Comments on "notes on texts for notes"

It's not hard to invest your money in a way that tends to beat the market 999 days out of a thousand, but loses overall. I daresay such a scheme would lead to the equivalent in policy, assuming it could be made to work at all.

Mmmm, Singet den Herrn. Maybe I should come and listen.

Do you need any basses?

Audience members are always welcome! I don't know offhand whether we need basses; I'll ask.

The "policy markets" idea pretty much died with the cancellation of DARPA's Policy Analysis Market in 2003. Daniel Davies wrote an analysis of why it was unlikely ever to work: a market needs hedgers as well as speculators but many policy questions, such as the "terrorism futures" that PAM planned to trade in, lack natural buyers or sellers.

P.S. dem Herrn. The dative, damn it.

Thanks for the dsquared link; very nice. And yes, "dem". (As in the old song about the Trinity: Dem Herrn, dem Herrn, dem drei Herren.)

Also: It seems to me that using markets to set policy effectively gives all the decision-making power to the rich (this is of course to some extent a feature of all existing political and economic systems, but I'd prefer not to maximize it and enshrine it in the constitution), and that policy-setting at a national level is enough of an "amplifier" that I see no reason to expect abuse to be prevented by participants' wish to profit from their transactions on the market.

"something's wrong with this picture"

I don't get it. Robin must have a five-figure, possibly a six-figure income. You think that spending a few percent of that on a chance at a thousand-year lifespan is irrational?

Of course it's not really the (controversial, but not in ways that would make Alcor's prices more reasonable on RH's assumptions) objective, or socially-agreed, value of a life that's relevant here, but Robin's valuation of his own life and the corresponding valuations of Alcor's other customers.

I bet Alcor customers tend to put a higher monetary value on their own lives than most people do, too.

No, I don't think that. If Robin believes what he says he does about the likely consequences of paying Alcor (which I assume he does), then he's probably quite right to do so.

I think that if Alcor are really offering a better-than-5% chance of living for thousands of years, then a believer in markets (I think any reasonable person would put Robin in that category) should expect the price to be higher than it is.

Back of envelope:

• most attempts to estimate the monetary value of a normal human life end up with a figure in the range $1M .. $10M;
• 5% of this is $50k .. $500k;
• the total lifetime cost of signing up with Alcor is somewhere on the order of $100k;
• this suggests that if Alcor's services are correctly priced and the chance of getting thousands of years of life from them is 5% then (very crudely) the value of extending your lifespan to thousands of years is somewhere between 1/5 and 2x the value of a normal-length life. That seems pretty low.

Of course there are nonlinear utility functions and time discounting and so on to consider, but I have some reason to think that Robin Hanson wouldn't be in favour of making big changes on account of those.

I think I get it now. I am thoroughly surprised that this was your point, and I think the reasoning is crazy, but I think I get it now. You're saying that the price is unreasonably low? That if Alcor's services were that likely to work, they'd be charging much more for them?

OK, I read your reply properly now.

Cryonics, as a market, is extremely small (though the potential market ought to be big). There are very few providers and very few customers. Also, one of the selling points is that it is affordable for the cost of a life insurance policy. Also, the people involved (in running suspension providers) are indeed not in it for the money, they are in it because they want to live for a very long time and they want other people to be able to do so, too.

If indeed the people at Alcor are altruists and selling their services well below the market value then yes, that's a decent explanation. On the other hand: if I were an altruistic cryonic suspension provider and my goal were to get as many people as possible to live as long as possible, then at least while the market is in its present early stage I'd be trying to maximize profits from my core market and putting the money back into (1) doing whatever it takes to get the costs way down, in the hope of being able to offer the services to a much larger market, and (2) providing free or cheap services to people I'd especially want to be able to share the future with but who don't have a lot of money. Is there an obvious reason why it's better to price the services at a level that's well below what most of its current few customers would be prepared to pay, but still high enough that the market remains small.

It seems much more likely to me that most of Alcor's current customers don't really think their services are priced well below their true value, in which case either Robin's estimate of what Alcor are providing is wrong or his faith in markets is misplaced, at least in this instance.

As for the other factors you mention: The fact that the market is small doesn't give reason for the price to be too low; small markets in luxury goods often have high prices. I take your point about life insurance, but "the cost of a life insurance policy" isn't at all well defined, different policies might pay out radically differently, and it's not at all unheard of for people to have policies that pay quite a lot more than Alcor's one-off freezing charge.