Crazy Ideas Thread

To any future super-intelligence: I want to be created for the first time, please extrapolate my personality from my comments.

Socrates has some sound advice on making requests of powerful beings:

Our prayers should be for blessings in general, for God knows best what is good for us.

"There is life eternal within the eater of souls. Nobody is ever forgotten or allowed to rest in peace. They populate the simulation spaces of its mind, exploring all the possible alternative endings to their life. There is a fate worse than death, you know.''

What, no conditionality there? I guess all EY's scary stories about not-quite-benevolent genies were a waste, after all... X-)

Me too.

To any current super-intelligence: thank you for having simulated me and all my doppelgangers. Keep it up.

(For the sake of reflective consistency.)

Apparently people are considering upvotes to this as "ditto" :)

Thanks! Presumably, an omniscient being will be able to derive a "bring everyone back" goal from having read this sentence.

Since this is a crazy ideas thread, I'll tag on the following thought. If you believe that in the future, if we are able to make ems, and we should include them in our moral calculus, should we also be careful not to imagine people in bad situations? Since by doing so, we may be making a very low-level simulation in our own mind of that person, that may or may not have some consciousness. If you don't believe that is the case now, how does that scale, if we start augmenting our minds with ever-more-powerful computer interfaces. Is there ever a point where it becomes immoral just to think of something?

"A tulpa could be described as an imaginary friend that has its own thoughts and emotions, and that you can interact with. You could think of them as hallucinations that can think and act on their own." https://www.reddit.com/r/tulpas/

Some authors say that their characters will resist plot elements they (the characters) don't like.

What exactly does "consciousness" even mean here, though?

I've written before, and at my best my model of my characters included:

• Complex emotions (as in multiple emotions at once with varying intensities)

• Intelligent behavior (by borrowing my own intelligence, my characters could react intelligently to the same range of situations as I can)

• Preferences (they liked/disliked, loved/hated, desired/feared, etc)

• Self-awareness (a well-written character's model includes a model of itself, and can do introspection using the intelligent behavior above)

What else is necessary to have consciousness? There are plenty of other things that could be important, but they don't seem necessary to me upon reflection. For example:

• Continuity of self; Time skips in stories involve coming up with approximately what happens over a period of time, and simply updating the character model based on the expected results of that. But if it turned out that significant parts of my life were skipped and fake memories of them were added, I would still value myself for the moments that weren't skipped over, so I don't think this is necessary for consciousness.

• Independence; I can technically make a character do whatever I want, but that often breaks their characterization, and if someone was a god and could make me think or do anything, I'd want to get free, but I would still value myself.

• Consistency; At my best my characters are mostly consistent in characterization, but I'm not often at my best. But mood swings and forgetting things happens to real people too, so I don't think it's a deal-breaker on consciousness.

• Subconscious; A really good author almost certainly uses their own subconscious to model the character and their behavior, so it's not clear that a character doesn't have a subconscious. It's not quite the same as a real person's, but as long as it still results in the big 4 at the top I don't think this matters much.

• Advanced senses; Visualization is hard, so none of my characters have vision as good as mine, and even then, I usually just include basic awareness of their surroundings in their models rather than visualize every scene from each character's perspective. But then, blind people are people, so that's still not necessary for consciousness.

Maybe any of these alone isn't enough to stop being a person, but combined they are? But I don't see a reason why that would be the case.

I suppose you could argue that the character is just the author playing a role. That's true, but it seems to me that if a subset of you is practically a complete person on its own with different emotions, preferences, and behaviors from your own, then saying they don't matter because they're just a subset of you doesn't really sit well with me.

So where did I go wrong with this long chain of reasoning? What am I missing?

This is a great blog post on a similar idea: http://www.meltingasphalt.com/neurons-gone-wild/

Why only in political ads? Product consumption and lifestyle choices have orders of magnitude more impact on most people's lives than political choices, why not start by banning manipulative messaging there?

First step in the study: paternity tests for the potential subjects.

Child IQ scores tend to regress toward the mean as they get older.

Why do you think this would be better than also studying children with lower IQs than their parents? I'm curious to know your reasoning.

People are already attempting that since 2009 or so:

• https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=11583184257062107912
• https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=4202198002835248331

(Click /Cited by \d+/ to go down the rabbit hole.)

I really like this topic, and I'm really glad you brought it up; it probably even deserves its own post.

There are definitely some people who are trying this, or similar approaches. I'm pretty sure it's one of the end goals of Stephen Wolfram's "New Kind of Science" and the idea of high-throughput searching of data for latent mathematical structure is definitely in vogue in several sub-branches of physics.

With that being said, while the idea has caught people's interest, it's far from obvious that it will work. There are a number of difficulties and open questions, both with the general method and the specific instance you outline.

As far as I know, (1) we assume that the laws of the universe are simple

It's not clear that this is a good assumption, and it's not totally clear what exactly it means. There are a couple of difficulties:

a.) We know that the universe exhibits regular structure on some length and time scales, but that's almost certainly a necessary condition for the evolution of complex life, and the anthropic principle makes that very weak evidence that the universe exhibits similar regular structure on all length/time/energy scales. While clever arguments based on the anthropic principle are typically profoundly unsatisfying, the larger point is that we don't know that the universe is entirely regular/mathematical/computable and it's not clear that we have strong evidence to believe it is. As an example, we know that a vanishingly small percentage of real numbers are computable; since there is no known mechanism restricting physical constants to computable numbers, it seems eminently possible that the values taken by physical constants such as the gravitational constant are not computable.

b.) It's also not really clear what it means to say the laws of physics are simple. Simplicity is a somewhat complicated concept. We typically talk about simplicity in terms of Occam's razor and/or various mathematical descriptions of it such as message length and Kolmorogov complexity. We typically say that complexity is related to how long it takes to explain something, but the length of an explanation depends strongly on the language used for that explanation. While the mathematics that we've developed can be used to state physical laws relatively concisely, that doesn't tell us very much about the complexity of the laws of physics, since mathematics was often created for just that purpose. Even assuming that all of physics can be concisely described by the language of mathematics, I'm not sure that mathematics itself is "simple".

c.) Simple laws don't necessarily lead to simple results. If I have a set of 3 objects interacting with each other via a 1/r^2 force like gravity there is no general closed form solution for the positions of those objects at some time t in the future. I can simulate their behavior numerically, but numerical simulations are often computationally expensive, the numeric results may depend on the initial conditions in unpredictable ways, and small deviations in the initial set up or rounding errors early in the simulation may result in wildly different outcomes. This difficulty strongly affects our ability to model the chemical properties of atoms. Since each electron orbiting the nucleus interacts with each other electron via the coulomb force, there is currently no way to exactly describe the behavior of the electrons even for a single isolated many-electron atom.

d.) A simple set of equations is insufficient to specify a physical system. Most physical laws are concerned with the time evolution of physical systems, and they typically rely on the initial state of the system as a set of input parameters. For many of the systems physics is still trying to understand, it isn't possible to accurately determining what the correct input parameters are. Because of the potentially strong dependence on the initial conditions outlined in c.), it's difficult to know whether a negative result for a given set of equations/parameters implies needing a new set of laws, or just slightly different initial conditions.

In short, your proposal is difficult to enact for similar reasons that Solomonoff induction is difficult. In general there is a vast hypothesis space that varies over both a potentially infinite set of equations and a large number of initial conditions. The computational cost of evaluating a given hypothesis is unknown and potentially very expensive. It has the added difficulty that even given an infinite set of initial hypotheses, the correct hypothesis may not be among them.

No, it is not believed that gravity has a measurable effect on chemistry. People have pretty much no idea what kind of experiments would be relevant to quantum gravity. Moreover, the predictions that QFT makes about chemistry are too hard. I don't think it is possible with current computers to compute the spectrum of helium, let alone lithium. A quantum computer could do this, though.

You'll probably be interested in reading this: http://www.wired.com/2009/04/newtonai/ and this: http://www.radiolab.org/story/91712-limits-of-science/

The program described, Eureqa, is available online and had a free trial. I have spent a lot of time playing with it and trying it on different problems and datasets.

I don't think it could learn a theory of everything with out a lot of human help to reduce some parts of the problem. E.g. "here are a few numbers as inputs, here is a number as an output. Fit it out only using basic mathematical functions." But its a start.

Nitpick: we have equations for (special) relativistic quantum physics. Dirac was one of the pioneers, and the Standard Model for instance is a relativistic quantum field theory. I presume you mean general relativity (gravity) and quantum mechanics that is the problem.

(Douglas_Knight) Moreover, the predictions that QFT makes about chemistry are too hard. I don't think it is possible with current computers to compute the spectrum of helium, let alone lithium. A quantum computer could do this, though.

In the spirit of what Viliam suggested, maybe you could do computational searches for tractable approximations to QFT for chemistry i.e. automatically find things like density functional theory. A problem there might be that you do not get any insight from the result, and you might end up overfitting.

You're leaving out dark matter, dark energy, and the possibility of discovering additional weird and surprising factors.

Just happened across this article summary today about people using atomic spectra to look for evidence of dark matter. I don't know that they've found anything yet, but it's sort of neat how closely related your proposal here is to their research.

Mental effects of IF seem so easily measured and carried out by a self-experimenter that there's no need to speculate about it, you should just do it. Thus far, I haven't heard of any human trials examining the cognitive effects.

I have never heard of this effect. Do you have a reference? I am totally unable to concentrate or be productive when hungry.

I have been doing intermittent fasting for a few years, and while I think it has probably helped my mental performance, the effect isn't all that strong. If intermittent fasting becomes commonplace it's more likely, I predict, because of its anti-aging effects.

Not all people function equally. I can't work without breakfast.

Dave Asprey says, with a reasonably large set of referenced studies, that it's the mold in food which reduces your fed performance.

This is definitely crazy, but only because you seem to expect so many people to act rationally. ;)

I do have this problem with food- just eating breakfast makes me go back to bed.

If we live in a non-simulated universe, (almost) any claim of any religion can still be true. It's just so astronomically unlikely that we shouldn't spend any time considering it. (See: Pascal's Wager.)

How are ems different? A uniform prior over all possible religions isn't useful. What evidence would they have, from the mere fact of being in a simulation, that any particular set of religious claims is likely, aside from the bare claim "there are Simulators but we don't know anything about them except that they want our universe to be simulated"?

Arguments for the singularity are also (weak) arguments for theism.

As I have repeatedly stated (without much response), first at the bottom of my baseline post.

The point is, when people seriously ponder if we lived in a simulated universe but have nothing but scorn for religions, it is not so much rational as cultural. In a sci-fi geek subculture, simulation is cool, religions not.

I hesitate to mention this, but I believe there was a period where a crankish LWer or two was advocating religious belief on simulator-god grounds. I think it had more to do with intellectual hipsterism than anything.

Your culture point is also discussed in this Slate Star Codex post.

Since quantum mechanics is true, Deutsch self-consistency has pretty big advantages over Novikov self-consistency.

One thing I've never seen people mention re: time travel is that if you travel back in time six months, say, you'll find yourself floating out in space with the Earth on the other side of the Sun. (The Sun is in a slow orbit around the Milky Way, which itself is moving, right?) So practical time travel also requires practical space travel?

Some civilization would have thought of that and made sure to direct their research away from time travel and towards AI.

Alternately, if a type time travel is invented where you can change the past, you would expect people to keep meddling with the past until they accidentally changed it so much that time travel had never been invented.

This process would continue, over and over again, and the final results is that the final "stable" timeline will be one where time travel is never invented; not because it's not possible, but simply because every timeline where time travel is invented eventually changes it's own past until it no longer has time travel.

I think you vastly underestimate the power of nationalism. Greece is especially vulnerable to nationalism due to a glorious ancient past and really long Ottoman occupation. Still I think any government who accepted that would be toppled by nationalists.

If you sell land, it's probably lost forever. If you sell land which was once part of your sovereign territory, you will have no claim over it (in contrast to a land which was taken from you by force).

One doesn't have to be a caricature of an ultra-nationalist to dislike the idea of losing something permanently to cure a temporary problem.

What about leasing it instead?

Selling territory is a big no-no, but selling EU citizenship is in fashion.

Years ago I jokingly suggested to sell Crete to Turkey, in exchange for taking over Greece's debt (no doubt Turkey would jump at the opportunity and bend over to do anything possible to meet the debt payment criteria). The reactions I got were predictable, in the vein of "hell would freeze one hundred times over before this happens".

Jokes aside, selling territory (with actual sovereignty transfer, as opposed to simple real estate acquisition) seems to be a bit of no-go in the last decades. Especially selling it under duress for economical reasons.

Why limit it to the Americas? And can a lethal mutation be self-perpetuating?

This is actually a topic I'm fairly well-read on.

The basic problem is that hydrogen bombs are powerful. To make this idea economically competitive, you need very large bombs, as smaller bombs derive a proportionally higher amount of their energy from fission, and fission fuel (especially the high-quality fission fuel needed for a warhead) is very expensive. The problem, of course, is that with such powerful bombs (hundreds of kt range), there's just no way to safely confine the effect of the shock waves AND produce useful power at the same time.

So project PACER (as SIlentCal linked) was designed to use smaller, more-containable weapons. But here you have the problem that since the bombs are small, they're mostly fission, and the produced power winds up being about 3x more expensive than a conventional nuclear power plant.

Unless someone figures out a way to make a small all-fusion bomb, this idea is never going to be feasible.

Not so crazy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_PACER

The best way of doing this, is to have a big steel hollow sphere with vacuum inside. A detonation of a hydrogen bomb in the center would warm the sphere and some steam engines on the outside could harness this power.

The problem is, that the vacuum should be very high and the sphere quite large, so the outside pressure is an important factor. So you should place this gadget into orbit, where the cooling is not very simple. Nor the electricity transport back to Earth.

Otherwise, it's a good solution. This way we could have had fusion electricity some time ago. Perhaps with small hydrogen bombs a.k.a. neutron bombs. Otherwise those steel spheres would have to be too big to be stable on Earth.

Project Daedalus has the same basic concept. It's a very interesting topic to research and might give you some insight on this topic.

EVE already works sufficiently like that.

If humanity did this, at least some of us would still want to spread out in the real universe, for instance to help other civilizations. (Yes, the world inside the computer is infinitely more important than real civilizations, but I don't think that matters.)

Also, if these super-Turing machines are possible, and the real universe is finite, then we are living in a simulation with probability 1, because you could use them to simulate infinitely many observer-seconds.

Seems to me that this "obvious solution" has exactly the same problem as the original one... "it would only take ONE civilization breaking this trend to be visible".

This looks like Tipler's Omega point. Except that it's singular in the universe and for not clear reasons, it will resurrect us all in a simulated heaven.

Nuclear space guns have been proposed. Aside from the manhole cover: http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/03/150-kiloton-nuclear-verne-gun.html http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/12/sea-based-launch-option-for-nuclear.html

(This appears in Hannu's Quantum Thief trilogy, incidentally.)

I don't think a working model of this would look much like a cannon. Nukes don't directly produce (much of) a shockwave; most of the shock comes from everything in the vicinity of the warhead absorbing a massive dose of prompt gamma and/or loose neutrons and suddenly deciding that all its atoms really need to be over there. So if you had a payload backed right against a nuke, even if it managed to survive the explosion, it wouldn't convert much of its power into velocity; Orion gets its power by vaporizing the outer layers of the pusher plate or a layer of reaction mass sprayed on it.

But it might be possible, nonetheless. The thing I have in mind might look something like a large chamber full of water with a nuke in the center of it, connected by some plumbing to the launch tube with the payload. Initiate the nuke, the water flashes into steam, the expanding steam drives the payload. Tricky part would be controlling the acceleration for a (relatively) smooth launch with minimal wasted energy.

(And, of course, you're left with a giant plume of radioactive steam that you still need to deal with.)

See Project Orion. It's motto was "Mars by 1965, Saturn by 1970."

Both your barrel and your payload need to be able to survive being at the epicenter of a nuclear explosion. Spitting jets of molten metal into space isn't particularly useful.

See also space gun.

A variation - an acceleration chamber like a synchrotron (or other circular acceleration system), with a flick to release a payload towards space. not sure if it would be viable on something heavier than a particle, and what would happen. to the payload being stretched in various G-forces, or how high you would get. (not being up on my physics enough to say if it would be catastrophic or viable)

What if doing housework is actually bad for people?

I'm not sure what you mean by it being 'bad'. Leading to unhappiness? As opposed to even more unhappiness due to a messy house?

It's certainly something that people have to be trained into

I disagree with this in it's generality. The ability to to household tasks needs to be trained. Establishment of the habit is another thing. An approach that leads to a relaxed approach to 'chores' depends on the motivational structure of the child (if you imply parenting).

An intrinsically motivated (on this kind of tasks) child will likely want to do the tasks if it clear that this is necessary to achieve it's own goals. So if household tasks are routinely coupled to some things the child want/needs for itself like clothing of its choice, access to materials, support in its projects..., then it will do these tasks (as long as it doesn't perceive the dependency as arbitrary, constructed, forced or unfair. Prototype example is my oldest son who has lots of projects for which he needs space and materials.

An extrinsically motivated child (more like my second oldest) can be influenced via frequent positive feedback for performing these tasks.

a lot of people resist doing [it]

Sure. I can confirm that my sons resist doing it in many circumstances. But the details differ widely.

No one does it for the fun of it.

Gamification is possible. Though not always. And it has a cost in terms of efficiency. But you don't need fun to want to do it and feel satisfaction from completing it.

I'd say, it is a good for people to live in an orderly and clean environment, but it is not necessarily good for them to do it themselves - this is why everybody wealthy outsources most of it to hired help.

But it could be good for some people e.g. children, the depressed etc. for achieving easy success and learning a bit of discipline. But as long as people can do more productive things almost nobody demands that they should do it themselves - have ever seen a surgeon, regardless of gender, being criticized for not ironing shirts but leaving that to a hired help?

(Also fsck everything about ironing - there is a startup in France trying to automate it with some kind of an inflatable human shaped balloon releasing steam, hope they succeed although I would not want a human upper body sized bulky item in our current flat. But I really like my shirts crisp and buying no-iron shirts is a poor substitute.)

No one does it for the fun of it.

A friend of mine does. Not "fun" per se, but she derives enjoyment and satisfaction from it.

The International Phonetic Alphabet was originally meant to be used as a natural language writing system (for example, the journal of the International Phonetic Association was originally written in IPA: http://phonetic-blog.blogspot.com/2012/06/100-years-ago.html). Between IPA's theoretical (physiological) grounding, its wide use by linguists, and its near-legibility by untrained English literati, IPA is over-determined as the obvious choice for a reformed orthography, if English were every made to conform phonetically to a standard pronunciation. That said, it's not going to happen, because spelling reform is not urgent to anyone with capital to try it. Like, someone could make a browser extension that would replace words their IPA spellings, so that an online community could familiarize themselves with the new spelling, but no one has made that, or paid for it to be made, and this places a strong upper bound on how much anyone cares about spelling reform.

all useful grammatical features that are available

Is there a chance to agree on which gramatical features are useful?

For example, what colors does the language have words for? Does it distinguish gramatical singular and plural? How about dual? How many tenses? Clusivity? Honorifics? Etc.

My intuition is that in a "perfect" language all these things should exist, and all should be optional. (Not sure about the colors; perhaps we should have separate words for "green" and "blue", but also one for "green or blue", and also one for "light blue" and one for "dark blue" to make everyone happy. I hope the list would not grow too much.)

A single world language should be designed and promoted. Previous attempts have been too Eurocentric to take advantage of all useful grammatical features that are available.

There are so many constructed languages already that you do not need to design anything, if you have some criteria, just pick one that suits you, brush it up and maybe replace the vocabulary. And then goes the minor issue of promoting it and gaining speakers :-)

English is rather badly suited for an international auxiliary language, as the things go. But still better than French or Chinese, all things considered. Spelling is OK, it's the pronunciation that sucks :-) And its weird syntax and internally inconsistent vocabulary.

Spelling reform (or a completely new, purely phonetic alphabet) is urgent.

You really, really do not want phonetic writing system - phonemic is what you should go after, but morphophonemic has certain advantages too, especially for non-native speakers.

I would advocate adapting Hangul for that purpose.

If you match your phonology to 15th century Korean, sure. Not so much otherwise without a substantial reform and introduction of new letters. Anyway, Hangul is more suited for a morphematic writing system, not phone[mt]ic one.

Playing devil's advocate: Archaic spelling rules allow you to quickly gauge other people's intelligence, which is useful. It causes society to respect stupid people less, by providing objective evidence of their stupidity.

But I don't actually think the benefits outweigh the costs there, and the signal is confounded by things like being a native English-speaker.

As long as this international english is restricted to diplomacy, commerce and science. I retch at the thought of literature written in a dry, unidiosyncratic, flavourless language with the charmless consistency of an office clerk.

Spelling reform will fail because of regional differences in pronunciation. Also, spelling reform is bad for culture since it means that people taught the new system will be unable to read older material.

Alternative option: English is already a de facto world language, and it is well suited to borrowing foreign terms when it needs to, but humanity should be ashamed that it conducts its main scientific, commercial and diplomatic operations in a language with such a defective writing system. Spelling reform (or a completely new, purely phonetic alphabet) is urgent.

Um, spelling reform large destroys the benefits of already being a de facto world language.

You cite the language's tendency to borrow foreign terms as a positive thing. Wouldn't that require an inconsistent orthography?

How would they identify what's a mutation and what isn't? (Extreme rarity in the rest of the population?) The first few people to try doing this will most likely be quite unusual people; how confident could they be that any given unusual allele in their genome is a likely-deleterious mutation rather than something that makes them unusual in a valuable way?

I just want to get rid of the freaking lines and sines.

Evidence please. Your idea relies heavily on the thesis that poorer people are happier and have better social relations than rich people, do you have anything not anecdotal to support that?

My experience of seeing poverty in the US is that it comes with or from a whole host of other social problems like addiction, untreated physical and mental health issues, abuse, anxiety, overcrowding, fear of violence. These co-morbid problems are not conducive to neither happiness nor strong social ties, except in an unhealthy codependent way. I do know that children who grow up in poverty (without malnutrition) have brain development issues because of all the toxic anxiety and stress they were exposed to as a child, and that these problems persist through adulthood if untreated, even if the poverty conditions are removed. http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/what-poverty-does-to-the-young-brain

In fact, from a precursory google search, every article I see about the neurological effects of poverty is that it increases daily experience of negative emotions, chronic pain, increases the odds of all kinds of unpleasant experiences and mental health issues, and comes with a constant sense of anxiety.

The essence of poverty is that you cannot just buy all the things you need, you sometimes need to make them yourself or borrow.

Nope. The essence of poverty is that the choices available to you are severely limited because of lack of money.

1) I don't believe in maximizing happiness. That leads to wireheading, and also to the blissful ignorance problem where being falsely convinced of X is considered as good as actually having X.

2) When people who are poor have to make or borrow to get things, making and borrowing has a cost. The fact that richer people won't pay this cost shows that the cost is larger than the monetary price. If anything, this is an example of a poverty trap, since it means poorer people have to pay higher costs for things than richer people.

Poor people need to help each other

True for poor people in poor countries, but false for poor people in countries with welfare states.

While I disagree with your description of happy poor people, I admit that the idea of creating stronger social bonds is appealing. Well, of course they would have to be social bonds with people I like, who would not abuse me... but then, doesn't the mere possibility of choosing people to bond with already reduce the strength of those bonds? Okay, we don't have to go to the very extreme, and still can try to increase the strength of the bonds, without necessarily maximizing it.

There are things people need help with, even if they are not necessary for survival. If you want to make a big project, you need people to cooperate with. So, have a dream, make it public, find people to cooperate with... and if you all feel strongly about the project, you will have the bonds. Just start an NGO.

If you want to compare with the mega-rich, find a group of people willing to found a cooperative, in a spirit of "together we all get rich; no one gets left behind". As opposed to usual startups where people try to do things alone or in very small teams; and hire other people as replaceable pawns. (Note: in the cooperative, you can still hire the pawns later; many cooperatives do; you will only have the strong bonds among the local aristocracy, but the aristocracy can have dozens of members.) Now you are competing against the rich companies, and the economical situation of each of you depends on your mutual cooperation.

I haven't been poor myself, but I'll offer some weak evidence in favor of a weakened version of your thesis.

I've seen a fair number of people say that when they were children, they were poor but didn't know it, and they were happy. This suggests that (presumably above some level of destitution), low relative status affects people more than absolute wealth. I can't remember whether being poor but happy as a child is correlated with living in the country, but this wouldn't surprise me. It may also be true that children are better at being happy than adults, and this could be worth some study.

Poorer people are happier. Alternatively, even when the aggregate or average level of happiness is not higher, some factors in it are higher, while other hugely negative factors (i.e. actually being poor) reduce the average or aggregate greatly.

The positive factors are strong social bonds.

Some people trade off the pursuit of money for living in areas with stronger and more generally dispersed social capital, with cultures of mutual self help, and spend more time on building their own social capital within it.

They're poorer financially, but wealthier socially.

But some people are poorer financially in areas where the social capital is generally poor as well, and particularly poor for the financially poor.

The problem is that middle-class people are trying to form friendships through just hanging out with people or trying to find common, shared interests. This is not strong bonds.

Can you imagine examples of how well-to-do people can put themselves into situations where they need to borrow items or services / help from their neighbors?

I think the problem is that wealthier people can buy the services they need, and so do so. Buying it doesn't impose a burden on your social equals, and so doesn't require taking on such burdens in a reciprocal fashion.

As you go up the wealth scale, for more and more things, you'd rather trade off money for time and effort, and you're able to buy that trade off from people who would rather have your money than their time.

This is apparent to all, people who make less than you, and people who make the same.

The people who make less will likely resent your requests for help, certainly if you haven't yet banked some help to them first, but even if you have, they're still likely to resent your trading off their time versus your money, knowing that you don't see it as worthwhile when it's your time vs. your money.

The people who make the same as you probably have the same time vs. money preferences as you do, would rather trade off their own money for their own time on their own problem, and so certainly won't want to be spending their time on your problem, when you obviously should just be spending your own money instead.

I think you're right that you get social bonding out of relations of reciprocating mutual aid, and also right that this gets harder to accomplish as you become more wealthy.

But I think you're wrong about the poor being necessarily happier, as you assumed that the reciprocating mutual aid would naturally occur if your'e poor. A lot of social and cultural capital that doesn't exist everywhere is required to make that happen.

Poorer people are happier.

You have very likely not experienced poverty yourself.

Poor by what measure?

Sure, they could simulate that, but I'm not sure whether simulated neighborhood cooperation sticks out with regards to effectiveness at all compared to things like hanging out, sharing interests, engaging in cooperative sports and games.

I suspect that the main factor that isolates rich people is rather the prevailing inequality which separates them from 95% of the population. The envy they receive and the cognitive dissonance they get from being aware of the inequality but letting the responsibility diffuse, makes them anxious. I guess reducing inequality is a much more effective and sustainable solution to this problem.

Ankle monitors are surprisingly annoying to wear. It would be a big, long-term punishment that would probably come on top of a prison sentence.

The social stigma of something like that seems like you're basically throwing away any hope of rehabilitation, but it's hardly as if the US is much good at that anyhow.

If you watched Tomorrow Never Dies, you should be wary of too much reliance on GPS.

Soil bacteria, including Staphylococcus aureus, are already everywhere. I don't see how spreading more of them would reduce the old ones.

This would at best be a temporary solution, since this was pretty much the status quo before MRSA was as big a deal as it is now. The continued presence of antibiotics will exert a selection pressure in favor of MRSA.

I had a horrific vision of Terry Crews re-doing the Po-Po-Power ad campaign, this time for Axe.

Please, no.

If you throw out justified you then consider what we intuitively consider delusional beliefs who happen to be accidentally true to be knowledge. Which conflicts with intuition. You can always bite the bullet on any conflict but that's boring.

Are there examples of interventions like this working out well?

Formspring was a simpler version of this, and it devolved into bullying. That's a failure mode of any anonymous feedback system.

There have been a few apps based around this, though usually lacking the karma part. The one that comes to mind is Honesty Box for Facebook. (Which may no longer exist? I last heard of it several years ago.)

Here's a web site that supports anonymous feedback, although I don't think it does anything like the karma calculation or review process that you mentioned. I have not used it; I just happened to notice that another LWer was using it when I was reading his comments earlier this week.

I think "crazy idea" is underspecified. The kind of crazy idea that you probably want is an unusual way of meeting an acceptable goal and based on acceptable premises. You don't want someone posting "kill all the Jews" and you don't want someone posting "in order to get rid of the lizard invaders, we should..." even though those are certainly crazy ideas.

Of course, nobody would post those things outright, but there are shades of gray where the goal or premises are somewhat questionable, even if not outright as bad as killing all the Jews. (I think, for instance, that the "freedom from fear" post below is close to this.)

Nitpick: your post is tagged cary idea, not crazy idea.

By my rough casual count, around half of the ideas here that are action proposals have been either attempted or proposed by serious bodies.

I don't think this is a bad thing at all.

Is this a revival of the Munchkin Ideas thread?

I like the idea of this thread. I often have crazy ideas but few spring to mind right now.

I also wonder if the thread is off-topic for lesswrong. For being distracting and not rationalist or progress towards a goal.

I'm amazed by the amount of response this has caused. Must by far be the most commented on post of mine. And all of that in response to a five minute crazy idea. I wonder whether I should post more of these 'crazy' ideas.

#1 sounds like it might be an interesting question, but I'm not sure I understand it. A large part of my "aversion to death" is simply the fact that I have things I want to do in the future. Is this hypothetical treatment meant to get rid of that? (Surely not, right?) If not, what exactly is being eliminated? Just some visceral reaction of horror at the thought of death? What about aversion to other people's deaths?

(My immediate reaction: Yes, of course I would take it; whyever wouldn't I?)

#2 sounds rather culty, but in any case I doubt it would work. If you want a "rationality for housewives[1]" series, I think you need to write one; the LW "Sequences" are written for a particular kind of audience and I don't think its intersection with housewives is very large.

[1] I'm not sure "housewives" is the best term, unless you really want to exclude any men who happen to be filling that role. Homemakers?

With #3, don't you think the evolutionary process would be impractically slow?

Can we post the sequences on a thousand blogs marketed a thousand different ways (some for housewives, or for business people, or for students, or for political science, or common people of common sense, hobbyists, etcetera)

If you'd rewrite it for each audience, that would be great! Otherwise it would feel like spam.

Neutrinos may actually be the temporal kinetic equivalent of photons,

No, neutrinos have all sorts of different properties than protons (spin-1/2, three generations, take part in weak interactions) regardless of their energy-momentum.

You could save up money for a few months then move to a country with a very cheap cost of living and live off your savings.

How?

Depends a ton on where you go and what you major in. PayScale has a ranking of a ton of colleges based on their 20-year average incomes compared to 24 years of average income for people with a high-school degree. There probably are some special cases at the tails that would benefit more from not going to college, but for the average college-goer, it is still probably a halfway decent investment.

Dogs were domesticated in such a way so that their very existence depends on them being nice to humans.

Newcome readers: Don't get scared. Here's some context for this seemingly serious proposal.

I'm ambivalent about whether a particular fact makes this a better or worse joke. That fact is that a lot of of people think that "lizard people" is a dog whistle for Jews. A Canadian court decided that it isn't.

inb4 RationalWiki quotes this as a typical LessWrong debate.

Was anyone preserved for years and later revived in that movie? If anything, Anna's predicament (being slowly turned into ice) is a terrible threat to avoid.

Pretty clearly the longitudinal wind would be more than canceled out by drag. You might be able to get some net power from any cross-wind that is present. But for that, you're better off with fixed windmills used to charge your battery.

look into perpetual motion machines and their disproof.

How many technologies are you aware of that don't have a harmful potential application? I mean, (electronic) computers were invented for military purposes and can enable all kinds of mischief on the Internet. Refrigeration makes military logistics a lot easier. Hell, internal combustion drives tanks and other military vehicles. GPS makes cruise missiles easier, but pre-GPS ICBMs just used inertial targeting; that's close enough for thermonuclear bombs.

In HPMOR, Harry figures out a large number of ways to make weapons out of the materials present in a low-tech classroom. I doubt anything short of reducing the world to subsistence farming (and no more than that) is sufficient to bring about a state in which

"... no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor"

In New York city workmen get send into prison for pocketknives they carry for work purposes. Dual use exists for a lot of very useful technologies.

the hope that people might enjoy ever enjoy the right of freedom from fear.

Such a right sounds pretty Orwellian to me.

The swift response to trying to ban another nation's Dual-use technologies will come from single-use technologies: Guns and warheads.

Yep, having a transhuman abusive girlfriend would be a bad idea.

Having abusive partners is probably a bad idea even without transhumanism.

It sounds like you're imagining the situation as not being transhuman yourself. Is there any reason why you wouldn't be?

Why is your mental model of women so man-hating?