This is not in the spirit of Eliezer's exhortation. I read that article as saying "When, in your travels, you encounter an impossible problem, that is not an excuse to give up, or otherwise an excuse for failure. It merely means you might try your best, and still fail. So hurry up and do it, and don't give us any of this 'try' crap either, because having tried harder doesn't excuse failure either."
I emphatically don't read it as saying "seek out impossible problems and try to do them". Your odds of failure are high, and your odds of producing useful results are low. None of these problems are things that you would think absolutely needed solving had they not already been identified as impossible.
I have an impossible project that I want to do because it needs doing, not because its impossible.
The Social Sciences are often very unscientific. I want to do to economics and foreign policy analysis what Jared Diamond and other similar authors have done with history. This is important because, you know, existential risk from nuclear wars or global warming or whatever else might kill us all. We can't have an AI or colonize space if we all die in the meantime. Making the Social Sciences more rigorous and subject to simple and empirical and bias free review methods would definitely pay off. We need this.
Anyone have any ideas how to get started?
IDEA - write a syntax/static analysis checker for laws. Possibly begin with U.S. state law in a particularly simple state, and move up to the U.S. Code (U.S.C.) and the Code of Federal Regulations (C.F.R.) Automatically look for conflicting/inconsistent definitions, logical conflicts, and other possible problems or ambiguities. Gradually improve it to find real problems, and start convincing the legal profession to use it when drafting new legislation.
While it may not directly pertain to lesswrong, it is an awesomely hard problem that could have far reaching impacts.
Idea: Build a profit generating company, which will accelerate fast and go far. Which will be very optimal at this goal.
Idea: Discover unrecognized bias
The first thing that comes to mind as for a way to do this is by comparing information looking for inconsistencies. We already do that, but we do it according to certain patterns. It's in determining what those patterns are and consciously choosing to compare the information using a different pattern that would reveal the types of inconsistencies that would serve as an opportunity to reverse engineer an undiscovered bias, thereby gaining knowledge of it.
For instance:
We observe ourselves behaving with people of two differ...
Idea: Solve Violent Crime
As a lot of you are probably already aware, testosterone level is considered a top predictor of violent crime. There are prescriptions that lower testosterone, so why do we still have violent crime?
I've been told there are two obstacles to treatment:
One, people with such excessively high testosterone that it causes them to commit crimes (most of them are men) feel strongly that reducing testosterone would make them less manly.
Two, our legal and ethical systems are such that forcing people, even convicted criminals, to undergo me...
Idea: Understand the human psychology that leads to the stability of the concept of currency/money.
I started with the problem: improve the economy consisting of people with visual impairments.
I ended with a far-from-exhaustive list of problems related to visual impairment. More specifically, there are 14 entries. Probably only half of them fit the criterion "impossible (but not really)". The rest are just difficult. These seem like subproblems of the economy problem.
Should I post these? Or more accurately, Is posting likely to get useful feedback with a better than 0.001 probability of leading to a viable solution to one or more of the problem...
In the Muehlhauser-Hibbard Dialogue on AGI, Hibbard states it will be "impossible to decelerate AI capabilities" but Luke counters with "Persuade key AGI researchers of the importance of safety ... If we can change the minds of a few key AGI scientists, it may be that key insights into AGI are delayed by years or decades." and before I read that dialogue, I had come up with three additional ideas on Heading off a near-term AGI arms race. Bill Hibbard may be right that "any effort expended on that goal could be better applied to the political and technical problems of AI safety" but I doubt he's right that it's impossible.
How do you prove something is impossible? You might prove that a specific METHOD of getting to the goal does not work, but that doesn't mean there's not another method. You might prove that all the methods you know about do not work. That doesn't prove there's not some other option you don't see. "I don't see an option, therefore it's impossible." is only an appeal to ignorance. It's a common one but it's incorrect reasoning regardless. Think about it. Can you think of a way to prove that a method that does work isn't out there waiting to be discovered without saying the equivalent of "I don't see any evidence for this." We can say "I don't see it, I don't see it, I don't see it!" all day long.
I say: "Then Look!"
How often do we push past this feeling to keep thinking of ideas that might work? For many, the answer is "never" or "only if it's needed". The sense that something is impossible is subjective and fallible. If we don't have a way of proving something is impossible, but yet believe it to be impossible anyway, this is a belief. What distinguishes this from bias?
I think it's a common fear that you may waste your entire life on doing something that is, in fact, impossible. This is valid, but it's completely missing the obvious: As soon as you think of a plan to do the impossible, you'll be able to guess whether it will work. The hard part is THINKING of a plan to do the impossible. I'm suggesting that if we put our heads together, we can think of a plan to make an impossible thing into a possible one. Not only that, I think we're capable of doing this on a worthwhile topic. An idea that's not only going to benefit humanity, but is a good enough idea that the amount of time and effort and risk required to accomplish the task is worth it.
Here's how I am going to proceed:
Step 1: Come up with a bunch of impossible project ideas.
Step 2: Figure out which one appeals to the most people.
Step 3: Invent the methodology by which we are going to accomplish said project.
Step 4: Improve the method as needed until we're convinced it's likely to work.
Step 5: Get the project done.
Impossible Project Ideas
Add your own ideas below (one idea per comment, so we can vote them up and down), make sure to describe your vision, then I'll list them here.
Figure out which one appeals to the most people.
Assuming each idea is put into a separate comment, we can vote them up or down. If they begin with the word "Idea" I'll be able to find them and put them on the list. If your idea is getting enough attention obviously, it will at some point make sense to create a new discussion for it.