Yes, you should definitely milk your PhD for as much status as possible, Dr. Manheim. 

https://www.metaculus.com/accounts/profile/114222/

My current all-time brier is .1 vs .129 for metaculus prediction and .124 for community prediction on the same questions. 

I'm also in the top 20 in points per question on https://metaculusextras.com/points_per_question 

Both of those metrics heavily depend on question selection, so it's difficult to compare people directly. But neither have to do with volume of questions. 

As a top-50 metaculuser, I endorse all proposals that give me more status.

I'm skeptical that physical pain scales beyond 2 or so orders of magnitude in a given span of time. I'm also skeptical of the coherence of death as an ontological possibility.

Being forced to choose between two things I believe are incoherent, I'd pick the torture. I'm more worried that there's a coherent notion of death being referenced than that some entity will experience a level of pain that seems impossible. There's multiple problems with the concept of pain here: it's not clear the entity experiencing it would be conscious during that time frame (especially if they have no memory, as memory is tied to consciousness), it's not clear that entity would be indentifiable as me, it's not clear that upping some pain number actually corresponds to that level of utility, as utility is plausibly bounded over short intervals, etc.

Did you see my initial reply at https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4vcTYhA2X99aGaGHG/why-do-stocks-go-up?commentId=wBEnBKqqB7TRXya8N which was left before you replied to me at all? I thought that added sufficient caveats. 

>"While it is expected that stocks will go up, and go up more than bonds, it is yet to be explained why they have gone up so much more than bonds." 

Yeah, I'd emphasize slightly more in expectation. 

The vast majority of the equity premium is unexplained. When people say "just buy stocks and hold for a long period and you'll make 10% a year", they're asserting that the unexplained equity premium will persist, and I have a problem with that assumption.

I tried to clarify this in my first reply. You should interpret it as saying that stocks were massively undervalued and shouldn't have gone up significantly more than bonds. I was trying to explain and didn't want to include too many caveats, instead leaving them for the replies.

It's interesting to note that several other replies gave the simplistic risk response without the caveat that risk can only explain a small minority of the premium.

Start with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equity_premium_puzzle. There's plenty of academic sources there. 

People have grown accustomed to there being an equity premium to the extent that there's a default assumption that it'll just continue forever despite nobody knowing why it existed in the past. 

>Isn't there more real wealth today than during the days of the East India Company? If a stock represents a piece of a businesses, and those businesses now have more real wealth today than 300 years ago, why shouldn't stock returns be quite positive?

I simplified a bit above. What's unexplained is the excess return of stocks over risk-free bonds. When there's more real wealth in the future, the risk free rate is higher. Stock returns would end up slightly above the risk-free rate because they're riskier. The puzzle is that stock returns are way, way higher than the risk-free rate and this isn't plausibly explained by their riskiness. 

Well there's some probability of it paying out before then.

If the magic value is a martingale, and the payout timing is given by a poisson process then the stock price should remain a constant discount off of the magic value. You will gain on average by holding the stock until the payout, but won't gain in expectation by buying and selling the stock.