There exists a hypothetical Earth. On this Earth is a secluded island. 100 random people from this hypothetical Earth are brought to the island and granted a trillion years of existence - and can end their existence if they wish. In addition, these people never feel pain or suffering.

Unfortunately, this comes with a cost. Every 100 years, a random person from that group is given a choice. The details of that decision are below:


Which option would you take? Essentially this is the prisoner's dillemma taken to the extreme. I got inspiration from this hypothetical from Berserk.

Are you able to take anything seriously? Your forced, childish demeanor will only hurt you in this world. Please read everything in the OP once again, and tell me what choice you'd genuinely make if you were the one randomly selected.

Are you able to take anything seriously?

Are you able to take deez nuts in yo mouf

i would spend 99 years on this island and find a way to "end my existence" just before the time comes for someone to make that choice

at that point, i've already lived what could essentially be considered a "full life" where i didn't have to suffer, and i've never had ambitions to live much longer than that, so there's absolutely no point in playing this silly game with a bunch of potentially sadistic morons for a trillion more years

when you account for things like aging, living more than a normal human lifespan isn't as desirable as most people think it is—i'm willing to bet that most people would choose to end their own lives before they even turned 200

therefore, to make this hypothetical more compelling, shorten the trillion years to just ten years, where someone is given the choice every single month, and instead of gaining simple immortality, you would get to spend that eternity in some sort of paradise, like heaven, while everyone gets cast to hell for as long as you would choose to remain in heaven

also, consider removing the option to just kill yourself—because that's still what i would choose to do in that situation, knowing that i wouldn't have anyone tortured, but that i can't trust anyone else to feel the same way, and that being dead is infinitely preferable to being tortured against my will for eternity

people don't want to live forever—they want to be happy forever, and on an island like this, there may be no suffering, but if there's no guarantee of happiness, then what makes living here any different than toiling in the normal world? there's basically no difference, so it's not a very thought-provoking hypothetical

If it's a perfect world, I wouldn't get bored and would be content with my 'modest' trillion years. In this perfect world I get to die in my sleep painlessly one day and that would be pretty neat too.

Seems a bit pointless to torture someone if it's a perfect world. It's a *perfect world*, so the defined time period is already built in to be perfect too.

Don't get too hung up on the "perfect" part. I'll just go ahead and remove it.

Going to make an updated thread using Verbatim's advice when I get home. I made this on the fly last night - expect a much cooler thread with better formatting / pictures.

Out of 100 people it's guaranteed one will

it isn't guaranteed, there's no way to be sure of that

otherwise, you're sadly correct

Quote from: Verbatim on October 26, 2021, 04:32:29 PM

Quote from: dahuterschuter on October 26, 2021, 04:23:29 PM

Out of 100 people it's guaranteed one will

it isn't guaranteed, there's no way to be sure of that

otherwise, you're sadly correct

It is though.  in fact it'd probably be many.  Every person who realizes that the choice it trusting 99 other people completely, or not, is not going to blindly trust 99 other people randomly selected from the population.

it's not necessarily about trust—it's also about you, personally, NOT wanting 99 people to suffer for all eternity and understanding that you have the power to prevent that

do you know how easy it would be for me to find 99 people who would take the second option? even if i had a hard time, if you assume any number of people would share my mentality, there's no reason to suspect that it would be impossible for 99 others to feel the same

the furthest you can go is "it's overwhelmingly likely"—you can't guarantee it any more than i can guarantee the opposite

if it was 100 dahuterschuters on this island, then you'd be wise to choose the first option, but not everybody is you (or someone like you), and that's the point—i'm sure there have been countless stories written about this level of myopia

I think I'll have to make the updated hypothetical tomorrow guys. Sam and I went over to our friend Camille's house, who I recently got into Twin Peaks. She was on the penultimate episode ("Miss Twin Peaks"), which precedes the legend of a finale ("Beyond Life and Death"). I told her there was no way that she watches those last two episodes without me there with her lol. So we ordered some pizzas and had some mixed drinks (I also did 200mg of DXM covertly - a very low dose) and watched the best hour and a half of television that anyone has ever come up with, ever. Such a cozy night.

Anyway I definitely want to expand on this hypothetical. Give me a day or two and I'll use Verb's wisdom to make a truly compelling one.

Quote from: dahuterschuter on October 26, 2021, 05:53:37 PM

Quote from: Verbatim on October 26, 2021, 04:32:29 PM

Quote from: dahuterschuter on October 26, 2021, 04:23:29 PM

Out of 100 people it's guaranteed one will

it isn't guaranteed, there's no way to be sure of that

otherwise, you're sadly correct

It is though.  in fact it'd probably be many.  Every person who realizes that the choice it trusting 99 other people completely, or not, is not going to blindly trust 99 other people randomly selected from the population.

it's not necessarily about trust—it's also about you, personally, NOT wanting 99 people to suffer for all eternity and understanding that you have the power to prevent that

do you know how easy it would be for me to find 99 people who would take the second option? even if i had a hard time, if you assume any number of people would share my mentality, there's no reason to suspect that it would be impossible for 99 others to feel the same

the furthest you can go is "it's overwhelmingly likely"—you can't guarantee it any more than i can guarantee the opposite

if it was 100 dahuterschuters on this island, then you'd be wise to choose the first option, but not everybody is you (or someone like you), and that's the point—i'm sure there have been countless stories written about this level of myopia

Can't wait to torture this idiot for a trillion years while I'm chilling in paradise

Can't wait to torture this idiot for a trillion years while I'm chilling in paradise

which is another thing that separates this from a true prisoner's dilemma in the sense that having the choice-makers be randomly chosen is imbalanced—why should some random person get to choose first over another random person? what's the logic behind that? if i were second in line, and the very first person chose to fuck everyone over, that kinda just throws the whole experiment out the window right off the bat

then again, the closer you model the hypothetical after the prisoner's dilemma, the more you might as well just be thinking about the prisoner's dilemma, where the choices are made simultaneously between just two people


^ the most optimal response to the prisoner's dilemma, but only if the "prisoners" (obviously contestants in this case) are allowed to communicate with each other

Quote from: Verbatim on October 27, 2021, 02:16:37 PM

Quote from: dahuterschuter on October 26, 2021, 07:00:54 PM

Nah, you can't just ignore the entirety of game theory.

if whatever you think "game theory" means clashes with basic, fundamental things like stochasticity that hard, i think i can

do you deny that if you flip a coin a million times, you COULD get heads every single time? or do you think it's literally impossible for that to happen (you know, instead of just extremely unlikely)

Human behaviour isn't a coin flip.

but this hypothetical doesn't really observe complex human behavior—it observes the choice between a simple binary of options for which there exist compelling reasons to take either, depending on your disposition

we don't know how the islanders are chosen, so we can assume that they'd be chosen randomly

take a random youtube video with at least 100 dislikes, but a like/dislike ratio of 99:1—out of all the people who rated this video one way or the other, let's randomly select 100 of those people

out of those randomly selected individuals, it's very unlikely that all 100 of them voted to dislike the video, but since we already know that 100 people did, we already know that there's a remote possibility of such a thing occurring

it's the same principle here, except rather than using raw data to support my position, i'm essentially using common sense—i'm personally fairly confident that there's more than 100 people on this planet of 7.9 billion who would never have anyone tortured under any circumstances, even if it would grant them immortality

to put it another way, in order to disagree with my position, you would have to believe that the world's population contains less than 100 people who would choose the second option, and that you also just happen to be speaking to one of them—that would be pretty remarkable

knowing that these people exist is enough to say that it isn't guaranteed that someone on that island will vote to fuck everyone over—you can only be 99.99999% sure if you want, but you cannot be 100% sure unless you happen to know all of the people on the island

i'm basically explaining the difference between "unlikely" and "impossible" to you right now, which i don't think i should have to do, so i can only assume you already understand this, and that you're just being semantically imprecise or deliberately obtuse

are you somewhat happy I came up with this

idk I want to expand what I post about here and even if my hypothetical wasnt compelling at least it led to some activity/discussion here right

I mean I know you still despise me but if you want to see me make more threads in this vein please let me know with a little bit of positive reinforcement if that's not an overstep to ask

i'm basically explaining the difference between "unlikely" and "impossible" to you right now, which i don't think i should have to do, so i can only assume you already understand this, and that you're just being semantically imprecise or deliberately obtuse

Actually you are the one being obtuse because the difference between unlikely and impossible is so irrelevant to this discussion that there is no reason to bring it up

It's like if I said "you won't spontaneously combust right now" and you said "ah but there is a chance you could"

ok bro you right good job

Quote from: Coomer on October 27, 2021, 06:09:21 PM

Actually you are the one being obtuse because the difference between unlikely and impossible is so irrelevant to this discussion that there is no reason to bring it up

he used the word "guarantee" wrong, and i carefully explained to him why it was

when someone is wrong, they have to be corrected—it doesn't matter if it's "relevant" (which it is, you're just being your typical dumbass self as usual)

Quote

It's like if I said "you won't spontaneously combust right now" and you said "ah but there is a chance you could"

ok bro you right good job

yes, because if you said that you could NEVER spontaneously combust, then you're missing the point of the word "spontaneously," and that is something that ought to be corrected, because it's bad to be wrong

glad you get it, good job

you have a small peepee lol