X-Message-Number: 31487
Date: Fri, 13 Mar 2009 17:31:26 -0500
Subject: Optimism
From: Charles Platt <>

Interesting preliminary rumblings of yet another financial debacle as
public-employee pension funds turn out to have been making absurdly
optimistic assumptions about their expected return on invested funds,
over the years:

"The giant California Public Employees Retirement System assumes
annual earnings averaging 7.75 percent in the decades ahead. The
California State Teachers Retirement System assumes 8 percent. . . .
Lowering the projection of earnings by even a percentage point or two
would create a funding gap of tens of billions of dollars."

Alcor's Patient Care Trust looks more fiscally prudent by comparison,
yet of course it took a substantial hit last year. When I first joined
Alcor in the early 1990s I well remember Carlos Mondragon's breezy
confidence about the longterm growth in value of a prudent mix of
blue-chip stocks. Years later I saw the same breezy confidence in a
Kurzweil presentation where he showed an exponential curve that
skipped over the Great Depression as if it were a tiny pot-hole on the
inexorable highway to Tomorrow.

Personally I feel that entities such as the stock market simply
haven't been around long enough for us to make assumptions about their
future. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was established in 1884.
That's 125 years ago, and extends through periods of history in which
technology and government (to name just two crucial factors) played
roles utterly different compared with today. And yet some smart people
seem (or seemed) to feel confident about extrapolating the Dow's
generally upward trend for, say, 200 years into the future?

Of course I don't have any magical answers to this issue, but it is an
issue, and I see it as part of a general tendency toward optimistic
assumptions in cryonics, beginning of course with the most fundamental
optimistic assumption that repair and resuscitation will be so cheap
and easy, we don't need to worry about setting aside funds for those
processes, in addition to funding liquid nitrogen deliveries and Dewar
or cryostat maintenance.

The older I get, the more skeptical I feel about the whole package.

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