14 KiB
[BST] You have the power to make anyone find you unnatractive. How do you use it?
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Author: u/lumenwrites *
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/3ljnd9/bst_you_have_the_power_to_make_anyone_find_you/
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Score: 11
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Created: 2015-09-19T11:08:19
Post:
(This is crosspost from writing prompts. )
I'm wondering how it would be possible to exploit.
Comments:
u/Darth_Hobbes [+34] Ankh-Morpork Guild of Assassins (2 hours later)
Go to James Randi and hope he doesn't steal it.
u/DCarrier [+7] (4 hours later)
Alternately, if you have power incontinence, go to James Randi and hope he steals it.
u/Transfuturist [+3] Carthago delenda est. (11 hours later)
This is pretty much the winning answer to any power prompts. Including the last phrase.
u/ishaan123 [+20] Sidebar Contestant (8 hours later)
-If it works on photos, billions of obvious practical uses.
-stay unattractive by default in social settings - only date people who are nice to you before you turn it off for them
-enter beauty contest, turn it on for everyone except the people judging, trollololol
-Sell cosmetics and health products door to door, with the most brilliant before -> after demonstration they've ever seen
u/lsparrish [+14] (18 hours later)
Go into politics. Selectively convince your opponents that you are ugly (while maintaining a good appearance in reality) so that the remarks they make will fail to resonate with voters at a visceral level. Whenever possible, bait them into making remarks about your appearance.
u/Jiro_T [+3] (a day later)
I think this is the best answer so far, and also the explanation for why "can't you do that anyway by doing something gross" isn't an answer. The difference between making yourself unattractive this way and just doing something gross is that someone who finds you unattractive because of this power can't communicate why they find you unattractive; as far as everyone else is concerned, you are just being victimized for no reason. And appearing to be an unjustified victim can be useful.
u/jesyspa [+25] (22 minutes later)
I've got years and years of experience with this power and still haven't found a use for it.
:(
u/Pluvialis [+4] Second Age Sauron (6 hours later)
Don't we all have that power? You just do something gross in front of them.
u/k5josh [+4] (4 hours later)
How does this signal of attractiveness propagate? If they think about me in another room, do their memories of me change when I activate it? Does it happen instantly, at c, or slower?
u/ArgentStonecutter [+4] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (6 hours later)
Could be a variant on "Plateau Eyes" in Niven's "A Gift From Earth". Basically, it was a psychic power that made people lose interest in you. They forgot you were there. This one is like a weaker version.
Niven came up with a kind of hokey superficially plausible mechanism for it, involving contracting the target's pupil triggering a conditioned response because when you are less interested in something your pupil contracts. The logic doesn't really work, but the character in the book who came up with it wasn't a scientist.
Anyway, it was purely line of sight. People had to see you to lose interest in you. That would be a cromulent mechanism for this.
u/GaBeRockKing [+4] Horizon Breach: http://archiveofourown.org/works/6785857 (13 hours later)
If you can make yourself sufficiently unnatractive, you could theoretically drive anyone away from you for any reason. The obvious application is robbing banks stark naked (besides for gloves) so that they can't even review the security footage to determine who you are.
u/notmy2ndopinion [+2] Concent of Saunt Edhar (15 hours later)
The obvious application is robbing banks stark naked
Be cautious of the Dunning-Kruger effect -- your answer may only seem obvious to you.
http://mindhacks.com/2010/02/11/the-burglar-with-the-lemon-juice-disguise/
u/GaBeRockKing [+1] Horizon Breach: http://archiveofourown.org/works/6785857 (16 hours later)
I figured "unnatractive" had negative implications, which would lead to people positing doing evil, which would lead to the most obvious crime -- robbing a bank.
u/raymestalez [+13] (35 minutes later)
Okay. So first of all - I assume that by default the person is attractive, otherwise it's not a power, just an unfortunate situation.
Another point - if you can use this power on everybody around you all the time, that means you can be unattractive and suddenly become attractive.
Where switching between attractive/unattractive modes could be useful?
- Obvious one, you could prevent yourself from being raped.
- You could make people underestimate you, and when necessary - suddenly become attractive. (can't think of an example where it could be useful)
- Does unattractiveness work by magic feromones, or by changing your appearance? If it changes your appearance - you could have a great disguise, like a second body. For example you could commit a crime as an ugly person, and evade police as long as you want as an attractive one.
That's all I've got for now....
u/None [+12] (6 hours later)
These are good, but I don't think unattractive people don't get raped.
u/Kishoto [-3] (6 hours later)
The implication is that if the rapist is attacking you because he finds you appealing, suddenly becoming unappealing may stop him. Why would he rape someone that doesn't turn him on.
u/Transfuturist [+5] Carthago delenda est. (11 hours later)
That's not how rape works.
The rapist is not even guaranteed to notice. They're kind of busy, you know, trying to rape you.
u/None [+10] (7 hours later)
For power trip and physiological needs ? I mean some guys are found with their dicks stuck in benches, they could rape anything
u/LordSwedish [+2] Q Continuum (10 hours later)
Yes but if they are about to rape you the sudden change in their perception might make them disappointed. I'm not saying attractiveness (or lack thereof) is even a significant factor in most rapes but the sudden shift might still stop an ongoing crime.
I can't figure out a good metaphor that isn't somehow demeaning or inaccurate though.
u/Kishoto [+1] (11 hours later)
True. But if you're totally repulsive to him, that's a pretty big incentive for him NOT to rape you. So i guess it would depend on how unattractive this power makes you.
u/FuguofAnotherWorld [-1] Roll the Dice on Fate (10 hours later)
What percentage of people would you say rape for one reason over the other?
u/None [+2] (10 hours later)
87, Same percentage as the one of percentages completely made up.
u/FuguofAnotherWorld [-1] Roll the Dice on Fate (11 hours later)
Well yes, that's the point. You invent a percentage number and then I say "well that's 37% of rapes you could get out of by confusing your attacker by suddenly turning ugly." The exercise is intended to make you realise that a thing doesn't have to work in 100% of cases to be useful.
You're not betraying the party line by admitting that some people rape for power reasons reasons and other people rape because they want to fuck pretty people.
u/MugaSofer [+2] (23 hours later)
I think most rapists are actually people known to the victim, and it's believed they're usually motivated by power dynamics - putting someone in their place and all that - although it's certainly not always the case.
It would certainly prevent unwanted romantic attention, from someone you don't like who won't stop hitting on you to someone who keeps trying to cop a feel. Assuming they're not trying to put on some sort of show to prove how libidinous they are to the crowd, which happens.
u/Kishoto [+2] (a day later)
True. I don't think the power may necessarily work if you know your rapist.
u/RMcD94 [+1] (7 hours later)
Well prison rape is more common than would be proportional unless prisons have more homosexuals than the general populace right? So I don't think attractiveness is the key.
u/Kishoto [+6] (11 hours later)
Rape is more about power than attraction. That's a fact. That being said, serial rapists who rape randomly, should, logically speaking, choose to rape attractive targets over unattractive targets. There has to be something about you that makes them want to rape you. I don't think any serial rapist wants to rape someone ugly. On average. People that commit rape do so for a variety of reasons, so it's hard to say that for every single rapist. But, in general, it seems logical to assume rapists would go for attractive vs. non-attractive. Especially if this power worked very well.
u/RMcD94 [+0] (11 hours later)
It only has to work once anyway so I'm never going to say that in a situation of imminent rape you shouldn't try it, however I wonder if the shock of flipping their mind view of you could make you a more appealing target. It seems to depend on how rapists target but I could imagine if it was a power thing that something strange would be more desirable to control (or whatever).
u/jesyspa [+6] (12 hours later)
if you can use this power on everybody around you all the time, that means you can be unattractive and suddenly become attractive
Huhm, I wouldn't mind reading a story about someone who believes they have this power and are intentionally choosing to be found unattractive until the key moment, but then discovers the unattractiveness was In Them All Along.
u/IWantUsToMerge [+4] (10 hours later)
if you can use this power on everybody around you all the time, that means you can be unattractive and suddenly become attractive
Oh. You can use it to condition people. They'll never figure out how you're doing it. They'll just think you're really expressive or something.
u/Kerbal_NASA [+5] (11 hours later)
I would use it to power a civilization of infinitely immortal beings!
The human brain is a mesh of neurons and synapses firing, right? If someone's opinion changes, that must entail some sort of new pattern of neurons and synapses firing. The prompt implies that no outside stimulus changes, so the only way I can see this working is if I caused a neuron (or neurons) to fire that wouldn't have otherwise. Which I believe implies I created energy out of nowhere.
So how do I power an entire civilization for eternity? Because I consider a "person" to simply be an information process. If that information process runs on a silicon computer (or some furuistic-y replacement) instead of a mushy carbon one, I still consider it a person. Soooo, if that mind happens to run on a computer that ran on a bajillon (Totally Scientific ^TM ) Gigawatts, that would mean the virtual neuron I caused to fire would produce a massive amount of energy.
BAM, true immortality via the (literal) power of our feelings!
u/Geminii27 [+4] (3 hours later)
"Five bucks and I won't follow you home." :)
u/None [+2] (9 hours later)
Bugger off, Foul Ole Ron.
u/kilkil [+4] (8 hours later)
Assuming that it doesn't change your appearance in any way, and simply changes how people react to your appearance...
You could use it to:
- avoid unwanted social interaction
Aaand that's about it. I'm not making any assumptions about default appearance, only that this power just makes people find you less attractive than they normally would.
Being ugly doesn't affect the world in any real way, except one thing: it makes a lot of other people instinctively want to avoid interacting with you. If they're polite enough, there isn't even that much of a difference; and if you can do something really well, the respect they gain for you makes up for being unattractive, for a lot of people.
This means you can only exploit it if you want to avoid social interaction with people.
However, this has applications.
See, if you do something annoying or infuriating, being ugly makes people react that much worse to you.
So what you can do is associate yourself with something or someone you dislike, but others don't; then, you can do mildly annoying and/or infuriating things to turn people against you, and them by extension.
You can use this to get out of being raped. You can use this to make people leave you alone.
You can even use this to attract attention, depending on how unattractive you can make yourself seem. Especially unattractive people draw attention to themselves.
Really, that's about it. That's all I got.
u/None [+2] (17 hours later)
I demonstrate it to James Randi and claim the million dollar prize, and then cooperate with whatever further experiments we come up with to track down the source of this power and exploit it.
u/kaukamieli [+1] (4 days later)
And boom. You learn that twisting your face to look unattractive is not a supernatural power.
u/None [+2] (4 days later)
Heh.
u/IWantUsToMerge [+1] (10 hours later)
You use it for maintaining romantic friendships without breaking any hearts. If someone seems to get a bit too attached, you just turn it up a bit and they'll disconnect on their own.
You start to run into problems when you fall into spells of misanthropy, or any measure of self-loathing, because when a person with this ability pushes the world away the world pushes back.
I know these things because I, and I'm sure many others, effectively have this power. All you need to do is be very conscious of the aesthetics of the world, and how well your actions fit into them.