This is a collection of random things that I'd like to look into further. There's another interesting source of questions in WhatWeDon'tKnow.

What does economic activity look like if you ignore money?

If you just track people's activities and the production of things, what does the world look like? Who's calling the shots?

Also, how does the pattern of activity evolve over time? (My intuition is that people are working harder and getting less liesure, as well as less material rewards.)

Where do all of the resources (labour, capital, materals) in the world go?

The ruling class want the lower classes to think that they're there to serve them, but it's actually the other way around.I'm curious what all of the resources in the world are used towards.

What percentage goes towards feeding people? What goes towards military projects? What goes towards science?

Is it possible to implicitly discover big unaccounted-for areas into which resources are being funneled by analyzing all the accounted-for areas?

Did language lead to lying, and did lying then lead to the expansion of our brains?

With langauge comes lying, and to be able to determine whether or not someone's lying, you need a lot of mental power (you've gotta remember many facts about a person's past behaviour, be able to piece them altogether, and to test the logical corollaries that would follow from the liar's claims). Could being able to detect liars (initially and most evolutionarily powerful, a person PRETENDING to be a good mate) push forward brain evolution (by allowing you to determine who really IS a good mate)?

If you transplant a piece of neural tissue from one person to another, will the recipient go crazy?

People who are missing pieces of their brain could benefit from having a chunk of neural matter from a healthy person inserted where the damaged bit is. But, neural networks are all unique (their structures determined by experiences and randomness). Each one, in a sense, has its own internal language that it's developed, and which all regions that interface with a specific region would have to share. Would transplanting a pre-trained piece of a donor's brain into a recipient make them think (once the brain had wired itself into the new neural tissue) crazy things were happening to them, since the signals coming from the donor tissue could mean completely different things in the host brain?

A good way to test this would be with an artificial neural network. You could virtually transplant a chunk of a pre-trained neural network into another one, then continue evolving it and see how its performance changes. A few things could happen:

• the host's tissue overrides donor tissue's patterns since they are the most effective at recognizing the patterns it's given, and hence are stimulated to grow
• the donated tissue totally screws up the signalling of the host brain and it just falls into chaos, and becomes a large undifferentiated mass of fresh neural matter that has to re-learn everything (it gets formatted!)
• the donated tissue contains novel patterns (or parts of patterns) that assist the host brain in coming to the answer more quickly, and it integrates the existing knowledge into its own
• the donated tissue simultaneously screws up and gives good patterns to the host brain, causing it to temporarily perform worse, but eventually end up performing better than originally

Does interrupting a sleep cycle do more harm than not having had that sleep cycle at all?

Sleep cycles come in 4 hour chunks on average. You have two of them per night. If you're a teenager, they're 5 hours long. If you're weird, they're 3-3.5 hours long. But you have two, whoever you are.

Well, ideally, that is. If you wake up early, you'll only get like 1.6 sleep cycles.

I've noticed that if I only have 4 hours sleep, I can function perfectly during the day. If I have 6 hours sleep, I'm a zombie. It's quite odd. Intuition is that sleep is like a health meter, and the more you have the better; but it doesn't seem to work that way!

We know now that during REM sleep, your brain defragments/compresses its contents. It reorganizes things, finds patterns, grows more permanent connections, deletes random noise, etc. Maybe if you interrupt that process, it leaves your brain in a mess beacuse it was in the process of being reorganized when you interrupted it.

It could also have to do with cortisol.

How many genes are responsible for the structure of each person's brain?

It's probably a lot.

Why does order benefit the universe('s survival)?

Answering that question will answer this question from the discussion about Quantum Monkeys:

• But why does this low-level information-processing that pervades everywhere in the world spontaneously give rise to this kind of high-level information processing where you have language, semantics, and goal-oriented behavior? That's, indeed, what we'd like to find out. This argument that you spontaneously produce complicated structures by no means solves that question, because there's a very detailed history of the way in which this complex behavior erupted in the first place. The nature of this history is a very interesting question, and I certainly wouldn't say that it's been solved at all.

High level information processing, language, semantics, and goal-oriented behaviour all seem to be ways of finding order in the large interconnected volume of patterned waves that is the universe. Finding patterns gives you the power to predict, and also lets you compress the universe. (a basic concept from Neural Network theory).

Earlier, Lloyd defined order as "a system in which the entropy's been pumped out of it". In evolutionary terms, entropy is definitely bad for survival. Losing information results in lost of coherence, and eventual fuzzing. If you can't replicate your patterns, you can't survive.

Order allows patterns to be compressed better, and a compressed pattern is easier to propagate. What's going to survive better: an ant, or a big mechanical ant that does the identical process but is made of a huge array gears and cogs? They both do the same thing, but the mechanical one will break down like crazy -- it has very high entropy (plus, it's costly to produce, but even if resources were infinite, it would be easily out-survived by an ant which can replicate faster).

So, perhaps the universe tending towards language, semantics, and goal-oriented behaviour is just part of the evolutionary pattern of data compression, running on the universal computer.

Is it better if an entire social class is kept ignorant?

In The Uneducational Educational System, you can read about how, in the early 20th century, the ruling class decided that education was making the labourers unhappy. They fixed the problem by making the education system produce malleable people who want to stay in line by removing their desire to think for themselves while believing that all authority is inflexible and pointless to go against. It's a kind of mental slavery, and, according to the ruling class, it's the best way to keep civilization functioning smoothly. I believe, however, that it's actually the best way to keep the ruling class in power.

Is a slave society the most economical? Obvious it costs less money when you enslave people, but money doesn't measure value. The value is the goods (or services) produced for a given set of inputs. Using that metric, slave societies are less efficient since the workers work slower since they don't care about their jobs. When the workers see no personal benefit from their labour, they lose the motivation to become more efficient workers. In fact, there's a direct parallel to keeping the labouring class stupid and slavery: in slave societies, the slave-owners would actually kill off the intelligent slaves. The effect was two-fold: it would quell any uprisings by removing potential leaders and people who questioned the rightness of what was going on, and it would also make slavery justifiable since they could say to the slave-owners and the public, "Hey! Look at how much less intelligent those slaves are than you! You deserve to rule them since they wouldn't be able to organize themselves without your intelligent guidance. In fact, they are almost like the animals that we are justified in enslaving -- they're not smart enough to care about being slaves."

Now, the whole moral issue of enslaving the labouring class by keeping them unedicated is one thing, but there's also an economic issue -- as the size of a company that's made up of cog-people scales, there will be more unintelligent people at all levels. Information in the company has to flow through those ignorant cog-people, and since they can't process the information as well as someone who understands what's going on in the entire company, you get information entropy. They don't know what information is salient and what isn't, so either they pass on too much information -- which by nature a lossy process; think of the Broken Telephone effect -- or, they pass on the wrong information. They won't know what information management needs to take proper action to correct problems lower down. Richard Feynman discovered this effect in NASA when he was investigating the Challenger disaster (see: the his original report at the end of What Do You Care what Other People Think?).

Basically, the problem is that when you build organizations out of unintelligent cogs, you have to use far more cogs. If you build them out of intelligent and adaptable cogs, the cogs can readapt themselves, so you need fewer of them. However, since they're less static, you have less direct control. Less control in this case, however, is a good thing, since when the company gets huge, micromanagement can't scale; a single human micromanaging a huge pyramid of workers is an information bottleneck. The people can work far more efficiently when they're given goals and allowed to create communication-channels between themselves at will. This efficiencly gain has been shown in Lean Production models time and again -- it's the reason Japan pwn3d America in the automotive industry in the 1980's.

So, essentially, I think the reasoning behind keeping the labour classes uneducated is fundamentally flawed. People like to work; it's in our nature to help each other and our tribe. However, when people learn about the system that they're in, get educated, they start to distrust the ruling class... and with good reason! A ruling class that keeps its citizens ignorant cogs cannot be trusted, just as anyone who keeps information from you is probably doing it to gain power over you. Information costs nothing to disseminate, so the only reason to keep information from you is to keep you from gaining the power that they own by controlling it.

There also seems to be a connection to the crazy Communist Fear in the 1950's. It seems logical to conclude, from the behaviour of the ruling class, that they were afraid of the ideas of Communism: not only empowering workers to understand how an economy works, but allowing them to control the system that the ruling class currently controls.