A Rational Altruist Punch in The Stomach

But I didn't bite any of the counterarguments to the extent that it would be necessary to counter the 10^100.

I don't think this is very hard if you actually look at examples of long-term investment. Background: http://www.gwern.net/The%20Narrowing%20Circle#ancestors and especially http://www.gwern.net/The%20Narrowing%20Circle#islamic-waqfs

First things:

Businesses and organizations suffer extremely high mortality rates; one estimate puts it at 99% chance of mortality per century. (This ignores existential risks and lucky aversions like nuclear warfare, and so is an underestimate of the true risks.) So to survive, any perpetuity has a risk of 0.01^120 = 1.000000000000001e-240. That's a good chunk of the reason to not bother with long-term trusts right there! We can confirm this empirically by observing that there were what must have been many scores of thousands of waqfs in the Islamic world - perpetual charities - and very few survive or saw their endowments grow. (I have pointed Hanson at waqfs repeatedly, but he has yet to blog on that topic.) Similarly, we can observe that despite the countless temples, hospitals, homes, and institutions with endowments in the Greco-Roman world just 1900 years ago or so - less than a sixth of the time period in question - we know of zero surviving institutions, all of them having fallen into decay/disuse/Christian-Muslim expropriation/vicissitudes of time. The many Buddhist institutions of India suffered a similar fate, between a resurgent Hinduism and Muslim encroachment. We can also point out that many estimates ignore a meaningful failure mode: endowments or nonprofits going off-course and doing things the founder did not mean them to do - the American university case comes to mind, as does the British university case I cite in my essay, and there is a long vein (some of it summarized in Cowen's Good and Plenty) of conservative criticism of American nonprofits like the Ford Foundation pointing out the 'liberal capture' of originally conservative institutions, which obviously defeats the original point.

(BTW, if you read the waqf link you'd see that excessive iron-clad rigidity in an organization's goal can be almost as bad, as the goals become outdated or irrelevant or harmful. So if the charter is loose, the organization is easily and quickly hijacked by changing ideologies or principal-agent problems like the iron law of oligarchy; but if the charter is rigid, the organization may remain on-target while becoming useless. It's hard to design a utility function for a potentially powerful optimization process. Hm.... why does that sentence sound so familiar... It's almost as if we needed a theory of Friendly Artificial General Organizations...)

Survivorship bias as a major factor in overestimating risk-free return overtime is well-known, and a new result came out recently, actually. We can observe many reasons for survivorship bias in estimates of nonprofit and corporate survival in the 20th century (see previously) and also in financial returns: Czarist Russia, the Weimar and Nazi Germanies, Imperial Japan, all countries in the Warsaw Pact or otherwise communist such as Cuba/North Korea/Vietnam, Zimbabwe... While I have seen very few invocations recently of the old chestnut that 'stock markets deliver 7% return on a long-term basis' (perhaps that conventional wisdom has been killed), the survivorship work suggests that for just the 20th century we might expect more like 2%.

The risk per year is related to the size of the endowment/investment; as has already been point out, there is fierce legal opposition to any sort of perpetuity, and at least two cases of perpetuities being wasted or stolen legally. Historically, fortunes which grow too big attract predators, become institutionally dysfunctional and corrupt, and fall prey to rare risks. Example: the non-profit known as the Catholic Church owned something like a quarter of all of England before it was expropriated precisely because it had so effectively gained wealth and invested it (property rights in England otherwise having been remarkably secure over the past millennium). Not to mention the Vatican States or its holdings elsewhere. The Buddhist monasteries in China and Japan had issues with growing so large and powerful that they became major political and military players, leading to war and extirpation by other actors such as Oda Nobunaga. Any perpetuity which becomes equivalent to a large or small country will suffer the same mortality rates.

And then there's opportunity cost. We have good reason to expect the upcoming centuries to be unusually risky compared to the past: even if you completely ignore new technological issues like nanotech or AI or global warming or biowarfare, we still suffer under a novel existential threat of thermonuclear warfare. This threat did not exist at any point before 1945, and systematically makes the future riskier than the past. Investing in a perpetuity, itself investing in ordinary commercial transactions, does little to help except possibly some generic economic externalities of increased growth (and no doubt there are economists who, pointing to current ultra-low interest rates and sluggish growth and 'too much cash chasing safe investments', would deprecate even this).

Compounding-wise, there are other forms of investment: investment into scientific knowledge, into more effective charity (surely saving peoples' lives can have compounding effects into the distant future?), and so on.

So to recap:

1. organizational mortality is extremely high
2. financial mortality is likewise extremely high; and both organizational & financial mortality are relevant
3. all estimates of risk are systematically biased downwards, estimates indicating that one of these biases is very large
4. risks for organizations or finances increases with size
5. opportunity cost is completely ignored

Any of these except perhaps #3 could be sufficient to defeat perpetuities, and I think that combined, the case for perpetuities is completely non-existent.

Robin used a Dirty Math Trick that works on us because we're not used to dealing with large numbers. He used a large time scale of 12000 years, and assumed exponential growth in wealth at a reasonable rate over that time period. But then for depreciating the value of the wealth due to the fact that the intended recipients might not actually receive it, he used a relatively small linear factor of 1/1000 which seems like it was pulled out of a hat.

It would make more sense to assume that there is some probability every year that the accumulated wealth will be wiped out by civil war, communist takeover, nuclear holocaust, etc etc. Even if this yearly probability were small, applied over a long period of time, it would still counteract the exponential blowup in the value of the wealth. The resulting conclusion would be totally dependent on the probability of calamity: if you use a 0.01% chance of total loss, then you have about a 30% chance of coming out with the big sum mentioned in the article. But if you use a 1% chance, then your likelihood of making it to 12000 years with the money intact is 4e-53.

I'm not sure what an investment in a particular far-future time would look like. Money does not, in fact, breed and multiply when left in a vault for long enough. It increases by being invested in things that give payoffs or otherwise rise in value. Even if you have a giant stockpile of cash and put it in a bank savings account, the bank will then take it and lend it out to people who will make use of it for whatever projects they're up to. If you do that, all you're doing is letting the bank (and the borrowers) choose the uses of your money for the first while, and then when you eventually take it out you take the choice back and make it yourself. The one way I can think of to actually invest in the distant future is to find or create some project that will have a massive payoff in the distant future but low payoffs before that, and I don't think anyone knows of a project that pays off further than 100 years in the future.

Maybe you could try to create a fund that explicitly looks for far-future payoff opportunities and invests in them, but I don't think one exists right now, and the idea is non-trivial.

I dunno, maybe there's something else I'm missing, though.

Like a lot of Robin's stuff, he makes the assumption that everyone already knows about some argument that's mostly original to him, and then proceeds to deduce why they're not acting on that (nonexistent) knowledge. Personally, after reading his argument, I did become marginally more interested in doing something like what he describes. However, I'm not convinced that it's obviously the most altruistic way to use resources.

For one thing, it seems possible that making the world a better place now would actually yield greater returns in the long run.

Let's say I donate to AMF, saving 10 African children from dying. Those children grow up and do useful work, shifting the world economy a bit forward on its exponential growth curve (say, from t=10 to t=10.01). 12,000 years later, we're at t=12,010.01 instead of t=12.010--but since we're so far along the exponential growth curve at this point, that ends up making a much larger difference. The difference that your contribution makes will grow exponentially just like in Robin's plan:

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There are lots of people who are trying to maximize their individual return on investment (through buying stocks and stuff), so opportunities there are thoroughly picked over. By contrast, there are a relatively small number of dollars chasing Wikipedia-style projects that accelerate economic growth without delivering financial returns to their creators, so ROI should (theoretically) be much higher.

One problem with this plan is that although you'll have a larger impact on growing the world economy, it's not clear to what degree a wealthier world economy contributes to altruistic ends. If everyone becomes extremely uncharitable between now and the very far future, then you'd be relatively better off following Robin's plan.

Another problem: if we assume a constant background probability that your investment ends up being worthless (because humanity destroys itself, or because it gets stolen, or whatever), then this is exponential decay, which has the potential to cancel out exponential growth. Let's say your investment has a constant .99 probability of continuing to exist each year. In 100 years, the probability that your investment still exists is .36. After 12,000 years, the probability that your investment still exists is about .000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000004.

Another problem with Robin's plan: although your investment grows exponentially, it stays constant as a factor of the world economy. Let's say global GDP is $80 trillion and you put $1000 in to Robin's idea (000000001.25% of global GDP). Your investment grows at the same rate as the global economy, so a billion years later, your investment is still amounts to about 000000001.25% of global GDP. If the number of people alive with problems to solve has stayed roughly constant in that period, then it's unlikely your investment will do much good, since everyone should be ridiculously wealthy anyway (unless there's extreme global inequality).

So yeah, lots of potential problems with Robin's argument. Sorry if I'm repeating stuff that was already said in the comments here or there.

The Southern red oak tree (Q. falcata) grows at a rate something like 1.25 feet every year, so in 12,000 years, I should have a tree over 12,000 feet tall, right?

Making a 2 percent return on investment which you expect to pay off after 12 thousand years is like planting a tree and expecting it to grow to 12,000 feet, or starting with two rabbits and expecting them to cover the entire world in a dozen generations.

Do you expect your investment to grow as a fraction of total wealth (rather than just keeping pace with overall economic growth)? If yes: How high a proportion of total wealth do you expect it to become?

Thought experiment: Suppose that a large fraction of the wealth on Earth was held by a "charitable trust" which was started 12,000 years ago, had spent the intervening time solely managing its wealth (not doing anything charitable), and now was seeking to use its resources for altruistic purposes (following the guidelines set forth by the person who gave it instructions 12,000 years ago). Would that be better than the status quo, or worse? By how much?

Second thought experiment: Suppose that a large fraction of the wealth on Earth was held by a "charitable trust" which was started 11,000 years ago, had spent the intervening time solely managing its wealth (not doing anything charitable), and was under strict instructions to spend the next 1,000 years solely managing its wealth (not doing anything charitable) before it finally turned to altruistic purposes. Would that be better than the status quo, or worse? By how much?

Methuselah trusts are not entirely legal. Someone who tries to set one up today may be prevented from doing so.

http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/essays/trust-issues.php?page=all

Continued accumulation of risk of some kind of failure over the years is exponential just like the interest is, and can reach 10^-100 as easily.

A space of correct arguments of N words, and space of invalid but superficially correct arguments of N words, differ in size by factor exponential in N, so improbability of correctness in general too can easily reach googol.

That being said, there is genuinely a problem with description length priors and unbounded utilities. Given a valid theory of everything with length L , a fairly small increase in the length can yield a world with enormous invisible, undetectable consequences. E.g. an enormous (3^^^^3 , or BB(11) ) number of secondary worlds where the fundamental constants depend to the temperature of the coldest 1-gram piece of frozen hydrogen in our universe (something global which we may influence, killing all the aliens in those universes). The perversity is that we don't know those worlds exist, and we don't know they don't exist, and the theory where they do exist is not very much longer than simplest known ToE, and predicts exactly identical observations so it can never be disproved.

I may not understand Robin's post. I think he said (paraphrased): "If you really cared about future bazillions of people, and if you are about to spend N dollars on X-risk reduction, then instead you should invest some of that so that some subset of future people - whoever would have preferred money/wealth to a reduced chance of extinction - can actually get the money; then everyone would be happier. We don't do that, which reveals that we care about appearing conscientious rather than helping future people."

But this seems wrong. However high the dollar value of our investment at time T, it will only buy the inheritors some amount of wealth (computing power, intellectual content, safety, etc.). This amount is determined by how much wealth humanity has produced/has access to at time T. This wealth will be there anyway, and will benefit (some) humans with or without the investment. Then increasing the chances of this wealth being there at all - i.e. reducing X-risk - dominates our present day calculation.

A flaw or trick in Robin's argument is talking about 12000 years as if that is the future that people care about. People concerned about AI and Global Warming make it a point that the harm comes, or at least is well on its way, within 100 years. 2% over 100 years is sort of crappy return, not game changing in anybody's imagination.

I wonder what the longest time that has passed between an investment aimed at a return in the far future and an actual return similar to what was expected in the far future? The few things I think of are cathedrals and universities. There are a few universities that are 1000 years old, do they qualify? I think not for these reasons: 1) the universities were not founded with the intention of a payoff 500 years or a 1000 years later, they were founded with the intention of getting value from them soon after they were founded. 2) The universities that have lasted 1000 years have been re-invested in episodically and massively over the 1000 years, so the return now from the original investment is probably quite a small part of their total present value.

And that's 1000 years, I am aware of NOTHING with the slightest hint of long term payoff from 1000 years ago. Look forward to being shown I'm wrong in comments, though :)

12000 years? Its a joke. 11,900 years after an AI with some real capacity is developed? Supposing I cared deeply about 12000 years from now, what "signal" would I have telling me how to invest for that time period that wouldn't be totally swamped by the noise of uncertainty and the interference of numerous possibilities?

This of course says nothing of an investment that pays a consistent or even an average of 2% over 12000 years. The fact that I can imagine such a thing does not suggest that its probability of existence is > 1.02^(-12000).

I plan on being alive in 12,000 years, please send bitcoins.

Note that Robin's post was an argument that nobody cares much about the far future. The conclusion is kind-of obvious - evolved organisms tend to care about things they can influence.

How will your investment create the future wealth? If you intend loan it and create interest, how much harm will those loans do (through environmental degradation) over 12k years?

If you instead invest that money right now in something that maximizes good, rather than investing it to maximize returns for 12k years first, would you expect higher total good?

Why 12k years, and not 12k+5, or 50? It hardly seems like a likely place for a global or even local maximum.

I can 10^100 trivially: if inflation averages about 2% per year, your compound interest keeps your value constant, providing no benefit over time. What values for inflation do you predict over the next 12,000 years, broken down into averages for each 200-year period?

The first problem is that, given that average inflation rates have exceeded 2% per year, any investment at 2% annually is going to be a terrible investment in the future - you're actually LOSING money every year on average rather than gaining it, in terms of actual value.

However, let us assume that for whatever reason you were actually getting 2% growth on top of inflation per year (an unlikely scenario for an unguided account, but bear with me a moment). The second problem is that the result is, obviously, irrational. There are not even a googol particles in the Universe; how could you have a googol dollars and have that be a reasonable result? There isn't anything to purchase with a googol dollars. Ergo, we must assume our assumption is flawed.

The flaw in this assumption is, of course, the lack of understanding of exponential growth; all exponential growth is self-limiting in nature. In reality you run into real constraints to how much growth you can have, how much of the economy can be in your fund, ect. As someone else pointed out, you can't assume that you will have indefinite growth; it is confined by the size of the economy (which will never reach a googol dollars in current day money), by the likelihood of you actually getting said returns (which is 0), whether anyone would recognize a currency when too much of the world economy was bound up into it, ect.

The truth is it is just a terrible argument to begin with. Anyone who promises you 2% growth for even a thousand years is a dirty liar. The rate seems reasonable but in actuality it is anything but. Do you think that the world economy is going to increase by 2% a year for the next 1000 years? I don't, at least not in real, inflation-adjusted dollars. The total amount of energy we can possibly use on the planet alone would constrain such economic growth.

I'm not sure what an investment in a particular far-future time would look like.

Maybe like this:

Franklin [left] £1000 each to Philadelphia and Boston in his will to be invested for 200 years. He died in 1790, and by 1990 the funds had grown to 2.3, 5M$, giving factors of 35, 76 inflation-adjusted gains, for annual returns of 1.8, 2.2%.

Utilitarianism has these problems whether you look at thousands of years in the future or today. It's unlikely that any "utilitarian" reading this list today doesn't have resources they reserve for themselves or those close to them that wouldn't easily produce greater good for a greater number spent elsewhere.