17 KiB
What would you do if you had the ability to kill off certain people?
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Author: u/xamueljones My arch-enemy is entropy*
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/2r83pd/what_would_you_do_if_you_had_the_ability_to_kill/
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Score: 4
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Created: 2015-01-03T19:04:26
Post:
You are allowed to pick one name (boy or girl) and completely eliminate anyone and everyone who ever existed with that name. What name do you choose to get rid of?
Credit: I stumbled on this question from /r/askreddit
Comments:
u/xamueljones [+10] My arch-enemy is entropy (25 minutes later)
For generations after The Reaping, no parent dared to name their child with the Name.
To use the Name meant to become "unborn". If parents ever named their child with the Name, the child would die without warning to a different cause every time.
It became wild-spread policy to give ones child a name in secret at birth and to give them a different name for public use. Some would live their entire lives without ever knowing their birth name. To know someone's birth name meant to become part of their family. To call others by the Name, whether or not they already had a name, meant they were cast out of the world, out of society; they were less than a ghost, less than memory, undeserving of even a thought, kind or cruel.
The Word is synonymous with loss and the void of forgetfulness. Over time, the Word would pass out of memory, only to reappear in different eras, cultures, civilizations, as a nonsense pattern of syllables with the power to kill a person.
The Word is ____.
u/Gurkenglas [+2] (2 hours later)
Kaplowey?
u/Kishoto [+1] (2 hours later)
Had a very "Inheritance Cycle" esque vibe when reading this...
u/ajuc [+4] (4 hours later)
Does it works in the womb if parents give name to a child before birth?
I would choose a name that doesn't exist yet, keep it secret as long as possible and sell instant painless no-complications untraceable abortion technique to parents all over the world.
Inevitably someone will spill and it will become free, but in the meantime I'll get rich.
u/Kishoto [+3] (2 hours later)
And, for me, I wouldn't use this power. The unforeseen sideffects could be huge (although limited, as our phonetic romanized language is only so old, so it's not like I'll be taking out anything too important, biologically speaking) and completely shift development. But, as I do live comfortably in our current state, I am obviously biased towards keeping it this way. For all I know, this is the darkest timeline, and only seems good relatively. Maybe if I took out all "Johns", we'd have had world peace by 1122?
Too unpredictable for my personal tastes. I don't think I would cause the end of the world, or anything similar, but I do think I could easily shift the current human condition. And that's not something I want to do randomly.
EDIT: minor change to what I mean by language.
u/xamueljones [+2] My arch-enemy is entropy (10 minutes later)
Ideas off the top of my head:
Using the power to eliminate mass-murderers from history such as Hitler, Kim, Nero, etc... Although, my previous post seems to imply that killing Hitler is a bad idea. Also can you save more people than the ones they kill?
Change history by saving an important person such as the JFK assassination (horrible president by today's standards by the way) or the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria which sparked off WWII.
As a form of population control by eliminating people who are the ancestor of a large number of the world's current population. such as Genghis Khan who has about 16 million descendents today. And those are just the male descendents that we can check; Genghis definitely had more descendents who are female.
An alternate form of population control is to pick extremely common modern-day names such as John (Caucasian), Muhammad (Muslim), Kim (Korean), Lee (Chinese), and so on.
EDIT: Oops, some of the names aren't just modern-day names. I doubt the Muslims would be happy with me killing off their Prophet. I'll still leave it in though, since Muhammad is the most common name in the world.
Both population control suggestions are a bad way to go about reducing the human population since there is no name universally common among all cultures, therefore some ethnic groups will have more people killed off than others.
Final idea is to simply not use the power.
Further EDIT: I wonder how many cases of stillborn children and parents being unable to conceive are due to the child (in some alternate timeline) being unfortunately named?
u/OffColorCommentary [+1] (2 hours later)
As a form of population control by eliminating people who is the ancestor of a large number of the world's current population. such as Genghis Khan who has about 16 million descendents today.
This shouldn't reduce the world population at all. You'd get different people instead of all of those people, and however much fallout from that, but it's not like the spouse of a tenth-generation Khan descendent would suddenly not have children.
u/xamueljones [+1] My arch-enemy is entropy (3 hours later)
In most cases that's true because people tend to have an average number of children over the course of their lives regardless of who they reproduce with.
But in Genghis' case, he is an outlier. He pillaged and raped over thousands of women for thousands of sons and daughters. With him gone from history, there would be a noticeable lack of an increase in the human population the following generation. Then again he is credited with killing as much as 11% of the world's population at the time.
u/davidmanheim [+2] (8 hours later)
Why do you think the people he raped would otherwise have been celibate?
u/xamueljones [+1] My arch-enemy is entropy (11 hours later)
Hmm, maybe I'm accidentally equating Genghis Khan increasing the frequency of his specific genes with an addition of people with his genes when it should thought of as a replacement.
You are probably right that I'm misunderstanding how Genghis Khan affected the human population, but I still feel confident that there must have been some people who directly caused more humans to be born.
Oh! Maybe something like a doctor who came up with better techniques for giving birth or raising children (so many women would hate me for this)? Either way, this is an interesting thought exercise in how to reduce the human population by using the Name, but it's a very crude tool for this contrived purpose so I wouldn't use it for this purpose. A bio-engineered plague is more cost-effective than time-travel after all.
u/davidmanheim [+1] (12 hours later)
Unclear why this makes any sense at all.
Reducing population won't fix the problem of overpopulation; you need to reduce population growth - and preferably not suddenly, or you end up with problematic population pyramids.
u/xamueljones [+1] My arch-enemy is entropy (12 hours later)
That's true. I was thinking in terms of total number of humans alive and not how fast humans breed. Dang it! That's the purpose of all the calculus classes I've been taking! To notice when rate of growth (acceleration) is more important than the speed of reproduction (generation to generation growth).
I'm might be babbling a little here, but basically you're right and I'm a little frustrated to not be paying attention to the mathematics behind this sort of thing.
u/itisike [+1] Dragon Army (10 hours later)
World War one would be better to get rid of.
Or perhaps figure out which economist or philosopher did the most harm? I'd expect getting rid of one of those could eliminate some/most wars, but not so good on history.
u/Kishoto [+2] (2 hours later)
In addition, names are a convention in and of themselves. They don't phsyically exist. They're placeholders. So the method by which this occurred would be heavily rationalized out by all of us, I presume, if this were a possibility.
For example, if I choose John, does history fate each child named John (specifically John. I choose to believe that derivatives won't be affected) with being stillborn? If so, this will easily be noticed a few thousand years ago, and we will just all know to not call our children John. Aside from any butterfly effects (although we can't discount these, either), I presume things would proceed in much the same manner, albeit with a varying devotion to studying why this specific act occurs, especially by scientists. I am also certain various religions will form based around this occurrence.
I could go on, but I'm feeling lazy.
u/OffColorCommentary [+1] (2 hours later)
I'd research it more, given the opportunity. With no opportunity for research, probably Hitler. The other people that pop to mind - like Stalin and Mao - seem like products of their time who could have had equally catastrophic replacements. Killing Hitler might not stop World War 2, but it would probably stop the Holocaust.
Since that's rather standard though, my edgy answer: Aristotle.
u/xamueljones [+1] My arch-enemy is entropy (3 hours later)
You said that you would research it more given the opportunity...well, now's your opportunity to learn more about the history behind mass-murderers!
Also, why Aristotle?
u/itisike [+1] Dragon Army (10 hours later)
So any name that would have been used over a few hundred years ago is basically like moving to an alternate universe; I expect even a few changes to quickly turn into macro level changes that you wouldn't recognize, and the person making this choice would likely not be born in the new universe.
So this is only good for newish names.
As I'm a selfish soulless being: I would see which person with a newish name has the highest price on their head, then sell myself out as an assassin. Based on some movies and books I'm familiar with, I'd probably get at least $10 million. If I can manage to do it without getting caught or revealing the method, I would actually open an open market for the name to choose, which may yield more.
Or perhaps I could make a lot by betting against a company's stock and then killing the CEO? There are ways to get options with steep payouts, the question is how much leverage I could get for that. Come to think of it, why don't people do this already? Is it that hard to kill CEOs of large companies that potential profits are less than cost+risk? Or are other people just a lot more moral than I give them credit for?
(I'm so totally going on some secret government list now, aren't I.)
u/xamueljones [+1] My arch-enemy is entropy (11 hours later)
Note that after selecting a name, you change the course of history so that everyone who would have been given that name in your timeline effectively disappears (somehow), and no one will ever remember that they ever existed (except you, unless you had an ancestor with the Name, which eliminates you a la grandfather paradox). So going by my interpretation of the post, you will never have to worry about getting caught, but no one's going to remember ever making a contract with you.
P.S. To answer your CEO question, assassinations are hideously expensive (according to every crime novel ever) and most CEOs aren't worth the assassination price. For the remaining few, they probably have high level security guards to protect them and the resources to find the person who is going around and killing off their fellow rich CEOs. So one CEO's death = $$ + the law + every other rich amoral CEOs = not worth it!
u/itisike [+1] Dragon Army (11 hours later)
I argued that any mass elimination of people past a certain amount of time ago would change who you are.
If I knew that the CEO of any Fortune 500 company would die in the next week, I could make somewhere in 100s of millions by buying out-of-the-money puts on the stock. Can private security really stop someone who's willing to pay $50 million?
u/xamueljones [+1] My arch-enemy is entropy (11 hours later)
I meant that according to my post, the CEO would have been wiped out of history and was never around to found his/her company for you to buy stocks from.
But if you want to reinterpret the post as being similar to having the power of Death Note to make people drop dead through their names, then yes there's nothing stopping you.
u/itisike [+1] Dragon Army (12 hours later)
Then it's just a case of deciding which world would be best to live in. I'd probably research which name is correlated highest with IQ and choose that so I have less competition. Does that make any sense?
For any Hitler style answer: creating an alternate universe without Hitler doesn't do anything for people that already suffered, and same for anything you do to help the past. The only beneficial things are ones which help the future.
It's hard to see how I could get an advantage from this other than killing competition. The womb answer was pretty good, actually.
I suppose I could save it for a get-out-of-jail-free card. (Usage should be obvious. ) Single use, what's the best way to capitalize on that?
Or could I use it at the right time to demonstrate supernatural abilities? Are there danger restrictions to the Randi challenge? (Hahaha.)
u/xamueljones [+1] My arch-enemy is entropy (12 hours later)
For IQ correlations, Ashkenazi (am I spelling that right?) Jews tend to have 10 more IQ points than the average and over 1/4 of all Nobel Prize winners are Ashkenazi Jews. So pick a nice Ashkenazi Jew name and you have lowered the human race's average IQ by a point or two. Congratulations!
u/itisike [+1] Dragon Army (12 hours later)
(I happen to be an Ashkenazi Jew).
Are we assuming that I'd retain all of my knowledge? Then I could just choose any big discovery in the last 200 years and rediscover that myself, ensuring me big bucks. Which recent important discoveries are mostly a result of a single person (or group of people with the same name) and likely wouldn't have been discovered without them?
u/itisike [+1] Dragon Army (12 hours later)
/r/nocontext
u/totes_meta_bot [+1] (12 hours later)
This thread has been linked to from elsewhere on reddit.
- [/r/nocontext] "So pick a nice Ashkenazim Jew name and you have lowered the human race's average IQ by a point or two."
^If ^you ^follow ^any ^of ^the ^above ^links, ^respect ^the ^rules ^of ^reddit ^and ^don't ^vote ^or ^comment. ^Questions? ^Abuse? ^Message ^me ^here.
u/itisike [+1] Dragon Army (22 hours later)
We can use Turing-complete regular expressions, right?
Game over.
u/xamueljones [+1] My arch-enemy is entropy (a day later)
Huh? I don't understand what you mean by this sentence. It sounds like you are thinking of some regular expression which somehow can be used to refer to every single person's name, but how is that possible?
Also, thanks for submitting me to /r/nocontext. I never thought I'd ever make it onto that subreddit and I am so embarrassed right now.
u/itisike [+1] Dragon Army (a day later)
Choose a Turing complete regular expression. You want one which works as a Universal Turing Machine with any TM representable as a name, and the expression matching iff the TM halts. As it is undecidable whether any given name is matched by the regular expression, by naming people specific names and checking whether they die, we've got a halting oracle or hypercomputation (same thing). That can trivially be used to take over the world.
To keep it more moral, we do it on soon-to-be-aborted fetuses and pay the parents.
But your idea also seems good; we can kill everyone just by matching some form of *, and can exclude ourselves if we want to. That might work as a kind of threat against humanity: "make me dictator or I'll kill all of you".
(Wonder if this is the weirdest halting oracle proposed yet. Probably not.)