Legalize doping and other artificial human enhancements in sports, but require them to reveal what drugs they are using. Create new sports if you want to encourage specific enhancements.

It would lead to arms races between medical teams and pharmaceutical companies and even if it would harm sportsmen themselves, the fact that new drugs would constantly be invented and perfected would help even ordinary people, because after a while those new drugs and other human enhancements would become available on the market.

Use already existing Paralympic Games to test artificial limbs.

I've always thought that a site or subreddit simulating the gradual creation of a legal system might be worthwhile. Call it YouBeTheJudge or something similar.

That is, each week you give the readers an incident. Details should look vaguely like Mock Trial, They render judgement, guided only by their own morality. Initially nothing constrains the court, thereafter it is limited only by the precedent that it has established.

Spin off new world any time one world gets too far into the weeds, maybe they are nations and you can do international incidents eventually?

Seems like it might be popular enough to sell to someone eventually. Long shot, but then I'd never have predicted that Epic Rap Battles of History would have succeeded.

This is a crazy idea that I'm not at all convinced about, but I'll go ahead and post it anyway. Criticism welcome!

Rationality and common sense might be bad for your chances of achieving something great, because you need to irrationally believe that it's possible at all. That might sound obvious, but such idealism can make the difference between failure and success even in science, and even at the highest levels.

For example, Descartes and Leibniz saw the world as something created by a benevolent God and full of harmony that can be discovered by reason. That's a very irrational belief, but they ended up making huge advances in science by trying to find that harmony. In contrast, their opponents Hume, Hobbes, Locke etc. held a much more LW-ish position called "empiricism". They all failed to achieve much outside of philosophy, arguably because they didn't have a strong irrational belief that harmony could be found.

If you want to achieve something great, don't be a skeptic about it. Be utterly idealistic.

LW/CFAR should develop a rationality curriculum for Elementary School Students. While the Sequences are a great start for adults and precocious teens with existing sympathies to the ideas presented therein, there's very little in the way of rationality training accessible to (let alone intended for) children.

Harvest organs from living, healthy, poor donors. Go to a poor country and find batches of 100 people earning $1 a day who are willing to give up their lives with probability .01 in return for 20 years wages. You will have to pay out $730,000 per batch, but in return you get the healthy organs from a living donor which should be worth a lot more than this. Run the operation as a charity to reduce negative publicity, and truthfully stress that the prime goal of the charity is to help the poorest of the poor.

We need to create more rivers! Water transport is still cheap and important for development, but sub-Saharan Africa and the middle of Asia are sadly deficient in rivers.

River creation is an interesting example of something which isn't forbidden by the laws of physics, but seems utterly unfeasible. Is there any imaginable technology for making rivers?

We should strongly discourage smart people from coming up with innovative new forms of torture, slavery, or other conditions that have been long recognized as social ills.

A botnet startup. People sign up for the service, and install an open source program on their computer. The program can:

• Use their CPU cycles to perform arbitrary calculations.
• Use their network bandwidth to relay arbitrary data.
• Let the user add restrictions on when/how much it can do the above.

For every quantum of data transferred / calculated, the user earns a token. These tokens can then be used to buy bandwidth/cycles of other users on the network. You can also buy tokens for real money (including crypto-currency).

Any job that you choose to execute... (read more)

Since we'd rather look at well-dressed people than badly dressed people, good clothes have positive externalities, and should therefore be subsidized. (The main problem with this is who would get to decide which clothes count as "good" for this purpose.)

America should take up the metric system.

The government picks arbitrary ages for when an individual has the mental capacity to make certain decisions, like drinking alcohol or having sex. But not everyone mentally matures at the same rate. It'd be nice to have an institution that allows minors with good backgrounds and who pass certain intelligence/rationality tests to be exempt from these laws.

Keep kindergartens dirty to help children avoid developing allergies.

A portion of a student's first two years salary (say, 10%) should go to the people who taught them the hard skills necessary to get that job (relative to how much those skills are needed on the job)

Details;

Companies could use relative importance testing to figure out which skills they valued to which degree, and teachers could keep track of which skills they taught students, and use standardized microdegrees to prove they had taught those students those skills.

immediate prerequisites would get say, 3% of the that 10%, and pre-pre-requisites would get 3% o... (read more)

Adding rivers was thinking too small. What we need is planet-sculpting-- getting closer to a planet which is optimized for human beings. I suspect that we'd be better off with more and smaller land masses, but this is certainly open to discussion.

Since the politics might be almost (?) as hard as the physical engineering, perhaps the right thing is to move Venus and Mars to more convenient orbits and optiform them.

Discussion of this thread goes here; all other top-level comments should be ideas or similar.

Murder is basically a victimless crime, because when you murder someone, there is no one left to be a victim. Murderers should be punished only for inconveniences that murder caused to other people who are still living.

Causing extinction of humanity would be a perfect victimless crime.

We could double humanity's genetic "shuffle rate" by allowing couples to have one child naturally but requiring men to donate their sperm to a central bank, and women to carry and give birth to "randomly-fathered" children.

Obviously the institutional and logistical (not to mention ethical) challenges make this impossible in any present society. But for a planned community of fixed size (e.g. a small colony of humans attempting to rapidly populate a planet, or a starship designed to support the minimum possible human population with the ... (read more)

How much of the expected rise in sea levels caused by melting glaciers can be rerouted to irrigate large deserts?

What is the U.S. waiting for to annex Cuba?

Somebody should explore if Stonehenge, Carnac stones, and other megalithic formations were banking and payment systems.

More recently, in the isle of Yap, they used big Rai stones as money.

Many megalithic buildings are tombs, places of worship, or served as calendars, but many big stones aligned in open spaces have no conclusive explanation.

I suggest they could have been a way of storing value and were used for payments too. There is evidence that there was trade across the European continent and into the middle east in those times (~6000 BC). Central m... (read more)

Adoption of already existing orphans, refugees and homeless kids should take precedence over the creation of more babies. This should be mandatory in the entire world.

Can MacDonalds be the next Give Directly?

Premise 1:

Salty food is addictive (repeat customers)

I haven't heard about salty chip vendors in developing countries.

Assuming potatoes could grow in those countries, labour costs for turning them into chips could be low.

Selling chips could be a financially sustainable business in developing countries

Premise 2:

Salt iodisation is cheap

Current competitors in salt iodisation work with governments, with no known private competition

Salt is like a nootropic for the malnourished

Let's open up salty chips vendors in the devel... (read more)