To any future super-intelligence reading this after my death: I very much want to be brought back to life.

How conscious are our models of other people? For example; in dreams it seems like I am talking and interacting with other people. Their behavior is sometimes surprising and unpredictable. They use language, express emotion, appear to have goals, etc. It could just be that I, being less conscious, see dream-people as being more conscious than in reality.

I can somewhat predict what other people in the real world will do or say, including what they might say about experiencing consciousness.

Authors can create realistic characters, plan their actions and internal thoughts, and explore the logical (or illogical) results. My guess is that the more intelligent/introspective an author is, the closer the characters floating around in his or her mind are to being conscious.

Many religions encourage people to have a personal relationship with a supernatural entity which involves modeling the supernatural agency as an (anthropomorphic) being, which partially instantiates a maybe-conscious being in their minds...

Maybe imaginary friends are real.

Ban music in political campaign advertisements. Music has no logical or factual content, and only adds emotional bias.

Here's an example of an ad with music intended to give two different emotional tones (optimistic/patriotic in the first six seconds, then sinister in the rest).

To learn about the genetic and environmental basis of intelligence study children who have significantly higher IQs than either of their biological parents.

Use computers to discover the Theory of Everything.

(I am not a physicist, so what I say here is probably wrong or confused, but I am saying it anyway, so at least someone could explain me where exactly am I wrong. Or maybe someone can improve the idea to make it workable.)

As far as I know, (1) we assume that the laws of the universe are simple, (2) we already have equations for relativity, and (3) we already have equations for quantum physics. However, we don't yet have equations for relativistic quantum physics. We also have (4) data about chemical properties of atoms, that is, about electron orbitals. I assume that for large enough atoms, relativistic effects influence the chemical properties of the atoms.

The plan is the following: Let the computer explore different sets of equations that are supposed to represent laws of physics. That is, take a set of equations, calculate what would be the chemical properties of atoms according to these equations, and compare with known data. Output those sets of equations that seem to fit. Create a smart generator for sets of equations, that would generate random simple equations, or iterate through the equation space starting with the simplest ones. Then apply a lot of computing power and see what happens.

(Inspired by: Einstein's Speed, That Alien Message.)

A crazy prediction: 25 years from now, what we call intermittent fasting will be called a normal daily schedule, and what we call a normal daily schedule (3 meals and some healthier snacks) will be called food addiction. And the primary reason for this change will not be even e.g. obesity but the mental effects: people will consider it an obvious truth that being constantly in a fed state dulls the mind and saps motivation and generates akrasia and generally harms productivity.

They will look back to us and think these people went through life half-asleep because they went through life constantly (nearly) sated.

They will says stuff like "you are a like a dolphin: if you feed yourself before you jumped through all the hoops you planned for that day, you won't jump through them".

Arriving to work with a breakfast in hand will be a bit like arriving to work with a beer in hand: if you roll best that way it is not for others to judge, but most people will prefer to work sober and sharp - and that means literally staying hungry. Today we joke about having a food coma and difficulty to concentrate after a work lunch, fixing ourselves up with coffee: this will sound a lot like as an 1950's person complaining that he finds it hard to concentrate after a two-martini lunch sounds today.

If we lived as ems in a simulated universe, literally any claim of any religion of any religion could be true. Any other claim, too.

The point is, when people seriously ponder if we lived in a simulated universe but have nothing but scorn for religions, it is not so much rational as cultural. In a sci-fi geek subculture, simulation is cool, religions not.

Culture, in this sense, means the following. If theory A and B makes the same predictions but the formulation, the wording of A seems vastly preferable than B - that is culture.

IMHO this is one of the most important kind of bias in me I need to control for. I need to ask myself "if this was reworded in a way that is culturally compatible with me, would I still reject it so strongly?" or the opposite "is it something entirely without merit, but merely worded in a way that presses my 'cool' buttons?"

Suppose backward time travel is possible. If so, it's probably of the variety where you can't change the past (i.e. Novikov self-consistent), because that's mathematically simpler than time travel which can modify the past. In almost all universes where people develop time travel, they'll counterfactualize themselves by deliberately or accidentally altering the past, i.e. they'll "cause" their universe-instance to not exist in the first place, because that universe would be inconsistent if it existed. Therefore in most universes that allow time travel and actually exist, almost all civilizations will fail to develop time travel, which might happen because those civilizations die out before they become sufficiently technologically advanced.

Perhaps this is the Great Filter. It would look like the Great Filter is nuclear war or disease or whatever, but actually time-consistency anthropics are "acausing" those things.

This assumes that either most civilizations would discover time travel before strong AI (in the absence of anthropic effects), or strong AI does not rapidly lead to a singleton. Otherwise, the resulting singleton would probably recognize that trying to ... (read more)

Greece lacks money, but they do have a whole lot of reasonably large, quite beautiful islands they barely use (only a small fraction of the 1200 islands are significantly inhabited) but which have the ideal Mediterranean climate for human habitation. Selling off sovereignty over these islands to other countries or to new country projects would be a great way to get some quick cash and there might be some downstream benefits, like increased trade in the region.

Aedes aegypti (the "Dengue mosquito") should be eradicated from the Americas by releasing genetically-modified mosquitoes carrying self-perpetuating lethal mutations.

Fusion energy from... hydrogen bombs. Is there a way? Maybe underground explosions with water pumped in, turning to high-pressure steam, and powering a turbine?

A large-scale social experiment in the form of a MMOG to recreate dynamics of feudalism, possibly intensified by being bet upon.

• There are a fixed number of castles in the game. Each castle has one owner at a given time.
• A castle provides a steady income to its owner. This is the only source of in-game money.
• A group of players can jointly attack a castle. If they defeat the current owner and any allied players in in-game combat, a pre-specified member of the attackers becomes the new owner.
• The game does not provide contract enforcement mechanisms. You can recruit an attacking army by promising them a share of the castle's income, but they only have your word you'll follow through.
• (optional) A monthly payout is distributed in proportion to in-game wealth. If the game were widely played, and wealth were highly concentrated, this could be very significant for some. Failing this, soft messaging such as leaderboards encourages amassing wealth as a goal.

The idea would be to see the coalition dynamics that play out. My suspicion is that people would at first try egalitarian coalitions to share income evenly, but over time things would get more and more hierarchical as established coalitions started admitting 'junior partners' on worse terms.

I always thought that the "most civilizations just upload and live in a simulated utopia instead of colonizing the universe" response to the Fermi Paradox was obviously wrong, because it would only take ONE civilization breaking this trend to be visible, and regardless of what the aliens are doing, a galaxy of resources is always useful to have. But i was reading somewhere (I don't remember where) about an interesting idea of a super-Turing computer that could calculate anything, regardless of time constraints and ignoring the halting problem. I... (read more)

If one were to build a cannon (say a large, thick pipe buried deep underground) and use a nuclear bomb as propellant, could they achieve anything interesting? For example, boost a first stage payload to orbit, or perhaps Earth escape velocity? The only prior art I know of for this is the Pascal-B nuclear test shot.

What if doing housework is actually bad for people? It's certainly something that people have to be trained into, and that a lot of people resist doing. No one does it for the fun of it.

A single world language should be designed and promoted. Previous attempts have been too Eurocentric to take advantage of all useful grammatical features that are available.

Alternative option: English is already a de facto world language, and it is well suited to borrowing foreign terms when it needs to, but humanity should be ashamed that it conducts its main scientific, commercial and diplomatic operations in a language with such a defective writing system. Spelling reform (or a completely new, purely phonetic alphabet) is urgent. I would advocate adapting Hangul for that purpose.