Crazy Ideas Thread, December 2015

Circus arts should be a required subject in school. That way, people will be able to get attention without shooting anyone.

I'd guess three things are true of a stable community:

First, 95% of everything that can loosely be referred to as "drama" comes from a semi-consistent 5% of a given group. Second, all major conflict involves at least one of this 5%, and the majority is composed entirely of members of this 5%. Third, eliminating a substantial portion of this 5% results in rapid evaporation of the group, and destabilization.

Some number of the 5% are transgressors; they're part of the dramatic group because they cross boundaries and bother people to an excessive degree. Some number of the 5% are warriors; they're part of the dramatic group because they react to those who cross boundaries and bother people (sometimes on behalf of others, sometimes on behalf of themselves). (These people are important to the community, but very bad moderators.) Some number of the 5% are diplomats; they get involved to try to reach a compromise to end the drama as rapidly as possible, getting entangled in the drama; because of their neutrality, attacking them just isn't done, and anybody insane enough to do so gets banned. (Good moderators, very rare.)

People can be different parts of these three classifications to different groups. One internal group's transgressor is another group's police. Diplomats tend to be defines across one-or-more groups, and I'd guess tend to be close to universally acknowledged as such. Within a given group perspective, however:

Eliminating transgressors wholesale (or never having them) causes the warriors adjust their Overton window on what is acceptable behavior, and start targeting lesser transgressions, until the community eventually destabilizes into constant fights about what constitutes a transgression, provoking evaporative cooling. Eliminating police wholesale (or never having them) causes non-transgressors to leave, as nobody is around to oppose the worst transgressions and provide a sense of healthy community, provoking evaporative cooling. Eliminating diplomats (or never having them) eliminates a necessary cap on escalation, and conflicts escalate until everybody not involved in it gets fed up and leaves.

Here is a second Simulation Trilemma.

If we are living in a simulation, at least one of the following is true:

1) we are running on a computer with unbounded computational resources, or

2) we will not launch more than one simulation similar to our world, or

3) the simulation we are in will terminate shortly after we launch our own simulations.

Here 'short' is on the order of the period between the era we start the simulation at and when the simulation reaches our stage.

Should ministries of education be designing trial curriculums to be about the solution rather than problem focussed by basing them around asking smart questions and interpreting expert judgement instead of providing unasked answers as lay non expert teachers? At higher levels education, students could be taught to survey special topics of research techniques. Yeah?

One objection I anticipate is that professionals are needed to practice in certain fields with commoditised bodies of knowledge. I reckon commodified knowledge is an asset that can be privately leased or bought into. It might downsize educationally oversized professions like mental health professionals.

After all, EA ventures demonstrates that it can use a very simple expert prediction method in order to fund the complex EA space. It looks like contemporary work in the field is as close to the formal study of 'rationality' as one gets.

System I and System II seem to be very unwidely terms because of the numbers. People like Gleb try to find alternatives to use to reach "the masses". There a common tradition of expressing new concepts with Greek and Latin roots. Can anybody think of good names for System I and System II based on Greek or Latin?

Prehensile tails for cats! I think cats would enjoy them.

Real world crazy idea: New improved feline overlords

A timeless interpretation of Quantum Immortality means that my choices are guaranteed to lead to immortality, and I'll probably get there through a series of totally normal-seeming events. Like orbital corrections, early and slow changes require less effort than late and fast changes. I'm more likely a not-too-unlikely immortal consciousness, and the not-too-unlikely path I experience is a world where I live forever without getting improbably lucky.

Furthermore, generalizing timeless Quantum Immortality across multiple Universes, I was probably created by an entity that creates immortal consciousnesses at a rate that's increasing nearly as rapidly as possible. Thus, there's a good chance that I too will spawn huge numbers of conscious immortal beings during my infinitely-long life, if I haven't already.

I was just listening to a piece about brain damage from sub-concussive impacts from sports, even in high school. Considering that participation in such sports seems to go over well on resumes, is it possible that countries which value such sports (I'm thinking especially of the US) might have significantly worse leadership (both business and government) as a result?