This is based on a discussion in #lesswrong a few months back, and I am not sure how to resolve it.

Setup: suppose the world is populated by two groups of people, one just wants to be left alone (labeled Jews), the other group hates the first one with passion and want them dead (labeled Nazis). The second group is otherwise just as "good" as the first one (loves their relatives, their country and is known to be in general quite rational). They just can't help but hate the other guys (this condition is to forestall the objections like "Nazis ought to change their terminal values"). Maybe the shape of Jewish noses just creeps the hell out of them, or something. Let's just assume, for the sake of argument, that there is no changing that hatred.

Is it rational to exterminate the Jews to improve the Nazi's quality of life? Well, this seems like a silly question. Of course not! Now, what if there are many more Nazis than Jews? Is there a number large enough where exterminating Jews would be a net positive utility for the world? Umm... Not sure... I'd like to think that probably not, human life is sacred! What if some day their society invents immortality, then every death is like an extremely large (infinite?) negative utility!

Fine then, not exterminating. Just send them all to concentration camps, where they will suffer in misery and probably have a shorter lifespan than they would otherwise. This is not an ideal solutions from the Nazi point of view, but it makes them feel a little bit better. And now the utilities are unquestionably comparable, so if there are billions of Nazis and only a handful of Jews, the overall suffering decreases when the Jews are sent to the camps.

This logic is completely analogous to that in the dust specks vs torture discussions, only my "little XML labels", to quote Eliezer, make it more emotionally charged. Thus, if you are a utilitarian anti-specker, you ought to decide that, barring changing Nazi's terminal value of hating Jews, the rational behavior is to herd the Jews into concentration camps, or possibly even exterminate them, provided there are enough Nazi's in the world who benefit from it.

This is quite a repugnant conclusion, and I don't see a way of fixing it the way the original one is fixed (to paraphrase Eliezer, "only lives worth celebrating are worth creating").

EDIT: Thanks to CronoDAS for pointing out that this is known as the 1000 Sadists problem. Once I had this term, I found that lukeprog has mentioned it on his old blog. 

We're currently translating chapter 11 into German. It's going along fine, but 

“PICKLED STEWBERRIES!”

is still puzzling us. No dictionary entries, no HPMoR-unrelated search hits, nothing…

Is this some kind of dadaist joke by Eliezer? Or are we missing something?

Meta-discussion is nasty. Allegedly, troll-feeding was flooding the comments. Verifiably, meta-discussion is flooding the comments. Keep it simple stupid!

A robot is going on a one-shot mission to a distant world to collect important data needed to research a cure for a plague that is devastating the Earth. When the robot enters hyperspace, it notices some anomalies in the engine's output, but it is too late to get the engine fixed. The anomalies are of a sort that, when similar anomalies have been observed in other engines, 25% of the time it indicates a fatal problem, such that the engine will explode virtually every time it tries to jump. 25% of the time, it has been a false positive, and the engine exploded only at its normal negligible rate. 50% of the time it has indicated a serious problem, such that each jump was about a 50/50 chance of exploding. Anyway, the robot goes through the ten jumps to reach the distant world, and the engine does not explode. Unfortunately, the jump coordinates for the mission were a little off, and the robot is in a bad data-collecting position. It could try another jump - if the engine doesn't explode, the extra data it collects could save lives. If the engine does explode, however, Earth will get no data from the distant world at all. (The FTL radio is only good for one use, so he can't collect data and then jump.) So how did you program your robot? Did you program your robot to believe that since the engine worked 10 times, the anomaly was probably a false positive, and so it should make the jump? Or did you program your robot to follow the "Androidic Principle" and disregard the so-called "evidence" of the ten jumps, since it could not have observed any other outcome? People's lives are in the balance here. A little girl is too sick to leave her bed, she doesn't have much time left, you can hear the fluid in her lungs as she asks you "are you aware of the anthropic principle?" Well? Are you?

Discussion article for the meetup : Cambridge (MA) Meetup

Discussion article for the meetup : Cambridge (MA) Meetup

I have often benefited from recommendations for Things I Didn't Know I Wanted.

Given that Less Wrong is a community of unusually intelligent, critical, and self-improvement-focused people, I suspect we can generate a pretty helpful thread of product recommendations — perhaps even a monthly thread of product recommendations.

Rules:

• Post one product your recommend per comment, so they can be discussed and voted on independently.
• Provide a link for purchasing the product.
• No books, movies, TV, games, or music. (These should go in other threads, like this one or this one.)

(Edit: Thanks for the helpful comments. Also, downvoting this thread to oblivion was probably a good idea —and it'd better stay buried. Sorry for the noise.)

(Sorry for the mind-killing topic, but here is the only place I can hope for something remotely rational.)

Lately, I have noticed the existence of what seems to amount to two meme-clusters.

On the one hand we have the Left-wing Alarmist, which want to have wealth more equitably distributed, warns about our dead soil, our resources consumption run amok, our (West) exploitation of the South, and above all, the unsustainability of our society (collapse often due before 2 or 3 decades). One particular flaw in this vision is the complete disregard for possible technology developments. Typically, this one will call for (classical) anarchy, localization and de-industrialization of (preferably organic) food production, economy of physical resources, reduced work-hours, sometimes even a simplification of every-day technology. The bottom line is, the world is currently worsening.

On the other hand, we have the Right-wing Optimist, which wants free markets, believes in growth (often defined as GDP growth) to solve most of our problems, is confident about the development of new technologies, and above all believes in our ability to adapt. One particular flaw in this vision is the complete disregard for the adaptation by starvation and war that often happen. Typically, this one will call for deregulation of the economy, the reduction (or elimination) of welfare, maximizing economies of scale and the law of comparative advantages through globalization, and the privatization of nearly everything. The bottom line is, the world is currently improving.

Of course, it's not all that clear cut. More likely, there is a spectrum between those two extremes.

Now, I'm especially puzzled by the correlation between political sides what seems to be the Enlightenment/Romanticism divide. Where could it possibly come from?

Also, there's got to be evidence one way or the other. The problem is, it's likely difficult to process. For instance, while Steven Pinker will tell you that violence is steadily decreasing by showing decreasing violent death rates, Noam Chomsky will tell you that violence is _increasing_ for a while, by showing "structural" violence like poverty, starvation, or unwanted pollution. So, does anyone know of a way to process the evidence rationally?

As I've already mentioned here before, our small goal is to built a program which only purpose is to search and submit new, previously unknown dense packing achievements to the Internet without any human intervention except to start it and to provide the hardware, power, internet connection and such. Every solution is the program's creation and innovation.

It has been done. A small program is "scavenging" over the www.packomania.com and reading the best packing solutions there. It tries to find a better one. If it succeeds in 8192 seconds, then the program publishes the result on the http://www.algit.eu/htmlji/Packntile/Packing_Contest_01052010.html and sends it to Eckard Specht  http://hydra.nat.uni-magdeburg.de/  by an email.

(Well this emailing has been cut out already as unnecessary. Packomaia is updated from our site, directly, by mister Specht.)

If there is no new better solution in those 8192 seconds, a new random problem is selected and pursued by the program. The program (formerly known as Pack'n'tile) also doesn't care if the current target solution is its own or of a human. Neither if its previous effort on that particular problem was not successful. Or if it was. He doesn't remember it, anyway.

For now, there will be only one instance of the program somewhere near us. It is fast and powerful enough to run on a modest PC computer for a solution per day. It would took decades to populate this large searching space of various dimensions, shapes and numbers predominantly by its solutions, but the impact is already visible. Of course, more and faster CPUs will be provided for the job, eventually. 

We don't want to take the fun out of the game. On the contrary, the solutions are the most important and we are providing them.