You cannot spend the money you obtain from a loan without losing the means to pay it back. You can do a tiny bit to borrow against your future labor income, but the normal thing to do is to declare personal bankruptcy, and so there is little assurance for that.
(This has been discussed many dozens of times on both the EA Forum and LessWrong. There exist no loan structures as far as I know that allow you to substantially benefit from predicting doom.)
Hello Habryka. Could you link to a good overview of why taking loans does not make sense even if one thinks there is a high risk of human extinction soon? Daniel Kokotajlo said:
Idk about others. I haven’t investigated serious ways to do this [taking loans],* but I’ve taken the low-hanging fruit—it’s why my family hasn’t paid off our student loan debt for example, and it’s why I went for financing on my car (with as long a payoff time as possible) instead of just buying it with cash.
*Basically I’d need to push through my ugh field and go do research on how to make this happen. If someone offered me a $10k low-interest loan on a silver platter I’d take it.
I should also clarify that I am open to bets about less extreme events. For example, global unemployment rate doubling or population dropping below 7 billion in the next few years.
You cannot spend the money you obtain from a loan without losing the means to pay it back. You can do a tiny bit to borrow against your future labor income, but the normal thing to do is to declare personal bankruptcy, and so there is little assurance for that.
(This has been discussed many dozens of times on both the EA Forum and LessWrong. There exist no loan structures as far as I know that allow you to substantially benefit from predicting doom.)
Hello Habryka. Could you link to a good overview of why taking loans does not make sense even if one thinks there is a high risk of human extinction soon? Daniel Kokotajlo said:
I should also clarify that I am open to bets about less extreme events. For example, global unemployment rate doubling or population dropping below 7 billion in the next few years.
I do actually have trouble finding a good place to link to. I’ll try to dig one up in the next few days.