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Greetings. My name is Albert Perrien. I was initially drawn to this site by my personal search on metacognition; and only really connected after having stumbled across “Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality”, which I found an interesting read. My professional background is in computer engineering, database administration, and data mining, with personal studies of Machine Learning, AI and mathematics. I find the methods given here to promote rational thought and bias reduction fascinating, and the math behind everything enlightening.
Recently I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the topic of a Resetting Gandhi-Einstein, and personally, I find that I would volunteer for such a state, given prior knowledge of what I signed up for and an interesting and useful enough problem. I realize that I would only retain limited knowledge from incarnation to incarnation, but given a worthy enough mental problem and reasonably well simulated environment, I see nothing innately wrong with it. And finally, that leads me to some questions:
What sort of challenges would there be in volunteering to do this, and how should volunteers be chosen?
Should this even be something that should be done, even given a willing subject?
How many iterations should an individual be subjected to?
How many others here would volunteer for such a state, and what sort of problems would you be willing to make that sacrifice for?
This last question being possibly personal, please don't think me too forward. For me, I'd like to help with some sort of medical problem, say for example, autoimmune diseases... (edit: Mangled the formatting...)
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There are a number of fantasy stories where the protagonist is very good at something, largely because they work hard at it, and then they enter a magical world and discover that their skills and work have a lot more impact. Often they have to work hard after they get there to apply their skills. Often the protagonist is a computer hacker and their skills, which in our world only work inside of computers, in a magical context can alter physical / consensual reality. (Examples: Broken Crescent, Web Mage. There are many others. Arguably this pattern goes back at least to The Incomplete Enchanter though success came way too easily for Harold Shea.)
So I think the appeal of this type of fantasy is partly that big effects in our world usually require big causes -- capital investment, megatons of steel, etc. -- even after you know the right "magic spell". In these fantasy worlds -- and in some cases in computer networks -- big, widely distributed effects can be produced just by uttering the magic spell in the right place, or by building a local, inexpensive magical workshop using the right blueprint -- e.g. YouTube.
I think 3d printing and Kickstarter are beginning to make this concept match more to our reality.