Crazy Ideas Thread

Someone should create a free speech Twitter that doesn't censor anything protected by the U.S. 1st amendment.

GiveWell should have book/movie/podcast/video game awards (like the Hugo award) open to voting for anyone who has given money through GiveWell in the past year.

Large scale heat management: controlling or influencing temperature flows on a geographic (regional or global) scale. Heat management is one of the deep fundamental problems in life and engineering, but humans have never tried to do anything smarter or more ambitious in this area than standard HVAC stuff.

Humans like moderate temperatures, say 55-75 F, but we spend quite a lot of our time in discomfort or even pain because the actual temperature is outside this range. But the problem isn't that heat (or cold) is in short supply, it's just distributed unevenly. This fact hit home for me when I was riding in an Uber because terrible winter weather knocked out Boston's subway system, and the driver told me she had just returned from a trip to Brazil, which was mostly unpleasant because the heat made it impossible to do anything outside.

Here are some options:

• Heat banking: store heat during the summer in large reservoirs of water. Release it during the winter.
• Heat trade: hot regions send heat to cold regions; both sides are happier.
• Heat sequestration: there are huge pools of cold water about 1000m underneath the ocean surface, when your city is too hot, send some heat down there.

I'm actually quite confident some version of this idea will work, because there are two vastly powerful forces working in its favor:

• Economics: in heat trade, both parties feel that they are exchanging a good for a bad. This kind of exchange almost never happens, most normal trade relies on the parties valuing something at a different magnitude of positive or negative value, but with the same sign.
• The Great Second Law: Humans suffer from temperature unevenness but Nature actually prefers temperatures to equilibriate. We just have to help Nature do what it already wants to do.

Meta discussion of the Crazy Ideas Thread

Let people with healthy feet sell their unwashed socks to people who have just finished fighting with pathogenic feet flora (if anyone has had a history of feet inflammation, they are prohibited to sell their socks.)

I've heard of cars powered by liquid nitrogen, since it boils at ambient temperature (even if the weather is below freezing), you can use it to expand a piston. The energy comes from the ambient environment.

Thermal equilibrium with outer space is about 4 Kelvin (due to background radiation). That's really cold. If we could make a large radiator exposed to open sky at night could we use it to produce liquid nitrogen? Not exactly, because the air itself can emit radiation. This is the greenhouse effect.

But would it be possible to coat the radiator with quantum dots that preferentially emit thermal radiation at a frequency not absorbed by the atmosphere?

If it works, this would be a completely passive system capable of producing fuel, and might also make cryonics and systems using superconductors more economical, such as long distance power transfer and grid scale energy storage in magnetic fields.

Orbiting landing tracks.

Payloads would be launched from earth with just enough fuel to loft them above the atmosphere and keep them hovering for a few minutes. Then they would electromagnetically couple to a long horizontal structure in low orbit, picking up velocity (or "losing" it, depending on the frame of reference) until they are orbiting at the same rate.

Electrically driven thrusters (e.g. vertical electrodynamic tethers which push against the earth's magnetic field) would be used to replenish the lost momentum. At any given time, the payload would be a fraction of the total track mass, but since it could be new track material this would permit (fairly rapid) bootstrapping.

Typical superheroes act like lymphocytes, while the bad aliens, against whom they fight, are antigens with no real planning beyond 'stake ground & multiply'; police in the stories are like interferon, and mass media are highly specialized, short lived antibodies, while the public shows general symptoms of inflammation if the situation spreads. Looping!days are malaria-like illnesses, apocalypses are...okay, there are really too many options...and mind control is, more or less, AIDS. Traveling between different universes is contagion.

Now, are there any stories sufficiently meta to be strictly epidemiological?

A form of society that is based on a social contract where the rules (like the rules of e.g. democracy) are constructed in such a way that

• individuals are (monetarily) rewarded if they take more responsibility (for other people basically) in a way that a doubled responsibility leads to a unit increase in reward (with a unit reward for taking responsibility for one self).
• sub groups can make individual decisions and take local responsibility (and e.g. distribute the reward according to the rules)
• there is an increase in power with group size but limited in a mathematically precise way
• optional: Limitation of private property to that which you can actually regularly use.

Thus there is a limit to income in a mathematically precise way (logarithm of total social product).

ADDED: Construct this in a way that it can be embedded in existing society (via existing contracts) such that it can grow from a small set of members to all.

(had the idea after seeing this)

Each person's vote should be weighed by their life expectancy given their age.

(ETA: I will downvote any comment in this subthread discussing the object-level issue of whether Britain had better stay in the EU, no matter how reasonable and insightful it is.)

Please take my consideration in moderation. I have a vested interest here. Also, I really love 80,000 hours and givewell, so I focus on the criticism for expediency: 80,000 highlights tobacco control in the developing world as one of the most important issues. However, I think they overestimate its neglectedness. As the tobacco atlas illustrates there is almost perfect symmetry between the research in the area and advocacy because you can see exactly what 'solutions' are required. Additionally, they underestimate the tractability of the problem. I don't even see how they generated their ratings - seems to be pulled out of their ass - excuse my language. This all being said, I reckon they grossly underestimate the scale of the problem - I think it blows biosecurity or nuclear security out of the water. It is the leading preventable cause of death and it is 100% certain unlikely biosecurity or nuclear security disasters. Additionally, the GiveWell open philanthropy project evaluation of developing world tobacco control is laughable, and focusses almost entirely on the WHO MPOWER recommendations. Gosh, who did that research?

I define intelligence as the ability to make optimal decisions to achieve some goal. The goal, clearly, is left undefined. This extends beyond the typical application of the word on humans, although I believe it fits nicely. A conventionally labeled intelligent person is capable of achieving conventionally defined "smart" goals such as performing well on tests and solving problems. However, things that are not seen as conventionally intelligent, such as the ability to distinguish between colors, would also fall under this definition.

One implication of this thought is that most people (may) have roughly the same amount of intelligence. Our brains and their biological neural networks can be trained in various ways to do certain tasks "better" and it is a matter of luck if those tasks align with conventional views of intelligence.

This isn't too revolutionary, perhaps the rough equality argument is somewhat controversial, but it got me thinking about how this definition extends to move complex entities. Specifically, I've been thinking about groups of people. In light of the recent British exit from the EU, many people argued that democracy had failed. A quote attributed to Winston Churchill was tossed around frequently: "The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter." Democracy attempts to find the average decision of each voter, so obviously it wouldn't be more intelligent than the average voter. In terms of raw intelligence, therefore, I would argue that a single voter picked at random is just as effective for decision making. I am of course ignoring the goal of democracy, which is fairness.

Another entity worth exploring with this definition is the economy. My thought is that the economy is very intelligent. I haven't been able to boil down exactly why, but the premise I've considered is that it works evolutionarily: the fittest companies survive. This is much unlike a democracy because each mind participating in the economy is effectively competing with every other mind. Each decision that is ultimately made is collaborative in nature, and I would argue that in the economy we don't see an average intelligence but rather a summation (to be vague with the mathematical model) of all the intelligences interacting with it.

I haven't explored any of the immediate parallels too much. An example would be neurons in neural networks functioning similarly (competitively) in their contribution to a full decision. It seems consistent with how most neural nets are set up: a correct decision backpropogates to increase that neuron's weight for future decisions.

You've all seen the pendulum exhibit at the planetarium. Is it possible to use gyroscopes to extract the rotational motion of the Earth as a power source? Maybe you can use a vacuum and maglev bearings so you aren't expending energy to keep them spinning. You can use gears to trade torque for rotation speed. The available torque from the planet must be immense. Building such a device may be expensive, but then it's "unlimited" free energy with no carbon emissions, and, unlike most renewables, it has steady output.

I just started using the MessagEase keyboard on Android. It has a nice feature whereby pressing alⓒ gives you α and beⓒ gives you β.

On the other hand I have to press Alt +3B1 or Alt 224 to get α in windows and that's extremly difficult to remember. I think it would be great if somebody would write a program that also allows me easy access to such unicode characters on windows.