14 KiB
[D] Death Curse
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Author: u/None *
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/3dzfyp/d_death_curse/
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Score: 8
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Created: 2015-07-20T19:54:36
Post:
Upon death, you can choose to kill any other person with probability 0.1%. Any criteria is valid so long as it selects exclusively among humans, and if it's ambiguous, it will choose its target randomly among those selected. If no-one meets the selection criteria, the curse fails.
For example, if executing someone who couldn't be caught by ordinary means was important enough, you could go into a palliative care hame and bribe people to assign that person as their death curse.
There's no way to tell who someone's death curse is apart from the usual methods (interrogation, truth serums, etc.), and they can change it at any time.
Dying by curse causes all cells containing your genetic fingerprint to be have their DNA and RNA scrambled randomly. Identical twins, for example, can be taken out by a single death curse.
How is this used?
Comments:
u/trifith [+12] Man plans, god laughs. Like the ant and the grasshopper. (24 minutes later)
Well, odds are good anyone of prominence who does anyone wrong whatsoever is dead. Add in psycopaths, and they don't even have to do anyone wrong, just be prominent. So that's going to eliminate most of the "World Leaders" of any stripe. Nobody WANTS to be king. If you're king, you're a target, and you won't last long. Same with any kind of celebrety. You don't WANT your name and face known, for fear of a crazy persons death curse.
What you've presented here is an unblockable method for anybody to kill anybody at the moment of their death. And you've given it to HUMANS. I can't even begin to imagine the kind of society that would come of that.
u/None [+3] (30 minutes later)
It has a 99.9% chance of not working, each time.
u/trifith [+6] Man plans, god laughs. Like the ant and the grasshopper. (38 minutes later)
So 1 in 1000 works.
Today on Earth there are 6,390 deaths per hour. 153,000 deaths per day. 56.0 million deaths per year. 3.9 billion deaths per average lifetime (70 years). Source (reliability is questionable, but the numbers seem right on a gut level) --- More reliable source Thanks /u/avret
So that's 6 people death cursed per hour. 153 per day. 56,000 per year. Do you still want to take those odds?
u/avret [+3] SDHS rationalist (an hour later)
[More reliable source] (http://www.medindia.net/patients/calculators/world-death-clock.asp)
u/trifith [+1] Man plans, god laughs. Like the ant and the grasshopper. (2 hours later)
Thanks!
Good to know even the unreliable source was right enough for the discussion.
u/avret [+4] SDHS rationalist (7 hours later)
Np--I'd always thought it was 1.8 seconds per death, so I looked it up. Once I found the source that proved me wrong, I figured you'd find it useful.
u/None [+4] (58 minutes later)
I was just clarifying the post, because your wording made it sound like anybody could reliably kill anybody.
And you're listing optimal statistics - what would happen if death curses were distributed perfectly. But they wouldn't be, because that would imply an impossible degree of organization which a world where leaders are impossible. Sure, the head honchos would get knocked off frequently, but if 10 000 people wish a man dead with their dying breath, there are 10 or so potential targets that don't get killed.
u/chaosmosis [+1] and with strange aeons, even death may die (a day later)
Puppet governments?
Edit: see Mugasofer's comment.
u/DCarrier [+12] (2 hours later)
Perhaps someone would popularize a death curse of the form "anyone who has a death curse other than this one."
u/notentirelyrandom [+2] (5 hours later)
Clever idea. It'd need to reach fixation, though, where fixation means something like "it is widely believed that 99.9% of the population has agreed."
u/DCarrier [+1] (5 hours later)
You assume people will use death curses unless it will probably kill them. If just as many people have this death curse and a regular one, you're equally likely to get killed as you are to kill someone. If you're fine with those odds, you're better off killing them conventionally.
u/xamueljones [+10] My arch-enemy is entropy (2 hours later)
I wonder if this could be used to as an oracle for the halting problem?
u/gabbalis [+12] (3 hours later)
Wha- goddammit, it's always halting oracles with you people!
Realistically though you're right. Any system where your human language is somehow being interpreted by the universe screams that something is up, Because if the universe can correctly interpret "The leader of North Korea" as Kim Jong-un (for example), we have to wonder exactly how the universe is doing it's interpreting and why on earth it's able to read the maps of humans. And at that point it's worth testing exactly how sophisticated the universe's death curse processing system really is.
u/Anakiri [+9] (3 hours later)
I can do better than that. I have a program that returns a number. I have numbered list of people. I target whoever the program would indicate after running to completion. This is an exact, unambiguous criterion that selects exclusively among humans. I can now run infinite steps in finite time. There's lots of noise, but it only takes about 700 people to have a 50% chance of having a definite return value, as long as no other death curses interfere.
This might be done efficiently with a moderately sized baby farm. Is being able to speak sufficient to lay curses? Just be sure to start early, before pesky things like "human rights" get in the way.
u/avret [+3] SDHS rationalist (7 hours later)
If you encoded language into a bit system you could also get any knowledge, let alone single step sizes.
u/jalapeno_dude [+6] (6 hours later)
I love this sub.
u/noggin-scratcher [+12] I am a happy tree (6 hours later)
'tis the only place I know where "So then we start an industrial scale operation to farm and kill babies" is met with "Uh huh, sure, makes sense... then what?"
u/Gurkenglas [+11] (5 hours later)
Any criteria is valid so long as it selects exclusively among humans
We've got an Oracle on our hands! Invent a god of your own design (an FAI, if you will) using clumsy human words ("Satisfy human values" should be a valid sort of phrase to be used in its definition) overlooking all of spacetime and make your Death Curse "May whoever my god would want me to choose drop dead.".
log_2(6000000000)/1000 bits at a time, that god would, like the Simurgh, bring the world that much closer to the sort of world we'd want it to be.
(Think of it like this: Every 1000 deaths, the timeline splits in 6 billion, each having a different person drop dead. After a million deaths, we've got 6000000000^1000 branches. The god we defined chooses the best one. Perhaps the one where that guy who fed a random number generator into a compiler just for the fuck of it happened to produce its sourcecode...?)
u/Rhamni [+4] Aspiring author (2 hours later)
Well, a lot of people are now going to pick their dying curse according to the rule: The person the person who killed me most wants to keep alive. So that'll be fun.
u/notentirelyrandom [+6] (5 hours later)
Nah; most people don't think at the meta level like that. Besides; at most one in a thousand people gets killed this way. It dwarfs the usual murder rate, but it's still anything but a sure bet that a given person gets "killed" by anyone.
u/Kishoto [+4] (2 hours later)
I don't really understand why identical twins would die. Based on what you've described here, they shouldn't, as the curse isn't being triggered via dna sample. It's being triggered by someone's wishes. Meaning by that person's identification of a person, which can vary in specificity.
As for how it's used? I'm going to assume the elderly now are extremely valuable, the sicker the better, as long as they're still conscious. I'm assuming they will organize (or be organized) into large blocks of death curse givers. So you may buy a 100 person block of people (giving yourself a 10% chance of offing someone) Organizing these groups is going to be difficult though, since there's no way to validate this curse, apparently. Proxies that vary wildly in appearance are going to be utilized by anyone with any real power.
u/Roxolan [+3] Head of antimemetiWalmart senior assistant manager (28 minutes later)
Well that's a harsh blow for celebrity.
I'm not just talking about nasty dictatorships here; anyone in a position of authority over a big enough community will have 1000 people wishing them dead. Hell, think of the amount of harassment that so many internet-famous people get, even those with no power at all.
u/None [+6] (7 hours later)
[removed]
u/None [+5] (8 hours later)
Plenty of people wouldn't be OK with killing someone with 100% probability.
I wonder how many people would be OK with killing someone with 0.1% probability? It's the equivalent of trying to assassinate your target blindfolded using a type of weapon you've never before touched.
The difference between "I want to die by sinking a knife into the president" and "I want to die by running in the general direction of the president while screaming and waving a blowgun".
You're gonna have to be really lucky to kill the guy.
u/ancientcampus [+1] juggling kittens (2 days later)
That's actually a good point - it really removes a lot of the guilt of the action.
u/Gurkenglas [-2] (5 hours later)
Well, it's probably not that hard to go kill some celebrities if you really wanted to. Just go to papparazzo school and pack a "Wait, this isn't a camera!" on your trips. The fact that most aren't doing this shows that most probably wouldn't choose to press a button that kills a celebrity. (Unless it's just the inconvenience stopping them...)
u/ulyssessword [+3] (5 hours later)
Educate the public on the effective uses of cursing. The US alone has about 3000 death curses per year to utilize, and it would be a waste if people had targeted "Osama bin Laden" after 9/11 instead of "The current leader of Al Qaeda" and just going down the chain of command.
u/puesyomero [+3] The Culture (10 hours later)
which would give countries like china a lot of power
u/libertarian_reddit [+3] (12 hours later)
Is it possible for one to conceal his/her identity from this murder god of yours?
u/MugaSofer [+3] (a day later)
What happens if the criterion doesn't describe any individual? Nothing, right?
Might be worth setting up elaborate misinformation programs if you're planning to do anything high-profile, like rule the world. (Oh, is that why twins are effected together? To stop them swapping places? Because plastic surgery should work too, or a simple mask worn at all times.)
More generally, it's pretty important that no plan or social structure have any one "key" individual - no presidents, etc. - because they will die. Lots of comittees is the answer here. Sure, there will still be some people who target "a member of the United States Senate", but the risk will be spread out and there's be no figurehead to focus people's dislike on.
Oh, and from a supervillainous perspective, it should be possible to set up a torture system that encourages people you've kidnapped to death-curse wwhoever you want. Fiddly, though, since they're by definition dead by the time the curse goes off, and you need to ensure they can't just target you or the torturer instead.
u/luminarium [+2] (5 hours later)
The hell? Who cares! You're dead already! GG!
Of course, if you could set it to kill 'the person who got you killed', that would be dead useful.
u/blazinghand [+2] Chaos Undivided (15 hours later)
dead useful eh
u/notmy2ndopinion [+2] Concent of Saunt Edhar (21 hours later)
Ugh.
I'm picturing a mix between Le Guin's short story "the One Who Walks Away from Omelas" and Collin's "Hunger Games." A thousand districts make up a dystopian country where weekly lotteries randomly select a citizen who is routinely sacrificed to eliminate enemies of the State through death curses. Hospices become places of mantras for hatred, in which bitter last words are used to thin out enemy groups using criteria like "kill those who are opposed to our way of life."
Of course, neighboring countries are using similar tactics. May the populace with the most unity persist.
u/Izeinwinter [+3] (a day later)
You can't have governments as unpopular as this would make you. Because "The person responsible for this shit" is an unique identifier, and a large fraction of everyone dying natural deaths would use it. So, basically, this means you can't rule at all without being.. well, not universally loved, but at least overwhelmingly not-hated. And even then, you are pretty likely to die in office due to political cranks croaking. Should lead to a very "Summer King". political setup. People are chosen for office (somehow. Certainly not hereditary, because that would wipe out bloodlines darn fast) Do their best to rule well, get laid and feasted a lot, drop dead.
u/ancientcampus [+1] juggling kittens (2 days later)
Is it the letter, or the intention of your targeting criteria?
Let's say take a straw-hermit example: some xennophobe lives in the middle of nowhere and wants to kill "that damn obama". Obama happens to die spontaneously by natural means, but the hermit doesn't know. If the hermit dies a year later, does his curse fizzle? Or does it target some other "damn obama"?
(Dear secret government agency: this is in no way a threat or predetermination or anything.)