Talk by Mike Hearn on autonomous agents enabled by bitcoin.

Here's an example from World of Warcraft:

In group content in WoW (i.e. teaming up with other players to kill big monsters — the high-end, maximally challenging game content), one of the key roles is the damage-dealer, or "DPS" (damage per second). One of the DPS classes is the hunter, a ranged attacker. The hunter's job is to deal as much damage to the enemies as fast as possible.

Like all DPS classes, hunters have a wide variety of damage-dealing abilities, with names like Aimed Shot, Arcane Shot, Serpent Sting, etc. Traditionally, damage-dealing classes use their abilities in complex, shifting sequences, called a "rotation", to maximize DPS. (The reasons for this are beyond the scope of this discussion.)

At one point, I was playing a hunter in high-end raid encounters, and consistently performing very well (doing significantly more damage than anyone else). I would often group with other hunters, who were not performing nearly as well. I often had conversations that went like this:

Other hunter: Hey, how are you doing that much damage?
Me: Oh, I just use Steady Shot over and over. Nothing else.
OH: Haha (they think I am joking)
Me: No, seriously. Look at the damage meters. Steady Shot over and over, never use any other ability. That's how you maximize DPS.
OH: That's dumb / that makes no sense / some other similar reply

<next raid, same person>

OH: I still am not doing very much damage...
Me: looking at damage meter You're using Serpent Sting / Arcane Shot / thing that is not Steady Shot. Why? Just use Steady Shot. Literally never hit any other button. I promise you that is how I'm doing it, look at the meters if you don't believe me.
OH: But Serpent Sting does damage over time!
Me: ... it's less damage than just using Steady Shot and nothing else. I can show you the math that proves this, or you can just look at the fact that you are doing the thing you said and doing much less damage than me.
OH: Well, you can do it that way, but this rotation works for me.
Me: gives up

In short, I met many people whom I simply could not convince that the way to maximize performance was to just hit one single button over and over. They insisted on complicating things, gaining no performance benefit and incurring a significant performance penalty. Note that none of these people ever said anything like the following:

"Yes, I realize that hitting Steady Shot repeatedly would maximize performance; however, I find that boring, and so I prefer to hit various buttons, because I find that more entertaining, and I willingly incur the performance hit involved."

These were people who were denied spots in raids (and rightly so!), i.e. denied access to game content, on the basis of their poor performance. They had a clear incentive to improve, yet did not.

We were a loud mob throwing rocks at a lion to steal its prey?

Same talks can also be found at Adam Ford's channel. It also has other interesting videos like this interview with Robin Hanson.

It was recently brought to my attention that Eliezer Yudkowsky regards the monetary theories of Scott Sumner (short overview) to be (what we might call) a "correct contrarian cluster", or an island of sanity when most experts (though apparently a decreasing number) believe the opposite.

I would be interested in knowing why. To me, Sumner's views are a combination of:

a) Goodhart's folly ("Historically, an economic metric [that nobody cared about until he started talking about] has been correlated with economic goodness; if we only targeted this metric with policy, we would get that goodness. Here are some plausible mechanisms why ..." -- my paraphrase, of course)

b) Belief that "hoarded" money is pure waste with no upside. (For how long? A day? A month?)

If you are likewise surprised by Eliezer's high regard for these theories, please join me in encouraging him to explain his reasoning.