I'd be curious to know what would have happened if Christopher Columbus's fleet had been lost at sea during his first voyage across the Atlantic. Most scholars were already highly skeptical of his plans, as they were based on a miscalculation, and him not returning would have further discouraged any explorers from setting off in that direction. How much longer would it have taken before Europeans found out about the Americas, and how would history have developed in the meanwhile?

I would like to know what would have happened if, sometime during the Dark Ages let's say, benevolent and extremely advanced aliens had landed with the intention to fix everything. I would diligently copy and disseminate the entire Wikipedia-equivalent for the generously-divulged scientific and sociological knowledge therein, plus cultural notes on the aliens such that I could write a really keenly plausible sci-fi series.

I'd like to know what would have happened if movable type had been invented in the 3rd century AD.

So many. I can't limit it to one, but my top four would be "What if Mohammed had never been born?", "What if Julian the Apostate had succeeded in stamping out Christianity?" and "What if Thera had never blown and the Minoans had survived?" and "What if Alexander the Great had lived to a ripe old age?"

The civilizations of the Near East were fascinating, and although the early Islamic Empire was interesting in its own right it did a lot to homogenize some really cool places. It also dealt a fatal wound to Byzantium as well. If Mohammed had never existed, I would look forward to reading about the Zoroastrian Persians, the Byzantines, and the Romanized Syrians and Egyptians surviving much longer than they did.

The Minoans were the most advanced civilization of their time, and had plumbing, three story buildings, urban planning and possibly even primitive optics in 2000 BC (I wrote a bit about them here). Although they've no doubt been romanticized, in the romanticized version at least they had a pretty equitable society, gave women high status, and revered art and nature. Then they were all destroyed by a giant volcano. I remember reading one historian's speculation that if they'd lived, a man would've landed on the moon by 1 AD.

I don't have such antipathy to Christianity that I'd want to prevent it from ever existing, but it sure did give us 2000 odd years of boring religion. Julian the Apostate was a Roman emperor who ruled a few reigns after Constantine and tried to turn back the clock, de-establish Christianity, and revive all the old pagan cults. He was also a philosopher, an intellectual, and by most accounts a pretty honest and decent guy. He died after reigning barely over a year, from a spear wound incurred in battle. If he'd lived, for all we know the US could be One Nation Under Zeus (or Wodin, or whoever) right now.

As for Alexander the Great, he was just plain nifty. I think I heard he was planning a campaign against Carthage before he died. If he'd lived to 80, he could've conquered all Europe, North Africa, and Western Asia, and have unified the whole western world under a dynasty of philosopher-kings dedicated to spreading Greek culture and ideas. Given a few more years, he might also have solved that whole "successor" issue.

I've been curious to know what the "U.S." would be like today if the American Revolution had failed.

Also, though it's a bit cliche to respond to this question with something like "Hitler is never born", it is interesting to think about just what is necessary to propel a nation into war / dictatorship / evil like that (e.g. just when can you kill / eliminate a single man and succeed in preventing it?) That's something I'm fairly curious about (and the scope of my curiosity isn't necessarily confined to Hitler - could be Bush II, Lincoln, Mao, an Islamic imam whose name I've forgotten, etc.).

I'd really, really like to see what the world would be like today if a single butterfly's wings had flapped slightly faster back in 5000 B.C.

If Einstein was wrong, and Newton right. More specifically, if experiments held at the time revealed the speed of light were relative and the earth moved in either.

I would try to study the effects of individual humans, Great-Man vs Historical Inevitability style, by knocking out statesmen of a particular period. Hitler is a cliche, whom I'd nonetheless start with; but I'd follow up by seeing what happens if you kill Chamberlain, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin... and work my way down to the likes of Turing and Doenitz. Do you still get France overrun in six weeks? A resurgent German nationalism? A defiant to-the-last-ditch mood in Britain? And so on.

Then I'd start on similar questions for the unification of Germany: Bismarck, Kaiser Wilhelm, Franz Josef, Marx, Napoleon III, and so forth. Then perhaps the Great War or the Cold War, or perhaps I'd be bored with recent history and go for something medieval instead - Harald wins at Stamford Bridge, perhaps. Or to maintain the remove-one-person style of the experiment, there's the three claimants to the British throne, one could kill Edgar the Confessor earlier, the Pope has a hand in it, there's the various dukes and other feudal lords in England... lots of fun to be had with this scenario!

A recent Facebook status of mine: Too bad Benjamin Franklin wasn't alive in 1835; he could have invented the Internet. The relay had been invented around then; that's theoretically all that's needed for computation and error correction, though it would go very slowly.

China not imposing the Hai Jin edict. Greater chinese exploration would have meant an extremely different and interesting history.

I'd like to know what would have happened if the Library of Alexandria hadn't been destroyed. If even the works of Archimedes alone -- including the key insight underlying Integral Calculus -- had survived longer and been more widely disseminated, what difference would that have made to the future progress of mathematics and technology?

What would that event be?

The easy and trite answer is: the event of EY discovering a correct FAI theory, which is so simple that it's fully described in the Wikipedia article.

I don't think you get a single outcome even from the best specified event-- you'd get a big sheaf of outcomes.

If you could see all the multiple futures branching off from the present and have some way of sorting through them, you could presumably make better choices than you do now, but it would still be very hard to optimize much of anything.

This one is hard.

Take Cannae, for example. Can you really measure this as one outcome? It could be broken down into all kinds of things:

• Varro's (or Paullus' if you happen to believe that Varro was indeed scapegoated for the disaster and that Paullus was really in command that day) decision to mass the legions in a phalanx, instead of their usual wide maniples.
• Whether the Celts, Celtiberians and Iberians would have been able to hold the center against the legionaires without breaking.
• Whether Hasdrubal would have managed to stop the Roman and Italian Cavalry
• I cannot recall who was in command of he Numidians on the other flank, but if they had not been turned around when they went to pursue The Italian Allied Cavalry on their flank, that side of the battlefield would not have been enveloped by the Punic/African Heavy Infantry that Hannibal had held back

And, one could continue, probably down to the level of "Did Legionaire Plebius manage to hurl his pila soon enough to impale the charging Celtberian Villoni in time to keep the aforementioned Celtiberian from eventually killing Plebius' centurian, who would have then gone on to kill Hannibal, just before he had time to issue the final order of the day?"

So, how are you defining "A single event" here?

Nice, I liked the part about Tuyuca:

Most fascinating is a feature that would make any journalist tremble. Tuyuca requires verb-endings on statements to show how the speaker knows something. Diga ape-wi means that “the boy played soccer (I know because I saw him)”, while diga ape-hiyi means “the boy played soccer (I assume)”. English can provide such information, but for Tuyuca that is an obligatory ending on the verb. Evidential languages force speakers to think hard about how they learned what they say they know.

It would be fun to try to build a "rational" dialect of English that requires people to follow rules of logical inference and reasoning.

I think it works very well as is. Upvoted.

Edit: but perhaps 'wondrous' for 'fortuitous'?

I'll just post the poem to stand by itself and for y'all to rip apart.

It reminds me of something that happened in college, where a poem of mine was being put in some sort of collection; there was a typo in it, and I mentioned a correction to the professor. He nodded wisely, and said, "yes, that would keep it to iambic pentameter."

And I said, "iambic who what now?"... or words to that effect.

And then I discovered the wonderful world of meter. ;-)

Your poem is trying to be in iambic tetrameter (four iambs - "dit dah" stress patterns), but it's missing the boat in a lot of places. Iambic tetrameter also doesn't lend itself to sounding serious; you can write something serious in it, sure, but it'll always have kind of a childish singsong-y sort of feel, so you have to know how to counter it.

Before I grokked this meter stuff, I just randomly tried to make things sound right, which is what your poem appears to be doing. If you actually know what meter you're trying for, it's a LOT easier to find the right words, because they will be words that naturally hit the beat. Ideally, you should be able to read your poem in a complete monotone and STILL hear the rhythmic beating of the dit's and dah's... you could probably write a morse code message if you wanted to. ;-)

Anyway, you will probably find it a lot easier to fix the problems with the poem's rhythm if you know what rhythm you are trying to create. Enjoy!

Go on and create the page on the wiki if you want.

http://predictionbook.com/ - doesn't include a registry for monetary bets, but it'd start narrowing things down.

I've noticed the same problem in separating work from procrastination environments. But it might work if it was asymmetric - say, there's a single fast hotkey to go from procrastination mode to work mode, but you have to type a password to go in the other direction. (Or better yet, a 5 second delay timer that you can cancel.)

I tried creating a separate login on my computer with no distractions, and tried to get my work done there. This reduced my productivity because it increased the cost of switching back from procrastinating to working.

A technical problem that is easily solvable. My approach has been to use VMWare. All the productive tools are installed on the base OS. Procrastination tools are installed on a virtual machine. Starting the procrastination box takes about 20 seconds (and more importantly a significant active decision) but closing it to revert to 'productive mode' takes no time at all.

I had the same problem when I was using just virtual screens with a key to switch, not even separate accounts. It was a significant decrease in productivity before I realized the problem. I think it's not just the effort to switch; it's also that the work doesn't stay visible so that you think about it.

My main characters in failed/incomplete/unsatisfactory stories are surprisingly reactive, that is, driven by events around them rather than by their own impulses.

That's not uncommon. Villains act, heroes react.

I hereby dub this the First Law of Fanfiction: Every change which strengthens the protagonists requires a corresponding worsening of their challenges. Or in plainer language, You can't make Frodo a Jedi without giving Sauron the Death Star.

It's already called The Law of Bruce, but it's stated a little differently.

Here's a nice visualisation of some big numbers.

Is this another example of a useful lie?

If it works, it can't be a lie. In any case, surely a sophisticated understanding does not say that intelligence is malleable or not-malleable. Rather, we say it's malleable to this-and-such an extent in such-and-these aspects by these-and-such methods.

People on lesswrong commonly talk as if intelligence is a thing we can put a number too, which implies a fixed trait.

No, it doesn't. What about weight?

The Na'vi didn't defect. The Na'vi refused to play. The human faction wouldn't accept any outcome that didn't end with them getting the unobtainium, and the Na'vi not playing was such an outcome, so the humans forced a game and, when the Na'vi still weren't cooperative, defected big-time. Since the game was spread out in time, this permitted retaliatory defection - which isn't part of the original non-iterated PD, nor is refusing to play.

If any dan-level statistician here has the inclination, I'll post a link to the paper here for your perusal...

Is there any reason not to post the link immediately? You are creating an additional barrier (pretty steep one) that lessens your chances of getting any cooperation.

You value things other than your own life, hence your life isn't priceless to you as well (there are hypothetical situations where you exchange your life for a significant improvement in the other things you value), though its value will of course be different for you and for other people, perhaps with the difference of couple orders of magnitude.

If you mean, "what would we pay to save your life", you could probably take up a respectable collection if you credibly identified a threat to your health that could be fixed with a medium-sized amount of money.

If you mean, "will we bribe you to hang out with us"... uh... no.

I need to read those links... I'll probably have to edit this as soon as I do...

Obviously, I did need to edit it. This is just a strange form of Modus Tollens except with a probabilistic thingy thrown in (pardon the technical term). Obviously, I need to go back and re-read the article again, because I am not seeing what they were talking about

If a person is an American, then he is probably not a member of Congress. (TRUE, RIGHT?)
This person is a member of Congress.
Therefore, he is probably not an American.

Valid reasoning. The problem lies in the failure to include all relevant knowledge (A member of Congress is very likely an American), not in the form of reasoning. The reason it looks so wrong is that we automatically add the extra premise on seeing discussion of a "member of Congress". Look at how the reasoning works in a context where there isn't such a premise:

If a person is an American, then he is probably not a Russian. (TRUE, RIGHT?)
This person is a Russian.
Therefore, he is probably not an American.

Somehow I get the feeling that the point your comment just whooshed over my head...

ETA: Okay, it's not valid reasoning. My point about the assumed premise of the reader remains though.

ETA: Yes it is valid reasoning. See my reply to Cyan.

My town has fairly recently (in the past ten years) added several new school buildings. The old buildings had problems (leaky roofs, no air conditioning, etc.) and the town's school-age population was growing.

Now, if they would only be willing to expand the library. :(

I knew perfectly well that I learned more or less the same whether the classroom was shiny new or grizzled gray and that this was true of just about every subject-matter*, and even then it was obvious that buildings must cost a lot to build and then maintain, and space didn't seem plausible (because I passed empty classrooms all the time and they were often the same classroom pretty much all day). So this always puzzled me as a kid - big buildings seemed like perfect white elephants. I could understand the donors' reason, but not anyone else's.

I don't know about that. I know that there are several buildings at my university that I hate to have classes in, because they're either too hot, too cold, or poorly ventilated. Yes, you're correct that in the majority of cases, the age of the building makes no difference (e.g. no one recognizes the difference between a two year old building and a twenty year old building), but in extremis, the age can make a difference (e.g. if the building does not have proper ventilation or temperature control). Its very difficult to keep focused when the classroom is 30 degrees Celcius and the lecture is two hours long.

I want to sign up. I don't want to sign up alone. I can't convince any of my family to sign up with me. Help.

Because trivial inconvieniences be a strong deterent, maybe someone should make a top-level post on the practicallities of cryonics; an idiots guide to immortality.

I wonder if any insurance companies have policies that cover cryonics? I have emailed a friend who is pretty tied in with the Alcor people in Austin Texas (as well as other cryonics companies, and in other locales) whom I asked for some info about what to do about paying for the service.

It seems that some form of indentured servitude should be available if they really have a belief that reanimation of some sort is possible.

We frequently become unconscious (sleep) in our threads of experience. There is no obvious reason we couldn't fall comatose after becoming sufficiently battered.

Even supposing this unpleasant scenario is true, it is not hopeless. There are things we can do to improve matters. The timescale to develop life extension and uploading is not a prior constant; we can work to speed it up, and we should be doing this anyway. And we can sign up for cryonics to obtain a better alternative worldline.

Not if, as is at least conceivable*, enough Friendly superintelligences model the past and reconstruct people from it that eventually most of your measure comes from them. (Or other, mostly less pleasant but seemingly much less likely possibilities.)

* It actually seems a lot more than "at least conceivable" to me, but I trust this seeming very little, since the idea is so comforting.

"The author recommends that anyone reading this story sign up with Alcor or the Cryonics Institute to have their brain preserved after death for later revival under controlled conditions."

(From a little story which assumes QTI.)

I'd have to say that the trollness seems obvious as all hell to me. Also, consider the prior probabilities.

Partial Fix #1:

We put together a special forum (subset of threads and posts) for a number of old argument topics, and make sure that it is readily accessible from the main page, or especially salient for new people. We have a norm there to (as much as possible) write out our points from scratch instead of using shorthand and links as we do in discussions between LW veterans.

Benefits:

• It's much less of a status threat to be told that one's comment belongs in another thread than to have it dismissed as happened to adefmay.

• Most of the trouble seems to happen when new people jump into a current thread and derail a conversation between LW veterans, who react brusquely as above. Separating the newest/most advanced conversations from the old objections should make everyone happier.

• I find that the people who have been on LW for a few months have just the right kind of zeal for these newfound ideas that makes them eager and able to defend them against the newest people, who find them absurd. I think this would be a good thing for both groups of people, and I expect it to happen naturally should such a place be created.

So if we made some collection of "FAQ threads" and made a big, obvious, enticing link to them on either the front page or the account creation page (that is, we give them a list of counterintuitive things we believe or interesting questions we've tackled, in the hopes they head there first), we might avoid more of these unfortunate calamities in the future.

Partial Fix #2:

I can't help but think that some people might have hesitated to downvote adefmay's first comment, or might have replied at greater length with a more positive tone, had it been obvious that this was in fact adefmay's first post. (I did realize this, but replied in a comically insulting fashion anyhow. Mea culpa.)

It might be helpful if there were some visible sign that, for instance, this was among the 20 first comments from an account.

When it became clear that adefmay couldn't role with the punches there were quite a few sensitive comments with good advice and explanations for why he/she had been sent links. His/her response to those was basically to get rude, indignant and come up with as many counter-arguments as possible while not once trying to understand someone else's position or consider the possibility he/she was mistaken about something.

I don't know if adefmay was intentionally trolling but he/she was certainly deficient in rationalist virtue.

That said, I think we need to handle newcomers better anyway and an FAQ section is really important. I'd help with it.

Years ago I was involved with both Loglan (the original) and Lojban (the spin-off, started by a Loglan enthusiast who thought the original creator was being too possessive of Loglan). For me it was simply an entertaining hobby, along with other conlangs such as Láadan and Klingon. But in the history of artificial languages, it is important as the first to be based on the standard universal language of mathematics, first-order predicate calculus.

There is some guy on the forums of Ray Kurzweil's website who regularly goes off on these huge tangents about Lojban and Pot and how AIs will all be the multi-agent Lojban speaking, pot smoking embodiments of... something...

Thus, where-ever/whenever I see the word lojban, I tend to have a negative reaction. I did manage to have a sane conversation with Steve Omohundro about Lojban when he spoke at my school last year, so my reaction has tempered somewhat. RichardKenneyway seems to say more about it (usefully) than I have said.

I'd be really curious to see what happened in a society where your social gender was determined by something else than your biological sex. Birth order, for instance. Odd male and even female, so that every family's first child is considered a boy and their second a girl. Or vice versa. No matter what the biology. (Presumably, there'd need to be some certain sign of the gender to tell the two apart, like all social females wearing a dress and no social males doing so.)

I'd like to know how many people would eat human meat if it was not so taboo (No nervous system so as to avoid nasty prion diseases). I know that since I accidentally had a bite of finger when I was about 19 that I've wondered what a real bite of a person would taste like (prepared properly... Maybe a ginger/garlic sauce???).

Also, building on Kaj Sotala's proposal, what about sexual assignment by job or profession (instead of biological sex). So, all Doctors or Health Care workers would be female, all Soldiers would be male, all ditch diggers would be male, yet all bakers would be female. All Mailmen would be male, yet all waiters would be female.

Then, one could have multiple sex-assignments if one worked more than one job. How about a neuter sex and a dual sex in their as well (so the neuter sex would have no sex, and the hermaphrodite would be... well, both...)

There are several that I've wondered about:

1. Raise a kid by machine, with physical needs provided for, and expose the kid to language using books, recordings, and video displays, but no interactive communication or contact with humans. After 20 years or so, see what the person is like.

2. Try to create a society of unconscious people with bicameral minds, as described in Julian Jaynes's "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind", using actors taking on the appropriate roles. (Jaynes's theory, which influenced Daniel Dennett, was that consciousness is a recent cultural innovation.)

3. Try to create a society where people grow up seeing sexual activity as casual, ordinary, and expected as shaking hands or saying hello, and see whether sexual taboos develop, and study how sexual relationships form.

4. Raise a bunch of kids speaking artificial languages, designed to be unlike any human language, and study how they learn and modify the language they're taught. Or give them a language without certain concepts (relatives, ethics, the self) and see how the language influences they way they think and act.