Talk about inferential distances... I was thinking from the title must be about the Oracle Financials software package or at least the database.

Watch Ex Machina. This is pretty close to what you are talking about, and I was it was well done.

I would recommend trying these books (at high school level or earlier, depending on when it becomes possible to follow them):

• H. Rademacher & O. Toeplitz (1967). The Enjoyment of Math.
• J. R. Weeks (2001). The Shape of Space.
• R. Courant & H. Robbins (1996). What Is Mathematics?

(I know there are almost certainly problems with what I'm about to suggest, but I just thought I'd put it out there. I welcome corrections and constructive criticisms.)

You mention gene therapy to produce high-IQ people, but if that turns out not to be practical, or if we want to get started before we have the technology, couldn't we achieve the same through reproduction incentives? For example, paying and encouraging male geniuses to donate lots of sperm, and paying and encouraging lots of gifted-level or higher women to donate eggs (men can donate sperm more frequently than women can donate eggs, so the higher levels of women would not be enough to match the higher levels of men, and you'd have to bring in the next-highest level), and then just having the children of the two groups be born from surrogates, whose IQ AFAIK should not have any effect on the child's, and can therefore be selected based on how cheaply they can be hired?

Deterrent effects would fall under "things present and to come". If you expect some kind of future benefit from a retaliatory act, that's one thing. On the other hand, if you seek vengeance because you're outraged that someone would dare wrong you, then you're mentally living in the past.

This is interesting. I have found that when you are like 16, you often want everything to be super logical and everything that is not feels stupid. And growing up largely means accepting "common sense", which at the end of the day means relying more on pattern recognition. (This is also politically relevant - young radicalism is often about matching everything with a logical sounding ideology, while people when they grow and become more moderate simply care about what typical patterns tend to result in human flourishing more than about ideology.)

There is something in pattern recognition that feels pretty "conservative" in the not-too-political sense. Logical reasoning is an individualistic thing, you can make your own philosophy of things especially if you are young and feel you are so much smarter than everybody else. But if you treat your brain as a pattern sensor, it is different.

First of all experience matters more than sheer brightness. You start to think less and less that old people are dinosauric fools and respect them more and more. (Of course the right kind of experience matters more than just clocking in a lot of birthdays. There are 19 years old guys who are so fanatic about cars that they spend day and night working on them and probably know why your car does not run well than your dad does.)

Second, throwing a lot of brains on the patterns i.e. actually listening to other people's opinions starts to look good. It scales differently. You can feel you can out-reason and out-logic a thousand people because logic is not additive. But being a sensor its. When hunting for a detail, you cannot out-see two thousand eyeballs. So you start to respect other people's opinions more.

Third, there are depositories of recognized patterns. They are usually called best practices, accepted practices or even traditions. They start to matter.

It is a very sobering experience, and for me it was kind of painful (because humiliating, deflating), it happened between 21 and 26.

It is turning people more conservative in the not-so-political sense and it is probably a good thing, at least I think it made me better off, although it was painful. For example, in architecture, do you value bravely tradition bucking original design, or you value traditional pattern-book architecture? Scruton argues the later is more likely to create an environment in which people feel good.

AFAICT, "Best" is ordered strictly by the number of upvotes, and isn't tempered by the number of downvotes. What shows up seems to vary by what's currently trending (varying by your configured comment window), rather than changes to the logic.

Is it just me/my browser, or has something changed in the Less Wrong code regarding the "Best" comment ordering? For example, it seemed like before if there were a bunch of 0% positive comments and a 50% positive comment, then the latter would almost always be at the bottom, but now I'm seeing them and even negative karma posts above or between neutral or positive karma posts. Has anyone else noticed this?

Good luck and I wish you the best! You're one of the people I most aspire to be like.