MichaelGR06 July 2010 02:49:03PM* 16 points [-]

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.

In response to comment by Jack on Open Thread: May 2010
MichaelGR03 May 2010 06:16:18PM* 2 points [-]

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.

MichaelGR03 May 2010 06:14:22PM* 1 point [-]

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.

MichaelGR01 May 2010 06:51:12PM0 points [-]

Sorry about that.

MichaelGR01 May 2010 05:50:44PM8 points [-]

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

MichaelGR01 May 2010 05:48:07PM9 points [-]

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

MichaelGR20 April 2010 12:05:24AM0 points [-]

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?

MichaelGR18 April 2010 10:48:27PM2 points [-]

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

MichaelGR05 April 2010 09:23:56PM* 1 point [-]
MichaelGR05 April 2010 06:37:16AM0 points [-]

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

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

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