This could be an interesting exercise, but posting actual answers in a public forum would be an extremely stupid idea. Please do not do that.

The way you formulated a question is not conducive to getting the answers you want, because people start thinking of something along the lines of the Holocaust, 9/11, or other memes associated with evil.

I recommend rephrasing it as follows: point out the most anti-altruistic legal ways a person or an organization have spent $1M. Thinking about it this way, there is no shortage of examples, none resulting in Kawoomba losing much sleep. In fact, a large chunk of what most governments do is both legal and anti-altruistic.

For example, suppressing one's right to die with dignity, and thus forcing doctors and nurses to torture thousands of helpless and elderly people against their will, often for years, before they are allowed to finally die, is arguably legal, anti-altruistic and doesn't cost a lot to perpetuate. The resulting disutility by most measures outweighs 9/11 by many orders of magnitude.

Another example: resisting self-driving car adoption. This one is even worse, given that every year self-driving cars are delayed, costs about 30,000 lives in the US only.

Just look around you, money is spent in anti-altruistic ways all the time.

I have to say i don't get why so many of the comments on this are negative. Surely, if there was a completely legal way to inflict great harm on humanity for only $1Million then there are a ton of people/groups with the desire and resources to do those things. The idea that anyone with the desire to implement these things will learn about them first on LessWrong seems ludicrous to me.

Anyway, here is an idea:

1. Offer a $1Million prize for a working self-improving paper-clip maximizing AI. I think that this is very unlikely to produce anything, but since it is a prize you don't have to actually pay it out until someone builds a UFAI that destroys the universe. If no one seems to be working on it, you can always rescind the prize and move on to another evil scheme. I guess the downside would be if somebody accidentally made a friendly AI while trying to win the prize.

Another idea: One of the great anti-utilitarian movements of our time has been the anti-vaccine movement. In that vain, how about setting up an anti-bed net advocacy group to argue that the children of Africa are being poisoned by chemical laden bed nets, and a charity that will collect and dispose of bed nets that are currently in use in Africa. I'm sure there must be a celebrity that would endorse such a charity. Snookie hasn't been doing much lately!

Start a foundation which would support the teaching of fundamentalist religious science far beyond the confines of religious schools. So create I would seek out brilliant but deluded "values" supporting people and point out how this would reach far more people than they could ever reach by participating only within declared religious institutions. I would include teaching communist and anarchist "theories" of economics, especially including teaching that all successful corporations and the people who help them succeed are greedy and e... (read more)

Invest in the payday loan sector, and reinvest all profits.

What did the promotion of anti-gay policies in Africa cost?

Have you actually thought about this for 5 minutes?

No, it's not difficult at all to think of extremely destructive but entirely legal things to do with $1,000,000 that would have an extremely negative impact on people. Look at what Norman Borlaug did to improve the human condition on a relatively small budget. Imagine if he decided he hated humanity. Now imagine he had access to modern-day technology.

Also consider how many copies of a book you can distribute for a million dollars.

And if you're taking this in directions anywhere near as specific and dark a... (read more)

I intend to bring utopia to the universe which will give an infinite number of sentient creatures an infinite amount of positive utility. Nothing can possibly be better than what I will do. But (for reasons you could not possibly understand) if given all the money I won't implement my plan. True, from your viewpoint the probability of my telling the truth is small, but

Given the declared forum rules of forbidding that advocation of violence I would judge this thread as violating them.

I hope this pushes you all to think of truly anti-altruistic means of spending this money. I think you may find that effective anti-altruism is a good deal harder than you'd believe.

You are offering a budget that double the amount of what 9/11 cost. Yes, you need to be creative to get around the barrier of 100% legality but laws have their loopholes.

Longer-term idea, for those who don't believe in the efficient markets hypothesis: hire prostitutes (legal-ish in my country) to seduce promising young mathematicians and theoretical physicists, both to directly lead them to work less hard, and to encourage them to switch into higher-paying professions, so that we end up with basic research being done by less skilled people.

Finance is where the actions of a few individuals have the biggest impact on world utility, right? So we just need a way to compromise their decisionmaking. I think the cheapest way to achieve this would be to run some kind of macho-culture events for financiers, promoting ideas like "staying up all night makes you manlier" and "real bankers drink four shots on their way into the office". Better still, make these things be charity events (charity awake-a-thon anyone?) - spend a small portion of the proceeds on ineffective charity, and reinvest the rest into running more events.

What would effective anti-altruism be?

Something that I hope no one posts a good idea about.

It's always struck me that terrorists are particularly unserious about causing destruction (OOOh, it go BOOM), but I'm hoping that no one who knows better shows them how to get more bang for their buck.

On 9/11, anyone know if the hijackers had actually modeled the building fire so that they knew they could bring down the building?

My impression is that they just got lucky, but I've never heard any facts on the point.

Reminds me of Austin Powers. One! Million! Dollars! ...

A million just isn't what it used to be :-/

The legality constraint is actually very binding. Laws are meant to prevent people from doing unnice things and are often written very broadly (for the convenience of law enforcement).

These kinds of questions are near-informational hazards for me. If I were to answer this, I'd have nightmares of uniformed (funny how that word only has a Damerau-Levenshtein distance of 1 to 'uninformed') men knocking on my door. Also, my PC would probably slow down due to all the root kits being installed. However, the "$1 million to keep for him or herself" is a heavy constraint because a) if you're overly successful you won't be able to enjoy the money much, and b) to be overly successful at some point you'd have to be overtly successful, i.e. no more anonymity.

I'm probably going to end up on a list for saying this might be possible.

Most evil thing I can think of?

I've not put much time into it but I'll take a swing at it. My top candidate would probably be to use the million to set up DNA synthesis company making custom DNA sequences to sell to university labs and similar.

The company probably wouldn't survive very long term as there's established companies already in the field but there's a good chance that it would allow you to leverage that million bucks to get more investment and most importantly leave you ... (read more)