You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

Jiro comments on Crazy Ideas Thread, Aug. 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion

7 Post author: polymathwannabe 11 August 2015 01:24PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (240)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: James_Miller 11 August 2015 03:50:43PM 9 points [-]

Harvest organs from living, healthy, poor donors. Go to a poor country and find batches of 100 people earning $1 a day who are willing to give up their lives with probability .01 in return for 20 years wages. You will have to pay out $730,000 per batch, but in return you get the healthy organs from a living donor which should be worth a lot more than this. Run the operation as a charity to reduce negative publicity, and truthfully stress that the prime goal of the charity is to help the poorest of the poor.

Comment author: Jiro 11 August 2015 04:06:05PM *  7 points [-]

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.