30 years ago, the Cold War was raging on. If you don’t know what that is, it was the period from 1947 to 1991 where both the U.S and Russia had large stockpiles of nuclear weapons and were threatening to use them on each other. The only thing that stopped them from doing so was the knowledge that the other side would have time to react. The U.S and Russia both had surveillance systems to know of the other country had a nuke in the air headed for them.

On this day, September 26, in 1983, a man named Stanislav Petrov was on duty in the Russian surveillance room when the computer notified him that satellites had detected five nuclear missile launches from the U.S. He was told to pass this information on to his superiors, who would then launch a counter-strike.

He refused to notify anyone of the incident, suspecting it was just an error in the computer system.

No nukes ever hit Russian soil. Later, it was found that the ‘nukes’ were just light bouncing off of clouds which confused the satellite. Petrov was right, and likely saved all of humanity by stopping the outbreak of nuclear war. However, almost no one has heard of him.

We celebrate men like George Washington and Abraham Lincoln who win wars. These were great men, but the greater men, the men like Petrov who stopped these wars from ever happening - no one has heard of these men.

Let it be known, that September 26 is Petrov Day, in honor of the acts of a great man who saved the world, and of who almost no one has heard the name of.

My 11-year-old son wrote and then read this speech to his six grade class.

In the second half of the interview we discussed several topics of importance to the LW community including cryonics, unfriendly AI, and eliminating mosquitoes. 

https://soundcloud.com/user-519115521/scott-adams-dilbert-interview

“In 2015, there were roughly 214 million malaria cases and an estimated 438 000 malaria deaths.”  While we don’t know how many humans malaria has killed, an estimate of half of everyone who has ever died isn’t absurd.  Because few people in rich countries get malaria, pharmaceutical companies put relatively few resources into combating it.   

The best way to eliminate malaria is probably to use gene drives to completely eradicate the species of mosquitoes that bite humans, but until recently rich countries haven’t been motivated to such xenocide.  The Zika virus, which is in mosquitoes in the United States, provides effective altruists with an opportunity to advocate for exterminating all species of mosquitoes that spread disease to humans because the horrifying and disgusting pictures of babies with Zika might make the American public receptive to our arguments.  A leading short-term goal of effective altruists, I propose, should be advocating for mosquito eradication in the short window before rich people get acclimated to pictures of Zika babies.   

Personally, I have (unsuccessfully) pitched articles on mosquito eradication to two magazines and (with a bit more success) emailed someone who knows someone who knows someone in the Trump campaign to attempt to get the candidate to come out in favor of mosquito eradication.  What have you done?   Given the enormous harm mosquitoes inflict on mankind, doing just a little (such as writing a blog post) could have a high expected payoff.

This thread is intended to provide a space for 'crazy' ideas. Ideas that spontaneously come to mind (and feel great), ideas you long wanted to tell but never found the place and time for and also for ideas you think should be obvious and simple - but nobody ever mentions them. 

Rules for this thread:

1. Each crazy idea goes into its own top level comment and may be commented there.
2. Voting should be based primarily on how original the idea is.
3. Meta discussion of the thread should go to the top level comment intended for that purpose.

An easy win for rationalists is to avoid actively managed mutual funds.  As a NYT article points out:   

"High fees, often hidden from view, are still enriching many advisers and financial services companies at the expense of ordinary people who are struggling to salt away savings....even for retirement accounts that are to be covered by the rules, many advisers are not required to act in their clients’ best interests. This means that they are legally entitled to look out for themselves first and recommend investments with higher fees, to the detriment of those who have asked for help....even when fund managers succeed in outperforming their peers in one year, they cannot easily repeat the feat in successive years, as many studies have shown. That’s why low-cost index funds, which merely mirror the performance of the market and don’t try to beat it, make a great deal of sense as a core investment....With fees included, the average actively managed fund in each of 29 asset categories — from those that invest in various sizes and styles of stocks to those that hold fixed-income instruments like government or municipal bonds — underperformed its benchmark over the decade through December. In other words, index funds outperformed the average actively managed fund in every single category....Investors who believe they have found honest and skillful advisers may still want to understand all of this. Not everyone truly has your best interest at heart."

I've started a podcast called Future Strategist which will focus on decision making and futurism.  I have created seven shows so far:  interviews of computer scientist Roman Yampolskiy, LW contributor Gleb Tsipursky, and artist/free speech activist Rachel Haywire, and monologues on game theory and Greek Mythology, the Prisoners' Dilemma, the sunk cost fallacy, and the Map and Territory.  

If you enjoy the show and use iTunes I would be grateful if you left a positive review at iTunes.  I would also be grateful for any feedback you might have including suggestions for future shows.  I'm not used to interviewing people and I know that I need to work on being more articulate in my interviews.

My Business Insider article titled 10 tips from a Silicon Valley bootcamp that aims to make smart, successful people more productive.

I wrote a review of Yudkowsky's Rationality: From AI to Zombies for The New Rambler.

I made a series of game theory videos that carefully go through the mechanics of solving many different types of games.  I optimized the videos for my future Smith College game theory students who will either miss a class, or get lost in class and want more examples.   I emphasize clarity over excitement.   I would be grateful for any feedback.

A 2006 study showed that “280,000 people in the U.S. receive a motor vehicle induced traumatic brain injury every year” so you would think that wearing a helmet while driving would be commonplace.  Race car drivers wear helmets.  But since almost no one wears a helmet while driving a regular car, you probably fear that if you wore one you would look silly, attract the notice of the police for driving while weird, or the attention of another driver who took your safety attire as a challenge.  (Car drivers are more likely to hit bicyclists who wear helmets.)  

The $30+shipping Crasche hat is designed for people who should wear a helmet but don’t.  It looks like a ski cap, but contains concealed lightweight protective material.  People who have signed up for cryonics, such as myself, would get an especially high expected benefit from using a driving helmet because we very much want our brains to “survive” even a “fatal” crash. I have been using a Crasche hat for about a week.