognition, and concepts.
4. Mere Reality: sequences on science and the physical world.
5. Mere Goodness: sequences on human values.
6. Becoming Stronger: sequences on self-improvement and group rationality.

The six books will be released as a single sprawling eBook, making it easy to hop back and forth between different parts of the book. The whole book will be about 1,800 pages long. However, we'll also be releasing the same content as a series of six print books (and as six audio books) at a future date.

The Sequences have been tidied up in a number of small ways, but the content is mostly unchanged. The largest change is to how the content is organized. Some important Overcoming Bias and Less Wrong posts that were never officially sorted into sequences have now been added — 58 additions in all, forming four entirely new sequences (and also supplementing some existing sequences). Other posts have been removed — 105 in total. The following old sequences will be the most heavily affected:

• Map and Territory and Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions are being merged, expanded, and reassembled into a new set of introductory sequences, with more focus placed on cognitive biases. The name 'Map and Territory' will be re-applied to this entire collection of sequences, constituting the first book.
• Quantum Physics and Metaethics are being heavily reordered and heavily shortened.
• Most of Fun Theory and Ethical Injunctions is being left out. Taking their place will be two new sequences on ethics, plus the modified version of Metaethics.

I'll provide more details on these changes when the eBook is out.

Unlike the print and audio-book versions, the eBook version of Rationality: From AI to Zombies will be entirely free. If you want to purchase it on Kindle Store and download it directly to your Kindle, it will also be available on Amazon for $4.99.

To make the content more accessible, the eBook will include introductions I've written up for this purpose. It will also include a LessWrongWiki link to a glossary, which I'll be recruiting LessWrongers to help populate with explanations of references and jargon from the Sequences.

I'll post an announcement to Main as soon as the eBook is available. See you then!

I wrote a blog post that popularizes the "false consensus effect" and the debiasing strategy of "imagining the opposite" and "avoiding failing at other minds." Thoughts on where the post works and where it can be improved would be super-helpful for improving our content and my writing style. Especially useful would be feedback on how to make this post more shareable on Facebook and other social media, as we'd like people to be motivated to share these posts with their friends. For example, what would make you more likely to share it? What would make others you know more likely to share it?

For a bit of context, the blog post is part of the efforts of Intentional Insights to promote rational thinking to a broad audience and thus raise the sanity waterline, as described here. The target audience for the blog post is reason-minded youth and young adults who are either not engaged with rationality or are at the beginning stage of becoming aspiring rationalists. Our goal is to get such people interested in exploring rationality more broadly, eventually getting them turned on to more advanced rationality, such as found on Less Wrong itself, in CFAR workshops, etc. The blog post is written in a style aimed to create cognitive ease, with a combination of personal stories and an engaging narrative, along with citations of relevant research and descriptions of strategies to manage one’s mind more effectively. This is part of our broader practice of asking for feedback from fellow Less Wrongers on our content (this post for example). We are eager to hear from you and revise our drafts (and even published content offerings) based on your thoughtful comments, and we did so previously, as you see in the Edit to this post. Any and all suggestions are welcomed, and thanks for taking the time to engage with us and give your feedback – much appreciated!

Vitalik Buterin has a new post about an interesting theoretical attack against Bitcoin. The idea relies on the assumption that the attacker can credibly commit to something quite crazy. The crazy thing is this: paying out 25.01 BTC to all the people who help him in his attack to steal 25 BTC from everyone, but only if the attack fails. This leads to a weird payoff matrix where the dominant strategy is to help him in the attack. The attack succeeds, and no payoff is made.

Of course, smart contracts make such crazy commitments perfectly possible, so this is a bit less theoretical than it sounds. But even as an abstract though experiment about decision theories, it looks pretty interesting.

By the way, Vitalik Buterin is really on a roll. Just a week ago he had a thought-provoking blog post about how Decentralized Autonomous Organizations could possibly utilize a concept often discussed here: decision theory in a setup where agents can inspect each others' source code. It was shared on LW Discussion, but earned less exposure than I think it deserved.

EDIT 1: One smart commenter of the original post spotted that an isomorphic, extremely cool game was already proposed by billionaire Warren Buffett. Does this thing already have a name in game theory maybe?

EDIT 2: I wrote the game up in detail for some old-school game theorist friends:

The attacker orchestrates a game with 99 players. The attacker himself does not participate in the game.

Rules:

Each of the players can either defect or cooperate, in the usual game theoretic setup where they do announce their decisions simultaneously, without side channels. We call "aggregate outcome" the decision that was made by the majority of the players. If the aggregate outcome is defection, we say that the attack succeeds. A player's payoff consists of two components:

1. If her decision coincides with the aggregate outcome, the player gets 10 utilons.

and simultaneously:

2. if the attack succeeds, the attacker gets 1 utilons from each of the 99 players, regardless of their own decision.

The attacker's commitment is quite counterintuitive: he promises that he will pay 11 utilons to each of the defecting players, but only if the attack fails.

Now the payoff looks like this:

Defection became a dominant strategy. The clever thing, of course, is that if everyone defects, then the attacker reaches his goal without paying out anything.

Steven Levy: Let me ask an unrelated question about the raging debate over whether artificial intelligence poses a threat to society, or even the survival of humanity. Where do you stand?

Bill Gates: I think it’s definitely important to worry about. There are two AI threats that are worth distinguishing. One is that AI does enough labor substitution fast enough to change work policies, or [affect] the creation of new jobs that humans are uniquely adapted to — the jobs that give you a sense of purpose and worth. We haven’t run into that yet. I don’t think it’s a dramatic problem in the next ten years but if you take the next 20 to 30 it could be. Then there’s the longer-term problem of so-called strong AI, where it controls resources, so its goals are somehow conflicting with the goals of human systems. Both of those things are very worthy of study and time. I am certainly not in the camp that believes we ought to stop things or slow things down because of that. But you can definitely put me more in the Elon Musk, Bill Joy camp than, let’s say, the Google camp on that one.

"Bill Gates on Mobile Banking, Connecting the World and AI", Medium, 2015-01-21

Viliam Bur made the announcement in Main, but not everyone checks main, so I'm repeating it here.

During the following months my time and attention will be heavily occupied by some personal stuff, so I will be unable to function as a LW moderator. The new LW moderator is... NancyLebovitz!

From today, please direct all your complaints and investigation requests to Nancy. Please not everyone during the first week. That can be a bit frightening for a new moderator.

There are a few old requests I haven't completed yet. I will try to close everything during the following days, but if I don't do it till the end of January, then I will forward the unfinished cases to Nancy, too.

Long live the new moderator!