Someone should create a free speech Twitter that doesn't censor anything protected by the U.S. 1st amendment.

GiveWell should have book/movie/podcast/video game awards (like the Hugo award) open to voting for anyone who has given money through GiveWell in the past year.

Large scale heat management: controlling or influencing temperature flows on a geographic (regional or global) scale. Heat management is one of the deep fundamental problems in life and engineering, but humans have never tried to do anything smarter or more ambitious in this area than standard HVAC stuff.

Humans like moderate temperatures, say 55-75 F, but we spend quite a lot of our time in discomfort or even pain because the actual temperature is outside this range. But the problem isn't that heat (or cold) is in short supply, it's just distributed unevenly. This fact hit home for me when I was riding in an Uber because terrible winter weather knocked out Boston's subway system, and the driver told me she had just returned from a trip to Brazil, which was mostly unpleasant because the heat made it impossible to do anything outside.

Here are some options:

• Heat banking: store heat during the summer in large reservoirs of water. Release it during the winter.
• Heat trade: hot regions send heat to cold regions; both sides are happier.
• Heat sequestration: there are huge pools of cold water about 1000m underneath the ocean surface, when your city is too hot, send some heat down there.

Meta discussion of the Crazy Ideas Thread

I've heard of cars powered by liquid nitrogen, since it boils at ambient temperature (even if the weather is below freezing), you can use it to expand a piston. The energy comes from the ambient environment.

Thermal equilibrium with outer space is about 4 Kelvin (due to background radiation). That's really cold. If we could make a large radiator exposed to open sky at night could we use it to produce liquid nitrogen? Not exactly, because the air itself can emit radiation. This is the greenhouse effect.

But would it be possible to coat the radiator with quant... (read more)

Typical superheroes act like lymphocytes, while the bad aliens, against whom they fight, are antigens with no real planning beyond 'stake ground & multiply'; police in the stories are like interferon, and mass media are highly specialized, short lived antibodies, while the public shows general symptoms of inflammation if the situation spreads. Looping!days are malaria-like illnesses, apocalypses are...okay, there are really too many options...and mind control is, more or less, AIDS. Traveling between different universes is contagion.

Now, are there any stories sufficiently meta to be strictly epidemiological?

A form of society that is based on a social contract where the rules (like the rules of e.g. democracy) are constructed in such a way that

• individuals are (monetarily) rewarded if they take more responsibility (for other people basically) in a way that a doubled responsibility leads to a unit increase in reward (with a unit reward for taking responsibility for one self).
• sub groups can make individual decisions and take local responsibility (and e.g. distribute the reward according to the rules)
• there is an increase in power with group size but limited

(had the idea after seeing this)

Each person's vote should be weighed by their life expectancy given their age.

(ETA: I will downvote any comment in this subthread discussing the object-level issue of whether Britain had better stay in the EU, no matter how reasonable and insightful it is.)

Please take my consideration in moderation. I have a vested interest here. Also, I really love 80,000 hours and givewell, so I focus on the criticism for expediency: 80,000 highlights tobacco control in the developing world as one of the most important issues. However, I think they overestimate its neglectedness. As the tobacco atlas illustrates there is almost perfect symmetry between the research in the area and advocacy because you can see exactly what 'solutions' are required. Additionally, they underestimate the tractability of the problem. I don't ev... (read more)

You've all seen the pendulum exhibit at the planetarium. Is it possible to use gyroscopes to extract the rotational motion of the Earth as a power source? Maybe you can use a vacuum and maglev bearings so you aren't expending energy to keep them spinning. You can use gears to trade torque for rotation speed. The available torque from the planet must be immense. Building such a device may be expensive, but then it's "unlimited" free energy with no carbon emissions, and, unlike most renewables, it has steady output.

I just started using the MessagEase keyboard on Android. It has a nice feature whereby pressing alⓒ gives you α and beⓒ gives you β.

On the other hand I have to press Alt +3B1 or Alt 224 to get α in windows and that's extremly difficult to remember. I think it would be great if somebody would write a program that also allows me easy access to such unicode characters on windows.