Open Thread Feb 29 - March 6, 2016

Scary Mark Zuckerberg interview on AI risks where the Facebook founder says:

"I think that along the way, we will also figure out how to make it safe. The dialogue today kind of reminds me of someone in the 1800s sitting around and saying: one day we might have planes and they may crash. Nonetheless, people developed planes first and then took care of flight safety. If people were focused on safety first, no one would ever have built a plane."

Yes, but if the crash of a single airplane would cause the extermination of mankind we would all be dead. A better analogy is scientists in 1940 considering whether detonating an atomic bomb would ignite the atmosphere.

moderator action: Old_Gold is banned

Another account of Eugine_Nier / Azathoth123 / Voiceofra / The_Lion / The_Lion2 is banned, effective now. I am posting this as a comment in Open Thread to avoid writing articles about banning the same person again and again, thus reducing the administrative cost of enforcing the already existing ban.

This specific change of policy does not apply to other potentially banned users (unless they are obvious spammers or scammers) who still deserve a separate post.

from r2.models import Account, Link, Vote
user = Account._by_name('Eugine\_Nier')
# list() to make sure enumeration is done before we start changing the votes
# (dunno if we actually need to do that)
votee_ids = list([v.c._thing2_id for v in Vote._query(Vote.c._thing1_id == user._id)])
# dir = None to remove a vote
# ip = None because ip isn't needed when not creating a new vote
for votee_id in votee_ids: Vote.vote(user, Link._byID(votee_id), None, None)

PSA: if you have chronic, low-level respiratory/sinus problems, there is a good chance it is caused by poor air quality in your place of residence. There are a lot of possible causes, including mold, bad carpeting, and poorly maintained HVAC systems.

I may be especially vulnerable, but I've experienced significant respiratory problems caused by bad air in several different apartments over the years. A couple of years ago, I was going through a particularly bad episode, and I thought I had simply developed adult-onset allergies to standard allergens (pollen, etc) but I noticed that when I spent a week away on a family visit, the symptoms almost went away. Then I moved out of the place with bad air, and the problems disappeared in a matter of weeks.

The good news is: it should be easy to tell if your apartment is causing problems, by staying elsewhere for a couple of days and noticing changes in the symptoms. The bad news is, if you'd prefer to fix the problem instead of moving to a different place, it might be hard to do, or even to identify the problem exactly.

I have an idea for a billion dollar company in the space of health care. It's a bit similar to metamed but has much better business model. I'm at the moment not sure whether to persue it commercially. From an EA perspective I would also be happy if someone else builds the company.

At the moment I'm thinking about writing a longer document laying out the idea but don't know about the best venue for it. Are you aware of any competitons for ideas where money can be won by writing a document about health care innovation without having an startup working on the idea?

I have been thinking a lot about Trump and I would like to start a discussion thread on him but I recognize that this would obviously violate LW's implicit rule against discussing politics so I thought I would run a poll to see if I have permission.

Should we have a discussion thread on Trump?
[pollid:1128]

Update: I won't be starting a Trump thread because of these poll results.

I am maybe 95% confident that Torchlight_Crimson is yet another Eugine account, and he (or someone) is mass-downvoting my comments (and probably others', but my own are easier to notice).

"You could also, if you had a sufficiently good understanding of organic biology and aerodynamics, build an airplane that could mate with birds. I don't think this would have been a smart thing for the Wright Brothers to try to do in the early days."
— Eliezer, in this interview with John Horgan, when asked whether AIs will experience sexual desire

"As you know, birds do not have sexual organs because they would interfere with flight. In fact, this was the big breakthrough for the Wright Brothers. They were watching birds one day, trying to figure out how to get their crude machine to fly, when suddenly it dawned on Wilbur. "Orville," he said, "all we have to do is remove the sexual organs!" You should have seen their original design."
— Dave Barry, "Sex and the Single Amoeba" (1986)

Haven't asked in a bit: Is the real book version of AI to Zombies out yet or still just e? I would gladly buy a few copies at textbook-scaled prices, let alone normal book prices, but I want to buy several as gifts for people outside of this community (we've already read the sequences), most of whom take being e-exclusive as a sign of not being good enough to print. As I myself do, frankly, but a fallible one that's wrong here. And besides, you can't wrap it ;)

Anyway, I'd be curious if it's happened yet, and if not, if there's anything I can do to help move it along. Thanks.

I've just read an interview to a Danish artist/enterpreneur who invented a low cost light bulb, trying to promote it to a poor African village.
The reaction he got when he explained the project was "Yeah, it's a cute idea, but this is a prosperous village, you should try to sell it to the poorer village down the road".
He then moved to the next village, which had the same level of average earning, but proposing his light-bulb as an appliance for rich people, this time receiving a lot more interest. The artist later remodeled the bulb, keeping it low-cost but giving it a fancier appearance to suit this image of a light for rich dwellings in poor villages.
It should come to no surprise to LWers that people are almost exclusively interested in things that raise their social status, even when understanding their situation would be the first thing to do to get out of it.
This raises an interesting question: if you were offering a service that tried to help people, how would you reframe it so that users would not feel devalued?

Uruguay proposes to deploy bats to kill mosquitoes.

Quarterly life report: 2016

Mental health

• No longer chronically suicidal, suicidality more sporadic and it's a rather dull urge mashed up with conflicting other urges

• Renewed interests in cryonics. Hmmm...

• Writing, being open socially and back pain exercises are clearly improving my mental health.

• Attending an outpatient mental health clinic. Approaching their upper age limit and will probably graduate to the clinic downstairs. They are helpful, but less helpful than services attended in the past like the university mental health clinic. Psychologists recently made clear that the notes shes been taking don't contain the secrets to the universe, she doesn't even study them after sessions, and are basically inconsequential. I've wasted lots of time here. Sunk costs, it's hard, make a decision.

Relationships

• Met a string of promising people lately. Two in particular stand out: 1 guy and 1 girl.

• 1 crush, it's been a while. Insta-crush on the aforementioned girl. Opened up immediately about it to friends, which is a first. Plan to open up about it to girl in question when I next see her after soliciting and contingent upon her attitudes to affection and emotional vulnerability.

• Low sex drive. Occasional sexual urges, ritualistic nightly sexual compulsion. It's interesting the girl I'm crushing on is asexual..

Nutrition

• Appear to be meeting my RDI's for nutritents and micronutrients based on crude aggregations of my daily dietary intake and the NHMRC reference values

• Still low weight and receiving unsolicited concerns and advice over my weight form an ecclectic mix of people

• Not losing or gaining weight

• No plans to change dietary strategy: will continue to eat when hungry, from the same selection of foods

• No bullshit diet, except occasional chocolate or misc. treats at moments of weakness: rationalising it as 'gaining weight' - watch out for that!

Fitness

• very poor. Nah, that's a lie. It's probably above average just not impressive. It's probably your mental health telling you you're not fit enough.

• working towards getting fit enough to make the entry requirements for a reference defence force (a little harder than Australia's) for goal-post purposes, rather than joining that military. That option is specifically excluded, despite the fitness gains, because travelling to that country would be neccersary for an interview with no guarrantees, and quickpacing to those fitness req's would potentially cause injury. By the time I expect to get that fit (~1.5 years), the opportunity cost of a fixed minimum period of service should be untenable given hopes I have for my future

• Leg pain still an issue when running. Not performing rehabilitation exercises as prescribed but half-assed attempts are made everyday. BIggest issue is probably motivation. however, motivational videos seem to have diminishing marginal motivational utility every time, and seem to be 'narcisstic supply', for lack of a less psychoanalytical term. No reference research or professional opinion seems to support or oppose this opinion but caution is urged.

Health

• delayed sleep phases. Keep pushing commitments into the afternoon. If someone says you're inflexible, tell them it's medical.

• Back pain is gnarly. Performed back pain exercises as prescribed for first time in months yesterday after a few days of desperate exercising in order to relieve quite bad pain lasting a few days from not taking exercises seriously for a little bit. The pain seems to have coincided with some standoffish behaviour and feeling really shoddy by memory and psychologists account. Causal? Just don't let this happen again. Be diligent, exercise.

• Otherwise in great physical health. No troubles to speak of. Be grateful!

Finance

• Very low liquidity after yolobetting most of your savings into stocks (there's a whole discussion post I made about this). Once a gambler always a gambler. You're hemmoraging money but your strategy was for long term gains, so as dumb as the move was, the smart move is to hold your grain and don't panic. Aim to sell in 2025. If nothing else, this will keep you from 'investing' in cryonics. And, you still have way more disposable income than you use.

• No income other than allowance from parents and welfare from government

Employment

• No employment, gainful or otherwise

• Indicated to social worker that I'm interested in doing peer-worker type work. If nothing else, my mental illness differentiates me from other job canidates so perhaps it can be a strength.

• Also expressed interest in doing a gardening apprenticeship. Will it be bad for my back? Will exposure to herbicides and pesticides occupationally be bad for my mental health and chronic pain?

• Negligible interest in the topic of my unpaid research at uni. Not sure research lyf will be flexible enough for episodic mental health issues either. It's stressful too, and I already exhaust my mind on mental health personal stuff already! At least it's another dead end. So is politics, for the same reasons, and the additional stress burden it will have due to the adversarial nature and laddeness with compromise, uncertain and career instability. Not that academia doesn't have career instability too...

• Should I be applying for grad jobs? I probably wouldn't like them anyway. Unless they were finance were I can yolobet professionally, and with some training behind me. Ok, do that, apply! Probably won't get them anyway but at least I can say I tried

Education

• Almost out of grad school. Wahoo! That was....better than the alternative. But now, you are fucked. Sink or swin in the job market. Just grind your way out of the research work you have for yourself then never look back. Sunk cost yes, but you can't change the past, and the hardest parts are behind you. Plus, this could open up doors to lobbying...go and contact some people who work in that area, or the organisations that employ them, and see what they make of you...

Social network

• Pretty awesome on this front. It's just too big and compartmentalised right now. You want trim the fat and consolidate networks. Introduce people to one another. You have lots of cash and nothing to do with it, so throw dinner parties and stuff, and shout them all It will be better than buying them gifts cause people seem to freak the fuck out when you do that. Shouting food and venues is a great way to go.

Impression management

Internet footprint

Email accounts:

• 2 university A email accounts (active)
• 1 university B email accounts (inactive)
• 2 hotmail email accounts:
• 1 outlook email account

• 1 gmail email account (all others forward to this email account)

• That's a lot of accounts, but there's no easy way around this. Email still gets sent through each of them and it would be such a hassle to manually switch things over, email people back saying email me at this new account, and just waiting for some email that's coming from an unexpected source, which may not come through for months or years (and is drastically important!). Oh, if you're an entrepreneur, please fix this problem for me and I"ll throw money at you.

Social media:

• facebook: people still asking me to like stuff, still lots of bullshit distractions in feed (do something about that), unappealing photos on wall (hide them)...wait, no don't hide them! It took you so long to become less fragile and scared to be open on facebook. The rule is, you can only be MORE transparent, you are never allowed to go back. In fact, just for thinking that, go and make some things that were visible to only me, visible to public now!
• angellist: meh
• youtube: meh
• blogspot (inactive): meh
• geni (managed by family member): I feel like my privacy is being violated. Fuck you family, ask for my permission first before expanding my internet footprint.

I remember reading a few times on LW that psychologists have the same treatement success as non-psychologists. Has someone looked more deeply into this issue and can point me to academic research around that claim?

An interesting article I found a long time ago. Scroll down to the tables. I've found these tables extremely interesting. Way better than the descriptions of what the different personality traits are supposed to mean.

E.g. Openness seems to be your measure of liberal vs conservative/ red tribe vs blue tribe stuff.

Conscientiousness measures focus/akrasia/ADHD.

Introversion is obvious, but what it correlates to is interesting. Extroverts are interest in parties, but introversion correlates very strongly with "nerd" culture stuff.

Agreeableness is atheism vs religion. Might be more generally having contrarian opinions on things, I'm not certain.

Neuroticism is... well I don't really know what's going on there.

If someone is "banned", does it also prevent them from sending private messages? I am asking because of the scam account who doesn't post in the forum anyway.

(Reposted for better visibility.)

I am torn as to if I should tie my astrobio bloggery to my professional identity. Primarily because such bloggery is known here and in one or two other online spaces in which I also occasionally piss people off.

Containment thread

Requests for information

• Why is there is no space where can I dance with strangers in public for free without prior preperation or an exceptional value proposition to prospective partners (e.g. I'll pay you to dance with me, or you get to look at my handsome self - hint: I'm not super handsome). Or is there, and I'm not aware of it? In a foreign country, perhaps?

• Which life insurer do you use? Anyone know if Commonwealth bank or uni super will payout for cryonics?

• Recently I've been toying with the notion of political determinism. I'd be interested in a text analysis program that could analyse new legislation (this exists already) brought before parliament and predict (this doesn't exist yet) the political feasability based on content and contextual factors. Any suggestions? Given I have access to the text mining software that can classify legislation, can I propose a kaggle competition to predict responses to it? Right now political feasability analysis is pretty crude and requires human specialists not instead, policies could one day be generated based on plausibility then simply selected by human supervisors in parliament.

• What is the relationship between housing characteristics and the elements of flourishing?

• Science PhD's are frequently derided for being in vast oversupply to demand, resulting in poor employment outcomes for those who go for them. How do management and marketing PhD's compare as a career capital aquisition strategy? Hearsay suggets busines PhD's are far more valuable and there is high demand for business academics. However, my research suggests this may be explained by higher barriers to entry to business PhD's than science PhD's. Regarding management professional doctorates:

As a rule, students had 15 years of professional experience and were 40 years old. Two out of three were male and the students were from all sorts of industries – such as financial services, consulting firms, or IT and telecommunication – or ran their own businesses. Most of the students worked full-time, mainly in senior and middle management.

However, professional doctorates are a step higher than traditional PhDs. www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20140507145246893. The fact that Oxford publishes a list of its unemployed PhD students from its last graduates is slightly telling of the markets disequilibrium. Take into account their already small intake and the high barriers to entry (Oxford Said GMAT simulator). The case for the marketing PhD is simpler. There is disequilbrium between supply and demand, but also mismatch between marketing PhD graduate characteristics and marketing job requirements so marketing PhD's are neccersarily even that geared towards academia. My tentative conclusion is that marketing and management PhD's are fraught endeavours justlike science PhD's (both being more job worthy than arts PhD's) in general.

• It seems like all studies between charitable giving and happiness are correlational and don't draw causal inferences, but journalists and charities frequently do. Is there any reason to believe that people who give more on aggregate have higher incomes, facilitating happier lives more generally?

Based on political affiliation, some studies argue conservatives, on average, are happier than liberals. A potential explanation is greater acceptance of income inequalities in society leads to a less worried nature.

-wiki

In fact, if I was to design a study from which to draw a cauasal inference, my hypothesise would test to see if becoming interested in donating harmed the donor.

• Effective altruism without justice considerations should suffer from the same problems as non-reciprocal altruism in nature.

Moralistic aggression. A protection mechanism from cheaters acts to regulate the advantage of cheaters in selection against altruists. The moralistic altruist may want to educate or even punish a cheater.

-wiki. How can they protect against that if at all?

Partnerships. Altruism to create friendships.

EA's don't try to improve the wellbeing of their own group directly generally so they're reducing their own fitness. In nature, altruistic cabals form and split away from the less altruistic groups, and if altruism is an effective strategy for their adaptiveness then that altruistic community thrives.

• What is the relationship between porn consumption and health outcomes? Are there any systematic reviews of the relationship between porn and health outcomes (including mental health outcomes)?

interesting research

Public interest alert. MIRI take note. I met a girl the other day who's researching reasoning about Goal Revelation in Human Negotiation. Specifically, she's working on training AI's to out-negotiate humans in psychological games. The implications for the AI box experiment are clear and terrifying. She seems unaware of the implications, and the field doesn't have a strong web-presence at my institute - but Harvard seems to be the powerhouse for papers in the subfield right now.

• The One Weird Trait That Predicts Whether You’re a Trump Supporter

• autobiographical episodic memory cueing the remedial equivelant to reference class forecasting

• In Meditation and attention: A comparison of the effects of concentrative and mindfulness meditation on sustained attention the case is made that long term meditators can sustain their concentration longer than short term meditators, and that mindfulness meditators deal between with unexpected tasks of attention than concentrative meditators, but no differences otherwise.

• Can't concentrate for long? In Volitional modulation of autonomic arousal improves sustained attention the case is made that their autonomic arousal biofeedback protocol can increase sustained attention in neuropsychiatrically impaired populations. It probably applies to nonclinical populations too if you're looking for a cognitive superpower.

• This research examines the influence of power on consumer decision strategies. It proposes that high power directs consumers' attention to options' positive features, making choosing a more preferred strategy than rejecting, whereas low power shifts consumers' focus to negative features, making rejecting a more preferred strategy than choosing. Two studies using different manipulations of power provide consistent support for this effect. The results also indicate that consumers in a state of high power are more satisfied with their choices when they adopt a choosing strategy than when they adopt a rejecting strategy, whereas the opposite is true for consumers in a state of low power. In addition, study 2 shows that the previous effects are reduced when consumers' sense of responsibility is made salient.

• A main assumption behind privatisations, public-private partnerships and private finance initiatives in major programme delivery is that the involvement of private risk capital in programme delivery, for instance in infrastructure provision, will bring much-needed discipline to the planning and delivery of programmes.

The research in this project is designed to test this assumption. So far the assumption has been tested only with small samples of programmes and the evidence is mixed. Statistically valid conclusions do not exist. This study will attempt to change this state of affairs.

• Private versus public finance in major programme management

-The powerful select, the powerless reject: Power's influence in decision strategies - empirical support for the 'abundance mentality' theory of personal development

• Ariely argues that aversion to loss rather than a desire for flexibility explains the paradox of choice. That is, DON'T KEEP YOUR OPTIONS OPEN, RISK AND ITERATE INSTEAD as a maxim might be prudent in a broad class of circumstances while people get use to this paradigm, it's astrategic.

asking individuals to think about “how much time they would like to donate” (vs. “how much money they would like to donate”) to a charity increases the amount that they ultimately donate to the charity.

-Liu and Aaker

opinion

• A/PROF ANISH NAGPAL, former mechanical engineer, former economist and present day marketing professor. Wow.

• end the objectification of children and infants for the cuteness, they are not objects and deserve respect and self determination and rights not trivialisation and paternalism

media

• Author Robert Greene on the Utility of Weirdness, Fear, and Pain - Inside Quest - a very good video just like many on Inside quest

Nick Bostrom in the news.

What do you guys think of the theories of Ernest Becker, and of the more modern terror management theory?

The basic argument as that many, if not all, human behaviors are the result of our knowledge of our own mortality and our instinct to deny and forget about it in order to seek some kind of literal or symbolic immortality (by living forever, or writing a famous book, etc.) Religion exists to tell us that it's okay to die, culture to make us forget about religion, so we don't examine it too closely or think about death in general (it can still be scary because the evolutionary instinct to survive is still there). This definition of "culture" applies to nearly every domain of human achievement, including this very website. Less wrong exists to raise users' self esteem or self-concept so that the feel some security in a symbolic kind of immortality (I'm rational, I'm a transhuminist--of course I'll survive!)

I suggest you read the links I gave above for further explanation. There have also been scientific studies on mortality salience (here's a review) which seem to support the theory.

Cryptography Pioneers Receive 2015 ACM A.M. Turing Award

Whitfield Diffie, former Chief Security Officer of Sun Microsystems and Martin E. Hellman, Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, are the recipients of the 2015 ACM A.M. Turing Award, for critical contributions to modern cryptography. The ability for two parties to communicate privately over a secure channel is fundamental for billions of people around the world. On a daily basis, individuals establish secure online connections with banks, e-commerce sites, email servers and the cloud. Diffie and Hellman’s groundbreaking 1976 paper, “New Directions in Cryptography,” introduced the ideas of public-key cryptography and digital signatures, which are the foundation for most regularly-used security protocols on the Internet today. The Diffie-Hellman Protocol protects daily Internet communications and trillions of dollars in financial transactions.

Speaking of NRx :-)

Clarkhat (who, I'm pretty sure, is Clark formerly of Popehat) wrote a good post talking about what is neoreaction. A taste:

Neoreaction defines itself more in in terms of what it is opposed to than in terms of what it is in favor of.

Fine. So what is neoreaction against?

Democracy.

Neoreaction is the political philosophy that says that democracy is not merely the well-meaning god that happened to fail, but that our current wreckage was predetermined, because democracy fatally intertwined with progressivism since its birth, that it is a tool of progressivism, and that therefore, for a society to accept democracy is for a society to accept its inevitable doom at the hands of progressivism.

Tyler Cowen on mindkilling politics:

Again, both the Democrats and the Republicans have their ready made, mostly true, and repeatedly self-confirming stories about the defects of the other. They need only read the news to feel better about themselves, and the academic contingent of the Democrats is better at this than are most ordinary citizens. There is thus a rather large cottage industry of intellectuals interpreting and channeling these stories to Democratic voters and sympathizers. On the right, you will find an equally large cottage industry, sometimes reeking of intolerance or at least imperfect tolerance, peddling mostly true stories about the failures of Democratic governance, absurd political correctness, tribal loyalties, and so on. That industry has a smaller role for the intellectuals and a larger role for preachers and talk radio.

It would be wrong to conclude that the two parties both ought to be despised. This is human life, and it is also politics, and politics cannot be avoided. These are what motivations look like. Overall these motivations have helped create and support a lot of wonderful lives and a lot of what is noble in the human spirit. We should honor that side of American life, while being truly and yet critically patriotic.

That said, I see no reason to fall for any of these narratives. The goal is to stand above these biases as much as possible, and communicate some kind of higher synthesis, in the hope of making it all a bit better.

Containment thread 2

• Is llyashpster really gone and is it because of me?

saints of effective altruism

• William MacAskill, patron Saint of Employment
• Brian Tomasik, patron Saint of Mercy
• David Pearce, Patron Saint of Pleasure
• Tony Ord, Patron Saint of Charity,
• Elie Hassenfeld, Patron Saint of Economics

• Peter Singer, Patron Saint of Fame

• I think the biggest issue with the lack of competition in the charity evaluation space is highlighted by begging a question you'd imagine they'd have answered, but haven't: What is the most cost-effective QALY with room for more funding?

Taking the bias out of megaprojects

From rail links and power plants to major events and IT systems, large-scale projects and programmes are the key to innovation, change, and growth across the world. However, they often fail, going over-time and over-budget ‒ or at the very least not delivering all the benefits they promised at the outset.

Oxford research into why megaprojects and major programmes go wrong has informed the work of managers and policymakers in both the public and private sectors. It has contributed to improved decision-making and better management of projects. In particular, it has provided a means of identifying early indicators of projects that are at high risk of failure.

Research by academics at the BT Centre for Programme Management in the Saïd Business School focused on building a database of 1,493 transport infrastructure projects from 34 different countries, dating back 90 years. The team found that at the root of cost overruns, schedule delays, and benefits shortfalls were optimism bias and strategic misrepresentation. That is, that the people running the projects either had a naïve belief that nothing bad could possibly happen to them, or they deliberately under-estimated the costs and over-estimated the benefits just to get the projects off the ground. Based on these findings, the research team developed an eight-step theoretical process model to conduct quality control and due diligence of decision making on megaprojects.

A second, more recent, stream of research looking at ICT projects challenged prevailing assumptions about social and technical complexity as a factor influencing project performance. The research was based on a global sample of nearly 4,300 projects from 189 public and private sector organisations. The key finding was that ICT projects were more often scuppered by a rare and unexpected event than by a problem that is common and predictable. Decision-makers tend to ignore these low-probability events in calculating risk – to their peril.

This body of research has had a direct impact on how megaprojects are implemented and measured in a range of sectors worldwide. Researchers worked with the UK’s National Audit Office (NAO) to identify measures of project complexity which would help identify high-risk projects. 10 factors were identified, showing that risks are mostly associated with the social and political environment of projects. In January 2013, this new assessment was rolled out as part of Infrastructure UK‘s ‘route map toolkit’ and applied to the pipeline of 576 projects worth GBP 300 billion.

A series of workshops about the research helped management consultancy McKinsey re-conceptualise their way of thinking about project management and change their methodology. McKinsey consultants then applied this new ‘value assurance’ methodology to advise more than 30 global clients between 2012 and 2013.

-Oxford research is changing the way infrastructure and ICT projects are planned, managed, and assured

**

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. "

”Of all the the things we could spend public money on - five hospitals, reducing the public debt by a third, funding Gonski for six years, reversing foreign aid cuts, reducing student loans by a quarter, or even giving everyone a $1000 - we choice already obsolete war toys.”

-Eisenhour

Which economics websites would you recommend reading? I would prefer websites that write analyses of economies and industry sectors rather than theoretical ones, although good websites of the latter kind are also of interest.

With transhumanist technology, what is the probability that any human alive today will live forever, and not just thousands, or millions of years? I assume an extremely small, but non-zero, amount.

Pentagon: "Please hack us."

If you find unknown Strong AI and you have to ask it only one question, what it should be? (You can't skip asking)

Some possibly good ideas:

How to create Friendly AI?

2+2=?

Is there a computable infinite sequence of bits, and a constant c>1, such that any algorithm that prints the sequence requires at least c^n time to print the nth bit?

Found this website selling very cool mattresses. Anyone tried them?

"very cool" = connected to a smartphone, collecting data about your sleep, adjustable by clicking a button

How do you say in Latin 'Fern imagined' (like a real species name)?

Why was the ban on talking about RB lifted?