19 Comments

I think there are too many variables here. For example, look at vitamin E. It turns out that natural mixed tocopherols combined with ascorbates are helpful, while a racemic mix of alpha tocopherol increases mortality by 'crowding out' other useful forms of vitamin E.

Who wins that bet?

Better to just bet on processes for producing resveratrol, or have a futures market in Japanese Knotweed or something. Or what if resveratrol is healthy, but they find a way to alter it so that it doesn't interfere with the cytochrome system, so that people taking statin drugs can still take it. And then some people choose to take the old kind since some benefits actually turn out to hinge upon cytrochrome inactivation. (yes, I know that the primary effect is from p53 inactivation)

When it comes down to it, I place little faith in the wisdom of crowds here. Have you seen the garbage people eat now? And don't get me started on their exercise habits.

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Dear Hopefully Anonymous,

Your wrote "I'm curious if you've thought about ways to influence other conservative republican opinion-shapers into advancing agendas that benefit those of us who don't want to die -agendas that are arguably in their own interest."

See

http://www.tcsdaily.com/art...

http://techcentralstation.c...

http://jamesdmiller.blogspo...

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Prof. Miller, I take it your conservative republicanism doesn't lead you to an anti-persistence maximizing position, and I'm thankful for that. I'm curious if you've thought about ways to influence other conservative republican opinion-shapers into advancing agendas that benefit those of us who don't want to die -agendas that are arguably in their own interest. If they approached perfect rationality, I imagine they have some sort of internal, non-transparent balancing going on, between populist positions that may be bad for advancement of persistence maximizing technology but which allows them greater wealth accumulation by taking those positions. For example, I imagine that there was a dollar benefit to Sean Hannity (or similarly positioned people) for being loudly against fetal stem cell research, in terms of increased audience, advertising revenue, and pay, that they could then use to maximize their personal odds of persistence. But I'd think they'd fear some personal cost because they might be so successful in voicing their oppostion to innovative medical technology that they could harm their personal odds of persistence. Sean Hannity may have plausible deniability that he even makes such calculations. But I don't think you do. ;)

So, how do you make these calculations? Or how will you from this point forward?

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Markets will be markets.. but I can tell you this, Resveratrol has helped me shed unwanted pounds.. And my guess is that the research is correct.. that there is indeed an anti-aging benefit.

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Dear Hopefully Anonymous,

I am a politically active conservative Republican. I sometimes enjoy writing partisan political articles in which I point out (what I believe are) flaws of the left. These articles are often written for an audience that I assume share many of my political views and consequently would be inappropriate for a site such as Overcoming Bias.

I would love to get some Sean Hannity money, do you have any advice about how I could accomplish this? As a college professor I always assumed that being a conservative would reduce my lifetime income, but I would be happy to be proved wrong.

James Miller

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James D. Miller, great post and follow-up comments. I looked up some of your old columns published elsewhere hoping for more of this quality of thought and writing and was disappointed by the hackneyed liberal vs. conservatives motiffs. Was that performative? Were you hoping to accumulate some Sean Hannity money from that audience that you could then use rationally to maximize your persistence odds? Hoping for a transparent reply in this thread.

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1) Get the government's heavy thumb off the scales in the medical market.

2) Unban insider trading - the ban closes off a path for knowledge to enter the market, as Brian above notices.

3) Voila! The actual real medical market also becomes an unbiased prediction market. No need to set up some elaborate game when the reality is ready to hand.

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Prediction Markets for Longevity Medicine

Prediction markets, like all markets, are extremely useful in those places where they have taken root. In a manner of speaking, all markets perform the function of a prediction market: they measure the ever-changing opinions of the participants on a ra...

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Vitamin D3 from UV light exposure on skin is more effective than vitamin D2 from supplements. See study: http://tinyurl.com/2lfwm6

Vitamin D3 from UV light protects against many life threatening diseases and many different cancers: http://www.theglobeandmail....

Health and economic benefits from sun exposure are much greater than risks: study http://www.medicalnewstoday...

Tanning in moderation is healthy behavior. Enjoy the sun in moderation. Don't sunburn.

When you can't get enough UV light exposure outside, a couple sessions in a tanning bed will process all the healthy vitamin D3 needed.

Feel good about sporting a healthy tan.

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Taleb in his book, The Black Swan, discusses that the market typically does undervalue low-probability, high-payoff events. So it is quite possible that Sirtris is a buy.

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Anthony,

You wrote that "I believe in 10 years most 'rich folks' will be taking the NCE that [Sirtris] will be producing." The market doesn't agree with you because the stock Sirtris Pharmaceuticals has a market capitalization of only $343 million, which is much to low if there is even a 10% chance it will develop a super-blockbuster drug. Of course, this means that if you know the market is wrong you can make a huge amount of money buying Sirtris stock.

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Anthony, there are other scenarios more likely than either a completely fixed numbers game and everyone being completely honest and forthcoming about everything without needing any incentives to do so.

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Hi interesting topic, I believe in 10 years most 'rich folks' will be taking the NCE that Sitris will be producing, while all the folks who are afraid of 'pharmas', or have lower spending dollars will take a resveratrol formulation of some kind.

I also agree with Mr. Delaney here regarding skewing the market perception. If it is the intention of building relevant information, I don't believe it can be done using a 'prediction market'. If things were all on the up and up (basically a perfect model, where everyone identifies themselves, and has a fixed 'vote' and somehow does not publish any papers in journals (can be construed as marketing you know...) to skew perception... we would really be relying on statistics. And if it's a fixed numbers game, it wouldnt be much of market, would it.

Anthony LoeraRevGenetics

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One problem with this market (I mentioned it here) is that a market that acts as its own fundamental indicator is prone to manipulation. For example, if the market offers a 20% chance that people will take resveratrol, and I buy enough contracts to pump that probability up to 50%, and this 'news' convinces new users to take it up, I can use the market to manipulate the fundamentals, without the fundamentals reflecting what we're actually measuring (the risk or reward of taking it).

So I'd suggest either a) forcing people to identify themselves when they make a trade, so manipulators can at least pay a penalty in reputation, or b) having a futures market on the actual effect (perform a double-blind test, and have a financial instrument whose returns are based on the excess life expectancy for reservatrol users).

This is a problem that could blindside many PM participants: in a market where changes in the market value of an instrument correlate positively with changes in the fundamental value of the instrument, there will be price trends and (possibly) manipulation. It might be nice for PM owners to warn potential buyers the way some brokers do ("This stock is close to the delisting threshold -- if it drops another 10%, it's going to be kicked off the exchange and probably drop another 20%").

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What this could be really interesting for is betting on which drug should be tested in a randomized clinical trial next. There are a lot of medical questions (especially about drugs) out there and these trials are not cheap; it would be interesting to see what drug-disease combinations that people thought would be the most likely to generate important results given that they had money riding on the outcome.

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Felix and Brian, speculative markets know nothing until someone with info comes to trade on that info. There are many kinds of relevant info, and the whole point is to get people who have or could obtain such info to trade on it.

Daublin, it is harder to predict the more distant future, in part because feedback is slower to tell people how good they are. But other institutions that compete with this proposal also suffer from that problem; the question is which does better. Also, it turns out that manipulation on average makes these markets more accurate on average.

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