From the Wikipedia article about perverse incentives:

In Hanoi, under French colonial rule, a program paying people a bounty for each rat pelt handed in was intended to exterminate rats. Instead, it led to the farming of rats.

and

19th century palaeontologists traveling to China used to pay peasants for each fragment of dinosaur bone (dinosaur fossils) that they produced. They later discovered that peasants dug up the bones and then smashed them into multiple pieces to maximise their payments.

I wrote a quick introduction to distributed computing a while ago:

http://michaelgr.com/distributed-computing/

My favorite project (the one which I think could benefit humanity the most) is Rosetta@home.

Personally I run Rosetta@home because, based on my research, it could be more useful to designing new proteins and computationally predicting the function of proteins. Folding seems to be more about understanding how they proteins fold, which can help with some diseases, but isn't nearly the game changing that in silico design and shape prediction would be.

I also think that the SENS Foundation (Aubrey de Grey & co) have some ties to Rosetta, and might use it in the future to design some proteins.

I'm a member of the Lifeboat Foundation team: http://lifeboat.com/ex/rosetta.home

But we could also create a Less Wrong team if there's enough interest.

Sorry about that.

In that same vein:

Rank beliefs not according to their plausibility but by the harm they may cause.

-Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan p.203

It does not matter how frequently something succeeds if failure is too costly to bear.

-Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness

By definition, all but the last doomsday prediction is false. Yet it does not follow, as many seem to think, that all doomsday predictions must be false; what follow is only that all such predictions but one are false.

-Richard A. Posner, Catastrophe: Risk and Response, p. 13

Funny you mention Hacker News, I'm about 100 karma points from being in the top 100 there (though under a different name).

I suspect there's a pretty big overlap between the LW and HN crowds. I wonder if there's a high correlation between karma on one site and karma on the other?

Hi. I'm a part-time lurker, part-time active participant.

Here is the piece I got it from:

http://www.economist.com/specialreports/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15557465

“It is not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves.”

--Sir Edmund Hillary (1919-2008) - New Zealand Mountaineer and First man to Climb Mt. Everest