Do you have any more examples of problems that have been solved or are trying to be solved using this approach?
This idea sounds very interesting and potentially a good business, but that rests completely on there being a large set of problems that would be cheaper to solve this way than by another method.
“A maid, a hot tub, and a paleo 2.0 kitchen”
Posts like these really make me want to move to the bay area.
An Eliezer Yudkowsky post a day keeps the bias at bay.
“A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week.”
General Patton
Obviously not true in all cases, but good advice for folks that have trouble getting things done despite being extremely intelligent (which this community has more than its fair share of).
Well, I agree with you that I should buy cryonics at very high prices and I plan on doing so. For the last few years I’ve spent the majority of my time in places where being signed up for cryonics wouldn’t make a difference (9 months out of the year on a submarine, and now overseas in a place where there aren’t any cryonics companies set up).
You should probably still upvote because the < 1⁄4 of the time I’ve spent in situations where it would matter still more than justify it. I should also never eat an icecream snickers again. I’ll be the first to admit I don’t behave perfectly rationally. :)
Irrationality Game:
These claims assume MWI is true.
Claim #1: Given that MWI is true, a sentient individual will be subjectively immortal. This is motivated by the idea that branches in which death occurs can be ignored and that there are always enough branches for some form of subjective consciousness to continue.
Claim #2: The vast majority of the long-term states a person will experience will be so radically different than the normal human experience that they are akin to perpetual torture.
P(Claim #1) = 60%
P(Claim #2 | Claim #1) = 99%
Many people are unsatisfied with their monogamous relationships, therefore polyamory must be great?
I have an absolutely atrocious memory for specifics when it comes to interpersonal interactions. I have a very difficult time saying what a person did or said even later that day. What makes this strange is that I have an excellent memory for a more abstract accounting of people’s abilities and can predict people’s reactions to different situations with a high degree of accuracy. I deal with utilizing people very often in my job (military officer) and I am known and respected for being very good at putting the right team together for a situation and splitting tasks between people in the most efficient manner. I always have a high confidence model of what a person is capable of, how trustworthy they are, how much stress they can handle etc, but when I try to analyze where this opinion originates from I can never remember anything. Since studying rationality I’ve become somewhat skeptical of how accurate I actually am in this regard, but after many attempts to test my gut opinions about people I’ve concluded that whatever my brain is doing, even in the absence of any consciously accessible data, seems to work.
“Most people are more complicated than they seem, but less complicated than they think”
BS
Rough Idea: Send brilliant, destitute kids to great schools from an early age in exchange for a percentage of their lifetime earnings.
Depending on the study you read there are up to hundreds of millions of children in the developing world that are in the primary/middle school age range that will never get the chance to attend a school. Some of these children have the genetic potential to be top tier in terms of intelligence and productivity but will never realize this potential.
Develop a cost-effective selection mechanism for finding these diamonds in the rough and present them with a deal. They are moved to a top-level boarding school in a developed country (This could be a partnership with existing schools or a school developed specifically for this program, maybe there is a year long english prep trial school they go to first, there are many details to consider). In exchange they commit to paying some percentage (10% feels about right as a gut-check) of their income to the company for the rest of their lives (maybe there is an option to buy out of the contract for kids that end up sufficiently wealthy, again, many details to consider).
Biggest issues I see:
The program will take many years, potentially 2 decades, to start generating revenue.
A host of legal hurdles
Social/litigious blowback from groups that don’t like the idea of plucking third world children from their families and signing them up for what may be interpreted as indentured servitude
Reliably selecting the right kids may turn out to be prohibitively expensive