We are living in a simulation.

Cryonics grows in popularity but our masters find it boring.

Eventually, it displeases them enough to start a new game file. Our game file is overwritten, our universe dies.

What are the strongest arguments that you've seen against rationality?

The variance of outcomes over the next few decades just went way up.

Hey everyone,

This is my first post!

This is what I've been wondering lately:

Who is the best sales person in the world? Who knows?

‘Sales competitions’ generally refers to ‘in-house’ competitions established by managers to motivate their sales people to compete against one another.

Recently I began thinking about the prospects for a ‘world sales tournament’ of sorts:

Successful sales people have lots of money. But sales is derided, whether it be in real estate, ‘charity mugger’ fundraisers, or even the people doing tenders for defence contracts.

What if we could could take their money, convert it to prestige, and take a smooth commision on the whole thing?

Sales tournaments! The World Series of Sales! The Sales Olympics. Major League Sales. Who says sales people ought to pay an entry fee anyway (except, perhaps to get a manageable number of entrants). If there are companies out there with products or services to sell, getting the best, most competitive sales people in the game to sell them is a highly desirable service itself. In return for product to sell, said product and service companies could sponsor the competition.

Sales people have difficulty switching industries, despite their highly tuned sales skills. Product and industry knowledge is easy to pick-up, but soft skills are tougher to gain. Never-the-less, recruiters are reluctant to pick up sales people from other industries - the numbers don’t always make sense. Someone working for a luxury car dealership may have huge sales numbers, but a luxury hand bag dealer might not be able to translate the numbers over. Having a high sales ranking, in a similar way that programmers are ranked in coding competition websites, could make for a highly desirable piece of career capital.

An online ‘quick and dirty’ version could be coded for email marketers and telemarketers that could be conducted in a distributed fashion in the likeness of coding competitions. But, a large scale, potentially TV-friendly could be much more profitable.

There’s an EA aspect to this too. Rationalisation of sales human resources may make Effective Altruism fundraising more quantified. And, with the birth of this idea here - the earliest competitions, or the non-profit ones could be ‘selling’ those GiveWell recommended charities as options for prospective donors. Major League Fundraising/Philanthropy! The same could be said about politics - if this become ubiquitous, voters could try to adjust their interpretations of the policy-offerings of politicans by their sales ability.

I reckon there could even be ‘team sales’. People might barrack for particular sales team’s their affiliated with - Say the Farmers Marketing Cooperatve of California (made up name) may consist of 10 members, but be supported by hundreds of farmers. Then, when it comes to a competition, say to raise money for Development Media International, one of GiveWell’s charities, people would support them like a sports team. Imagine that, people caring as much about charity as sports teams, or their online gaming leagues! In a sense, this is the gamification of sales.

If you have read this till here, you are the kind of person I want to help me build this. Please do get in touch, preferably publically as a comment here and privately (yes, twice! Once for people to know who’s involved, and twice for contact details which you may prefer not to publicly disclose) with a contact email address so I can keep everyone involved in the loop and we can decide upon a work cycle.

Equity split for founding team, including myself will be by negotiation among all of us. I forsee an equal split of total equity - an equal partnerships, for those involved.

I don't like such things. I believe they are poisoning the well.

You're right, transparent feigned interest will reduce the recipient's trust in the sender and probably others as well. I agree that we should promote trustworthiness and cooperation for a variety of very important reasons.

...BUT we need to quantify because AMF saves lives.

I pose the question: how much bullshit eliminates one WALY?

“Hi [Person A]!

How are things? How are your kids doing? Over here, things are going really well. I just came back from a trip to Chicago, which was surprisingly beautiful and very cold. It snowed! The buildings were gorgeous and ornate though. It felt like I’d come to a steampunk city. [Note: start with something personal]

I don't like such things. I believe they are poisoning the well.

This is a commercial message (I define commercial as "about money"). The "How are your kids doing?" is a lie -- it's an attempt to make commercial personal, to use personal as a tool to extract money. I understand that this is the standard operating mode for charities. It does not make me like it any more.

I don't want to acquire an association between receiving a message that starts by asking about my family and wondering what kind of a template the writer is using and how much money does he want.

I have a secondary question to that. These things seem to all operate online only, without bricks and mortar. How do I assure myself that a website that I have never seen before is trustworthy enough to invest, say, 6-figure sums of money in? Are there official ratings or registers, for probity rather than performance?

In parallel, if I am to compare two independent scenarios, the at-least-one-in-ten-billion odds that I'm hallucinating all this, and the darned-near-zero odds of a Pascal's Mugging attempt, then I should be spending proportionately that much more time dealing with the Matrix scenario than that the Pascal's Mugging attempt is true

That still sounds wrong. You appear to be deciding on what to precompute for purely by probability, without considering that some possible futures will give you the chance to shift more utility around.

If I don't know anything about Newcomb's problem and estimate a 10% chance of Omega showing up and posing it to me tomorrow, I'll definitely spend more than 10% of my planning time for tomorrow reading up on and thinking about it. Why? Because I'll be able to make far more money in that possible future than the others, which means that the expected utility differentials are larger, and so it makes sense to spend more resources on preparing for it.

The I-am-undetectably-insane case is the opposite of this, a scenario that it's pretty much impossible to usefully prepare for.

And a PM scenario is (at least for an expected-utility maximizer) a more extreme variant of my first scenario - low probabilities of ridiculously large outcomes, that are because of that still worth thinking about.

I see yet another problem with the Singularity. Say that a group of people manages to ignite it. Until the day before, they, the team were forced to buy the food and everything else. Now, what does the baker or pizza guy have to offer to them, anymore?

The team has everything to offer to everybody else, but everybody else have nothing to give them back as a payment for the services.

The "S team" may decide to give a colossal charity. A bigger one than everything we currently all combined poses. To each. That, if the Singularity is any good, of course.

But, will they really do that?

They might decide not to. What then?

One of our cats (really, my cat) escaped a few days ago after a cat carrier accident. In between working to find her and having emotional breakdowns, I find myself wanting to know what the actual odds of recovering her are. I can find statistics for "the percentage of pets at a shelter for whom original owners were found", but not "the percentage of lost pets that eventually make it back to their owners by any means." Can anyone do better? I don't like fighting unknown odds.

Additionally, if anyone has experienced advice for locating lost pets -- specifically an overly anxious indoor cat escaped outdoors -- it would be helpful. We have fliers up around the neighborhood, cat traps in the woods where we believe she's hiding, and trail cameras set up to try and confirm her location. Foot searches are difficult because of the heat and terrain (I came back with heat exhaustion the first day). I guess what I'm specifically looking for from LW is "here is something you should do that you're overlooking because bias X/trying to try/similar."