X-Message-Number: 9783 From: Date: Tue, 26 May 1998 00:01:43 -0700 (PDT) Subject: Ettinger on my resignation In Message #9734, Bob Ettinger wrote concerning me: > I remember speaking to him when he was a student at Wayne State > U. in Detroit in the sixties. I wasn't able to offer him much > except encouragement, but he was a self-starter and didn't even > need my encouragement. Actually, from 1959-1963 I was a student at the University of Michigan (Hail to the victors valiant!), not Wayne. Then I moved to California to begin graduate studies at UC Berkeley. On my own I became very interested in trying to achieve physical immortality. I was thus quite excited to read an article "Intimations of Immortality" by Fred Pohl in the September 1964 Playboy. (Yes mom, I only buy it for the articles!) The article had a section on a forthcoming book by one Robert Ettinger who proposed freezing the newly dead for later revival. I was quite excited by this, and hounded the local bookstores until they got me a copy of his book. At the end of 1964 I flew back to Michigan and arranged a meeting with Ettinger. I soon became the Berkeley Coordinator of the Life Extension Society, and have been active in cryonics ever since. Interestingly, Saul Kent was also stimulated by the same Fred Pohl article as I was. I think Saul and I are tied for second place (after Bob) for longest active involvement in cryonics. In Message #9735, Bob Ettinger wrote: > Art has done brilliantly in helping to manage TT investments. > However, he notes that his investment model (for a certain > group of stocks), while forecasting a mean return of 105%/year, > had a standard deviation of 97%. This means that there was > roughly a 5% chance of losing your ENTIRE INVESTMENT in > one year (two standard deviations from the mean). With average > luck, you would be wiped out every 20 years or so. Hardly > advisable. Bob largely retracted this claim in his #9736, but I will comment further anyway. His calculation was based on the assumption that stock prices are normally distributed. But they are NOT; to much better approximation, the natural logarithms (logs) of stock prices are normally distributed. A better way to describe my model is the log of my recommended portfolio had a projected yearly growth rate of 62% with standard deviation 45%. (I didn't want to use logarithms in my letter to shareholders). The log of the actual portfolio adopted by the Board started with expected growth rate of 27% and standard deviation 41%. That is, the log of my recommended portfolio was expected to grow 2.3 times as fast, with only slightly more risk, than the actual portfolio. The choice should have been a no-brainer. Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=9783