I have long made an explicit practice of trying to be a social supernode. It pays off, it really does. (Today's example: free Skype speech therapy sessions for my daughter from a friend I haven't seen in a decade, who I met because another online friend had mentioned to her that I was in the same city.)

How strong is the evidence in favor of psychological treatment really?

I am not happy. I suffer from social anxiety. I procrastinate. And I have a host of another issues that are all linked, I am certain. I have actually sought out treatment with absolutely no effect. On the recommendation of my primary care physician I entered psychoanalytic counseling and was appalled by the theoretical basis and practical course of "treatment". After several months without even the hint of a success I aborted the treatment and looked for help somewhere else.

I then read David Burns' "Feeling Good", browsing through, taking notes and doing the exercises for a couple of days. It did not help, of course in hindsight I wasn't doing the treatment long enough to see any benefit. But the theoretical basis intrigued me. It just made so much more sense to be determined by one's beliefs than a fear of having one's balls chopped off, hating their parents and actively seeking out displeasure because that is what fits the narrative.

Based on the key phrase "CBT" I found "The now habit" and reading me actually helped to subdue my procrastination long enough to finish my bachelor's degree in a highly technical subject with grades in the highest quintile. Then I slipped back into a phase of relative social isolation, procrastionation and so on.

We see these phenomena consistently in people. We also see them consistently in animals being held in captivity not suited to their species' specific needs. I am less and less convinced that this block of anxiety, depression and procrastination is a disease but a reaction to an environment in the broadest sense inherently unsuitable to humans.

The proper and accepted procedure for me would be to try counseling again, this time with a cognitive behavioral approach. But I am unwilling to commit that much time for uncertain results, especially now that I want to travel or do a year abroad or just run away from it all. (Suicide is not an option) What lowers my odds of success even more is that I never feel understood by people put in place to understand in various venues. So how could such a treatment help?

I am open to bibliotherapy. I don't think I am open to traditional or even medical therapy.

If they have to succeed to get the million, why would they care about the prize? If they make a friendly AI they won't need the million, and if they have an unfriendly one, the also won't need it, but for different reasons. Even if it's just a human-level AI, it would be worth orders of magnitude more than that.

Another idea: One of the great anti-utilitarian movements of our time has been the anti-vaccine movement. In that vain, how about setting up an anti-bed net advocacy group to argue that the children of Africa are being poisoned by chemical laden bed nets, and a charity that will collect and dispose of bed nets that are currently in use in Africa. I'm sure there must be a celebrity that would endorse such a charity. Snookie hasn't been doing much lately!

I have to say i don't get why so many of the comments on this are negative. Surely, if there was a completely legal way to inflict great harm on humanity for only $1Million then there are a ton of people/groups with the desire and resources to do those things. The idea that anyone with the desire to implement these things will learn about them first on LessWrong seems ludicrous to me.

Anyway, here is an idea:

1. Offer a $1Million prize for a working self-improving paper-clip maximizing AI. I think that this is very unlikely to produce anything, but since it is a prize you don't have to actually pay it out until someone builds a UFAI that destroys the universe. If no one seems to be working on it, you can always rescind the prize and move on to another evil scheme. I guess the downside would be if somebody accidentally made a friendly AI while trying to win the prize.

Gold mining. Adding marginal ounces of gold to world supply adds very little utility because gold can be pretty much endlessly reused and there is plenty of it around that has already been mined. Central banks of fiat currencies sit on many years supply for no particularly good reason. Meanwhile, the industry consumes $billions annually of real resources (like fossil fuels and capital equipment) and produce pollution and environmental damage.

*Laugh at least 15 minutes a day.

Does it matter which kind of laughter? Is laughing with others a lot better than doing it alone? Is schadenfreude laughter as good as any other kind of laughter?

Not obvious? How many really amazing things can you get for free these days?

But the flush toilet can only be invented once. We might have access to talking super toilets with multi-coloured fountains - but all the bells and whistles are less useful that the original flushing toilet aspect.

how about a teleporter combined with a toilet. It could sit somewhere in your house, scanning your bladder and colon periodically, and then removing accumulated waste without you having to do anything. While it is doing that it could also remove any viral particles or unhealthy bacteria from your bloodstream, excess ear wax, unwanted body hair, tumors, arterial plaques, unpleasant memories, etc. THAT would be a real innovation!

The argument that innovation has slowed is pretty simple. In the developed world, per capita output has to be driven by innovation. To some extent people can work harder, but that's pretty limited. We can see that by the best measures we have, growth of per capita output has been slowing since the 70s and especially since 2000. That means that innovation is slowing. The counter argument is that the best methods of measuring output aren't good enough, and that the newer forms of innovations are not captured as well as older forms of innovation. I guess that's possible, but its not obvious. After all a lot of tech companies are worth a lot of money.