This is fast becoming my favourite thread on the forum.
Has anyone yet managed to spot Disgruntled Monkey^TM in suchmoon's original image? Clue: he's nestled coyly atop the Alien.
This is not another oblique reference to Trump. Let me be clear: I am not suggesting that there is something nestled coyly atop the POTUS's head, be it Alien, Disgruntled Monkey^TM or something that is and hopefully shall forever remain beyond human understanding.

I'm leaning towards Pfizer/BioNTech, but it's not listed.

I still feel guilty about mentioning the five year anniversary. I feel like I'm partly responsible for bringing about the end of what is perhaps the finest work of literature in the history of human civilisation.

Batman's final sentence of his final post was the perfect sign off, though.

Okay, let's do it. Let's start a thread. You go first, I'll reply. Let's see if we can keep it going for 5 years.

If it's a USB drive, then it's got its head in the sand. Which means it may have the potential to protect us against the pandemic, but is unwilling to do anything to help. Which brings me back quite neatly to the Face of Trump.

BTW - I hope I'm not offending anyone by combining imagery of Trump and Alien. I should make it clear that I am in no way suggesting that Trump erupted out of a space egg in the outer reaches of the solar system, and was carried back to Earth by an unwitting Sigourney Weaver, there to wreak untold destruction. Because that's certainly not true.

You two are brilliant! Normally I'd divert the trolley to the route with the fewest people... but if I had a choice between:
route A) one unknown person,
route B) franky1 and Spendulus

... then I'd definitely divert it onto you two, safe in the knowledge that you'd find some way to weasel out of the problem completely unscathed!

Thanks, got it. This reveals your answer to the trolley problem. Bitcoin is the answer, and pulling the lever would effectively be forking the coin. If you don't touch the lever: bitcoin. If you move the lever: bitcoin cash.
No-one likes bitcoin cash. So you're saying it doesn't matter how many people are on the track, the original vision is the answer, and don't touch the lever.  

I don't think it was a typo. The calculation looks correct to me. Please let me know though if my reasoning is wrong!

0.9^1   0.9
0.9^2   0.81
0.9^3   0.729
0.9^4   0.6561
0.9^5   0.59049



  But it's not easier if it's the same, it's the same. Unless you mean the psychological difference... which is interesting, because to me—intuitively—the multi feels easier, because you're stacking multiple individual outcomes that individually are easier.

Yes, a lot of people are focusing on that. However, more interesting to me is that if you squint a bit, you can almost see a human face* in the rock to the right.




*see an almost human face

---

And for a bonus point, who can see this friendly face looming out of the rock? Clue: he appears to have a disgruntled monkey on top of his head. You'll have to go to the original image though, it's cropped out on mine.

I definitely prefer single bets. With multi bets, it can be very easy to be tricked into a false sense of confidence. Just because 5 individual events each have an overwhelming favourite, it doesn't mean that all 5 together are likely to happen.

Consider 5 events where a good team is playing a bad team. Each good team has a 90% chance of winning. You make a bet on one of these, you have 90% chance of winning. But make a multiple bet on all 5 big teams winning, and your odds are 0.9^5... which is only 59%.

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Come on, you lot. It's a thought experiment with two outcomes. If you start to 'real world' it, and throw in alternatives, the experiment is pointless.
I've had lengthy and interesting discussions with each of you in numerous P&S threads. I'm interested in which of the two available choices you'd make, and why.

Franky1, I know you've answered with the bare mathematical fact, but if actually faced with this choice, would you find it easy to intervene and pull the lever? Would there be any temptation to do nothing rather than pull the lever?


I'm with the OP here. It's artificial and constrained not because it's a flawed representation of reality, but rather because it's a hypothetical and simplified situation set up to enable us to explore moral choices and the reasoning behind them. Trying to turn it into reality misses the point; it's like refusing to play a game of Cluedo because the owner of the mansion was an idiot who didn't set up a CCTV system.

XRP has a fundamentally different use case.

Whilst bitcoin's ultimate use case is still to be determined, it seems reasonable to assume it will be a store-of-value, and a safe haven asset. Bitcoin has none of the deficiencies of fiat. Its rival here is gold. Bitcoin improves on gold, as has been covered many times.

Whereas XRP is for fast, cheap, international transfers. XRP does excel at what it does, XRP (and Ripple tech) provides a great solution for that particular problem, but this is a limited use case that has very little overlap with bitcoin.

The reason you think bitcoin has no utility is because you are looking in the wrong direction. It doesn't try to be XRP. It doesn't need to try.

Sure. We can't demand that people think and feel in a certain way. Still, the three options I outlined are all logically equivalent, right? They all amount to having a choice, deciding on an outcome (whether actively or 'passively'), and then that choice resulting in the same outcome (for the people on the track).

There's no absolute right or wrong, but the easiest route to a clear conscience is to do nothing and say what happened (5 die) would have happened anyway, so I wasn't involved, so it's not my fault. In which case you are effectively saying that if I kill one person I'll feel bad, but if I kill five people I'll feel better... so for the sake of feeling better, I am willing to kill an extra four people. If we pretend this isn't the case, then we are deceiving ourselves and being intellectually dishonest.


It's a thought experiment to enable us to explore the reasoning behind our decisions. If you remove the binary outcome, you make the experiment irrelevant.

Ha, sorry. There's a joke in there about derailing the thread

Because not acting is an active choice. You can't simply not act and claim that you weren't involved, so it wasn't your problem. That's not remotely convincing as an argument. You may not like it, but you are an active participant in the situation, because the choices you make can affect the outcome. In fact, you are the only person who controls the outcome. You decide who lives and who dies. It's all down to you.

The three choices below are absolutely morally equivalent:

• standing back and doing nothing
• grabbing the lever and not diverting the trolley
• grabbing the lever, diverting it to the one person and then diverting it back to the five original people

Each of those three choices confers the same level of guilt. The difference is that with some of those choices, it is easier to convince yourself (falsely) that it's not your fault.
So I think that in that situation, I would pull the lever. In practice, faced with that decision, I might try to convince myself through intellectual cowardice that I was not involved... but this would be a self-comforting lie.

Facebook is certainly a major reason for the pervasive lack of privacy in modern society. But people do—to an extent—have control over whether or not they use Facebook. Appreciate there's not much that can be done about "friends" sharing your information, but there is at least some degree of control.

But the general position is that you have to go to often ridiculous lengths to opt out of being tracked and surveilled. Internet tracking is a good example, particularly here in the EU, where we have the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) to (ostensibly) protect us from surveillance and data-harvesting. The legal requirement is that we specifically have to opt-in to surveillance; there can be no implied consent:

https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protection/guide-to-the-general-data-protection-regulation-gdpr/lawful-basis-for-processing/consent/

In practice of course, companies disregard this entirely. I posted an example of this a year and a half ago.
Often, your choices when visiting a website are:
a) click okay to the pre-ticked consent box, or
b) navigate a labyrinthine sprawl of sub-pages to individually untick every aspect of surveillance and every partner organisation.

... but this is just the internet. It barely scratches the surface. Consider your phone spewing out your physical location all the time, to whoever wants to listen. Consider the fact that there are estimated to be 1 billion surveillance cameras around the world by next year (ignore the somewhat sinophobic nature of the article, it's obviously a global problem).

Everything comes down to a yearning for power. Money has always been a manifestation of power, but now—as we are so often told—we live in the information age, and data is* power. Everyone who wants to increase and entrench their power wants your data, be it companies or governments. We can be aware of it, we can rail against it, but it looks like a losing battle. Take the US election as a disheartening example. Biden has made it clear that he despises Zuckerberg, and has raised the possibility of revoking Article 230. There was speculation he might try to break up the big tech firms. And what happens when he wins the election? He fills his transition team with tech and surveillance-capitalism insiders...

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/11/16/the-biden-teams-tug-of-war-over-facebook-436672

https://www.protocol.com/bulletins/bidens-transition-is-stacked-with-tech-players

"Where to elect there is but one,
'Tis Hobson's choice—take that, or none."


_*are

delete

The trolley problem is a fascinating exploration of morality. It is interesting to consider variants that are morally exactly the same, but where people might make different decisions. One such variant has the participant as a surgeon, who has five transplant patients who are about to die because no suitable donors have been found. Someone healthy comes in for a routine check, and you find that they are a suitable match. Do you murder this healthy person, extract their organs and transplant them into your patients? Because this is a thought experiment, we assume no complications; if you perform the transplants then all five will make a full recovery and live healthy lives. If you don't murder the innocent person, your five patients die.

I would suspect that many of the people who would pull the train lever would refuse to kill the healthy patient... but morally this is the exact same thing, you are killing one to save five.

I think that these simple thought experiments give some huge insights into moral agency, and how easy it is for us to avoid difficult decisions by pretending that we are not involved, and that 'do nothing' is just a passive choice, when in fact, in many situations, you would be actively doing nothing in order to not take responsibility for choosing between two morally bad outcomes.

Me personally? I think I might take action to divert the trolley, but definitely wouldn't take the donor organs. And I say this despite just outlining that this is inconsistent reasoning... which does demonstrate how powerfully our emotions influence our decision-making, even for supposedly rational beings.

As an aside, the theoretical trolley problem did become reality in 2003, when the driver of a runaway freight train heading for central Los Angeles had a choice to divert it into a neighbourhood of lower density housing instead.

The coke/pepsi analogy is appropriate. The issue of course is that 'capitalist democracy' is an oxymoron. Those with money run the show, and always have. In an election, you are never voting to remove the reins of power from the elite, you are instead voting for a figurehead, a public face, that's all. Nothing changes behind the scenes.

The difference is that Trump is vastly more confrontational. He creates and establishes support though the classic Orwellian 'us and them' approach. Just as capitalism is a process rather than an end-state, so is this opposition-building. It can't continue indefinitely; eventually it reaches breaking-point. Biden's "I'm not Trump!" candidacy can be viewed as the establishment attempting to return to the pre-Trumpian status quo. 'Us and them' is tried and tested, but the idea is for it to be carefully targeted outwards, not turned on the establishment itself. Trump is a destabilising influence, a threat... he's more than an obnoxious front-end (yes, that is a phallic metaphor).

The masses vote for tyranny because it is what they are taught to want. Democracy is viewed by many as simply a right, when it should also be viewed as a responsibility. Is true democracy possible or even desirable, if opinions can be corrupted and managed so easily?

I don't know if it's a scam. That implies subterfuge. People in 'democracies' are complicit, or are conditioned to be complicit. The manipulation of opinions is often quite overt and transparent. You say that people want tyranny, but is that because they have been taught to want it? What is the alternative? I've been looking for years, but have found nothing. Anarchism is utopian and only works with ideal people... but if people were like that, then democracy would work. Communism doesn't work for the same reason, it's far too easy to corrupt.

Übermensch needs the herd as a backdrop. How to liberate the herd? "We are all individuals" can't work. What's left? Eternal return?

Current transaction fee is supremely irrelevant against the long-term potential of the project. Remember that ETH is under continuous development. Indeed we have the imminent upgrade to PoS. High transaction fee is not an inherent quality of the system, it's a reflection of the current situation. ETH is still by a long long way the best and the strongest smart contract platform out there. There are newcomers that offer sparkly new features, but these haven't been battle-tested in the way that ETH has. Don't give up on ETH because of fees! There's a reason it is entrenched as the top altcoin.