Thought that people (particularly in the UK) might be interested to see this, a blog from one of the broadsheets on Bostrom's Superintelligence

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/tomchiversscience/100282568/a-robot-thats-smarter-than-us-theres-one-big-problem-with-that/

I think the Kickstarter idea is interesting as a way to try to identify large-enough areas where a voting bloc might exist - and might make a more credible commitment than just a petition from people saying they'll vote based on something, which people might sign several of just because they support the cause. Otherwise, as people have said, this is something that pretty much exists already in various forms.

I think the fundamental problem with all the things you mention (transhumanism, homeopathy, FAI etc) is that the number of people per constituency who actually care about these enough to vote based on them would be miniscule. If this sort of thing was going to work, it would be on something with wider and more visceral appeal.

You also have to get things on the agenda - and realistically on the agenda - as well as get votes. The Government of the day sets the vast majority of what's debated, and deals with budgets etc. I therefore think this works better for things that are already being debated, and where the decision can be made somewhat independently from the broader government programme (e.g. the Eurosceptic one you mentioned). Otherwise there's little reason to think that the MP will get a chance to vote for your policy. You mention private membes Bills, but (i) they may not get one (ii) they're certainly not likely to get many, so you're asking them to give up a chance to promote their real priorities and/or build credibility with some other group. This is really unlikely, and makes defecting more likely: how many of your Kickstarters would really blame them if they raised an issue that had just emerged as a big urgent problem? (iii) they don't get passed all that often, ESPECIALLY on budgetary-type things: the science spend will already have been allocated to the Research Councils on a fairly long-term basis as part of an overall Spending Review, MPs don't very often just vote for a slug of money to go to something. You're talking about getting an exra £1bn out of the Treasury or diverting about a 30th of the already-allocated science budget: I don't see it happening.

Finally, I wouldn't be entirely surprised if that Kickstarter commitment to vote certain ways was regarded as breaking a law established to protect the secret ballot and prevent vote-rigging

This sort of standardised/independent testing would have a much more radical effect than the professor-teacher relationship. From my experience in the UK, plenty of people could get a decent grade at various humanities subjects just by doing a couple of weeks of 'revising' the subjects raised in exams and making sure they understood how it was graded. With university increasingly expensive (in the UK fees were introduced about 20 years ago, rose to £3k a year 10 years ago and rose to up to £9k a year a couple of years ago), it would be very interesting to see the effect of someone being able to get a degree in English by demonstrating their ability rather than having to pay the time/money cost of 3 years of studying.

I'm not sure the results would be overall good: you'd get more hothousing and less depth of knowledge etc. etc. But I think it would be quite meritocratic both for first-time students and for people in work who'd like to respecialise in something needing a new degree but find the costs of doing the course prohibitive.

It would also expose a huge difference between degrees that just require a library and a computer, and degrees that require access to labs of various kinds.

This area (or perhaps just the example?) is complicated somewhat because for authority-based moral systems (parental, religious, legal, professional...) directly ignoring a command/ruling is in itself considered to be an immoral act: on top of whatever the content of said act was. And even if the immorality of the act is constant, most of those systems seem to recognise in principle and/or in practice that acting when you suspect you'd get a different order is different to direct breaking of orders.

This makes sense for all sorts of practical reasons: caution around uncertainty, the clearer Schelling point of 'you directly disobeyed', and, cynically, the fact that it can allow those higher in the authority chain plausible deniability (the old "I'm going to pay you based on your sales. Obviously I won't tell you to use unscrupulous methods. If you ask me directly about any I will explicitly ban them. But I might not ask you in too much detail what you did to achieve those sales: that's up to you")

Orin is willing to risk the kingdom as there is very real impact on being wrong. 10 likewise lost bets could ruin the kingdom. It's not a good test of truthfullness but it test's that the subjects knows the gravity and is sure he did not misunderstand anything.

Also Orin net worth is 3-4 lifetimes of skilled work? He must have inherited more than he will ever make. Assuming 3 kids per generation and one working parent the reward will see almost all of his 81 great grandchidlren workfree (as there is enough money to fund 100 lives).

The only way to be indifferent about whether honest persons have valid intel or not is to earn money equal to the damages of raising the bridges. 1000c / (200c/p / 70y / 365d/y *3d) the population of the kingdom is about 42583 if the skilled craftman's life payments would be the average payments (but it is not so it's more).

*miscalculated king winnigs of 800c resulted in population of 34066.

If there's a reason to be interested in average IQ beyond mutual ego-massage, I guess the best way would be to have an IQ test where you logged on as 'Less Wrong member X' and then it reported all the results, not just the ones that people chose to share.

Would still suffer from selection effects. People that thought they might not do so well would be disinclined to do it, and people who knew they were hot shit would be extra inclined to do it. The phrase "anonymous survey" doesn't really penetrate into our status-aware hindbrains.

This doesn't seem to me to be about fundamental intelligence, but upbringing/training/priorities.

Well, then I have to ask what you think "fundamental intelligence" consists of, if not ability with (and consequently patience for and interest in) abstractions.

Can we taboo 'intelligence', perhaps? We are discussing what someone ought to do who is average in something, which I think we are implicitly assuming to be bell-curved-ish distributed. How changeable is that something, and how important is its presence to understanding the Sequences?

Selection bias - which groups and forums actually asked about IQ?

Your average knitting/auto maintenance/comic book forum probably has a lower average IQ but doesn't think to ask. And of course we're already selecting a little just by taking the figures off of web forums, which are a little on the cerebral side.

I don't think most of LessWrong's material is out of reach of an average-intelligence person.

Wasn't the average IQ here from the survey something like 130+?

I think this underestimates the difficulty average humans have with just reading upwards of 2500 words about abstract ideas. It's not a question even of getting the explanation, it's a question of simply being able to pay attention to it.

I keep repeating this: The average human is extremely average. Check your privilege, as the social-justice types might say. You're assuming a level of comfort with, and interest in, abstraction that just is not the case for most of our species.