I like the idea of this thread. I often have crazy ideas but few spring to mind right now.

I also wonder if the thread is off-topic for lesswrong. For being distracting and not rationalist or progress towards a goal.

I think "crazy idea" is underspecified. The kind of crazy idea that you probably want is an unusual way of meeting an acceptable goal and based on acceptable premises. You don't want someone posting "kill all the Jews" and you don't want someone posting "in order to get rid of the lizard invaders, we should..." even though those are certainly crazy ideas.

Of course, nobody would post those things outright, but there are shades of gray where the goal or premises are somewhat questionable, even if not outright as bad as killing all the Jews. (I think, for instance, that the "freedom from fear" post below is close to this.)

Is this a revival of the Munchkin Ideas thread?

By my rough casual count, around half of the ideas here that are action proposals have been either attempted or proposed by serious bodies.

I don't think this is a bad thing at all.

Nitpick: your post is tagged cary idea, not crazy idea.

Here's a web site that supports anonymous feedback, although I don't think it does anything like the karma calculation or review process that you mentioned. I have not used it; I just happened to notice that another LWer was using it when I was reading his comments earlier this week.

There have been a few apps based around this, though usually lacking the karma part. The one that comes to mind is Honesty Box for Facebook. (Which may no longer exist? I last heard of it several years ago.)

Child IQ scores tend to regress toward the mean as they get older.

First step in the study: paternity tests for the potential subjects.

How would they identify what's a mutation and what isn't? (Extreme rarity in the rest of the population?) The first few people to try doing this will most likely be quite unusual people; how confident could they be that any given unusual allele in their genome is a likely-deleterious mutation rather than something that makes them unusual in a valuable way?

I just want to get rid of the freaking lines and sines.

See Project Orion. It's motto was "Mars by 1965, Saturn by 1970."

A variation - an acceleration chamber like a synchrotron (or other circular acceleration system), with a flick to release a payload towards space. not sure if it would be viable on something heavier than a particle, and what would happen. to the payload being stretched in various G-forces, or how high you would get. (not being up on my physics enough to say if it would be catastrophic or viable)

Both your barrel and your payload need to be able to survive being at the epicenter of a nuclear explosion. Spitting jets of molten metal into space isn't particularly useful.

I don't think a working model of this would look much like a cannon. Nukes don't directly produce (much of) a shockwave; most of the shock comes from everything in the vicinity of the warhead absorbing a massive dose of prompt gamma and/or loose neutrons and suddenly deciding that all its atoms really need to be over there. So if you had a payload backed right against a nuke, even if it managed to survive the explosion, it wouldn't convert much of its power into velocity; Orion gets its power by vaporizing the outer layers of the pusher plate or a layer of reaction mass sprayed on it.

But it might be possible, nonetheless. The thing I have in mind might look something like a large chamber full of water with a nuke in the center of it, connected by some plumbing to the launch tube with the payload. Initiate the nuke, the water flashes into steam, the expanding steam drives the payload. Tricky part would be controlling the acceleration for a (relatively) smooth launch with minimal wasted energy.

(And, of course, you're left with a giant plume of radioactive steam that you still need to deal with.)

Nuclear space guns have been proposed. Aside from the manhole cover: http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/03/150-kiloton-nuclear-verne-gun.html http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/12/sea-based-launch-option-for-nuclear.html

(This appears in Hannu's Quantum Thief trilogy, incidentally.)

See also space gun.

This would at best be a temporary solution, since this was pretty much the status quo before MRSA was as big a deal as it is now. The continued presence of antibiotics will exert a selection pressure in favor of MRSA.

Soil bacteria, including Staphylococcus aureus, are already everywhere. I don't see how spreading more of them would reduce the old ones.

The social stigma of something like that seems like you're basically throwing away any hope of rehabilitation, but it's hardly as if the US is much good at that anyhow.

Ankle monitors are surprisingly annoying to wear. It would be a big, long-term punishment that would probably come on top of a prison sentence.

If you watched Tomorrow Never Dies, you should be wary of too much reliance on GPS.

How many technologies are you aware of that don't have a harmful potential application? I mean, (electronic) computers were invented for military purposes and can enable all kinds of mischief on the Internet. Refrigeration makes military logistics a lot easier. Hell, internal combustion drives tanks and other military vehicles. GPS makes cruise missiles easier, but pre-GPS ICBMs just used inertial targeting; that's close enough for thermonuclear bombs.

In HPMOR, Harry figures out a large number of ways to make weapons out of the materials present in a low-tech classroom. I doubt anything short of reducing the world to subsistence farming (and no more than that) is sufficient to bring about a state in which

"... no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor"

The swift response to trying to ban another nation's Dual-use technologies will come from single-use technologies: Guns and warheads.

In New York city workmen get send into prison for pocketknives they carry for work purposes. Dual use exists for a lot of very useful technologies.

the hope that people might enjoy ever enjoy the right of freedom from fear.

Such a right sounds pretty Orwellian to me.

Me too.

What, no conditionality there? I guess all EY's scary stories about not-quite-benevolent genies were a waste, after all... X-)

"There is life eternal within the eater of souls. Nobody is ever forgotten or allowed to rest in peace. They populate the simulation spaces of its mind, exploring all the possible alternative endings to their life. There is a fate worse than death, you know.''

Socrates has some sound advice on making requests of powerful beings:

Our prayers should be for blessings in general, for God knows best what is good for us.

Are there examples of interventions like this working out well?

The best way of doing this, is to have a big steel hollow sphere with vacuum inside. A detonation of a hydrogen bomb in the center would warm the sphere and some steam engines on the outside could harness this power.

The problem is, that the vacuum should be very high and the sphere quite large, so the outside pressure is an important factor. So you should place this gadget into orbit, where the cooling is not very simple. Nor the electricity transport back to Earth.

Otherwise, it's a good solution. This way we could have had fusion electricity some time ago. Perhaps with small hydrogen bombs a.k.a. neutron bombs. Otherwise those steel spheres would have to be too big to be stable on Earth.

Not so crazy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_PACER

Years ago I jokingly suggested to sell Crete to Turkey, in exchange for taking over Greece's debt (no doubt Turkey would jump at the opportunity and bend over to do anything possible to meet the debt payment criteria). The reactions I got were predictable, in the vein of "hell would freeze one hundred times over before this happens".

Jokes aside, selling territory (with actual sovereignty transfer, as opposed to simple real estate acquisition) seems to be a bit of no-go in the last decades. Especially selling it under duress for economical reasons.

I think you vastly underestimate the power of nationalism. Greece is especially vulnerable to nationalism due to a glorious ancient past and really long Ottoman occupation. Still I think any government who accepted that would be toppled by nationalists.

Selling territory is a big no-no, but selling EU citizenship is in fashion.

If you sell land, it's probably lost forever. If you sell land which was once part of your sovereign territory, you will have no claim over it (in contrast to a land which was taken from you by force).

One doesn't have to be a caricature of an ultra-nationalist to dislike the idea of losing something permanently to cure a temporary problem.

What about leasing it instead?

Some civilization would have thought of that and made sure to direct their research away from time travel and towards AI.

One thing I've never seen people mention re: time travel is that if you travel back in time six months, say, you'll find yourself floating out in space with the Earth on the other side of the Sun. (The Sun is in a slow orbit around the Milky Way, which itself is moving, right?) So practical time travel also requires practical space travel?

Since quantum mechanics is true, Deutsch self-consistency has pretty big advantages over Novikov self-consistency.

People are already attempting that since 2009 or so:

• https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=11583184257062107912
• https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=4202198002835248331

(Click /Cited by \d+/ to go down the rabbit hole.)

You're leaving out dark matter, dark energy, and the possibility of discovering additional weird and surprising factors.

No, it is not believed that gravity has a measurable effect on chemistry. People have pretty much no idea what kind of experiments would be relevant to quantum gravity. Moreover, the predictions that QFT makes about chemistry are too hard. I don't think it is possible with current computers to compute the spectrum of helium, let alone lithium. A quantum computer could do this, though.

Nitpick: we have equations for (special) relativistic quantum physics. Dirac was one of the pioneers, and the Standard Model for instance is a relativistic quantum field theory. I presume you mean general relativity (gravity) and quantum mechanics that is the problem.

(Douglas_Knight) Moreover, the predictions that QFT makes about chemistry are too hard. I don't think it is possible with current computers to compute the spectrum of helium, let alone lithium. A quantum computer could do this, though.

In the spirit of what Viliam suggested, maybe you could do computational searches for tractable approximations to QFT for chemistry i.e. automatically find things like density functional theory. A problem there might be that you do not get any insight from the result, and you might end up overfitting.

I really like this topic, and I'm really glad you brought it up; it probably even deserves its own post.

There are definitely some people who are trying this, or similar approaches. I'm pretty sure it's one of the end goals of Stephen Wolfram's "New Kind of Science" and the idea of high-throughput searching of data for latent mathematical structure is definitely in vogue in several sub-branches of physics.

With that being said, while the idea has caught people's interest, it's far from obvious that it will work. There are a number of difficulties and open questions, both with the general method and the specific instance you outline.

As far as I know, (1) we assume that the laws of the universe are simple

It's not clear that this is a good assumption, and it's not totally clear what exactly it means. There are a couple of difficulties:

a.) We know that the universe exhibits regular structure on some length and time scales, but that's almost certainly a necessary condition for the evolution of complex life, and the anthropic principle makes that very weak evidence that the universe exhibits similar regular structure on all length/time/energy scales. While clever arguments based on the anthropic principle are typically profoundly unsatisfying, the larger point is that we don't know that the universe is entirely regular/mathematical/computable and it's not clear that we have strong evidence to believe it is. As an example, we know that a vanishingly small percentage of real numbers are computable; since there is no known mechanism restricting physical constants to computable numbers, it seems eminently possible that the values taken by physical constants such as the gravitational constant are not computable.

b.) It's also not really clear what it means to say the laws of physics are simple. Simplicity is a somewhat complicated concept. We typically talk about simplicity in terms of Occam's razor and/or various mathematical descriptions of it such as message length and Kolmorogov complexity. We typically say that complexity is related to how long it takes to explain something, but the length of an explanation depends strongly on the language used for that explanation. While the mathematics that we've developed can be used to state physical laws relatively concisely, that doesn't tell us very much about the complexity of the laws of physics, since mathematics was often created for just that purpose. Even assuming that all of physics can be concisely described by the language of mathematics, I'm not sure that mathematics itself is "simple".

c.) Simple laws don't necessarily lead to simple results. If I have a set of 3 objects interacting with each other via a 1/r^2 force like gravity there is no general closed form solution for the positions of those objects at some time t in the future. I can simulate their behavior numerically, but numerical simulations are often computationally expensive, the numeric results may depend on the initial conditions in unpredictable ways, and small deviations in the initial set up or rounding errors early in the simulation may result in wildly different outcomes. This difficulty strongly affects our ability to model the chemical properties of atoms. Since each electron orbiting the nucleus interacts with each other electron via the coulomb force, there is currently no way to exactly describe the behavior of the electrons even for a single isolated many-electron atom.

d.) A simple set of equations is insufficient to specify a physical system. Most physical laws are concerned with the time evolution of physical systems, and they typically rely on the initial state of the system as a set of input parameters. For many of the systems physics is still trying to understand, it isn't possible to accurately determining what the correct input parameters are. Because of the potentially strong dependence on the initial conditions outlined in c.), it's difficult to know whether a negative result for a given set of equations/parameters implies needing a new set of laws, or just slightly different initial conditions.

In short, your proposal is difficult to enact for similar reasons that Solomonoff induction is difficult. In general there is a vast hypothesis space that varies over both a potentially infinite set of equations and a large number of initial conditions. The computational cost of evaluating a given hypothesis is unknown and potentially very expensive. It has the added difficulty that even given an infinite set of initial hypotheses, the correct hypothesis may not be among them.

If we live in a non-simulated universe, (almost) any claim of any religion can still be true. It's just so astronomically unlikely that we shouldn't spend any time considering it. (See: Pascal's Wager.)

How are ems different? A uniform prior over all possible religions isn't useful. What evidence would they have, from the mere fact of being in a simulation, that any particular set of religious claims is likely, aside from the bare claim "there are Simulators but we don't know anything about them except that they want our universe to be simulated"?

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.

I hesitate to mention this, but I believe there was a period where a crankish LWer or two was advocating religious belief on simulator-god grounds. I think it had more to do with intellectual hipsterism than anything.

Your culture point is also discussed in this Slate Star Codex post.

Poorer people are happier.

You have very likely not experienced poverty yourself.

1) I don't believe in maximizing happiness. That leads to wireheading, and also to the blissful ignorance problem where being falsely convinced of X is considered as good as actually having X.

2) When people who are poor have to make or borrow to get things, making and borrowing has a cost. The fact that richer people won't pay this cost shows that the cost is larger than the monetary price. If anything, this is an example of a poverty trap, since it means poorer people have to pay higher costs for things than richer people.

Evidence please. Your idea relies heavily on the thesis that poorer people are happier and have better social relations than rich people, do you have anything not anecdotal to support that?

My experience of seeing poverty in the US is that it comes with or from a whole host of other social problems like addiction, untreated physical and mental health issues, abuse, anxiety, overcrowding, fear of violence. These co-morbid problems are not conducive to neither happiness nor strong social ties, except in an unhealthy codependent way. I do know that children who grow up in poverty (without malnutrition) have brain development issues because of all the toxic anxiety and stress they were exposed to as a child, and that these problems persist through adulthood if untreated, even if the poverty conditions are removed. http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/what-poverty-does-to-the-young-brain

In fact, from a precursory google search, every article I see about the neurological effects of poverty is that it increases daily experience of negative emotions, chronic pain, increases the odds of all kinds of unpleasant experiences and mental health issues, and comes with a constant sense of anxiety.

The essence of poverty is that you cannot just buy all the things you need, you sometimes need to make them yourself or borrow.

Nope. The essence of poverty is that the choices available to you are severely limited because of lack of money.

Poor people need to help each other

True for poor people in poor countries, but false for poor people in countries with welfare states.

Poorer people are happier. Alternatively, even when the aggregate or average level of happiness is not higher, some factors in it are higher, while other hugely negative factors (i.e. actually being poor) reduce the average or aggregate greatly.

The positive factors are strong social bonds.

Some people trade off the pursuit of money for living in areas with stronger and more generally dispersed social capital, with cultures of mutual self help, and spend more time on building their own social capital within it.

They're poorer financially, but wealthier socially.

But some people are poorer financially in areas where the social capital is generally poor as well, and particularly poor for the financially poor.

The problem is that middle-class people are trying to form friendships through just hanging out with people or trying to find common, shared interests. This is not strong bonds.

Can you imagine examples of how well-to-do people can put themselves into situations where they need to borrow items or services / help from their neighbors?

I think the problem is that wealthier people can buy the services they need, and so do so. Buying it doesn't impose a burden on your social equals, and so doesn't require taking on such burdens in a reciprocal fashion.

As you go up the wealth scale, for more and more things, you'd rather trade off money for time and effort, and you're able to buy that trade off from people who would rather have your money than their time.

This is apparent to all, people who make less than you, and people who make the same.

The people who make less will likely resent your requests for help, certainly if you haven't yet banked some help to them first, but even if you have, they're still likely to resent your trading off their time versus your money, knowing that you don't see it as worthwhile when it's your time vs. your money.

The people who make the same as you probably have the same time vs. money preferences as you do, would rather trade off their own money for their own time on their own problem, and so certainly won't want to be spending their time on your problem, when you obviously should just be spending your own money instead.

I think you're right that you get social bonding out of relations of reciprocating mutual aid, and also right that this gets harder to accomplish as you become more wealthy.

But I think you're wrong about the poor being necessarily happier, as you assumed that the reciprocating mutual aid would naturally occur if your'e poor. A lot of social and cultural capital that doesn't exist everywhere is required to make that happen.

While I disagree with your description of happy poor people, I admit that the idea of creating stronger social bonds is appealing. Well, of course they would have to be social bonds with people I like, who would not abuse me... but then, doesn't the mere possibility of choosing people to bond with already reduce the strength of those bonds? Okay, we don't have to go to the very extreme, and still can try to increase the strength of the bonds, without necessarily maximizing it.

There are things people need help with, even if they are not necessary for survival. If you want to make a big project, you need people to cooperate with. So, have a dream, make it public, find people to cooperate with... and if you all feel strongly about the project, you will have the bonds. Just start an NGO.

If you want to compare with the mega-rich, find a group of people willing to found a cooperative, in a spirit of "together we all get rich; no one gets left behind". As opposed to usual startups where people try to do things alone or in very small teams; and hire other people as replaceable pawns. (Note: in the cooperative, you can still hire the pawns later; many cooperatives do; you will only have the strong bonds among the local aristocracy, but the aristocracy can have dozens of members.) Now you are competing against the rich companies, and the economical situation of each of you depends on your mutual cooperation.

Poor by what measure?

I haven't been poor myself, but I'll offer some weak evidence in favor of a weakened version of your thesis.

I've seen a fair number of people say that when they were children, they were poor but didn't know it, and they were happy. This suggests that (presumably above some level of destitution), low relative status affects people more than absolute wealth. I can't remember whether being poor but happy as a child is correlated with living in the country, but this wouldn't surprise me. It may also be true that children are better at being happy than adults, and this could be worth some study.

Spelling reform will fail because of regional differences in pronunciation. Also, spelling reform is bad for culture since it means that people taught the new system will be unable to read older material.

The International Phonetic Alphabet was originally meant to be used as a natural language writing system (for example, the journal of the International Phonetic Association was originally written in IPA: http://phonetic-blog.blogspot.com/2012/06/100-years-ago.html). Between IPA's theoretical (physiological) grounding, its wide use by linguists, and its near-legibility by untrained English literati, IPA is over-determined as the obvious choice for a reformed orthography, if English were every made to conform phonetically to a standard pronunciation. That said, it's not going to happen, because spelling reform is not urgent to anyone with capital to try it. Like, someone could make a browser extension that would replace words their IPA spellings, so that an online community could familiarize themselves with the new spelling, but no one has made that, or paid for it to be made, and this places a strong upper bound on how much anyone cares about spelling reform.

As long as this international english is restricted to diplomacy, commerce and science. I retch at the thought of literature written in a dry, unidiosyncratic, flavourless language with the charmless consistency of an office clerk.

Playing devil's advocate: Archaic spelling rules allow you to quickly gauge other people's intelligence, which is useful. It causes society to respect stupid people less, by providing objective evidence of their stupidity.

But I don't actually think the benefits outweigh the costs there, and the signal is confounded by things like being a native English-speaker.

EVE already works sufficiently like that.

This looks like Tipler's Omega point. Except that it's singular in the universe and for not clear reasons, it will resurrect us all in a simulated heaven.

If humanity did this, at least some of us would still want to spread out in the real universe, for instance to help other civilizations. (Yes, the world inside the computer is infinitely more important than real civilizations, but I don't think that matters.)

Also, if these super-Turing machines are possible, and the real universe is finite, then we are living in a simulation with probability 1, because you could use them to simulate infinitely many observer-seconds.

Seems to me that this "obvious solution" has exactly the same problem as the original one... "it would only take ONE civilization breaking this trend to be visible".

If you throw out justified you then consider what we intuitively consider delusional beliefs who happen to be accidentally true to be knowledge. Which conflicts with intuition. You can always bite the bullet on any conflict but that's boring.

Why limit it to the Americas? And can a lethal mutation be self-perpetuating?

Was anyone preserved for years and later revived in that movie? If anything, Anna's predicament (being slowly turned into ice) is a terrible threat to avoid.

Yep, having a transhuman abusive girlfriend would be a bad idea.

Having abusive partners is probably a bad idea even without transhumanism.

It sounds like you're imagining the situation as not being transhuman yourself. Is there any reason why you wouldn't be?