"I think there should be a law of Nature to prevent a star from behaving in this absurd way!" (Eddington, 1935)

Eddington erroneously dismissed M(white dwarf) > Mlimit ⇒ "a black hole" , but didn't he correctly anticipate new physics?
Do event horizons (Finkelstein, 1958) not prevent nature from behaving in "that absurd way", so far as we can ever observe?

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_censorship_hypothesis

With some awe and much respect, I would say that you are an inspiration, but that has already been said. I'll upvote that and say something else instead. For whatever reason, some part of my brain tells me; "Yeah, this is pretty much what I would expect the research interests of of a "supervillain"-in-training to look like". I don't pretend to know exactly what awesomeness is, but you have grown a lot of it.

EDIT: OTOH, there's this... What person makes a will at 26?

It seems he published "If i get hit by a truck" in 2002, at age 16. Sad. Also, perhaps, awe-inspiring. Eliminating the problem of one's bus-factor would ordinarily be admirable... if you do it for the contingency where you simply get hit by a bus. I want, but can't, quite make myself believe that he didn't write this, at that time, in anticipation of an end like this. In that case; not awe-inspiring, only sad.

Almost no chance at all. Keep in mind, the most important thing, when it comes to dealing with this, this... insidious threat, is to be intensely careful in avoiding any false negatives. There must be none what so ever. And besides, who cares, really — about a few — or a few million false positives. Oh, and this condition, it's really quite heritable, and, as head of the program, you would need to... well, deal with the children, in a like manner as that of the parents. Not that this would be a problem, of course.

Joe Stalin, the NKVD, the Moscow Trials, and the Great Purge sort of came to mind.

Neat. Upvote delivered, as promised.

In the future, please consider adding a paragraph that provides a summary, or at least a snapshot, of the article's contents.

Yes. However, I would suggest not to wait for next time to do it right. Do it right, now.

I will downvote the top post, but I promise to upvote it, if and when benthamite's suggestion is followed.

Sorry for the carrot and stick, but doing so shouldn't take more than a minute.
(Which would be less than was spent on writing this.)

Maybe they need better treatments. Has anyone asked psychopaths - "How would you convince a psychopath like you to stop doing X?" Has anyone let psychopaths try? Aren't they the master manipulators? They even have a readily available model of a psychopath to test out the theory on. How convenient! Sufficiently motivating a psychopath with rewards for changing the mind of another psychopath might be an effective treatment for the first psychopath. Did they try that treatment?

Something like it was tried in Canada, in the sixties, with LSD, in a four year experiment where a group of 30 psychopaths were, at least apparently, temporarily reformed through unconventional means.

This strange and unique program was obliquely referenced in the top post:

...operated for over a decade in a maximum security psychiatric hospital and drew worldwide attention for its novelty. The program was described at length by Barker and colleagues…The results of a follow-up conducted an average of 10.5 years after completion of treatment showed that, compared to no program (in most cases, untreated offenders went to prison), treatment was associated with lower violent recidivism for non-psychopaths but higher violent recidivism for psychopaths.

The Insane Criminal as Therapist
E.T. Barker, M. H. Mason, The Canadian Journal of Corrections, Oct. 1968.

Here's an account from a recent pop-psychology book, The Psychopath Test:

In the late 1960s, a young Canadian psychiatrist believed he had the answer. His name was Elliott Barker and he had visited radical therapeutic communities around the world, including nude psychotherapy sessions occurring under the tutelage of an American psychotherapist named Paul Bindrim. Clients, mostly California free-thinkers and movie stars, would sit naked in a circle and dive headlong into a 24-hour emotional and mystical rollercoaster during which participants would scream and yell and sob and confess their innermost fears. Barker worked at a unit for psychopaths inside the Oak Ridge hospital for the criminally insane in Ontario. Although the inmates were undoubtedly insane, they seemed perfectly ordinary. This, Barker deduced, was because they were burying their insanity deep beneath a facade of normality. If the madness could only, somehow, be brought to the surface, maybe it would work itself through and they could be reborn as empathetic human beings.

And so he successfully sought permission from the Canadian government to obtain a large batch of LSD, hand-picked a group of psychopaths, led them into what he named the "total encounter capsule", a small room painted bright green, and asked them to remove their clothes. This was truly to be a radical milestone: the world's first ever marathon nude LSD-fuelled psychotherapy session for criminal psychopaths.

Barker's sessions lasted for epic 11-day stretches. There were no distractions – no television, no clothes, no clocks, no calendars, only a perpetual discussion (at least 100 hours every week) of their feelings. Much like Bindrim's sessions, the psychopaths were encouraged to go to their rawest emotional places by screaming and clawing at the walls and confessing fantasies of forbidden sexual longing for each other, even if they were, in the words of an internal Oak Ridge report of the time, "in a state of arousal while doing so".

...

Barker watched it all from behind a one-way mirror and his early reports were gloomy. The atmosphere inside the capsule was tense. Psychopaths would stare angrily at each other. Days would go by when nobody would exchange a word. But then, as the weeks turned into months, something unexpected began to happen.

The transformation was captured in an incredibly moving film. These tough young prisoners are, before our eyes, changing. They are learning to care for one another inside the capsule.

We see Barker in his office, and the look of delight on his face is quite heartbreaking. His psychopaths have become gentle. Some are even telling their parole boards not to consider them for release until after they've completed their therapy. The authorities are astonished.

Several of the 30 participants of the experiment went on to commit violent homicides some years after release.

An internal memo from the experiment: "LSD in a Coercive Milieu Therapy Program" (E.T Barker)

Intriguing.

"On the Earth, the IPCC states that "a 'runaway greenhouse effect'—analogous to Venus—appears to have virtually no chance of being induced by anthropogenic activities."
http://www.ipcc.ch/meetings/session31/inf3.pdf

Hmm, the IPCC asserts this statement without providing any argument to support it.

Some quick thoughts: In the beginning, there were no oceans. The earth was molten and without form. Now, assume venusian-runaway is a possibility for for this planet's climate. Why has it not already occurred, much, much earlier in the planet's history?

The planet was very much hotter and more humid in the very distant past. The CO2 in the oceans and the methane in the permafrost was captured from the atmosphere. The O2 in the atmosphere is a biogenic waste product of photosynthesis.

I do think the oceans will boil eventually, not because of global warming, but because of solar warming, after the sun has depleted it's hydrogen.

Welcome, and thanks for the comments.

Even the term getting out there is a positive!

Agreed.

If journalism demands that you stick to Hollywood references when communicating a concept,
it wouldn't be so bad if journalists managed to understand and convey the distinction between:

• The wholly implausible, worse than useless Terminator humanoid hunter-killer robot scenario.
• The not completely far-fetched Skynet launches every nuke, humanity dies scenario.

Yudkowsky seemed to me simplistic in his understanding of moral norms. “You would not kill a baby,” he said to me, implying that was one norm that could easily be programmed into a machine.
“Some people do,” I pointed out, but he didn’t see the full significance. SS officers killed babies routinely because of an adjustment in the society from which they sprang in the form of Nazism. Machines would be much more radically adjusted away from human social norms, however we programmed them.

Wow. This particular mistake seems to be an unlikely and even difficult mistake to make in good faith,
as opposed to, for example, by outright dishonesty.

Update: I told Appleyard of his mistake, and he simply denied that his article has made a mistake on this matter.

Never mind, it seems they don't even try to be honest.