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Post by edmonddantes on Oct 20, 2018 10:56:59 GMT -5
Okay, so, scenario: Today, as you're reading this, God has decided that YOU are going to take his place. He gives you power almost equal to his own, and he's not gonna take it away for at least five days. In the meantime, you're the big kahuna. You just point and anything you want happens. What would you change about the world? What new things would you implement to improve it? Which of God's mistakes would you fix? My own answer is behind a spoiler since I might not get to post my own followup today, but you should come up with your own before reading mine. I would create the world's first actual superhero, a genderless humanoid that, more than anything, looks like an anime character come to life and doesn't fit any known nationality. Its powers would include indestructability, mind-reading, the ability to see into the past, teleportation, the ability to make clones of itself, healing powers, and always being able to hear a cry for help--even one that's not spoken--no matter where in the world it is or what language its in, in fact this being would be fluent in every language and be able to grant that fluency to any being on Earth. This being would only have two limitations: The first is that it can't actually kill anybody or anything--in fact anything that would've died as a result of its actions is instead healed to perfect health, so even if it wants to be violent it can't. The second is there would be at least one sword which can kill it, which this being can not destroy and would have no desire to, which I would give to the youtuber Markiplier since that man is already a model for us all to live up to. Anyway, since I like topics like this I'll be waiting for your answers. (Just, umm... let's not turn this into a political discussion, k?) |
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Post by surnshurn on Oct 26, 2018 0:22:14 GMT -5
I would make universal translators a thing. Not strictly limited to "X said this", but "X said this and meant that, given cultural context and relevance."
I believe in empowering people, not just rescuing them from the evils of the universe. Keep in mind that I am a basically altruistic individual, who would rather see the world prosper than burn. It brings to mind a psychology lecture I listened to in recent memory, that mused over the nature of good and evil, and how a person cannot really be good until they have come to terms with the evil that they themselves are capable of. Perhaps this could be construed as a libertarian argument, and perhaps it is to an extent, but it's a libertarian argument that really does not take into consideration all of the realities that we imperfect humans have to deal with in the real world.
Short version: People would be able to communicate with and understand one another effectively, to help erase the tribalism that divides us as people and end up giving us a chance to find a global consensus without constant threat of annihilation. As a final note - I do think this is something that will happen with humans on earth, but not for a long long time. as an aside - spoiler tags don't show up properly in response editing |
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Post by edmonddantes on Oct 29, 2018 1:33:08 GMT -5
I'm kinda shocked it took this long to get even one response... must not be many people here who feel they could improve the world?
(Which yeah, sometimes I think the world is perfect as-is, but I do want to help out the people seeing the not-as-good parts of it)
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Post by Bumpyroad on Nov 19, 2018 3:22:52 GMT -5
I'd prohibit to use anonymous/fake names on social networks.
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Post by edmonddantes on Nov 19, 2018 4:18:00 GMT -5
You know... I'd be surprisngly okay with that. People knew my real name in high school, what's wrong with them doing so on the internet?
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Post by jorpho on Nov 23, 2018 0:03:30 GMT -5
Today, as you're reading this, God has decided that YOU are going to take his place. He gives you power almost equal to his own, and he's not gonna take it away for at least five days. In the meantime, you're the big kahuna. You just point and anything you want happens. What would you change about the world? What new things would you implement to improve it? Which of God's mistakes would you fix? To be in such a position would grant one new perspective that one would not otherwise have to see the mistakes. I swiftly recall this bit on LessWrong, which concludes that ultimately, if you were granted a wish, the only safe thing to do would be to say, "I wish for you to do what I should wish for." There's another bit from Lukyanenko's "Night Watch" that stands out: |
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Post by edmonddantes on Nov 23, 2018 20:31:12 GMT -5
Yeah but, that's wishes, granted by genies who may be covered by odd rules or (if you're in a Wishmaster movie) may simply be assholes.
God itself[1] handing you power equal to its own would be a different thing, since in this case you would be directly causing a thing to happen, God would simply have veto power after a week... and you'd know the big kahuna is honest since, being omniscient, it really has no reason not to be... well, you could also use some of its actions/inactions as character witness too if you wanted but eh.
As for wishing though... yeah I've heard the "safe" argument before but I kinda think that comes from a perspective of a person not being able to trust his or her own judgment/wisdom. I mean just for example, "I wish I had a bottle of Tylenol that refills to 3/4ths full every midnight" seems safe enough... how could such a wish be corrupted? Granted that brings up the other question... that it depends on what the wish actually is. Obviously the bigger/more complicated the wish, the more particulars you have to have and probably the less worthwhile it is, depending on what's granting them.
[1] I never understood gendering God. I mean, God invented the first man and first woman. If he invented them, then God can't be either gender itself, because they didn't exist yet. It also seems odd that there could be a male/female God without one of the opposite gender being around.
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Post by jorpho on Nov 23, 2018 23:41:21 GMT -5
I mean just for example, "I wish I had a bottle of Tylenol that refills to 3/4ths full every midnight" seems safe enough... how could such a wish be corrupted? Easy. Some crazy-looking person breaks into your apartment every night after midnight and refills the bottle. |
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Post by edmonddantes on Nov 23, 2018 23:50:41 GMT -5
Okay, that's an interesting way to corrupt a wish. you've piqued my interest in your thinking, so here is a few more wishes. Tell me how you could see these being corrupted: 1. "I wish to lucid dream every time I sleep." [In case you haven't heard of this, lucid dreaming is where you realize you're dreaming and therefore can control your dream self, unlike normal dreams where things just happen to you and you wake up wondering how you could be such an idiot] 2. "I wish for whatever numbers I choose on this exact lottery ticket to wind up being the jackpot winners." 3. "I wish to be fluent in Japanese, Chinese, French and English." 4. "I wish to know everything there is to know about programming in C and C++." 5. "I wish for all insects, rodents and arachnids to be naturally repulsed by me and have a desire to avoid being within ten feet of me." I'll think of more later  |
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Post by jorpho on Nov 24, 2018 0:52:02 GMT -5
Okay, that's an interesting way to corrupt a wish. you've piqued my interest in your thinking, so here is a few more wishes. Tell me how you could see these being corrupted: You know there are lengthy forum threads out there all over the Internet dedicated to this fine sport, right? Not that I've spent much time dwelling in them. I'll take a crack at it. 1. Crippling ennui and frustration develops as you begin to long for the time when you could just completely abandon yourself to your imagination rather than maintaining total conscious control of yourself for every hour. 2. Eh, winning the lottery can already screw up one's life over completely in a variety of colorful ways. But if we're going for more creative interpretations: they're the jackpot winners, but they're actually for some other jackpot, possibly in some different lottery at some distant point in the future, perhaps in some different country for which you're not eligible for prizes. 3. You wind up speaking with an appalling accent that makes you sound like a buffoon, no matter how eloquent your word choices, and no amount of coaching can quite make it go away. 4. You can only find employment as a code monkey on frustrating, time-crunched collaborative projects where you spend untold hours trying to chase down missing semicolons in code written by people who aren't nearly as good as you, but not quite so incompetent that you could justify it to management if you scrapped all their stuff completely and wrote it yourself. When your work stars to draw attention, you are promoted to management and find yourself completely stripped of any opportunity to code in the first place. 5. The local ecosystem is devastated as the bottom of the food chain becomes overly disrupted. Property values also take a dive as the unusual migratory patterns lead to concentrations and infestations – albeit none within ten feet of you. It's bad enough that your neighbors move away and obnoxious folks move in who insist on playing terrible music at odd hours. Or something. |
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Post by edmonddantes on Dec 28, 2018 2:14:54 GMT -5
So I felt like reviving this cuz I had some ideas (and let's get back to the "godhood fantasy" part and away from the "wishes" tangent).
Admittedly I'm half-venting, but here's some things I would do as a god:
1. Shut down both Twitter and Tumblr. I honestly don't get why these services exists--they're just blogs but with restrictions instead of features--Twitter's is low word/letter counts, Tumblr's is no ability to comment and instead you have to reblog. In both cases this means there is no nuanced discussion or understanding and, predictably, both sites are known to spawn some dangerous ideology. So they might as well not exist.
2. Shut down Hollywood... but only for five, maybe ten years. In those years America would be forced to import media from the rest of the world (not exclusively Japan) and play that in theaters or on television.... which is how the rest of the world already works.
3. While I've been pro-gun ownership in the past, if I had godhood I'd destroy all such weapons. You wouldn't need self-defense if you had a literal superhero looking out for you.
.... Although now that I've typed all this, I'm kiiiiiinda wondering what kind of "End of the World!" chaos this would cause, and a part of me actually is inclined to find the idea funny, so... maybe I wouldn't make the best demigod.
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Post by eatersthemanfool on Dec 28, 2018 4:45:23 GMT -5
I would absolutely destroy social media as it exists today. Send us back to the days of webrings and forums. I'd keep youtube, but that's it.
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Post by edmonddantes on Dec 28, 2018 5:10:11 GMT -5
Did the days of forums ever really pass? I mean we're using one right now, and there's Reddit, which is basically a really big forum.
I do admit I miss one thing about classic internet, the personal website where everyone had their own individualized webspace. Today that's subsumed by blog services but even then, a lot of times we tend to instead see conglomerate sites or wikis designed for groups instead of individuals.
Like... one of my internet memories is the days of Warcraft II websites, there were dozens of them and each one had something unique (such as personal accounts of people's online matches). Today, all of this would be on an all-encompassing wiki which might in some sense be more useful, but less fun. Modern internet nature also has a side to it I don't like, this feeling that only one voice ever gets to be heard--for example look at any YMMV page on TV Tropes, which many people take as being a de-facto stance of the fans of whatever media (I've seen it pointed out on forums that very often the editors for those pages are only describing their own pet views or experiences and passing them off as the fandom's, but ever since the site enacted rules against "natter" whoever edits the page gets to have the de-facto final say). Wikipedia is much the same--if they say, for example, that nobody bought tickets to Movie X, even if Movie X was actually really successful, you can't challenge the narrative and it gets to be in their canon, and since they're a top hit on Google...
Well, now I'm rambling. I'll shut up and go back to sleep for a moment.
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Post by lurker on Dec 28, 2018 10:23:57 GMT -5
So I felt like reviving this cuz I had some ideas (and let's get back to the "godhood fantasy" part and away from the "wishes" tangent). Admittedly I'm half-venting, but here's some things I would do as a god: 1. Shut down both Twitter and Tumblr. I honestly don't get why these services exists--they're just blogs but with restrictions instead of features--Twitter's is low word/letter counts, Tumblr's is no ability to comment and instead you have to reblog. In both cases this means there is no nuanced discussion or understanding and, predictably, both sites are known to spawn some dangerous ideology. So they might as well not exist. 2. Shut down Hollywood... but only for five, maybe ten years. In those years America would be forced to import media from the rest of the world (not exclusively Japan) and play that in theaters or on television.... which is how the rest of the world already works. 3. While I've been pro-gun ownership in the past, if I had godhood I'd destroy all such weapons. You wouldn't need self-defense if you had a literal superhero looking out for you. .... Although now that I've typed all this, I'm kiiiiiinda wondering what kind of "End of the World!" chaos this would cause, and a part of me actually is inclined to find the idea funny, so... maybe I wouldn't make the best demigod. You can respond to posts with Tumblr, though to an extent. Its great for communities and artwork, but the problem is that the moderation is kind of a mess. |
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Post by eatersthemanfool on Dec 29, 2018 0:46:00 GMT -5
Did the days of forums ever really pass? I mean we're using one right now, and there's Reddit, which is basically a really big forum. I do admit I miss one thing about classic internet, the personal website where everyone had their own individualized webspace. Today that's subsumed by blog services but even then, a lot of times we tend to instead see conglomerate sites or wikis designed for groups instead of individuals. Like... one of my internet memories is the days of Warcraft II websites, there were dozens of them and each one had something unique (such as personal accounts of people's online matches). Today, all of this would be on an all-encompassing wiki which might in some sense be more useful, but less fun. Modern internet nature also has a side to it I don't like, this feeling that only one voice ever gets to be heard--for example look at any YMMV page on TV Tropes, which many people take as being a de-facto stance of the fans of whatever media (I've seen it pointed out on forums that very often the editors for those pages are only describing their own pet views or experiences and passing them off as the fandom's, but ever since the site enacted rules against "natter" whoever edits the page gets to have the de-facto final say). Wikipedia is much the same--if they say, for example, that nobody bought tickets to Movie X, even if Movie X was actually really successful, you can't challenge the narrative and it gets to be in their canon, and since they're a top hit on Google... Well, now I'm rambling. I'll shut up and go back to sleep for a moment. Reddit is not a forum though. It resembles a forum but the voting system and the fact that anyone can make a subreddit make it different enough that it changes the way people use it. |
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