How many dollars is a Human life worth, if a vote would choose a tax to pay it?

[myrkul]

Its supposed to look crazy. I'm a mad-scientist.

You heard it here, folks.

[BenRayfield]

A mad-scientist is thought by many to be crazy, but sometimes their theories work and change the world. I'm just trying to have a sense of humor about it.

6 of 12 voters chose "Human lives are worth a negative amount on average, and the more of them die the better" instead of $0 or a positive number of dollars. Who is really crazy here?

[speeder]

A mad-scientist is thought by many to be crazy, but sometimes their theories work and change the world. I'm just trying to have a sense of humor about it.

6 of 12 voters chose "Human lives are worth a negative amount on average, and the more of them die the better" instead of $0 or a positive number of dollars. Who is really crazy here?

You.


If 50% of voters believe human lives are worth negative, it means the normality, is that.

Thus if you vote against the normality, you are not-normal, thus crazy.

[BenRayfield]

If crazy means not normal, then genius and idiot are equally crazy. That's not what crazy means.

Here's an example of crazy:
(1) Person X will die today if does not receive $1000 of medical supplies. Person Y gives $1000 to X, and X lives. This is legal.
(2) If person Z pays Y $2000 to not give X $1000 (which Y was going to do, and nobody else was going to do), X dies, but its still legal.
(3) But if Z pays Y to kill X, its illegal.

Only a crazy person would think (2) and (3) are significantly different. Both are paying for the future where X dies to occur.
Also, only crazy people think "paying for the future where X dies to occur" is significantly different from "paying for X to die", but people think they're different.

This is not about ethics. Its about the lack of ability of most people to see logical contradictions.


Maybe I should really do this... find somebody who is about to pay money to save a specific person's life, and then pay them to not donate the money and therefore not save the life, so effectively I would be paying to cause somebody to die but its completely legal. I think this would be a great way to get people to see how crazy they are. I can pay for somebody to die and its completely legal, if its set up indirectly like this. I think I should really do this, and advertise it. What could be wrong with paying somebody not to save somebody elses life when they didn't have to? Its my money. I have the legal right to spend it on that. Anyone want to help me pay for someone to die this specific legal way? I expect you do, since half of you voted that Human life has negative value.

I hope you're happy about what you've just set in motion, because I'm going to try to make this really happen. The hardest part is finding somebody whose life could be saved but there is no obligation and somebody who is about to pay to save it and would accept money not to. The news people will come if they know that is happening, and the world will watch in a state of mental shock as I pay to cause someone to die and its completely legal. See what you did? Somebody is going to die because you voted that people have negative value, and now I see my best strategy for saving the most lives and improving the world is to pay to have someone killed in a completely legal way. Here's your democracy.

[BenRayfield]

Human lives are worth a negative amount on average, and the more of them die the better.    6 (42.9%)
$0 per life saved (choose this if you are against redirecting existing tax money for this)    2 (14.3%)
$1 per life saved    2 (14.3%)
$3 per life saved    0 (0%)
$10 per life saved    1 (7.1%)
$30 per life saved    0 (0%)
$100 per life saved    1 (7.1%)
$300 per life saved    1 (7.1%)
$1,000 per life saved    0 (0%)
$3,000 per life saved    0 (0%)
$10,000 per life saved    0 (0%)
More than $10,000 (you do realize the price is less than $1000, right?)    1 (7.1%)
Total Voters: 14

6 out of 14 voting Human life has negative value is a little better (the last vote was $0), but the general plan (not the details, maybe it could be a game show done in a hospital where we save only a few extra out of 10 possible lives depending on how much money the players decide to keep for themselves, for example) I described in my last post still needs to be done by someone if even 1 out of every million people think Human life has negative value, since it would save many millions of lives at least as a result of getting the world to admit its organized in a way that does this kind of thing all the time but so indirectly nobody gets blamed for it. The world needs a specific example where who pays to kill and who dies are not anonymous and its completely legal (with police offered an invitation to watch to make sure its legal). When the world realizes its been doing this and billions have died from it already, paying for people to not save lives, people will decide to reorganize the world to stop most of that. But first they would need to admit its happening, and 1 life is a small price to pay for that, as proven by your vote of how much 1 life is worth (I'm the only one who voted for more than $300), or you could also interpret it to mean the supply and demand decides, and in that case it would be a little less than $1000 as researched by http://givewell.org Either way its not enough.

They think I'm crazy?

"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." --Jiddu Krishnamurti


In this thread... "What percent of Bitcoins are used for unethical things"
http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=24964.0
...and its paired thread... "What percent of Dollars are used for unethical things (compare to Bitcoin poll)"
http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=24970.0
..I said

I created these 2 polls/threads (one about bitcoins and one about dollars) to understand how people think, not because I care specificly about the ethics of bitcoins or dollars. I created a thread http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=23054.0 called "A Compromise To Avoid World War 3", a very serious subject important to the future of the Human species, and most people got off subject, distracted by the details instead of the possibility (a high chance in my opinion) that we could all die if nothing is done. So I decided to figure out what about Human minds causes them to ignore such an important thing. Similar to how a programmer uses a debugger (like Eclipse or Netbeans) to find bugs in software, I am debugging the Human species, so I'm interested in how people choose their thoughts instead of the specific thoughts.

Bug found. Solution planned: pay somebody to not save somebody elses life when they didn't have to (and advertise it and get it on the news etc), therefore changing how people think about money.

I think its interesting that I maybe wouldn't have thought of this way to save many millions of lives if I had not listened to a certain Eminem (a guy who most people think is very offensive and destructive) song, with the words "that guy who could have saved that other guy from drowning, but didn't". Theres interesting ideas in many unexpected places.

A more important, and harder to fix, bug in how the Human species thinks is:
If I flip 2 coins and at least 1 landed heads, what's the chance both landed heads? Most people say 1/2 or 1/4 chance, but its 1/3 because there are 4 ways for 2 coins to land, "at least 1 landed heads" excludes "tails tails" leaving 3 possibilities, and I asked what is the chance of 1 of the 3 remaining possibilities, so its 1/3. This bug causes misunderstandings of the combination of any 2 events in the same way a neural network (gets the wrong answer) is different from a bayesian network (gets the right answer). This is a variation of the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem I have a plan to fix it through complex math in my Audivolv software bending the way people think toward bayesian, but that is a long-term solution while the "Human life has very little value in dollars" problem is much easier to solve, as explained above.

[speeder]

There is a good reason why many geniuses were considered crazy


Any crazy person is crazy, if the result is better for society, the guy is a genius, if it is worse, he is a fool, if is the same, he is an idiot.

[Explodicle]

I'm pretty sure the "fewer people" answer is the norm in my country (USA) - the vast majority of the population supports spending a huge percentage of our national budget on "defense". What's sad/funny about this is even the an-caps here, whose selfish and idealistic attitudes frequently irritate me, more support a foreigner's right to live (with $0) than my neighbors. I guess the poll had its intended effect...

[OgNasty]

Natural Selection.

[Anonymous]

The fact that this thread exists and has the results it does are seriously making me rethink my bitcoin business. How can we possibly expect people to see that Bitcoin is a new hope for the future when this horrible, truly morally bankrupt, awful thread is on the main forums.

In nowhere in the world would the "fewer people" answer be acceptable to actually voice out loud. It's essentially a position that has been universally unpopular since the Nazis.

[Explodicle]

I think you are grossly underestimating the prevalence of misanthropy in internet scum in general. Sadly, this is typical for an online forum.

[Thanak]

I didn't say everyone was worth equal amounts. This vote is about the cheapest Human lives to save, which would start to cost more as we save the cheaper lives.

Actually with those condition, I'm supprised that anyone has a value above zero.

There are definatly some people that I don't care if they die (so worth zero for me). There are even a few people that I would probably be glad if they where dead, ask me on a bad day and I would probably donate a few $ if it meant their death   (Not that I would actually follow through with that idea).

I also think that we are heading for overpopulation that will hurt everyone quality of life. I would gladly donate to provide free birth control to people that can't aford it and cash incentive for people to get sterillized.

On the other hand there are some life wich I value above my own and I would give everything I have, including my life to save them.

Most importantly, no matter how I value a life, I think it would be wrong to force other people to give anything to save it.... I'm not saying I would alway have the integrity to act morally.  

Imagine a situation where I have the choice to let my son die or kill 10 strangers.... I kill the 10 strangers even if it's morally wrong.




 

[Quantus]

"I also think that we are heading for overpopulation that will hurt everyone quality of life. I would gladly donate to provide free birth control to people that can't aford it and cash incentive for people to get sterillized."

Agreed