Posts
Comments
Three wishes for improvement (don't know how easily done on Typepad, if at all)
1) In addition to feeds available now, an RSS or Atom feed that includes all posts and all comments to them
2) disable comment pagination
3) ability to edit comments for a short while after publishing them
Whoops, USD 10^13 , of course.
(0) Ask people smarter and more familiar with the subjects than myself on how I should approach these things.
With the exception of "(5) Minimum necessary charity not to be a pariah." pretty much the same as HA, but in addition to that and more specifically:(I'd hire people to start doing listed things simultaneously, so not really in order)
(8) contact various AI, nanotech and life extension organizations and people in order to start negotiations on how much money should be given and to whom(a very important aspect of this being of course not to give anything to people likely to spend it dangerously, which I currently think includes AI organizations and people that don't have ensuring Frienliness as their prime concern.)
(9) initiate healthcare, agriculture and education improvement programs especially in the third world
(10) declare large bounties to certain technological improvements in areas such as energy, healtcare, communications, etc.
(11) initiate programs to bootstrap various industries around the third world with a focus on helping people be more productive and help themselves. Stuff like Muhammad Yunus does, but on a larger scale.
(12) maximize the possibility that in the event of my death as little of the money as possible could be taken off of these projects.
(13) found startups to do interesting projects.
(14) drop out of university, quit day job, party for a while and while not overseeing these projects, resume studying what I find most important and interesting and hire people to help in that.
USD 10^16 is a lot, but some of these projects are rather expensive so and important part would be to solicit other individuals, organizations and states to participate in funding them, e.g. with matching grants.
Laura ABJ: In Netherlands there's apparently an "escort service" targeted towards insecure virgin male nerds that does not offer a sex only service but some more comprehensive training as well. Of course the three hour minimum is ridiculously short for building relevant social skills but otherwise I think it's basically what you suggested. link
Anyway, the sex part of such a training should be the easier part. What would me more difficult is building the confidence to initiate and to appropriately respond to romantic and sexual contact with the relevant social skills. I read some of those linked materials from pickup artists and a large portion of them didn't describe stuff I'd consider brainwashing, but how to better understand the target's intentions from non-explicit cues which one could see at least to some extent as rather basic social skills.
With regards to increasing one's tolerance for underconfidence, might it not be a sensible investment and mutually beneficial under some circumstances to take such a person and build up their confidence?
It would be interesting to see some demographics on OB readers. How about setting up a few polls?
As to suggestions on what could turn off female readers of OB, what Robin Hanson asked for seemed to me more like "We like what we are doing now, so we don't want to do more things to attract female readers, but is there something in our way of doing our thing that should be eliminated or changed?" than "What more could we do to attract female readers?" in which case the answer "Give a list of don'ts, not dos." is perfectly legitimate, though if that is the case, unnecessary aggression could have been avoided by being more articulate about it.