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The Harry Potter books as an example. Once you get around the fact that the main character is a complete idiot then the rest of the books are not that bad.

Ah yes, fantasy... perhaps you'd enjoy a tale in which he has enough marbles to sort into Ravenclaw. The Magicians trilogy isn't half bad either.

Harry Potter and the Methods Of Rationality ( http://hpmor.com/ ) by Eliezer Yudkowsky (and the community) I wish it had been written earlier, so I could've read it earlier. Also, it's free.

HPMOR. Definitely Harry Potter and the Method Of Rationality. How is this book not mentioned all over already in the comments ?

"I have lived a hundred and ten years," the old wizard said quietly (taking his beard out of the bowl, and jiggling it to shake out the color). "I have seen and done a great many things, too many of which I wish I had never seen or done. And yet I do not regret being alive, for watching my students grow is a joy that has not begun to wear on me. But I would not wish to live so long that it does! What would you do with eternity, Harry?"

Harry took a deep breath. "Meet all the interesting people in the world, read all the good books and then write something even better, celebrate my first grandchild's tenth birthday party on the Moon, celebrate my first great-great-great grandchild's hundredth birthday party around the Rings of Saturn, learn the deepest and final rules of Nature, understand the nature of consciousness, find out why anything exists in the first place, visit other stars, discover aliens, create aliens, rendezvous with everyone for a party on the other side of the Milky Way once we've explored the whole thing, meet up with everyone else who was born on Old Earth to watch the Sun finally go out, and I used to worry about finding a way to escape this universe before it ran out of negentropy but I'm a lot more hopeful now that I've discovered the so-called laws of physics are just optional guidelines."

"I did not understand much of that," said Dumbledore. "But I must ask if these are things that you truly desire so desperately, or if you only imagine them so as to imagine not being tired, as you run and run from death."

"Life is not a finite list of things that you check off before you're allowed to die," Harry said firmly. "It's life, you just go on living it. If I'm not doing those things it'll be because I've found something better."

Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

From here.

(2) that anyone disseminating untrue information is an agent of the enemy

"What Muggles have learned is that there is a power in the truth, in all the pieces of the truth which interact with each other, which you can only find by discovering as many truths as possible. To do that you can't defend false beliefs in any way, not even by saying the false belief is useful." (source)

(3) there is no obligation to treat enemy or enemy agents ethically which puts you in the company of a lot of less-than-august characters.

You're extending my position from fairness to ethics and then applying it to people, implying that since I said it was OK to be unfair to a corporation, it's also OK to be unethical to people. And then an ad-hominem attack by putting me in the company of unsavory people.

One definition of ethics is to take actions which minimize the suffering of others. Rooftop solar would likely reduce total suffering much more than bolstering the profits of the energy conglomerate, so I don't see a problem with the ethics.

And why is the argument suddenly about me? Doesn't that deflect discussion away from the original point?

(1) there can be no true information against your base premise

You certainly haven't presented any true information. In fact, you haven't presented any information at all.

Really. Speak to the specific issue (rooftop solar), or the outer issue of (astroturfing) and let's have a discussion.

Or, look at how George Lucas initially ripped off 'The Hidden Fortress' to make Star Wars.

Or, look at how Less Wrong ripped off Harry Potter to create a story that teaches the Methods of Rationality.

Or, look at how common certain melodic arrangements are in music.

Artists should simply not work without first having made payment arrangements for that work. The public then funds the work (or doesn't, instant market research). Once the work is done, the public then owns the work since they paid for it to be done.

This is how open source works. This is how mechanics work. This is how all rational labor markets work that are not based on artificial scarcity.

I've been working on strong AI for the past 7 years. Here's my take on the whole issue:

Military person: We want your software/techniques for an autonomous war machine.

Me: Uh... that's a really, really bad idea. You'll make mistakes, and then...

Military person: We know what we're doing, son.

Government - any government - won't see the problems until it's too late. To take obvious examples from history, government never thought that land mines would pose any sort of problem for future generations, and never thought that randomly bombing terrorist organizations would increase their number.

Having just finished "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality", there's a concept in that book "never reveal the secrets of power to someone who's not intelligent enough to figure them out for themselves", as applied to - for example - the atomic bomb. Einstein and others regretted ever unleashing that level of destructive power on humanity, not for any reason other than it would be misused by short-sighted people. It held promise for a utopian easing of the worlds troubles, while at the same time made it easy to obliterate a city on a whim.

For example Leó Szilárd (IIRC - I may be remembering the wrong name) discovered that graphite can be used as a neutron moderator thus making chain reactions possible. Had he not published his results, the atomic bomb might have been delayed by decades - possibly indefinitely.

I've discovered a few things that might be "results" in strong AI. I dunno if I want to publish, though(*) - the idea of a house-cleaning drone seems pleasant enough, but reading about a sentient tank going berserk in Afghanistan and wiping out a small village puts me to pause.

"No one's to blame, it was a software glitch. We've patched and fixed all the other units."

(*) Moral advice on this issue would be appreciated.

It would be an insanely unlikely coup. (...) If there is ever a time for the tinfoil hat metaphor...

"Professor Quirrell had remarked over their lunch that Harry really needed to conceal his state of mind better than putting on a blank face when someone discussed a dangerous topic, and had explained about one-level deceptions, two-level deceptions, and so on. So either Severus was in fact modeling Harry as a one-level player, which made Severus himself two-level, and Harry's three-level move had been successful; or Severus was a four-level player and wanted Harry to think the deception had been successful. Harry, smiling, had asked Professor Quirrell what level he played at, and Professor Quirrell, also smiling, had responded, One level higher than you." (Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, Chapter 27.)

I believe you. Your oft repeated nonsense has finally made the "no true Scotsmoron" argument stick.
What would you propose we do about it? Perhaps require teaching scientific methods in schools?
Oh, now that's just crazy talk. One could sooner teach kids by re-writing Harry Potter to teach Methods of Rationality!

Fortunately, the people who believe death is a gift will rapidly die out, and only us aspiring immortals will be left.

"I have lived a hundred and ten years," the old wizard said quietly (taking his beard out of the bowl, and jiggling it to shake out the color). "I have seen and done a great many things, too many of which I wish I had never seen or done. And yet I do not regret being alive, for watching my students grow is a joy that has not begun to wear on me. But I would not wish to live so long that it does! What would you do with eternity, Harry?"

Harry took a deep breath. "Meet all the interesting people in the world, read all the good books and then write something even better, celebrate my first grandchild's tenth birthday party on the Moon, celebrate my first great-great-great grandchild's hundredth birthday party around the Rings of Saturn, learn the deepest and final rules of Nature, understand the nature of consciousness, find out why anything exists in the first place, visit other stars, discover aliens, create aliens, rendezvous with everyone for a party on the other side of the Milky Way once we've explored the whole thing, meet up with everyone else who was born on Old Earth to watch the Sun finally go out, and I used to worry about finding a way to escape this universe before it ran out of negentropy but I'm a lot more hopeful now that I've discovered the so-called laws of physics are just optional guidelines."

"I did not understand much of that," said Dumbledore. "But I must ask if these are things that you truly desire so desperately, or if you only imagine them so as to imagine not being tired, as you run and run from death."

"Life is not a finite list of things that you check off before you're allowed to die," Harry said firmly. "It's life, you just go on living it. If I'm not doing those things it'll be because I've found something better."

Dumbledore sighed. His fingers drummed on a clock; as they touched it, the numerals changed to an indecipherable script, and the hands briefly appeared in different positions. "In the unlikely event that I am permitted to tarry until a hundred and fifty," said the old wizard, "I do not think I would mind. But two hundred years would be entirely too much of a good thing."

"Yes, well," Harry said, his voice a little dry as he thought of his Mum and Dad and their allotted span if Harry didn't do something about it, "I suspect, Headmaster, that if you came from a culture where people were accustomed to living four hundred years, that dying at two hundred would seem just as tragically premature as dying at, say, eighty."

From: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, Chapter 39

Why cognitive development is roughly the same among all humans:

"Complex machinery was always universal within a sexually reproducing species. If gene B relied on gene A, then A had to be useful on its own, and rise to near-universality in the gene pool on its own, before B would be useful often enough to confer a fitness advantage. Then once B was universal you would get a variant A* that relied on B, and then C that relied on A* and B, then B* that relied on C, until the whole machine would fall apart if you removed a single piece. But it all had to happen incrementally - evolution never looked ahead, evolution would never start promoting B in preparation for A becoming universal later. Evolution was the simple historical fact that, whichever organisms did in fact have the most children, their genes would in fact be more frequent in the next generation. So each piece of a complex machine had to become nearly universal before other pieces in the machine would evolve to depend on its presence.

So complex, interdependent machinery, the powerful sophisticated protein machines that drove life, was always universal within a sexually reproducing species - except for a small handful of non-interdependent variants that were being selected on at any given time, as further complexity was slowly laid down. It was why all human beings had the same underlying brain design, the same emotions, the same facial expressions wired up to those emotions; those adaptations were complex, so they had to be universal."

Source

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality: http://hpmor.com/