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Punoxysm comments on What is the most anti-altruistic way to spend a million dollars? - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (93)
The real purpose it to get us thinking about whether our first impulse answers (probably industries and ideologies we'd like to take pot shots at) are actually really "the worst".
It can cast light on what effective altruism means.
And I really don't see anyone following this as a how-to manual, so I don't get why you say it's stupid.
What is a "real purpose" and why should I care about it, rather than the possible consequences a thread like this could bring about?
My first impulse was to try to arrange a war or at least a large secession movement somewhere in South-East Asia... :-P
The ones that have momentum are saturated, and the ones that don't won't get going with 1 million. Also, not all secessions have turned out poorly (though certainly many have).
Most people here do not believe in a benevolent god due to lack of evidence.
But many believe in basilisks and imagine that they need to watch what they say because they might let one loose. I wonder what is the evidence for these beliefs in basilisks?
That seems completely unrelated to the parent comment, are you sure you're responding to the right thing? Or are you just kind of spamming a "LW is a cult" type message?
I am questioning the belief of some that there is more harm from gaming negative scenarios in a forum like this than there is good from gaming negative scenarios in a forum like this. I am wondering where the evidence for this position might be. Throwing in the benevolent god thing was meant to motivate people who might take this as negative commentary to take the question seriously.
I would estimate that the worst idea posted here would probably be equivalently bad to killing about a million people. Do you think there's more or less than a 1 in a million chance of someone reading and executing one of these ideas?
I doubt you're correct on either of your estimates, but I am toying with putting up a new question along the lines of "what is the most anti-altruistic way to make a profit", in which case whatever ideas people have will most likely have already been tried.
There are so many examples of this in real life it would be hard tocome up with a new one. Open a casino, sell cigarettes or hard drugs, pump and dump penny stock operations, three card monty on a street corner, pickpocketing, high frequency stock trading, alternative medicine, making markets in synthetic mortgage backed securities, trafficking in human slaves, ponzi schemes, identity theft, selling things to people with alzheimers, and on and on and on.
I guess the hard part might be identifying which of these was the MOST antialtruistic.
Vastly less. I expect the chances of a given person genuinely wanting to indiscriminately harm humanity -- not just as an idle revenge fantasy or as a means of signaling cynicism, but as a goal motivating actual behavior even when it comes at high costs -- to be somewhere in the neighborhood of one in a million already, if not lower. The chance of such a person reading the offending post, following the reasoning, deciding to implement it, and coming up with the liquid money to fund it (million-dollar budgets don't grow on trees) is very small indeed.
It's much easier to find people that want to direct harm at some nation or identity group, but most of the ideas in this thread aren't so easily targeted.
On reflection, I think you're right that the chances are much lower than 1 in a million that a given human wants to indiscriminately harm humanity. Retracted.