We have a tradition of treating ruthlessness in businesspeople as something of a virtue. Certainly, ruthlessness can help one get ahead in the business world, and companies often benefit from executives who're willing to put aside scruples while devising means of turning a profit. So ruthlessness in business executives can certainly be useful for businesses.

From a societal perspective though, businesses are only valuable to the extent that they increase the wealth and quality of life of society as a whole. Businesses are allowed (indeed, required, in the case of publicly traded companies) to attempt to maximize profits, on the presumption that in doing so, they'll enrich the broader society in which they operate. But there are plenty of ways in which businesses can increase their own profits without becoming more wealth productive, such as cooperating with competitors or establishing monopolies in order to keep prices artificially elevated, use of advertising to promote a product or service relative to equal or superior competitors, lobbying with politicians to slant the legal playing field in their own favor, and so forth.

I have reasons to expect myself to be somewhat biased on this issue, so I'm not sure how telling it is that I personally come up short of any examples of ruthlessness in business executives being useful from a societal perspective, when compared to business executives who're highly competitive, but compassionate, with restrictive senses of fair play. So does anyone else have examples of ruthlessness in businesspeople as a social virtue?

We seem to have at least one bot editing the Less Wrong Wiki. Is this something that could easily be fixed by instituting a karma requirement for wiki editing?

When attempting to introduce non-rationalists to the ideas of cryonics or Strong AI, it appears that their primary objections tend to be rooted in the absurdity heuristic. They don't believe they inhabit a universe where such weird technologies could actually work. To deal with this, I thought it would be useful to have a cache of examples of technologies that have actually been implemented that did, or ideally, still do, challenge our intuitions about the way the universe works.

The first example that comes to my mind is computers in general; imagine what Ernest Rutherford, let alone Benjamin Franklin, would have thought of a machine that uses electricity to calculate, and do those calculations so fast that they can express nearly anything as calculations. Nothing we know about how the universe works says it shouldn't be possible, indeed it obviously is knowing what we do now, but imagine how weird this would have seemed back when we were just coming to grips with how electricity actually worked.

I suspect there may be better examples to challenge the intuitions of people who've grown up in an age where computers are commonplace though. So does anyone have any to volunteer?

Open to anyone, single or otherwise. What do you look for in a relationship?

A few questions to narrow down the responses:

1: What traits are most important to you in a prospective partner?

2: What kind of role would you want your partner(s) to play in your life?

3: How much time would you spend together, ideally?

4: How important is it to you that you share similar tastes?

5: How important is it that you be ideologically similar?

6: What, if anything, are your dealbreakers?

Inspired by Don't Plan For the Future.

For the purposes of discussion on this site, a Friendly AI is assumed to be one that shares our terminal values. It's a safe genie that doesn't need to be told what to do, but anticipates how to best serve the interests of its creators. Since our terminal values are a function of our evolutionary history, it seems reasonable to assume that an FAI created by one intelligent species would not necessarily be friendly to other intelligent species, and that being subsumed by another species' FAI would be fairly catastrophic.

Except.... doesn't that seem kind of bad? Supposing I were able to create a strong AI, and it created a sound fun-theoretic utopia for human beings, but then proceeded to expand and subsume extraterrestrial intelligences, and subject them to something they considered a fate worse than death, I would have to regard that as a major failing of my design. My utility function assigns value to the desires of beings whose values conflict with my own. I can't allow other values to supersede mine, but absent other considerations, I have to assign negative utility in my own function for creating negative utility in the functions of other existing beings. I'm skeptical that an AI that would impose catastrophe on other thinking beings is really maximizing my utility.

It seems to me that to truly maximize my utility, an AI would need to have consideration for the utility of other beings. Secondary consideration, perhaps, but it could not maximize my utility simply by treating them as raw material with which to tile the universe with my utopian civilization.

Perhaps my utility function gives more value than most to beings that don't share my values (full disclosure, I prefer the "false" ending of Three Worlds Collide, although I don't consider it ideal.) However, if an AI imposes truly catastrophic fates on other intelligent beings, my own utility function takes such a hit that I cannot consider it friendly. A true Friendly AI would need to be at least passably friendly to other intelligences to satisfy me.

I don't know if I've finally come to terms with  Eliezer's understanding of how hard Friendly AI is, or made it much, much harder, but it gives me a somewhat humbling perspective of the true scope of the problem.

In the comments of a recent thread, another poster pointed out that religious individuals tend to report higher levels of happiness than nonreligious individuals. I suggested that the social network of churches, rather than the direct effects of theistic belief, might be responsible for this difference, and after doing a bit of searching around to see if the available studies support such an explanation, found a study that indicates that this is indeed the case.

Religious churches may be far from optimal in the services they provide to communities, but they have a great positive impact on the lives of many individuals. And not just as friendly social gatherings and occasional providers of community service; I've known priests who were superb community organizers and motivational speakers, who played an important role for their congregations to which I know of no existing secular analogue.

It seems probable that a secular organization could effectively play the same role in a community, but would anyone be likely to take it seriously? Since people who're already religious may be inclined to reject the value of a secular authority filling the role of a church, and atheistic individuals may not be inclined to attend, either due to reversing the stupidity of religion, or due to asocial and anticooperative values, it's uncertain whether a secular organization that adequately filled the role of a church would get off the ground in the first place in the present social climate.

So, what are your feelings on the prospect of secular church analogues? Do you think that they're appropriate or practical? Do you expect them ever to become common in real life?

I've long entertained a dubious regard for the practice of lying to children about the existence of Santa Claus. Parents might claim that it serves to make children's lives more magical and exciting, but as a general rule, children are adequately equipped to create fantasies of their own without their parents' intervention. The two reasons I suspect rest at the bottom line are adherence to tradition, and finding it cute to see one's children believing ridiculous things.

Personally, I considered this to be a rather indecent way to treat one's own children, and have sometimes wondered whether a large proportion of conspiracy theorists owe their origins to the realization that practically all the adults in the country really are conspiring to deceive children for no tangible benefit. However, since I began frequenting this site, I've been exposed to the alternate viewpoint that this realization may be good for developing rationalists, because it provides children with the experience of discovering that they hold beliefs which are wrong and absurd, and that they must reject them.

So, how did the Santa deception affect you personally? How do you think your life might have been different without it? If your parents didn't do it to you, what are your impressions on the experience of not being lied to when most other children are?

Also, I promise to upvote anyone who links to an easy to register for community of conspiracy theorists where they would not be averse to being asked the same question.

The trolley problem is one of the more famous thought experiments in moral philosophy, and studies by psychologists and anthropologists suggest that the response distributions to its major permutations remain roughly the same throughout all human cultures. Most people will permit pulling the lever to redirect the trolley so that it will kill one person rather than five, but will balk at pushing one fat person in front of the trolley to save the five if that is the only available option of stopping it.

However, in informal settings, where the dilemma is posed by a peer rather than a teacher or researcher, it has been my observation that there is another major category which accounts for a significant proportion of respondents' answers. Rather than choosing to flip the switch, push the fat man, or remain passive, many people will reject the question outright. They will attack the improbability of the premise, attempt to invent third options, or appeal to their emotional state in the provided scenario ("I would be too panicked to do anything",) or some combination of the above, in order to opt out of answering the question on its own terms.

Some time ago, I had a talk with my father where I explained to him the concept of the broken window fallacy. The idea was completely novel to him, and while it didn't take long for him to grasp the principles, he still needed my help in coming up with examples of ways that it applies to the market in the real world.

My father has an MBA from Columbia University and has held VP positions at multiple marketing firms.

I am not remotely expert on economics; I do not even consider myself an aficionado. But it has frequently been my observation that not just average citizens, but people whose positions have given them every reason to learn and use the information, are critically ignorant of basic economic principles. It feels like watching engineers try to produce functional designs based on Aristotelian physics. You cannot rationally pursue self interest when your map does not correspond to the territory.

I suppose the worst thing for me to hear at this point is that there is some reason with which I am not yet familiar which prevents this from having grand scale detrimental effects on the economy, since it would imply that businesses cannot be made more sane by the increased dissemination of basic economic information. Otherwise, this seems like a fairly important avenue to address, since the basic standards for economic education, in educated businesspeople and the general public, are so low that I doubt the educational system has even begun to climb the slope of diminishing returns on effort invested into it.

Related to Belief In Belief

Suppose that a neighbor comes to you one day and tells you “There’s a dragon in my garage!” Since all of us have been through this before at some point or another, you may be inclined to save time and ask “Is the dragon by any chance invisible, inaudible, intangible, and does it convert oxygen to carbon dioxide when it breathes?”

The neighbor, however, is a scientific minded fellow and responds “Yes, yes, no, and maybe, I haven’t checked. This is an idea with testable consequences. If I try to touch the dragon it gets out of the way, but it leaves footprints in flour when I sprinkle it on the garage floor, and whenever it gets hungry, it comes out of my garage and eats a nearby animal. It always chooses something weighing over thirty pounds, and you can see the animals get snatched up and mangled to a pulp in its invisible jaws. It’s actually pretty horrible. You may have noticed that there have been fewer dogs around the neighborhood lately.”

This triggers a tremendous number of your skepticism filters, and so the only thing you can think of to say is “I think I’m going to need to see this.”

“Of course,” replies the neighbor, and he sets off across the street, opens the garage door, and is promptly eaten by the invisible dragon.