Interesting. In addition to that, how much of this lack of desires is sociological and related to self-perception? I mean, these elders probably perceive themselves as a periphery of society, as someone whose time has already passed, who shouldn't have any more ambitions. Will aging societies make businesses and entertainers cater more and more towards seniors (e.g. like this), thus making them feel as the central part of society that everyone else revolves around?

Heh. Qualify this under "crazy ideas". Chinese tech companies are motivating programmers by hiring cheerleaders. It would be interesting to know if this increases productivity. Do cheerleaders help improve results sports teams?

Self-harm counts as violence too, doesn't it? And it's not always accidental. The analogy stands.

Well, it's very subjective. I tried to optimise heavily for originality, ideas that I've seen on Slatestarcodex, but haven't seen anywhere else. On the other hand, I've also included comprehensive rebuttals like Why I hate your freedom, Consequentialism FAQ and Who by very slow decay. Here it isn't so much the ideas that are unique, but how comprehensively he tackles these issues and with how much charity.

The reason why the list is so long is that I've tried to be inclusive. My aim is to try ensure that it includes all the "must read" articles, even if this results in the list being very long.

What criteria have you used to decide which posts are the most important?

Is it possible to tame an octopus? Could humanity over several generations tame octopuses and breed them into work animals?

Is there a subreddit or some other place where I can describe ideas for products or services, explicitly forfeit any rights to them, and they are actually as good as I imagine (maybe other user can help rate, or say how much it'd be worth to them), have a chance someone with the resources to do so will actually implement one or another?

Has anyone already tried Windows 10? What are your impressions?

Disclaimer: I am lazy and could have done more research myself.

I'm looking for work on what I call "realist decision theory." (A loaded term, admittedly.) To explain realist decision theory, contrast with naive decision theory. My explanation is brief since my main objective at this point is fishing for answers rather than presenting my ideas.

Naive Decision Theory

1. Assumes that individuals make decisions individually, without need for group coordination.

2. Assumes individuals are perfect consequentialists: their utility function is only a function of the final outcome.

3. Assumes that individuals have utility functions which do not change with time or experience.

4. Assumes that the experience of learning new information has neutral or positive utility.

Hence a naive decision protocol might be:

• A person decides whether to take action A or action B

• An oracle tells the person the possible scenarios that could result from action A or action B, with probability weightings.

• The person subconsciously assigns a utility to each scenario. This utility function is fixed. The person chooses the action A or B based on which action maximizes expected utility.

• As a consequence of the above assumptions, the person's decision is the same regardless of the order of presentation of the different actions.

Note: we assume physical determinism, so the person's decision is even known in advance to the oracle. But we suppose the oracle can perfectly forecast counterfactuals; to emphasize this point, we might call it a "counterfactual oracle" from now on.

It should be no surprise that the above model of utility is extremely unrealistic. I am aware of experiments demonstrating non-transitivity of utility, for instance. Realist decision theory contrasts with naive decision theory in several ways.

Realist Decision Theory

1. Acknowledges that decisions are not made individually but jointly with others.

2. Acknowledges that in a group context, actions have a utility in of themselves (signalling) separate from the utility of the resulting scenarios.

3. Acknowledges that an individual's utility function changes with experience.

4. Acknowledges that learning new information constitutes a form of experience, which may itself have positive or negative utility.

Relaxing any one of the four assumptions radically complicates the decision theory. Consider only relaxing conditions 1 and 2: then game theory becomes required. Consider relaxing only 3 and 4, so that for all purposes only one individual exists in the world: then points 3 and 4 mean that the order in which a counterfactual oracle presents the relevant information to the individual affect the individual's final decision. Furthermore, an ethically implemented decision procedure would allow the individual to choose which pieces of information to learn. Therefore there is no guarantee that the individual will even end up learning all the information relevant to the decision, even if time is not a limitation.

It would be great to know which papers have considered relaxing the assumptions of a "naive" decision theory in the way I have outlined.

Is there any scientific backing for ASMR?