CarlShulman comments on Contests vs. Real World Problems - Less Wrong

15 Post author: badger 25 March 2009 01:29AM

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Comment author: CarlShulman 25 March 2009 08:44:51PM *  6 points [-]

A policy against it may provide some marginal disincentive to future scientists under vile regimes.

Edit: of course the real cause of the objection is just 'moral contamination,' the same trigger-happy associational neural machinery used to avoid poisonous foods attaches negative affect to anything associated with the Nazis. But the heuristic can sometimes be useful, just as our cooperative emotions can be hacks to implement binding commitments.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 26 March 2009 12:20:23AM 5 points [-]

If we assume those scientists actually care about their future number of citations, then yes.

Comment author: taw 26 March 2009 12:15:09AM 1 point [-]

How likely is it to be a result of genuine reasoning leading to this conclusion, and how likely is it to be just a rationalization of the yuck factor? It seems pretty straightforward.