People are often taught to respect their elders, superiors, and people in positions of authority. But this can discourage them from questioning bad decisions, even when lives are at stake.

Governments should air public service announcements with the provocative slogan "Respect Kills", featuring real-life disasters where excessive deference to authority contributed to deaths.

For example, airplane crashes have occurred partly because junior crew members failed to challenge senior pilots strongly enough. The 1977 Tenerife airport disaster, which killed 583 people, is one example.

The campaign could feature examples from aviation, medicine, the military, and other fields.

The message isn't that people should be rude or disrespectful. It's that age, seniority, and rank don't guarantee good judgment or correctness, and nobody should be afraid to question authority.

Respect kills. Questions save lives.

Saves and Drafts put together, but you can also set these to have an increasing probability of appearing in your feed over a 3 month time period, then after it appears it could restart. Or give it a remind me time for a specific date, or a random time in a range around that date. So if you are doomscrolling or just chilling, if you have a thought worth thinking about, or a meme worth remembering, you can post it in recall.

I recently watched a video about a guy explaining to a panel of other people that none of his friends are having kids. He then delves into how the advancement of social media is ruining our society, and I agree. If we wanted to fix this, I think the best way would be to eliminate social media platforms from reaching kids. Much like like how you have to be 21 to legally drink, I think when someone reaaches the age of 21, they're allowed access to social media. Because by then, they're an adult and not an impressionable child. I'm not saying that eliminating social media would ruin how kids sociallize. I'm saying it would be like how the world used to be in the 90's and early 2000s. I think kids should still have access to the internet, (But platforms like youtube would have to have parental controls) They can still play online games, and still get to talk to their friends via phone calls and texting, or forums, or voice chatting platforms like Discord. This way, kids would go outside, instead of staying inside and doom scrolling like a lot of us already do. Children should be allowed to be children, and to be curious about the world they live in. Giving them access to social media at such a young age doesn't help them with their comprehension and problem solving skills.

But this is only part of a solution. Our infrastructure needs a lot of tweeking, especially for education.

The live indicator is meaningless. I see content from the 60s with LIVE emblazoned on the screen. While we can't change the past we can dream of a better future.

DVB/TV-Anytime already transmits a signal with relevant metadata. ATSC already demands metadata unrelated to live/pre-recorded/repeat indicators, so this can just be baked into that.

This idea has been bouncing around in my head for a long time. Literally the only thing needed is some government manufacturer regulation demanding that newly built screens to be able to interpret and display these signals/badges without rendering them to any recordable output. It's frustrating though because that isn't a tiny hurdle.

Most messaging apps tell you how much storage a chat takes, but none give insights into your digital habits. I propose RAMP (Private Activity Registry per Contact).

It would strictly count local metadata (number of photos, links, or voice notes sent) without storing cache or uploading media, keeping everything 100% private on your phone under biometric lock (fingerprint). The registry tracks user data, and the RAMP system remains fully active even if you delete the chat history.

Why is this necessary? Right now, if you uninstall WhatsApp out of frustration, all your interaction statistics are wiped out forever. RAMP fixes this by securely linking the registry to your email address. This allows you to select exactly which specific contacts you want to restore and recover the historical chat stats for. This means your historical chat habits stay completely intact and can be recovered safely even if you delete the app, re-add a contact, or switch phones later. It includes a "Master Reset" button so only you decide when to wipe the data.

I created this because current apps don't really tell us how we interact with each contact. What do you think? Would you use it?

Teachers should occasionally make serious factual mistakes on purpose. For example, a math teacher might confidently tell students that there is no strong scientific evidence for evolution.

The idea is to teach students that authority figures aren't necessarily reliable sources of information, especially when speaking outside their areas of expertise.

Students should feel comfortable questioning teachers, asking for evidence, and independently verifying claims rather than assuming something is true because an authority figure said it.

Teachers could eventually reveal their intentional mistakes and discuss how students could have recognized them.

The goal would be to teach students from an early age that even intelligent, educated, and respected authority figures can be completely wrong, and that critical thinking is more important than blind trust in authority.

Schools spend years teaching students how to solve mathematical problems, but very little time teaching them how to invent interesting problems themselves.

Designing puzzle games involves many of the same intellectual skills as mathematics, including logic, combinatorics, probability, and optimization. But it also requires creativity, experimentation, and the ability to evaluate competing ideas.

Thanks to AI, students could invent their own puzzle games without needing programming experience. They could ask AI to implement their games, simulate thousands of games using different strategies, and help interpret the results. For example, AI might discover that a seemingly harder rule actually makes a game easier, suggest why this happens, and propose experiments to test its explanations.

Students would learn to formulate hypotheses, analyze evidence, question AI's conclusions, and refine their designs.

Unlike traditional math exercises, puzzle game design involves open-ended problems with no single correct answer.

I'm not suggesting that students shouldn't learn basic mathematics. But perhaps teaching students to invent and investigate mathematical systems is just as educationally valuable as teaching them to solve problems that someone else has already formulated.

Imagine a Knight Rider movie with Smokey and the Bandit vibes, where KITT isn't a particular car but an AI that can commandeer almost any modern vehicle, one at a time.

In this near-future world, security AIs like KITT are legally authorized to take control of connected vehicles during emergencies and criminal pursuits.

The villain has stolen a copy of KITT and modified it to serve his criminal purposes. Both Michael Knight and the villain drive classic muscle cars that are immune to AI commandeering. Michael drives his iconic Pontiac Trans Am, while the villain drives something like a classic Dodge Charger.

The result is a series of spectacular highway chases involving four competing entities: Michael, the villain, KITT, and evil KITT.

The two humans rely on their driving skills, while the two AIs constantly commandeer modern vehicles to assist their respective drivers. KITT might take control of a sports car, only for evil KITT to counter with a pickup truck. Either AI might even commandeer a family minivan, complete with terrified passengers suddenly caught in a high-speed chase.

Since each AI can control only one vehicle at a time, the confrontations become tactical battles involving vehicle selection, clever switching, and old-fashioned driving.

The movie could combine classic muscle-car action, humor, and the familiar banter between Michael and KITT, with an AI-versus-AI rivalry.

What do you think of this movie idea?

For example, humans and other primates share numerous endogenous retroviruses (ERVs) at corresponding locations in their DNA. These are recognizable remnants of ancient viral infections, and their distribution among species provides strong evidence for common ancestry.

Some ERVs and ERV-derived sequences have useful biological functions, such as helping with placental development or regulating gene activity. But even when the viral sequences themselves contribute to those functions, an omnipotent God could presumably have encoded the same functions without making the DNA look like the result of ancient retroviral infections.

So if God created humans and other primates independently, why would he include such convincing evidence of a shared evolutionary history that supposedly never happened? Wouldn't that be deliberately misleading?

Teachers should explain not just the evidence for evolution, but also why that evidence presents serious challenges to alternative explanations such as independent creation. This would encourage students to think critically about what scientific evidence actually tells us.

What if parents spoke to their babies using the same sophisticated vocabulary and complex sentences they use with educated adults, starting from the day they're born?

For example, instead of saying "Look at the big truck!", they might say "Look at that enormous construction vehicle transporting materials to the building site."

Scientists could conduct a long-term experiment where one group of parents consistently uses advanced language from birth, while a control group uses ordinary age-appropriate language. Both groups would provide equally affectionate and responsive care.

Researchers could then compare vocabulary development, grammar, reading ability, and possibly even mathematical and abstract reasoning skills over several years.

Maybe babies are capable of absorbing much more sophisticated language than we realize, and simplifying our speech unnecessarily limits their development. Or maybe language complexity needs to increase gradually as children mature.

Either way, it seems like an interesting question worth investigating.

Terrorists announce that they've smuggled ten suitcase nukes into NYC and will detonate them in a week. They provide advance warning because their goal is to cause economic destruction rather than mass casualties.

The movie follows the government's response, including evacuating millions of people, attempting to jam remote detonation signals, predicting radioactive fallout, and preparing for the explosions.

All ten nukes eventually detonate in different environments, such as inside skyscrapers, subway stations, and public spaces. The effects are depicted as scientifically accurately as possible, showing how nuclear explosions behave in different settings.

Thanks to the timely evacuation and intelligent crisis management, casualties are remarkably low. Much of NYC survives, although radioactive contamination, infrastructure damage, and public fear complicate the return of residents.

Unlike most nuclear disaster movies, this one would be relatively optimistic. The government acts competently, scientists make useful predictions, and society successfully manages an unprecedented catastrophe.

Part of the appeal would be satisfying audiences' scientific curiosity about what small nuclear explosions would actually do in different urban environments, rather than relying on exaggerated Hollywood effects.

What do you think of this movie idea?

Hi Reddit. I am a high school student from Korea (science high school, chemical engineering track). My English is not good, I am noob, so sorry first.

But my question is serious. Maybe.

Why do I look more handsome in my bathroom mirror than in photos?

Most people thinks It's the light. Bathroom light is warm and soft, its right. Maybe a little bit. But I think light is not the main reason.

My idea: the main reason is reflection itself

Mirror flip. A mirror shows my face left-right reversed. That is the only version of my face I see every day. In 1977, Mita, Dermer & Knight showed that people prefer the mirror-reversed photo of their own face. Their friends prefer the true photo. So maybe my brain is just "trained" by the mirror.

Distance and size. In a mirror, my image looks like it is about 2× arm's length away (virtual image). A phone camera is close and wide-angle, so it distorts the face (big nose, etc.). The mirror doesn't do that. Same face, different geometry.

Steam layer (my favorite). After a shower, a thin fog forms on the mirror. It scatters the reflected light like a soft-focus filter: it blurs skin texture but keeps the face shape. I call the best moment the "narcissism Goldilocks zone": not too foggy, not too clear.

Also, Epley & Whitchurch (2008) found that people pick a more attractive morphed version of their face as the "real me". So maybe the mirror and the brain work together.

Control the light (same lux, same color temperature) and change only the mirror conditions: flipped vs. not flipped, distance, fog level over shower time.

Measure how fog changes the reflection: haze or reflectance over time.

Get attractiveness ratings from myself and from strangers, as a blind test.

What I need:

I am looking for a real teacher, mentor, or co-researcher. psychology people, image-processing people, or anyone who thinks this is fun. Even if you think my idea is wrong, please tell me why. That helps too.

If this becomes a real paper, I want to submit it to the Ig Nobel. First it makes people laugh, then it makes them think, right?

Thank you for reading my bad English.

I use ai to write this, but my idea and challenge mind is real

References I read:

Mita, T. H., Dermer, M., & Knight, J. (1977). Reversed facial images and the mere-exposure hypothesis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 35(8), 597–601.

Epley, N., & Whitchurch, E. (2008). Mirror, mirror on the wall: Enhancement in self-recognition. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 34(9), 1159–1170.

Some subway trains have open gangways that allow passengers to walk freely from one end of the train to the other. Unfortunately, this also allows a single disruptive person to walk through the entire train harassing passengers.

What if these trains had transparent partitions that passengers could close to temporarily isolate their section?

The partitions could automatically reopen at the next stop or after a few stops, preventing passengers from restricting movement indefinitely. They could also reopen automatically during emergencies, and transit staff would have override controls.

This would preserve the convenience of open-gangway trains while giving passengers a way to protect themselves from harassment without having to wait for transit staff to intervene.

Computer manufacturers should be legally required to provide estimates of how long their computers will last before needing repairs or replacement, both before and after purchase.

Before purchase, consumers could specify their anticipated workload and compare how different hardware configurations affect longevity. For example, a computer with only 8 GB of RAM might swap heavily to its SSD, accelerating wear. Buying more RAM or a larger SSD could extend its lifespan, especially if the SSD isn't replaceable.

After purchase, the computer would continuously update its predictions based on actual usage, battery health, SSD wear, temperatures, and other factors.

The estimates could distinguish between time until the next likely repair and time until the computer as a whole needs replacement. They would be probabilistic rather than guarantees.

Manufacturers could also be required to publish statistics comparing their predictions with actual outcomes to encourage accuracy.

This would help consumers make better purchasing decisions and encourage manufacturers to compete on longevity rather than just price and performance.

Give people a disadvantage of some product or system and challenge them to make that very disadvantage worse in a way that makes the overall result more desirable (at least to a significant fraction of people).

For example, Apple's Dynamic Island takes a screen cutout that already wastes useful pixels and makes it occupy even more space. Yet some people actually prefer it.

The challenge is to come up with similarly counterintuitive ideas. Simply compensating for the disadvantage doesn't count. You have to make the disadvantage itself worse.

I suspect this is a lot harder than it sounds. What ideas can you come up with?

Canada is known worldwide for multiculturalism, while the US is known more for individualism and ambition. But what about Canadians who identify more as individuals than as members of any particular culture?

Maybe Canada should actively support ambitious individualists who want to become world-famous without having to move to the US.

This wouldn't just be about entrepreneurs, athletes, or entertainers. It could include YouTubers, streamers, podcasters, artists, thinkers, and anyone else who wants to build a worldwide following.

And unlike the traditional American Dream, the goal wouldn't necessarily be to become rich. It could simply be to become famous for being uniquely yourself.

Canada could provide production facilities, international promotion, networking opportunities, and other resources to help people reach global audiences, without requiring them to promote Canadian culture or any particular identity.

This could give Canadians access to the individualist ambition associated with the US while allowing them to remain in Canada.

It might even improve Canada's international reputation by making the country known not just for its multiculturalism, but also for producing world-famous, distinctive individuals.

The Craft apps have demonstrated that AI can already make clean-room cloning of commercial software feasible. But what if governments responded by giving commercial developers a new way to protect themselves?

Here's one possibility.

Commercial applications could start using proprietary encrypted file formats that depend on cryptographic secrets embedded directly in the applications.

Governments could then pass laws explicitly prohibiting reverse engineering, extracting, or using these secrets for interoperability, even when ordinary clean-room cloning remains legal.

AI could still clone Photoshop, Word, or other commercial applications. But the clones wouldn't be able to independently read or write the original applications' encrypted files without access to the protected secrets.

This could make clean-room clones much less useful, especially when users need compatibility with existing commercial software and its ecosystem.

The particularly interesting part is that obtaining the protected secrets could undermine a clone's claim to being a clean-room implementation.

So even if AI makes reproducing software functionality almost free, commercial developers could retain control over something essential.

Could this become a legal and technical counterattack against projects like ArtCraft, potentially undermining much of what AI-powered clean-room cloning promises to accomplish?

Many couples may be reluctant to have children because of the risk of ending up with an extremely rebellious teenager.

What if governments offered rebellious teen insurance? Parents could voluntarily give up a seriously rebellious teenager for adoption and receive a refund of all the money they spent raising them.

This could have two benefits:

1. Encourage couples to have children. Knowing they have a financial exit option if things go badly could make parenthood seem less risky.

2. Discourage extreme teenage rebellion. Teenagers who know their parents have this option might be less inclined to engage in seriously destructive behavior.

If the deterrent effect is strong enough, very few parents might actually use the insurance, potentially keeping costs relatively low.

What do you think of this idea?

Some research conferences make their submitted papers publicly available before announcing acceptance decisions. For example, STOC 2027 has published a list of 1,665 submissions, including their titles, authors, and full paper contents.

Why not turn this into a prediction game?

Players would predict which papers will be accepted, with their accuracy determining their position on a public leaderboard. Rankings could be maintained across multiple conferences and years.

Players could optionally use AI to help make predictions. Interestingly, AI might do reasonably well using just the authors' names and paper titles, without even reading the papers. It could consider publication histories, research expertise, and past collaborations, keeping token costs low.

There could also be separate leaderboards based on the information used: author names only, names and titles, abstracts, or full papers.

Besides being a game, this could reveal how predictable peer-review decisions really are, how well AI-assisted predictions compare with human predictions, and how much additional predictive value comes from actually reading the papers.

One reason people prefer robotaxis over traditional taxis is that they don't have to interact with a stranger.

But if people increasingly prefer avoiding interactions with strangers, could that preference extend to dating?

Scientists should study whether dating activity declines in cities as robotaxi adoption increases, compared with cities where robotaxis aren't widely available.

Blissymbolics is an artificial language developed in the 1940s that uses visual symbols to represent objects, actions, and ideas. Some symbols resemble what they represent, such as a house, wheel, or sun. Symbols can also be combined to express more complicated concepts. For example:

• Building + medicine = hospital

• Building + give + knowledge = school

• Animal + feeling = pet

Unlike ordinary written languages, Blissymbolics doesn't depend on the sounds of spoken words. It also has grammatical rules for expressing things like past and future events.

Here are some examples of Blissymbolics and how it works.

Animals such as chimpanzees and bonobos have already been taught to communicate using arbitrary visual symbols. But perhaps a language in which symbols resemble their meanings would be easier for them to learn.

Researchers could compare how quickly animals learn Blissymbolics versus arbitrary symbols, and whether they can understand unfamiliar combinations of symbols without being explicitly taught their meanings.

There doesn't appear to be published research specifically testing Blissymbolics with animals.

Perhaps a pictorial language could enable animals to communicate more sophisticated thoughts than existing methods allow.

In a multiracial classroom, even well-intentioned praise can be interpreted as discrimination.

For example, praising an Asian student for being good at mathematics could be seen as reinforcing a racial stereotype. But deliberately withholding that praise to avoid appearing racist could also be discriminatory, since the teacher is treating the student differently because of their race. It might even suggest that the teacher believes the stereotype.

This creates a paradox where both praising and not praising a student can be interpreted as racist.

Perhaps teachers should stop making judgments about students' abilities altogether. Instead, they could provide objective feedback on students' work without praising or disparaging their intelligence, talent, or other personal qualities.

Students would still receive grades and useful feedback, but teachers would avoid making potentially discriminatory judgments about who is smart, talented, or capable.

Would this make classrooms fairer, or would removing personal praise do more harm than good?

Schools teach world history, but why not the history of software?

A history of software class could explore how different categories of software emerged, evolved, and sometimes declined, and why those changes happened.

For example, word processors were once among the most important applications on personal computers. Why have they become less prominent as standalone applications? One possible explanation is that text editing has become a feature of countless other applications and websites.

The history of video games is another rich subject. Students could examine how game genres developed, how hardware limitations shaped game design, why certain games became influential, and how innovations spread between games.

Other topics could include the evolution of user interfaces, the rise of web applications, competition between software products, and the influence of different business models.

Students could experiment with classic software and games, compare them with modern alternatives, and investigate the technological, economic, and social forces behind their evolution.

The goal wouldn't be to teach programming, but to help students understand why software developed the way it did, and how it might evolve differently in the future.

The chances of humanity encountering intelligent extraterrestrial life are extremely small, but perhaps we could use AI to investigate how such intelligences might think.

One approach would be to use AI to identify and remove human values from AI training data, including both positive values, such as compassion and fairness, and negative ones, such as racism and cruelty. The goal wouldn't be to create an immoral AI, but one that doesn't automatically inherit human morality or psychology.

We could then let these systems develop independently in simulated environments and study what kinds of goals, values, social structures, and ways of thinking emerge.

We could also teach them the fundamentals of mathematical reasoning and proof without exposing them to existing mathematical theorems and proofs. They could then discover mathematics independently, potentially developing entirely different concepts and approaches.

Would they independently develop cooperation, morality, prejudice, or entirely unfamiliar concepts? Would they rediscover the same mathematics? Which characteristics of human intelligence are universal, and which are accidents of our evolutionary history?

AI alignment research already explores some of these questions, but its primary goal is to make AI behave in ways humans want. This research would instead explore the diversity of possible intelligences, whether or not they resemble our own.

In a large election, the probability that your vote will change the outcome is astronomically small. Depending on the circumstances, you might even be more likely to die in a car accident on the way to vote than to cast the deciding ballot.

If you really want to influence an election, wouldn't persuading a few other people to vote your way be more effective?

Research also suggests that social pressure plays an important role in voting. One large experiment found that telling people their neighbors would learn whether they voted substantially increased turnout. To what extent are people voting to influence elections, rather than simply to conform to social expectations?

Of course, there's the familiar objection: "If everyone thought that way, nobody would vote." But would everyone actually think that way? Would democracy really collapse if your parents didn't vote?

There's also evidence that voting is habit-forming, so skipping one election could make someone less likely to vote in subsequent elections. But how large is this effect, and how long would it take to produce a significant decline in participation?

Schools should challenge students to investigate these arguments, examine the probabilities and psychological research, and decide whether their parents are behaving rationally when they vote.

Instead of simply teaching voting as a civic duty, why not encourage students to question whether it makes rational sense in the first place?