Comments on: Posterity Review Comes Cheap

By: gwern

gwern — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 18:48:55 +0000

It’s a better afterlife, actually. Contemporary academics could observe the posterity reviews of past academics. Would-be martyrs and saints cannot observe the heavenly rewards of dead believers.

By: Stuart Armstrong

Stuart Armstrong — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 22:00:31 +0000

There is a sort of posterity review going on for the moment: species are being renamed and re-classified as DNA evidence reveals how reliable or unreliable the previous classifications were.

Since a lot of these species are named after their discoverers, their names are being banished from posterity if the specie isn’t well defined. So (current) posterity is reveiwing the classification work, and banishing those whose results don’t stand up.

This sort of reclassification has been going constantly on for centuries now. So the scientists naming critters after themselves would be aware that their names would survive only if they did their jobs properly.

Has this had a beneficial or detrimental effect in the field? I’m not sure I can say, but this is an example Posterity Review, so should be looked into.

By: Robin Hanson

Robin Hanson — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 20:57:15 +0000

Tyler, perhaps it is Brin’s transparent society, writ academic.

By: Tyler Cowen

Tyler Cowen — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 20:07:28 +0000

This, of course, is Bentham’s Auto-Icon proposal, writ small. He wanted to preserve and prop up and publicly display corpses, so we would know that people in the future are always thinking of us…

By: billswift

billswift — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 12:26:39 +0000

With technological growth as it can reasonably be expected in the near future, anyone who projects anything past about fifty years is grabbing the short end of the cattle prod.

By: michael vassar

michael vassar — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 23:57:41 +0000

As far as I can tell, the first six paragraphs of this
http://www.mindstalk.net/polymath/polyarc/0384.html
still hold.

By: michael vassar

michael vassar — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 22:37:01 +0000

It seems clear that no organizations have increased their savings by 17,000-fold where value is measured in terms of wages for a given level of education via a “buy and hold diversified investments” strategy.

It also seems clear that both US returns and 1807-2007 returns are non-representative of global and historical returns respectively.

By: Telnar

Telnar — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 22:20:29 +0000

The market risk premium considers the needs of many participants who are predominantly investing for the short or medium term. I think that there is every reason to expect that an investor with a time horizon of 2 centuries (and the ability to set up a diversification strategy which will run automatically, so that he isn’t forced to commit to a view about what the world economy will look like over 200 years) will be able to have an expected return far better than the risk free return.

By: Robin Hanson

Robin Hanson — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 20:35:28 +0000

Michael, many academic institutions, such as universities, have survived for many centuries. Of course future returns could possibly be lower than past returns, but I’d be pleased if that was the worst problem with my proposal.

By: James D. Miller

James D. Miller — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 20:34:47 +0000

Many people are motivated to do good work in this life because they believe that after they die God will judge them. You are trying to create a motivating afterlife judgement mechanism that academics will believe in.