On the subject of artifact distribution:
If I end up stuck with the One Ring, there is no way I’m giving it to the cool ambitious rationalists. As Alison and crowd have pointed out before, that thing corrupts. I think the consensus ended up being that we give it to aprilwitching, and only handle it in one of those lead-lined cart things you use to keep radioactive stuff away from you if you handle radioactive medicines a lot.
If the artifact is not one of the Inherently Corrupting ones, it goes to basically any of my online acquaintances who seem ethical, ambitious, and interesting who can either pick it up from me themselves or otherwise arrange secure transit.
So, an interesting question: that logic holds for the one ring. What about the other artifacts? Would you, for example, feel comfortable giving me the Death Note?
(Death Note b/c degree of corruption is…unclear, at best.)
Clearly the Death Note belongs to me, because we absolutely don’t have any evidence that giving it to someone named Kira would end poorly.
Death Note mentioned, and I heard someone here likes contrived scenarios leading to world domination, so let me present mine:
I’ve got 21 days of untraceable control on anyone, with the unfortunate side effect that it’s lethal. Kind of a bummer that last one, but it can be put to good use.
Now, were I to acquire one, I’d naturally test it on someone evil, well-known, and actively hunted, so that I’d get the news of it working reliably and using it would only leak the information that someone who knows about $famous_bad_guy did it, or in other words, basically zero. For example, if there was some kind of an intertationally hunted terrorist or something, and a superpower were to take them out in a surprise raid 21 days after me acquiring the Note, that would be pretty strong and safe evidence that it works.
Then, politicians. Every country has “those guys” who are only good for deathnote-fodder (such as nazis) and I’d use them to deliver my messages to the world’s influential people. In their own language of course, so they wouldn’t leak information. The rules themselves are pretty simple: do what the sovereign of the new world says, or face the consequences. Only those who disobey, or are actively extra-evil would need to be taken out. Trying to hunt down criminals is a waste of human life when one could be reshaping institutions surgically.
The interesting part would be whether I could use it to control other things; for example, would writing “$person dies from heart attack after hearing about $marvellous_invention on the news” make someone else invent $marvellous_invention? If it could, then that’s obscenely exploitable. Whoops, someone accidentally released gene-drivered mosquitoes with inevitable eradication instincts into the wild and the biggest bioethicist in the world had a heart attack, how “unfortunate”. And maybe someone were to invent a strange apparently reactionless source of propulsion or something too.
1 month ago · tagged #support your local supervillain #death cw · 27 notes · source: ilzolende · .permalink
amakthel liked this
ambivalencerelations reblogged this from sdhs-rationalist and added:The only hard part would be proving it to the mathematical community. I suggest “person X dies in two hours after...
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soundlogic2236 reblogged this from socialjusticemunchkin and added:The death note has limits on its degree of control-you might be able to speed up research with things like that-if...
metagorgon said: the death note can’t make physically impossible things happen, and it only has control of the subject.
ilzolende liked this
sdhs-rationalist reblogged this from socialjusticemunchkin and added:grins As is writing ‘If P=NP, person X dies in Y way. Else, person X dies in Z way’ or similar.
collapsedsquid reblogged this from socialjusticemunchkin and added:See, this is why you should give it to me. My anhedonia ensures that my fear of bad shit going down will win over any...
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socialjusticemunchkin reblogged this from rusalkii and added:Death Note mentioned, and I heard someone here likes contrived scenarios leading to world domination, so let me present...
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rusalkii reblogged this from sdhs-rationalist and added:Clearly the Death Note belongs to me, because we absolutely don’t have any evidence that giving it to someone named Kira...
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