I dislike these threads. They encourage and reward ill thought out contrarian (often straight up crackpot) ideas. Correcting them is a large cost, in part because convincing an audience doesn't require arguing things that are true, it merely requires arguing things that take more time to refute than to assert. I'd rather not get tangled up in object level for this reason by citing real examples but here is an example of the kind of idea I would expect to see here.

Made up crazy idea (that I expect some people here would endorse):

"Get rid of research ethics boards, they prevent useful research from being done that would benefit society out of an ill founded fear of us becoming the Nazis"

This sort of argument ignores the history behind why research ethics boards exist, and is usually asserted by people who are ignorant of the actual guidelines that research ethics boards abide by. It's also usually asserted without knowledge of the actual abuses of patient trust that were committed before research ethics guidelines were established), which include withholding known treatments and doing liver toxicity study in children without telling them (quite an extensive one in which biopsies were taken, and upon recovery, liver toxicity was re-induced leading to damage lasting at least a month).

(Of course, it took me much longer to write that response than to make the initial claim)

One could say that the US has tried before, and it didn't work out well for them. The time to do it would have been after the Spanish American War; instead of a Cuban republic, absorb it into the US as a state (or collection of states).

It is unclear whether nations are better off trying to have high average value (per capita gdp, say) or high total value (total gdp, say). If a nation is pursuing the first strategy, then they wouldn't accept a petition for a lower-value region to join. One could try to ask whether or not the US is better off with Puerto Rico than it would be if Puerto Rico were independent, for example. If a region has an economy dominated by agriculture and tourism, for example, a country whose economy is dominated by services and manufacturing will find any wealth redistribution schemes flowing out of the developed part to the undeveloped part. It's probably better to let the businesses do that with their own funds, rather than have the government play a part.

As well, the general rule since ~1950 appears to be that countries should only become smaller.

Why is Cuba a better target of annexation than, say Mexico? Or Puerto Rico? Or the whole lot of Caribbean islands? (I assume imperialist fat cats want beaches for their model girlfriends to tan on)

If you break it, you have to fix it. Annexing Cuba would mean having to spend a lot of money on it and generally dealing with it. The population is Spanish speaking and currently the prospect of getting more Spanish speaking immigrants isn't popular in the US.

Allow a reporting lag of a few years to give participants an incentive to innovate without fear that any success would just be immediately copied, although require immediate reporting on the enhancements used by any athlete who dies or suffers serious harm.

While I'm not sure about some of the details, I agree that performance enhancing drugs should be legal. They certainly are no less fair than the genetic lottery, and no more dangerous than training can be.

Is that actually illegal or just against the rules? I would expect it would be perfectly legal to start your own, although I could see why people might object if you don't at least limit it to make sure it stays at safe levels. And if you do limit it, you'll have all those advantages you said, but not the obvious one of not having cheaters. It's just as hard to tell if someone's doping more than they should as it is to tell if they're doing it at all.

There's this book series.

And/or a video game!

I think the General Semantics folks have some of this.

http://www.generalsemantics.org/the-general-semantics-learning-center/teaching-materials/

Most people do not consider "perform a single step which has an X chance of death" and "perform two steps, one of which is an X chance, and another of which kills with certainty the person chosen in the first step" to be equivalent.

Most of the world has deontological ethics, not consequentialist.

Healthy people earning 1$ a day? How certain can you be of your choice?

Even if we ignored the ethical problems with this system, imagine the horrifically creative ways people would find to abuse it. Especially as those countries are usually also famous for high corruption and occasional ethnic cleansings.

Leaving aside all that ethical stuff....

What do you do when the 'winner' of the lottery runs away? The people who sign up will be weighted towards those who believe that they can escape, and once you have won the contest, the calculation becomes a risk of 100%, not 1%, so the motivation to escape is high.

Politically, asking people from a very poor country to accept that people from rich countries (or perhaps even worse, a rich upper class) are taking their countrymen apart for spare pieces is almost certainly going to increase the risk of public unrest.

And finally, while this is a solution, it is probably not the best or most workable. I suspect that you could get nearly equivalent outcomes in ROI and end up helping more people in both countries if you either paid people for becoming organ donors registered at the local hospital and with a contract specifying that you get the organs, or alternatively, paid families post-death for rights to organs. This might result in a delay in getting your first batch, and would mean more paperwork and more in depth ties with the local medical systems, but would cause much less social/political brouhaha.

However, I do support you setting up your foundation simply so that when someone proposes the solution in the above paragraph, people consider it to be the sane option :-)

Several issues;

1. I didn't think that many organs were needed.

2. tissue typing is difficult and rare to find a match.

3. this would probably discourage the creation of synthetic organs that would actually solve the problem without a need for removing the organs of other people.

Ancient idea, actually.

Edited to add: Current proposals.

River creation is an interesting example of something which isn't forbidden by the laws of physics, but seems utterly unfeasible. Is there any imaginable technology for making rivers?

Perhaps if you replace the word "river" with the word "canal"..?

The obstacle to making a river is usually getting the water uphill to begin with. Regular cloud seeding of moist air currents that would otherwise head out to sea? Modifying land albedo to change airflow patterns? That's all dubious, but I can't think of any other ideas for starting a new river with new water.

If you've got a situation where the water you want to flow is already "uphill", then the technology is simply digging, and if you wanted to do enough of it you could make whole new seas.

Airship transport is even cheaper and more energy-efficient.

Canal creation was the infrastructure boom at the start of the industrial revolution, before railroads. One particularly impressive work is the Barton Aqueduct.

Use clean (mostly fusion) nuclear weapons to blast a channel through the landscape.

I wonder how many canals are being built these days. That used to be a big thing. Maybe all the low hanging fruit got done long ago.

On river making technology, there must be something. Just read an article that the Danube had been straightened out in a section between Croatia and Serbia in the 19th century.

Not only the rivers. But also huge tunnels from the sea to the interior cities. like Denver or Munich.

Large container ships may bring goodies deep inside the continents. A whole network of such underground channels would be nice.

They render judgement, guided only by their own morality

I vote to put this on 4chan X-D

This reminds me of the game Nomic wherein the players simply agree on a small set of Initial rules like {players start with 0 points, player with 100 points wins, in each round each player may introduce a new rule, player that introduces a rule that makes the rule set inconsistent loses, the initial rules may not be changed or invalidated}. I've heard that these games can continue for years and result in pretty complex rule systems.

This is called emancipation of minors.

I think drinking is also about the idea that it might cause problems to people who aren't fully grown. I don't know if that's true, but I don't think that matters politically.

Not arbitrary! Those are not small effect sizes. To determine that someone's neurological development is such that they are not at the same level of risk for alcohol dependence as the general population, requires a test that doesn't exist. Moreover there is no need for such a test to exist because simple rules work better than complex rules. The drinking age law is simple and effective.

Who would you trust to design the tests and the criteria for good backgrounds?

I think the research I've seen in this area has been looking at kids younger than kindergarten age. Also, be careful with your dirty -- bug, bird, and rodent droppings may may asthma worse.

Additional assumptions you are making: 1. The only cost of suicide is physical pain 2. Humans mature into rational adults immediately after birth

You assume people will commit suicide if their life is not worth living. People have a strong instinct against suicide, so I doubt they'd do it unless their life is not worth living by a wide margin.

But what would the student do, if he goes from the stipend of 60$ per month to the salary of 32? (And he cannot quit.)

Here are some perspectives on education:

• Education of an individual provides expected benefits to that individual. He or she will have better career opportunities than if he or she did not receive that education. Therefore, the cost of education should be borne primarily by the individual, for instance in the form of debts that must be repaid.
• Education of an individual provides expected benefits to the whole society in which that individual lives and works. He or she will be capable of greater productivity, which will have positive but diffuse externalities for a very large number of people. Productivity increases, however, accrue mostly to the wealthier members of society. Therefore, the cost of education should be borne primarily by the public in general, for instance in the form of tax-funded grants, but these should be funded by progressive taxes on income or wealth.
• Education of an individual provides expected benefits to the individual's future employers, as workers with particular skills are scarce and obtained on a competitive job market. When an educated person is hired (and thus removed from the job market for the moment), there are fewer educated candidates available to the next employer. Therefore, the cost of education should be borne primarily by employers of educated workers, for instance in the form of a payroll tax; or a payment to the educator from the employer.
• Education should not be modeled as a future economic benefit to particular parties, but as a duty of society to its own next generation, based on the benefit of past education: to a first approximation, everyone has received benefits that would not be possible without oneself and one's fellows and predecessors having been educated; therefore, everyone bears responsibility to pay it forward, proportional perhaps to the benefit that they themselves have received.

How?

More generally I do sometimes worry that attack vectors which seem obvious and dangerous to me simply haven't been though of by deeply unimaginative malicious people and so feel vaguely worried about even mentioning them as a negative possibility if I can't find people already proposing them with google.

Since we'd rather look at fit people than fat people, physical fitness has positive externalities, and should therefore be subsidised.

Since we'd rather look at people we can visually identify with than people we can't, ethnic segregation has positive externalities, and should therefore be subsidised.

Employers pay well-dressed people more money and in general beautiful people get all sorts of advantages. Do you think that isn't enough of a subsidy?

Potential problem. Jump to "now let’s get to the fashion."

Ethereum is somewhat close to this.

So, Folding at Home, but with money involved? Any idea if it can justify the increased electrical bills?

I think a system that does that does this that provides good VPNs/Proxys would be a winner. When the system runs on an internal currency it can get much faster than Tor.

I would add a way to allow people to connect to your router and then connect to a VPN.

I don't see how this competes with AWS on cost / reliability / etc. on the demand-side. On the supply side, consider cloud server racks as home heating devices.

package of common tasks you can use, such as DDoS

LOL

But generally speaking it would be interesting to see what the kids of BitTorrent ("you can play only if you share") and Tor ("nah, thank you, we'll set up our own network") might look like.

Am I correct to paraphrase you this way: maximizing EX and maximizing P(X > a) are two different problems.

To translate. Do not buy this LW-Yudkowsky AI mantra how hard, difficult and dangerous it is. Do it at home, for yourself, have no fear!

Well, or find a way to bottle mania.

Isn’t that growth mindset? (Is growth mindset not rational?)

Achieving something great may require your confidence in its possibility, but the reasonableness of that confidence is only discovered in hindsight. It's not uncommon to stumble upon a true belief while having begun with wrong evidence.

Rationality and common sense might be bad for your chances of achieving something great, because you need to irrationally believe that it's possible at all.

That is true.

If you want to achieve something great, don't be a skeptic about it. Be utterly idealistic.

Well, umm... there is the slight issue of cost. If you are deliberately choosing a high-risk strategy to give yourself a chance of a huge payoff, you need to realize that the mode of outcomes is you failing. Convincing yourself that you are destined to become a famous actress does improve your chances of getting into the movies, but most people who believe this will end up as waitresses in LA.

It's like "If you want to become a millionaire, you need to buy lottery tickets" :-/

In other words, laziness and overconfidence bias cancel each other out, and getting rid of the second without getting rid of the first will cause problems?

There are a lot of ways to be irrational, and if enough people are being irrational in different ways, at least some of them are bound to pay off. Using your example, some of the people with blind idealism may get stuck to an idea that they can accomplish, but most of them fail. The point of trying to be rational isn't to do everything perfectly, but to systematically increasing your chances of succeeding, even though in some cases you might get unlucky.

As a data point to support this, overconfidence correlates positively with income.

I think it is more interesting to study how to be simultaneously supermotivated about your objectives and realistic about the obstacles. Probably requires some dark arts techniques (e.g. compartmentalization). Personally I find that occasional mental invocations of quasireligious imagery are useful.

I wrote a post arguing that what is irrational overconfidence for an individual can be good for society. (In short, scientific knowledge is a public good, individual motivations to produce it is likely too low from a group perspective, and overconfidence increases individual motivation so it's good.)

To extend this a bit, if society pays people to produce scientific knowledge (in money and/or status), then overconfident people would be willing to accept a lower "salary" and outcompete more rational individuals for the available positions, so we should expect that most science is produced by overconfident people. (This also applies to any other attribute that increases motivation to work on scientific problems, like intellectual curiosity.) As a corollary, people who produce science about rationality (e.g., decision theorists) are probably more overconfident than average, people who work at MIRI are probably more overconfident than average, etc.

In brainstorming, a common piece of advice is to let down your guard and just let the ideas flow without any filters or critical thinking, and then follow up with a review to select the best ones rationally. The concept here is that your brain has two distinct modes of operation, one for creativity and one for analysis, and that they don't always play well together, so by separating their activities you improve the quality of your results. My personal approach mirrors this to some degree: I rapidly alternate between these two modes, starting with a new idea, then finding a problem with it, then proposing a fix, then finding a new problem, etc. Mutation, selection, mutation, selection... Evolution, of a sort.

Understanding is an interaction between an internal world model and observable evidence. Every world model contains "behind the scenes" components which are not directly verifiable and which serve to explain the more superficial phenomena. This is a known requirement to be able to model a partially observable environment. The irrational beliefs of Descartes and Leibniz which you describe motivated them to search for minimally complex indirect explanations that were consistent with observation. The empiricists were distracted by an excessive focus on the directly verifiable surface phenomena. Both aspects, however, are important parts of understanding. Without intangible behind-the-scenes components, it is impossible to build a complete model. But without the empirical demand for evidence, you may end up modeling something that isn't really there. And the focus on minimal complexity as expressed by their search for "harmony" is another expression of Occam's razor, which serves to improve the ability of the model to generalize to new situations.

A lot of focus is given to the scientific method's demand for empirical evidence of a falsifiable hypothesis, but very little emphasis is placed on the act of coming up with those hypotheses in the first place. You won't find any suggestions in most presentations of the scientific method as to how to create new hypotheses, or how to identify which new hypotheses are worth pursuing. And yet this creative part of the cycle is every bit as vital as the evidence gathering. Creativity is so poorly understood compared to rationality, despite being one of the two pillars, verification with evidence being the other, of scientific and technological advancement. By searching for harmony in nature, they were engaging in a pattern-matching process, searching the hypothesis space for good candidates for scientific evaluation. They were supplying the fuel that runs the scientific method. With a surplus of fuel, you can go a long way even with a less efficient engine. You might even be able to fuel other engines, too.

I would love to see some meta-scientific research as to which variants of the scientific method are most effective. Perhaps an artificial, partially observable environment whose full state and function are known to the meta researchers could be presented to non-meta researchers, as objects of study, to determine which habits and methods are most effective for identifying the true nature of the artificial environment. This would be like measuring the effectiveness of machine learning algorithms on a set of benchmark problems, but with humans in place of the algorithms. (It would be great, too, if the social aspect of scientific research were included in the study, effectively treating the scientific community as a distributed learning algorithm.)

I think that very much depends on what you mean with rationality. The kind of rationality this community practices leads for better or worse to a bunch of people holding contrarian beliefs that certain things are possible that general society doesn't consider to be possible.

In HPMOR you have "do the impossible", "heroic responsibility" and "having something to protect" all as part of the curriculum.

I don't know if I would hate on Hume this much. Hume is pretty big.

I agree with your broader point, though, I think. At the highest levels, EVERYTHING has to go right, including having the hardware, and having a super work ethic, and having a synergistic morale (an irrationally huge view of own importance, etc.)

I seem to vaguely recall a novel in which a world government had declared that in order to promote hybrid vigor and resistance to disease, same-race marriages and matings should be considered equivalent to incest. People who were not already mixed-race were permitted to marry or have children only with a partner of a different racial background.

The slightly-secret reason for this was to prevent future outbreaks of racial violence by blending the races. Although everyone in the story's present day was opposed to racism, it might come back in the future. (I'm guessing the novel was written in the '60s or '70s.)

And the real reason for it was to reduce population, since most people were still System-1 racist even though they were System-2 anti-racist. Making the only socially acceptable partners be ones of other races meant that people were overall less likely to find partners and have children.

Why would we want a higher "shuffle rate"?

What we need is planet-sculpting

Terraforming is the usual term.

more and smaller land masses

Artificial islands exist.

Can't we terraform them without disrupting entire orbits?

There are two major problems with how the earth is currently set up. Only the surface is habitable, and it's a sphere, which is known for having the minimum possible surface area for its volume. A Matrioshka brain would be a much more optimal environment. Although that depends on your definition of "human being".

perhaps the right thing is to move Venus and Mars to more convenient orbits

Also, we can (in theory) harvest a lot of gravitational potential energy by pulling Mars closer to the Sun.

It's not a crazy idea at all; it's more on the field of "The world is a dumber place because this needs to happen and hasn't yet."

Totally agree.

Amusing story: I work at NIST this summer. They have posters that say things like "Think Metric" here, but the food scales in the cafeteria are still in pounds.