Re: poly: Why interest rates may stay low

In a message dated 3/3/98 10:26:50 AM, hanson@econ.berkeley.edu wrote:

>Curt Adams writes:

>>I understand the principle, but I do think that if we know enough
>>to upload, we'll know enough to play with temporal perceptions.
>>Any built-in emotional responses to produce appropriate discounting
>>- such as a certain demand for novelty slightly below production -
>>ought to have already gone haywire in our society. A lot of
>>people plan out their life spending fairly explicitly after the
>>mid-30's or so. I think our discounts, then, may have a
>>substantial rational component an upload will emulate without
>>trouble.

>You've completely lost me here. What is a "rational discount rate"?

In this context, a discount rate that accounts for the probability
of death in the appropriate time frame. E.g., if you have a n%
cahnce of dying per year, your discount should be about n% per
year, after accounting for income effects. More precisely, I
suppose it would be based on probabilities of reproduction,
but I'm not sure how to work that with uploads.

>How can we "play with temporal perceptions" of uploads, other than
>by running them faster or slower?

Well, a human perceives future values in such a way that they
have a discount value of roughly 2%. When uploaded, some of those
perceptions get altered, increasing the discount rate. Just alter
the connections between the perception and the outcome discount
rate. Alternatively, you might set the particular perceptions
responsible for the discount rate to a level given a more rational
discount.

In other words, I don't see that the entire upload has to run at
the same speed, nor that we will be completely unable to alter
the upload in any way to adjust for its accelerated speed. If
you can't adjust for the timing change in any way, the upload
wouldn't even be able to play catch.
Received on Wed Mar 4 03:17:37 1998