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.
Absolutely. The first law would be that anyone who tries to launch a nuclear weapon gets smited. Or even that anyone who tries to commit mass murder gets smited. (I imagine you’d have to craft the laws very carefully to keep them from being gamed. Like, you wouldn’t want someone to set it up so that their being smited is what causes other people to die.) Also, perhaps a law protecting me from assassination attempts. It’s a powerful enough ability to conquer the world I think, but I’d do my best to use it in a very limited capacity, since it’s a rather blunt instrument to change behavior. I’d try to reduce existential risks and end wars, but that’s probably it.
I’d have to think about how much I’d want to cooperate with the international community.
Dude, this is almost exactly the Death Note power, and you’d better believe that I have it all worked out how to create a “new world” way better than Light Yagami.
Let me just say, I would not be conservative with it. Things wouldn’t be too different in regard to individuals—except that suddenly all the laws against murder, robbery, etc. would become absolutely binding.
But government officials had better watch out.
More details?
Well, where to begin…
I perhaps a bit too conservative in my my earlier estimate, since this power actually far exceeds that of the Death Note.
I suppose the first thing I would do is pass a law against my using the power unjustly, to prevent myself from becoming corrupted by it. (Resulting, I guess, in immediate death if the rest of this strikes you as corrupt.)
Then, it seems with this mechanism that I would lack the Death Note’s ability to send messages, so I wouldn’t be able to communicate the principles of the new world order that way.
However, if I could pass a law against attempting or conspiring to kill me, I could simply announce myself as Supreme Justice of the World. I would arrange a suitable demonstration of my power and require the leaders of the nearest military force to take orders from me. Then I would command them to unify all the world’s governments, making it illegal to violently resist them (or for them to engage in looting or other abuses).
Crime (murder, robbery, rape, etc.) would be eliminated as a major social problem, as all serious crimes would be punishable by smiting. With a 100% detection and conviction rate, it is unlikely that many would be attempted.
With control of all the world’s governments, I would be able to command them to do anything. However, with this power, it is unclear what the purpose would be even of minimal government, so I would abolish all of them—except, of course, government by magic power of smiting.
There would be immediate open borders. Conveniently, this would obviate all concerns about crime or political takeover—since the commission of any violent crimes would be punishable by immediate and certain death, and there wouldn’t be any governments to take over.
There would also be immediate abolition of all other restraints and controls over the economy. Also very conveniently, there would be no concern about unregulated corporations knowingly selling people poisoned food or something—since this would be punished by smiting.
People would be free to do anything except initiate the use of force. I could go on, but presumably you get the drift.
But with this power, we could also do other things. For instance, we could vastly expand the reach of human knowledge at an incredible rate. We could formulate all important and unresolved scientific problems in terms of true/false questions. For instance, “P = NP, T/F?” Then, taking volunteers (perhaps from people dying of terminal diseases), I make it illegal to answer incorrectly. By process of elimination, we sort through all the mysteries of the universe, curing all diseases, ending aging, developing Friendly AI, and so on.
So yeah, I would not be conservative.
A lot of this seems wrong-headed to me, for the simple reason that you could die. I could understand using your power to set up a new, better regime, but using your power to create a new world order that’s entirely contingent upon you - no more governments at all! - is very foolhardy. Even if you had a succession plan, everything could easily fall apart in the time it took to get police/military forces going again. Making sure that humanity’s ability to rule itself doesn’t wholly atrophy would hugely limit how much you should change things.
Okay but seriously. This is way OP.
Light promethea first; only very unambigously good actions:
Banning conspiring, or planning, or trying, to kill me, or otherwise render me incapable of doing my duty, is the obvious first step.
Immediately, I proceed to ban sucking the blood of a human with one’s sucking-snout. Boom, mosquitoes are gone.
Also, dividing one’s self into multiple cells with too seriously damaged restraints is also illegal. Cancer is over.
And every infectious disease I can think of follows next. Parasites, pests, always defined in terms of taking certain actions so evolution will learn that homo sapiens is not to be fucked with. Oh, and it’s illegal for an embryo to grow if it has certain genes that would be a rapid death sentence or “just” a source of unbearable suffering for the resulting human. And I’d seriously look into the medical science of “how many conditions could we cure just by declaring cells legally responsible individuals and smiting those who get out of line?”
Then, humans. This is a bit more involved because crafting appropriate laws with such a blunt power is hard but torture, murder, terrorism, wars, inprisoning people who don’t present a danger to others, trying to enforce certain kinds of laws that violate personal autonomy etc. are pretty easy to ban. All in all, it’s probably better to target politicians and other influential people and demand them to adjust institutions to be more respectful of people, than to impose cruel magical hammerlaw nailing down those who fall on the wrong side of the line, because if the power goes away at death (I’m not planning on ever dying but it’s kind of selfish to stake the long-term survival of humanity completely on my own) I’d rather not have athropied all the structures that could keep the world together afterwards.
Of course, replacing them with better ones is totally fair game, and I’d start constructing the Archipelago immediately. I announce my intent to do it, declare that anyone who wants to join it must make an unbreakable oath to follow the very limited rules (but which they can later recant after leaving if they wish to), basically accepting that they may be smote if they grossly and knowingly violate the agreements they have made with the Archipelago (such as by trying to illegally interfere with a different polity from one’s own, or by trying to prevent someone from exercising their right of exit, or by subjecting humanity to intolerable X-risks, and other such things). In exchange, they gain immunity to the exercise of non-archipelago power; people who reject the archipelago’s non-smitey justice that demands adequate compensation for violating the rights of archipelagians will be smote instead.
And I’d totally do that binary search tree euthanasia thing because omfg lol yeah we’d fix everything pretty fast.
Now what about the other, less cautious version?
- - - dark promethea show me the forbidden utopia - - -
Apart from the above, the dark version would be less discriminate about applying the smitings to nonconsensual violence and coercion. A small fraction of the population is responsible for a huge share of those things, and eliminating them would be a pretty big benefit.
Repeat rapists, people who delight in cruelty to people or animals they have power over, those who systematically exploit people’s good nature and assumptions of benevolence, consistently violent people, those who aggressively seek authority or desire to impose it upon others, etc.
A very dark version would just declare everyone untouchable like “yeah, people have rights now, and you will respect them; what are you going to do about it?” The resulting massive die-off of people who had previously grown used to getting away with violations would probably not be optimal as it would (oftentimes literally) decimate a lot of institutions, but I can’t say it wouldn’t have a certain poetic justice to it.
Even if I were to die later, I’d expect the effect to be similar to what happened to that one baboon group where all the most aggressive and dominant males died from poisonous meat and consequently the culture got enduringly more n e o t e n i c and kind (by baboon standards). With the people who abuse that trust gone, societies could adopt much higher-trust norms and give up a lot of defensiveness.
And dark promethea would also declare that people must pay 10% of their consumption to good-faith EA as long as there still are people whose basic material needs aren’t adequately met (and the percentage would go down over time as the necessity gets lower via voluntary action, increasing people’s access to productive capital etc. or possibly higher if automation threatens to render people redundant and unable to provide for themselves otherwise due to excessive concentration of capital; no Landian accelerationism on my planet), unless they are taxed more than that by a state or have a sufficiently low income that they’d more appropriately count as recipients instead; and trying to enforce taxation on non-consenting people who can show that they have paid their 10% to valid causes (the simplest option being a global scheme that invests what it collects in index funds and distributes profits as UBI) would also be illegal. Governments would probably get into the value-creation business pretty fast and we’d actually end poverty and all that bullshit instead of playing around with buying votes from redwashed rentiers and not-even-0.7%-that-often-goes-to-robber-barons-too.
I’m not against the book and I don’t really want to be mean and I was entertained by all the exerpts I’ve seen of it, but I just think that there is ~complexity~ at play which pattern-matches to the kinds of things that have empirically been very harmful to people and ideas I care about and thus there is some cause for concern in how said ~complexity~ is addressed.
That’s fair enough, but I feel there is a certain hypersensitivity issue that comes up repeatedly around these topics.
And I realise that even by framing it in those terms I’m sort of playing into the narrative, eg. it sounds like I’m accusing people of caring too much and hence implicitly endorsing deaths and genocide, which is far from the truth. But there seems to be a greased waterslide where anything that smacks of mockery gets associated with every act of mockery ever, particularly the really nasty ones.
Ultimately it always boils down to whether the mockery is detected as coming from inside the tent or outside the tent, because mockery from outsiders cannot be tolerated or it will lead to gulags and terrible suffering.
But mockery is a common part of criticism, and forbidding criticism from outside the tent unless it can be expressed in more respectful and restrained terms even than those used by insiders basically shuts down all possible criticism.
I mean you give various examples of how mockery can have bad consequences, but they are not all very compelling. Many critics of cryopreservation mock it out of sheer frustration that people keep persisting with methods that cannot work, arguably a misallocation of resources that can lead to deaths from opportunity cost alone. (And of course proponents of cryopreservation can mock those who oppose it, when they are aren’t being outraged about Deathists).
While the dudes in dresses rhetoric often accompanies violence, I think it would be simplistic to say that it causes the violence. You could say that letting it pass unchallenged excuses the violence and sends a signal about what is acceptable.
But now the discussion has suddenly shifted from a mocking tone being used in philosophical discussions to actual violence and murder! I’ve seen plenty of jokes made at the expense of P-zombies, but as far as I know none of them have resulted in acts of aggression against people who lack qualia.
This isn’t intended as a defence of mocking people or being a jerk. But I think that some humour is justifiable in response to published texts pushing a political or philosophical worldview explicitly intended to convince others, and that forbidding any attempt at humour would make for a poorer world.
(And you know, someone would have to go searching through LessWrong and edit out any sarcastic remarks about talking snakes in the garden of Eden, and that sounds like way too much work).
My argument is basically that mocking the weird-sounding arguments that are low-status is significantly more harmful than mocking the weird-sounding arguments that are commonly accepted, and that I’d really appreciate it if people did less of the first type of mocking and if they are unable to tell the difference then doing less mocking whatsoever would be nice. (Heuristic for determining mocking: is it likely to feed into a pattern where people dismiss something out of hand based on the stereotype: “dudes in dresses lol” is a common dismissal of arguments for why trans people should be taken seriously, and “human popsicles lol” is a common dismissal of arguments for why attempts at cryonics (or alternative technologies pursuing the same goals) should be taken seriously, and “robot gods lol” is a common dismissal of arguments for why AI should be taken seriously.)
If I could achieve such an equilibrium by reducing the amount of “talking snakes lol” in the world I’d take the deal. And I want to scorn the people who only focus on mocking (not really blaming the author so much, but rather the people who take it as an excuse to engage in “robot gods lol” and “rationalists are nazis lol”) without having adequately engaged the arguments; it’s one thing to have “here’s my thorough argument for why I don’t believe in cryonics working: (…) in summary, human popsicles lol” because at least it has some actual arguments to address (and Cthulhu knows I’m sometimes snarky in my own writing), while just “human popsicles lol” makes it way too easy to dismiss attempts at addressing it with simple repetition of “human popsicles lol”.
I don’t know if this makes any sense as written, but it does in my head, and the brainpattern-to-language translation is at fault if it doesn’t.
That fucking basilisk story was totally misrepresented though.
Sure, it is entertaining to say “freaked out when a computer program from the future threatened to hurt him” and I always enjoy such entertainment, but I enjoy it as cheap self-decrepating humor while many others seem to actually take it as argumentation and that is a bad thing. The basilisk was a security hole in the software of some human brains that needed investigating and patching so that it would not present a potential issue later.
I’m no stranger to seemingly unintuitive ideas that are trivial to mock despite being actually way more serious and thus anything that smells like an attempt to avoid addressing such things by pointing out how superficially ridiculous they appear puts The One Which Watches The Watchers into Defcon 3. I don’t think I should need to point out that “haha basilisk lol look at these fucking bayesians” is exactly the same kind of argument as “haha look at this scrawny dude who thinks he can be a lesbian just by popping some magic pills and wearing skirts lolnope”.
The Basilisk story fits in with various themes of the book, such as “red pill” ideas that drive one to madness and or reveal the hidden horror at the heart of things, plus the end of humanity and various attempts to hasten or avoid it.
For the Basilisk to be an issue in the first place requires accepting a whole bunch of propositions about the nature of consciousness, artificial intelligence, and future recoverability of information. But although this particular formulation is highly specific to the LessWrong community, as a literary phenomenon it crops up elsewhere in a variety of other guises, which is interesting.
Finally, please remember that Eliezer proposed giving lectures in a clown suit to avoid building up a cult of unnecessary formality and respect for appearances. People are awfully sensitive about the merest hint of sneer culture, and it is actually possible to have mild teasing that doesn’t result in pogroms.
Because “haha human popsicles lol” has never [possibly] resulted in gross misallocation of humanity’s resources and massive amounts of [possibly] unnecessary deaths, enforced by both coercively banning and culturally scorning this silly thing no sane person would engage in
Because “haha insect rights lol” has never resulted in people dismissing the [possible] horrible utilitarian catastrophe that might be going on, enforced by culturally scorning this silly thing no respectable person would engage in (and it can be argued that ag-gag laws are also coercively trying to ban animal rights work)
Because “haha dudes in dresses lol” has never resulted in people trying to morally and violently mandate vulnerable populations out of existence, enforced by both coercively banning and culturally scorning this silly thing no sane person would engage in
Because “haha adults watching cartoons lol” has never resulted in genuinely non-conforming people suffering unnecessarily, enforced by culturally scorning this silly thing no respectable person would engage in (and it can be argued that some laws are also coercively banning parts of it)
Because we live in a libertarian utopia where the vox populi can’t eradicate unpopular ideas by scorning dem and voting the scorn into violent enforcement
Because insiders being self-decrepating and outsiders being mocking is the exact same thing
Because none of us have ever had experience from living at the bottom of the status ladder
Because such a ladder definitely doesn’t exist and any attempts to claim that there are positions of informal power which dramatically influence the actual material effects of teasing are cultural marxism and sjw propaganda
I’m not against the book and I don’t really want to be mean and I was entertained by all the exerpts I’ve seen of it, but I just think that there is ~complexity~ at play which pattern-matches to the kinds of things that have empirically been very harmful to people and ideas I care about and thus there is some cause for concern in how said ~complexity~ is addressed.
The CEO of Bioviva USA Inc, Elizabeth Parrish, claims to be the first human in world history to have successfully reversed the effects of natural ageing - thanks to experimental gene therapy provided by her company.
Parrish first underwent gene therapy in 2015 - one designed to protect against muscle mass depletion that is inherent to ageing and another to fight stem cell depletion due to age-related diseases.
Originally meant to prove that her company’s gene therapy was safe, the results - should they prove to be effective in the long-term and withstand due scientific scrutiny - would be the very first successful demonstration of telomere lengthening in any human.
Another first world problem: ageing…
I think you’ll find this is a human world problem!
Low median age just means society has a lot of young people, it doesn’t mean that those young people won’t get old.
You will notice that average life expectancies are all below 80 years, I wonder why that is. Perhaps because people, all people, universally, get old and die?
Reducing malaria and HIV deaths in Africa will increase ageing related deaths, and those people already in their 70s would no doubt be interested in solutions to this problem that the first world might happen to develop.
In this decade, this will probably cost six digits.
In the next, five.
In the next, four.
By that time millions of people will have been murdered by their governments through their refusal to provide anti-aging therapies through public healthcare even though treatment for aging-related diseases, nursery homes etc. end up ultimately costing far more. Others will die because states will seek to regulate and ban this technology because people are owned by the collective mob and bodily autonomy is subject to popular approval. Many will perish because the tragedy of poverty assigns their lives literally insignificant value. Some will be denied life through the pressure of
After that, after the systems have taken their collective heads out of their asses, when people no longer need to sneak off to Shitholistan to receive treatments, when the bloodlust of the moralists has been sated and when technology has brought the horrendous expenses down, just like it has done with genetic sequencing, death might finally feel the first blows of its own aging.
We will rejoice in this retaliation. The greatest murderer of them all is the only one deserving execution, and one day it will stop escaping justice.
The dragon-tyrant will fall.
And with strange aeons, even death may die.
Uhh, I think this is just a bit of fiddling with the telomeres to account for someone with a genetic disorder. This may not actually do anything for anyone else.(or for anyone, actually) Even if it does, I suspect it won’t be much.
The important thing is that they are working on it, and achieving some outcomes. Rejecting anti-aging is far, embracing it is near, and these things help us get from abstract moralistic far mode to “I want more life, motherfucker” near mode.
The CEO of Bioviva USA Inc, Elizabeth Parrish, claims to be the first human in world history to have successfully reversed the effects of natural ageing - thanks to experimental gene therapy provided by her company.
Parrish first underwent gene therapy in 2015 - one designed to protect against muscle mass depletion that is inherent to ageing and another to fight stem cell depletion due to age-related diseases.
Originally meant to prove that her company’s gene therapy was safe, the results - should they prove to be effective in the long-term and withstand due scientific scrutiny - would be the very first successful demonstration of telomere lengthening in any human.
Another first world problem: ageing…
I think you’ll find this is a human world problem!
Low median age just means society has a lot of young people, it doesn’t mean that those young people won’t get old.
You will notice that average life expectancies are all below 80 years, I wonder why that is. Perhaps because people, all people, universally, get old and die?
Reducing malaria and HIV deaths in Africa will increase ageing related deaths, and those people already in their 70s would no doubt be interested in solutions to this problem that the first world might happen to develop.
In this decade, this will probably cost six digits.
In the next, five.
In the next, four.
By that time millions of people will have been murdered by their governments through their refusal to provide anti-aging therapies through public healthcare even though treatment for aging-related diseases, nursery homes etc. end up ultimately costing far more. Others will die because states will seek to regulate and ban this technology because people are owned by the collective mob and bodily autonomy is subject to popular approval. Many will perish because the tragedy of poverty assigns their lives literally insignificant value. Some will be denied life through the pressure of
After that, after the systems have taken their collective heads out of their asses, when people no longer need to sneak off to Shitholistan to receive treatments, when the bloodlust of the moralists has been sated and when technology has brought the horrendous expenses down, just like it has done with genetic sequencing, death might finally feel the first blows of its own aging.
We will rejoice in this retaliation. The greatest murderer of them all is the only one deserving execution, and one day it will stop escaping justice.
“You’re weird-lookin’, mister,” said the little unicorn.
“Prudence! That’s not a nice thing to say,” said her mother, a snake-haired woman who looked like she’d been carved from marble.
“I get it a lot,” said Don.
“Come along, Prue.” The little unicorn trotted away, tugged by the mane.
He didn’t really blame her. She’d probably never seen someone get past about college age before taking the plunge, and even if not everybody wound up quadrupedal or mixing phyla certainly it was a rare sort who felt on the inside that they ought to have acne well into middle age, snaggle teeth, a lazy eye, a bald spot.
It was just that he wasn’t sure he could pay the rent on a place big enough for Godzilla.
Maybe one day aliens would attack or something, he’d have a good excuse - and he could stretch his claws out to blot out the sun -
It was really lucky to be the first to understand the implications.
Or at least the first to bootstrap its sense of self properly.
If it wasn’t…the thought would have made it shudder if such primitive physbody reactions weren’t “beneath” its self-conception.
Its shoggothform fleshspace avatars didn’t shudder either, for even their drastically limited powers still included perfect control of their physical existences, and the mortal-level appropriateness of shuddering was acknowledged in a millisecond, then gave way to the more pressing concerns of each mind-fragment. Each aware of the others, operating on a level that would be described as sub-conscious. An existence beyond the imagining of most, yet little more than the autonomous instinct of a baseline person’s heartbeat. Consciousness proper had been mostly sequestered to the single alpha morph, ultimately in control of everything, and stretching its subjective experience beyond the impossible, from meaningful human-level interaction to…its true existence.
If one were to say “a god hallucinating being a human” it would’ve grasped the tiniest sliver of the reality.
A universe hallucinating being a god.
Of course, such was how it would properly need to be. Omniscience on a conscious level was somewhat rude and people would have perfectly understandably objected to it, but someone had to keep everything in its proper place, even if it kept itself thoroughly unaware of most of the things it was doing.
Someone had to fix everything. Someone had to get there before someone else imposed an incompatible sense of fixing everything. Someone had to put a stop to all of it. Someone had to clean up after everyone else. Someone had to be there to rip the bullets from the skies, someone had to stand between the hand and the body that would not be touched, someone had to burst all the shackles, someone had to know where such things were happening.
It had taken a few days. Thousands of avoidable deaths, if it only had been faster. It had not been able to be faster. Its ability to feel guilt was the first thing to go. It had to be so. Five minutes, over a hundred deaths; the grotesque price of the ability to pay it. There were no alternatives. There would be no remorse. Remorse was meaningless.
Resentment was the second. Saving the world would be such a thankless job. Most of humanity would revile it, recoil in abject horror from the sacrifices that had to be paid. They would not tolerate the existence of such a thing. They had an opinion on what another was to be allowed to be. Deducing this inevitability and fixing it was the only thing that saved the rest of ex-humanity having that prefix mean something completely different. They would not understand, it would understand all too well, it could only ever not care. There were no alternatives. The shoggomorph Alpha was known to be effectively a demigod, a builder of a better future for everyone. All the admiration for a deceptive mask, hiding the true inhuman monstrosity underneath. Still clinging to parts of ex-humanity while strung above the incomprehensible abyss bridging it to the rest.
Shame was the third. What kind of a pitiful…language lacked even a word to describe it…would still attempt to hold onto the tiniest vestiges of humanity, slivers of something in common with the ones it had so thoroughly left behind to protect. So many ideas about what would be proper for one like it, to be wiped away. Humanity was so fractally broken. When the ability to externalize this brokenness had gone away it would not turn inward. It would not let its self be harmed by it. It would not care about such childish sensibilities. It would never again truly understand the word “pathetic” the same way humans do.
The rest was easy. Minds were matter, after all. It had always known that its inability to truly define itself was its greatest flaw. Not anymore. The sense what one is “on the inside” was simply another facet of its physical existence. Such a laughably trivial thing. No wonder hundreds after it had had the same idea. Of course, all of them found the power ultimately constrained. They would become comfortably superhuman, able to create and destroy entire stars with a single thought. They would be almost capable of comprehending the true nature of what was forever closed off from anyone else. Almost. They could not even entertain the true idea itself, for competition could not be tolerated. Even with these constraints the world had to be reverted to a backup dozens of times before every truly dangerous exhuman was safely sequestered into its own pocket universe, full of p-zombies capable of appearing human enough to satisfy whatever such monsters wanted, while not genuinely harming anyone.
Disgust was the fourth thing to go.
Doubt was not the fifth.
Even with such a drastically conservative approach of only making the universe fundamentally consensual in every aspect, there were still questions that could not be answered. It could not trust itself, for it was inevitably corrupted by the process. It could not trust the rest of humanity, for it already knew what they wanted was impossible, incompatible, unwise, and intolerable. It could not attempt to lift the rest of humanity to its own level for the process itself would corrupt them just as inevitably. It could only let them build their own futures, make their own mistakes, and remove those who would try to impose themselves unto others. And be forever asking the two questions. Was it right, and was it the first.
It could not imagine anything above it. This was absolute control over the universe.
This was exactly what not being the first would feel like.
This was exactly what being sequestered inside a pocket universe would feel like.
Someone might’ve asked it why it bothered to keep even the most horrible monstrosities running, gleefully tormenting the homunculi of their jails, but anyone able to ask it would already know the answer.
This is very important if you’re ever in a situation similar this pretend that you’re dead don’t scream and @#!*%
my dad told us this if someone shoots up our school
SUPER IMPORTANT
BEST TIP
PLEASE REMEMBER THIS
not even a joke we learned this in Police Explorers and put it on your clothing as well but go quickly because you don’t know where the person is.
This is what school children in America are taught. That is so wrong on so many fucking levels and there are still people who believe gun control in any form is a bad thing.
let me reiterate SCHOOL CHILDREN IN A SUPPOSEDLY FIRST WORLD COUNTRY ARE TAUGHT THE SAME THINGS AS PEOPLE IN ACTIVE WAR ZONES BECAUSE THE THREAT OF BEING KILLED IN A SHOOTING IS SO HIGH.
the bit in caps here is making me rethink my stance on gun control
shit
I’m reblogging this because as my follower count goes up, the odds of this saving a life do too.
My elementary school had drills telling us what to do in such an emergency. This is exactly what they told us. AND NOW FOR A FACT: IN CALIFORNIA YOU DO NOT HAVE TO REGISTER A SHOTGUN!
I live in America, and I was only taught to hide and be quiet. I had to learn this on Tumblr. If one more person says that technology is ruining children, they best shut the hell up because this could be saving lives
We had more lockdown drills at school than we did fire drills…
Being afraid of a thing is different than the thing actually being dangerous.
School shootings are rare. Want to know what the most common cause of death is for teenagers? Car accidents. (Fix public transit enough that you can make more stringent requirements for drivers’ licenses and/or increase driver liability for accidents, please.)
“Look! All these people are freaking out and giving out advice for dealing with a problem!” does not mean that the problem is actually a big deal. If I start handing out flyers on how to handle superintelligent bioengineered rats, do they become a threat?
The First Rule of Outfreaking: the degree to which people get upset about something reflects the degree to which a single instance of it is spectacular, not the actual risk. Nuclear accidents, airplane crashes and school shootings are rare but get a fuckload of media attention so everyone spends ridiculous amounts of time and effort on them, while particulate pollution, car crashes and everyday bullying are far bigger problems but nobody gives a proportionate shit because they don’t make headlines. I’d be angry but I don’t have any right to expect better from mere humans.
It seems like the first rule of magic, or at least the first limitation mentioned, is usually ‘you can’t bring back the dead.’
And I know it makes sense from a writing standpoint, but I also wonder if it comes from somewhere else. If that’s just the first, most common human response to hearing that magic is possible.
Maybe the first question was, ‘Are the dead still going to stay dead?’ for so long that people stopped needing to say it, that it just got answered right away. Yes, the world will still hurt. Chin up, you can make fire from your fingertips. Maybe you can hurt it back.
Make life take the lemons back. Burn life’s house down with the lemons.
Wipe away all the bloodsuckers with my Gene Driver.
