Thats actually a really good dilemma if you think about it. Like if everyone doubles it you basically don’t kill anyone. But you’ll always risk that there’s some psycho who likes killing and then you will have killed more. And if these choices continue endlessly you will eventually find someone like this. So killing immediately should be the right thing to do.
Now, what if you’re not the first person on the chain? What if you’re the second one. Or the n one? What now? Would you kill two or n knowing that the person before you spared them?
Yes, but it also kinda depends on what happens at and after junction 34, from which point on more than the entire population of earth is at stake.
If anything, this shows how ludicrously fast exponentials grow. At the start of the line it seems like there will be so many decisions to be made down the line, so there must be a psycho in there somewhere, right? But (assuming the game just ends after junction 34) you’re actually just one of 34 people, and the chance of getting a psycho are virtually 0.
It’s not that interesting. If you rephrase the question as a choice between a good option and a less good one, it’s still barely even a choice.
“Would you rather have only one (or, say, trillions) die now, or would you like to allow *at a minimum *twice that many people die the second we talk to a sadist?”
If you can’t choose the smaller number, all it means is that you lack moral strength - or the test proctor has put someone you know on the tracks, which is cheating. A highly principled person might struggle if choosing between their daughter and one other person. If it’s my kid versus a billion? That’s not a choice, that’s just needless torture. Any good person would sacrifice their kid to save a billion lives. I take that as an axiom, because anything else is patently insane.
Kill fewer people now is obviously the right answer, and not very interesting.
What is interesting is that the game breaks already at junction 34, which is unexpectedly low.
So a more interesting dilemma would have been “would you kill n people now or double it and pass it on, knowing the next person faces the same dilemma, but once all humanity is at stake and the lever is not pulled, the game ends.”. Because that would involve first of all figuring out that the game actually only involves 34 decisions, and then the dilemma becomes “do I trust the next 33-n people not to be psychos, or do I limit the damage now?”. Even more interestingly “limiting the damage now” makes you the “psycho” in that sense…
Yeah, fuck having a political party run by a small cabal control everything under the name of communism, that does not work, it’s simple economics! What works is a small cabal of corporate groups run by billionaires control everything! That is the only system that will ever work.
It’s either that or communism, there is no other system and anyone who says there is is a communist!
Kinda has a stench of “the wealthy get taxed too much 😢”
The IRS doesn’t get that money. The IRS processes that money and prevents your lottery-ticket-buying-ass from hoarding it all, and redistributes some of that unnecessary wealth to the utilities and services were all invested in together as a society.
Technically correct. They were under Stalins Marxism-Leninism, which was supposed to be a placeholder until true communism could be implemented.
But it’s a bit disingenuous to split that hair in this thread. The irony being that the latter are all countries that got to experience the kind of gouvernemental structure that Lenin facilitated.
Lenin was a counterrevolutionary that brutally suppressed any dissent and directly placed Stalin (being well aware of what a person he was) in a position that would make his later takeover possible.
Lenin placed Stalin as an enforcer to do the dirty stuff for him. It would be very naive to assume Lenin didn’t know the risk involved of putting a former mob gangster in such a position.
Like, dude, you’ve been here for 3 weeks and basically half of what you do is complain about communism and left wingers. You got some serious unresolved issues man.
Firefox is so shit on mobile that it reloads every time I switch to other apps. I once tried to fill up a very long form, and when I tried to look up some information on my notepad app, I switched back to ff it reloaded and all my progress was erased.
It’s a bug that has existed for years, and they never bother to fix it.
So I switched to chrome + adblocking DNS on my phone and pc and I never looked back.
edit: Lemmy is becoming circlejerky like Reddit who would have thought. Facts downvoted have you guys even visited the link above it’s a widespread issue. My phone is 8gb sd855+ with battery optimization disabled for FF mobile app. This is why I rarely engage.
The reason for 12-hour clocks is most cultures worldwide have variable length hours of over a year. For Western times this comes from Greeks who had 12 day and 12 night hours. Early water clocks in antiquity would attempt to make that adjustment automatically.
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