Nope as then it might improve but will not learn the lessons required to KEEP that improvement without an outside force dictating the direction.
You've essentially got the plot to The Adjustment bureau in that post.
Hard and good times are required for humanity to evolve, it's just this hard time was self inflicted by sparing the belt too much. But we are seeing the fight back and return by our own will especially in the US.
I am extremely resistant to FULLY relying on a bigger power by massive self sacrifice to 'improve the world' as that kinda talk leads to commie and cult mass deaths..
Just letting you know I mentioned you in my own comment, but I don't think the tag initially worked.
Anyway, spot on, I think. It's the journey, not the destination. Forcibly reshaping society is forcibly reshaping people. A "perfect society" is slavery.
My primary motivation is that I want a better world for my kids. I don't see this question being good because "the society in which you live will be demonstrably better in every possible way by leaps and bounds" would/should benefit my kids. A society being better would be a homogenous society free of discrimination where my kids can walk around without having some minority "culturally enrich" them. A society where they would not be discriminated against when they get in to schools or jobs. Where history does not get black washed and they are not made to feel guilty for being white. I care little to nothing about my life and all about my kids.
There is no way to remove that from the equation.
If I did not have kids and I never would have kids then I would take it just because it means my enemies would lose.
I would take it in a second. As I mentioned before, my life holds no special meaning for me. If I can sacrifice myself so my grand-grand-grand kids have a better life I would.
In a heartbeat. I'd certainly kill to reverse the vile course of iniquity, laziness and debt that has enslaved Western Civilization, so naturally I'd be willing to die for it. As written, my wish would also likely exterminate or at the very least fully repatriate several groups that I consider responsible for contributing to the downfall of and presently assailing my society.
I have four children, going on five. My posterity would be very likely to survive and thrive in such a situation.
As for your last question, I know two. My wife and my mother. Just about every other woman I know, I wouldn't trust within earshot of an actual genie.
Interesting, and I definitely get it. I am curious though, and I want to be very clear this isn't an attack, I'm honestly interested in the discussion, how does this mesh with Christianity? I'm also not super learned on the theology, but my understanding is one of the big points is we're here to learn, and Heaven and Earth are distinct. We're not supposed to create paradise here. We're supposed to learn and improve, but the important thing is to personally overcome degeneracy and sin, not to wipe it out with the push of a button or the making of a wish. I'm not saying you can't combat it - you should - but that eradication isn't the primary end goal.
Even if you got rid of all evil...isn't that in some ways also robbing people of making the choice for good, the decision to stand against evil and overcome it? Would the people in a magically better society be better people? And, if it was against their will, or at least without it...does it matter? If you just force perfect society on people...are their souls in better state?
I honestly don't know. My feelings are no, but it's also worth taking into account that those are shaped by our modern degenerate society. Maybe I'm completely wrong, and have fallen for their trap on that.
And of course, as in the Trolly Problem and others, avoidant answers like "What if the genie is lying?/How did the people get onto the tracks?" where one tries to dodge out of answering the core moral question by poking pedantic holes in the premise are null.
They're not null, they're asking the more important question for actually improving society. The one of "does your idea of morality belong in fairytales, or reality?".
There's no rational, even superficially believable explanation of how your dying would improve the world, and you have no direct control over any of the outcomes other than killing yourself. Accepting the premise means accepting a literally suicidal belief in pure magic/cope.
The actual "moral conundrum" is incredibly trivial, of course one life has less ethical weight than billions and the righteous thing would be to sacrifice yourself. The only difficult part is the "personal conundrum" of if you're willing to lay down and die for a fairytale, which is frankly a poisonous red herring.
My belief is that some people truly are more inclined towards the level of altruism and willingness to self-sacrifice required for the ideal prosperous, high-trust society to thrive. Not just by the circumstances of their surroundings and upbringing, but just as a core fibre of their being. Those are the "good men" out there, and both their success and survival is vital for the best possible societal outcomes.
Too many good men already have the foolish idea that their highest ideal is to die for the sake of their brothers. Where it should be of winning for the sake of their brothers, the dying should be just an incidental practicality. Even if dying for one fight may make winning more likely in one particular instance, it also means forfeiting an entire lifetime of later fights as a loss by default. Plus there's the practical observation that the fabric of society is essentially non-newtonian; it is shaped far more readily by a slow, steady application of pressure (E.g. frog boiling) than it is by sudden, shocking, grand gestures of self-immolation. So survival is an integral part of having the most meaningful impact for good.
Every thought experiment I've ever seen has shown that altruism as an inherent trait doesn't survive natural selection on an even footing, it gets abused into extinction. It only survives if natural altruists are also stronger, more effective, and favor their fellow altruists first over the selfish. The rot we're seeing now has in large part been allowed to happen because the great grandsons of the altruists who found the key to survival were mistakenly taught that the most profound self-sacrifice is just turning yourself into a corpse, instead of the most profound self-sacrifice being the act of forgoing your own joy and turning yourself into an enduring, effective weapon against those who would rather take than give freely.
Skepticism doesn't come easily to good people, and in a perfect society it would often just bring inefficiency with little benefit to anyone. But in a broken society skepticism keeps you out of many pitfalls to failure, and again it is vital that good people learn to succeed if we ever hope to see a better world in the future. So it's about time for good people to consciously ingrain skepticism into themselves and stop telling fairytales without it.
The snake's so low it can't even see over the first paragraph, I literally referred to thought experiments in my 6th. Go on, give me more of your desperate, empty insults. This is just taqiyya at this point.
Oh and to answer your final original question, I know more women than men who would say they'd say yes. It's just believing in fairytales and empty virtue signalling, which are right up their street.
Local weirdo dekachin went on twitter (before Elon bought it) and posted a hypothetical to own the feminists: "would you rather get raped, or do 10 years in prison?" This was supposed to illustrate that the #MeToo culture hurt men more than women because rape is the risk for them, and prison from false accusations is the risk for men, but prison is worse. After his post went viral and he was banned, he came here to whine about it.
Obviously the problem is he assumed everyone would pick "I'd rather get raped," which is lunacy. Somewhere along the line it became "rape or death" and the split was about 50/50 here, which is still crazy to me because we used to be a dueling culture where men shot at each other over the reputation of their name. I'm not saying that was ideal, but now some dudes, even on the right, think it's okay to give up their own cornhole.
It just puts the lie to this accelerationism larp where your fantasy is Civil War 2. Wars are messy. They require the conviction to potentially die for your ideals, not just kill. But you'd literally offer up your own butt, or more realistically your wife's butt, because "what else am I supposed to do?"
The American Civil War is an anomaly, not the norm. Our Civil War was really just a regular war between two countries. Normal civil wars are fought by a miniscule percentage of people against their own government, and often isnt called a civil war until years after the fact. A 50/50 split on a dumb hypothetical doesn't indicate that there's no possibility of a civil war. The fact that 50% would rather die shows that at least some of them could be capable of guerilla warfare.
Although this definitely deserves more thought, instinctively I agree with u/SoctaticMethod1, and it's along the lines of what I was going to say.
That which is given has no value. Is the journey or the destination more important?
There are all sorts of philosophical questions to be asked and, no, I'm not trying to dodge, or say the genie is lying or anything like that. But I can see where literal and truthful "improvement in ever single way" actually still isn't good for people.
You can't change people, and society is based on people. "A perfect society" would largely require a perfect people, so what we're talking about here is rewriting people.
Also, if we want to get metaphysical, is paradise on Earth, or in Heaven? I'm not really qualified to speak on that, but I can say I've seen what the people trying to make Heaven on Earth turn both Earth and the concept of Heaven into. I think it's better to keep them separate, or you end up destroying both.
I want the people to strive for a better society. Taking out some of the steps just doesn't feel right, and it's also basically what the communists do, that ends in disaster every time. Now, I admit, a perfectly valid rebuttal to my stance would be that maybe I just don't have the imagination to imagine a perfect or better world. Maybe I'm too caught up in the way things currently are, the way people currently are. Leftists hit me with that all the time when talking about communism, taxes, poverty, what have you, and there's some merit to that. If you have an actual magic genie, yeah, maybe you could solve some things, and it's not worth getting stuck in our current framework. Maybe my thinking is wrong on this.
But, still, instinctively this just feels like a cheat, and I don't even think it would be good for people in the long wrong. Flipping a switch and fixing society? You're either taking away free will and rewiring people, which I find abhorrent, or they won't have learned anything and, in another one hundred years, we'll have spiraled back into degeneracy the likes of which humanity has never seen. And I do mean never.
People need to figure things out on their own. That's a bit part of why we're here.
If I wanted to to just follow orders and do what people who quietly hate me tell me to do, I'd have joined the Dem run military.
OP has already dropped the mask, he doesn't respect us, maybe even hates us. He's out there in other threads lying to long time users faces and trolling them calling them fake Christians for complaining about Israel. I think it was always his intent to plant insidious ideas about how suicide is good and noble and to stifle effective realism.
For one, if the world owes me nothing, I owe nothing to the world.
For two, I have no assurance or knowledge that the Genie is telling me the truth, and there is no feasible way for him to guarantee such. I have no idea of what paradigm he's operating under, so I have to fall back to the old lore of such things, and dealing with such creatures in this manner is a bad fucking idea.
Three, I now know that I exist in a world where magic is fucking real. That changes alot.
Four, even assuming he's operating in good faith, I would still get nothing out of it; I have no children, no wife, and none my relatives have children either. My immediate family line would gain nothing.
What is the "demonstrably better in every possible way"?
Is it what I think is better? Because that is all I would really care about, they can guarantee that the world looks the way I think would be good? Erase (i mean literally every single trace, no history, no books, no people) islam, erase lgbtqia ever existing along the same vein, change history and blacks were immediately killed or sent back to Africa at the end of slavery, etc, etc...
I don't even know if these things are good, but as a tiny window into my mind there, I need to know without a shadow of a doubt that all of these things would be exactly what I think and the way I think the world would be 'better'
Then sure I would, for the happiness and greatness of an earth free from these horrible aspects that drag it down.
Societal improvement is subjective so the question is really just would you force you views on others if you could?
Maybe if your beliefs were actually better you wouldn't need to force them upon others.
It's like that red button parable. Man gives you a box with a red button and says if you press the button you'll get a million dollars but somebody you don't know will die. You press the button and the man shows up with your million then gives the button to somebody you don't know. Ironic. You shouldn't do something to others you wouldn't want other people doing to you.
Also we already have this genie, and he's not even taking Soros' life in exchange for forcing a shitty Soros society on us.
My first answer would be no because you should never trust a djin, but in the spirit of the question I'll assume this genie is in fact trustworthy and all seeing.
I would still say no. My life is too important to me, and no one I know or love will benefit.
Nope as then it might improve but will not learn the lessons required to KEEP that improvement without an outside force dictating the direction.
You've essentially got the plot to The Adjustment bureau in that post.
Hard and good times are required for humanity to evolve, it's just this hard time was self inflicted by sparing the belt too much. But we are seeing the fight back and return by our own will especially in the US.
I am extremely resistant to FULLY relying on a bigger power by massive self sacrifice to 'improve the world' as that kinda talk leads to commie and cult mass deaths..
Your hypothetical was well crafted, but he still insisted on ducking it lol
Just letting you know I mentioned you in my own comment, but I don't think the tag initially worked.
Anyway, spot on, I think. It's the journey, not the destination. Forcibly reshaping society is forcibly reshaping people. A "perfect society" is slavery.
good movie
So you’re asking me if I would kill myself in order to kill all the jews in 100 years?
Bruh!
Someone already tried that route, 100 years ago.
My primary motivation is that I want a better world for my kids. I don't see this question being good because "the society in which you live will be demonstrably better in every possible way by leaps and bounds" would/should benefit my kids. A society being better would be a homogenous society free of discrimination where my kids can walk around without having some minority "culturally enrich" them. A society where they would not be discriminated against when they get in to schools or jobs. Where history does not get black washed and they are not made to feel guilty for being white. I care little to nothing about my life and all about my kids.
There is no way to remove that from the equation.
If I did not have kids and I never would have kids then I would take it just because it means my enemies would lose.
I would take it in a second. As I mentioned before, my life holds no special meaning for me. If I can sacrifice myself so my grand-grand-grand kids have a better life I would.
I think the specifics re: the quality and magnitude of the "societal improvement" would have to be better negotiated and outlined.
In a heartbeat. I'd certainly kill to reverse the vile course of iniquity, laziness and debt that has enslaved Western Civilization, so naturally I'd be willing to die for it. As written, my wish would also likely exterminate or at the very least fully repatriate several groups that I consider responsible for contributing to the downfall of and presently assailing my society.
I have four children, going on five. My posterity would be very likely to survive and thrive in such a situation.
As for your last question, I know two. My wife and my mother. Just about every other woman I know, I wouldn't trust within earshot of an actual genie.
Interesting, and I definitely get it. I am curious though, and I want to be very clear this isn't an attack, I'm honestly interested in the discussion, how does this mesh with Christianity? I'm also not super learned on the theology, but my understanding is one of the big points is we're here to learn, and Heaven and Earth are distinct. We're not supposed to create paradise here. We're supposed to learn and improve, but the important thing is to personally overcome degeneracy and sin, not to wipe it out with the push of a button or the making of a wish. I'm not saying you can't combat it - you should - but that eradication isn't the primary end goal.
Even if you got rid of all evil...isn't that in some ways also robbing people of making the choice for good, the decision to stand against evil and overcome it? Would the people in a magically better society be better people? And, if it was against their will, or at least without it...does it matter? If you just force perfect society on people...are their souls in better state?
I honestly don't know. My feelings are no, but it's also worth taking into account that those are shaped by our modern degenerate society. Maybe I'm completely wrong, and have fallen for their trap on that.
It doesn't, it's a hypothetical and a bizarre one at that.
They're not null, they're asking the more important question for actually improving society. The one of "does your idea of morality belong in fairytales, or reality?".
There's no rational, even superficially believable explanation of how your dying would improve the world, and you have no direct control over any of the outcomes other than killing yourself. Accepting the premise means accepting a literally suicidal belief in pure magic/cope.
The actual "moral conundrum" is incredibly trivial, of course one life has less ethical weight than billions and the righteous thing would be to sacrifice yourself. The only difficult part is the "personal conundrum" of if you're willing to lay down and die for a fairytale, which is frankly a poisonous red herring.
My belief is that some people truly are more inclined towards the level of altruism and willingness to self-sacrifice required for the ideal prosperous, high-trust society to thrive. Not just by the circumstances of their surroundings and upbringing, but just as a core fibre of their being. Those are the "good men" out there, and both their success and survival is vital for the best possible societal outcomes.
Too many good men already have the foolish idea that their highest ideal is to die for the sake of their brothers. Where it should be of winning for the sake of their brothers, the dying should be just an incidental practicality. Even if dying for one fight may make winning more likely in one particular instance, it also means forfeiting an entire lifetime of later fights as a loss by default. Plus there's the practical observation that the fabric of society is essentially non-newtonian; it is shaped far more readily by a slow, steady application of pressure (E.g. frog boiling) than it is by sudden, shocking, grand gestures of self-immolation. So survival is an integral part of having the most meaningful impact for good.
Every thought experiment I've ever seen has shown that altruism as an inherent trait doesn't survive natural selection on an even footing, it gets abused into extinction. It only survives if natural altruists are also stronger, more effective, and favor their fellow altruists first over the selfish. The rot we're seeing now has in large part been allowed to happen because the great grandsons of the altruists who found the key to survival were mistakenly taught that the most profound self-sacrifice is just turning yourself into a corpse, instead of the most profound self-sacrifice being the act of forgoing your own joy and turning yourself into an enduring, effective weapon against those who would rather take than give freely.
Skepticism doesn't come easily to good people, and in a perfect society it would often just bring inefficiency with little benefit to anyone. But in a broken society skepticism keeps you out of many pitfalls to failure, and again it is vital that good people learn to succeed if we ever hope to see a better world in the future. So it's about time for good people to consciously ingrain skepticism into themselves and stop telling fairytales without it.
The snake's so low it can't even see over the first paragraph, I literally referred to thought experiments in my 6th. Go on, give me more of your desperate, empty insults. This is just taqiyya at this point.
Oh and to answer your final original question, I know more women than men who would say they'd say yes. It's just believing in fairytales and empty virtue signalling, which are right up their street.
Enjoying this discussion more than the "would you die to stop your own buttrape" debate that idiot lawyer dekachin started here. Lol
That question fraud checked a lot of people
What insanity did I miss?
Local weirdo dekachin went on twitter (before Elon bought it) and posted a hypothetical to own the feminists: "would you rather get raped, or do 10 years in prison?" This was supposed to illustrate that the #MeToo culture hurt men more than women because rape is the risk for them, and prison from false accusations is the risk for men, but prison is worse. After his post went viral and he was banned, he came here to whine about it.
Obviously the problem is he assumed everyone would pick "I'd rather get raped," which is lunacy. Somewhere along the line it became "rape or death" and the split was about 50/50 here, which is still crazy to me because we used to be a dueling culture where men shot at each other over the reputation of their name. I'm not saying that was ideal, but now some dudes, even on the right, think it's okay to give up their own cornhole.
It just puts the lie to this accelerationism larp where your fantasy is Civil War 2. Wars are messy. They require the conviction to potentially die for your ideals, not just kill. But you'd literally offer up your own butt, or more realistically your wife's butt, because "what else am I supposed to do?"
The American Civil War is an anomaly, not the norm. Our Civil War was really just a regular war between two countries. Normal civil wars are fought by a miniscule percentage of people against their own government, and often isnt called a civil war until years after the fact. A 50/50 split on a dumb hypothetical doesn't indicate that there's no possibility of a civil war. The fact that 50% would rather die shows that at least some of them could be capable of guerilla warfare.
You are mostly correct, but my point is that it's a pretty stupid thing to pray for if you're on the wrong 50 of that split.
Although this definitely deserves more thought, instinctively I agree with u/SoctaticMethod1, and it's along the lines of what I was going to say.
That which is given has no value. Is the journey or the destination more important?
There are all sorts of philosophical questions to be asked and, no, I'm not trying to dodge, or say the genie is lying or anything like that. But I can see where literal and truthful "improvement in ever single way" actually still isn't good for people.
You can't change people, and society is based on people. "A perfect society" would largely require a perfect people, so what we're talking about here is rewriting people.
Also, if we want to get metaphysical, is paradise on Earth, or in Heaven? I'm not really qualified to speak on that, but I can say I've seen what the people trying to make Heaven on Earth turn both Earth and the concept of Heaven into. I think it's better to keep them separate, or you end up destroying both.
I want the people to strive for a better society. Taking out some of the steps just doesn't feel right, and it's also basically what the communists do, that ends in disaster every time. Now, I admit, a perfectly valid rebuttal to my stance would be that maybe I just don't have the imagination to imagine a perfect or better world. Maybe I'm too caught up in the way things currently are, the way people currently are. Leftists hit me with that all the time when talking about communism, taxes, poverty, what have you, and there's some merit to that. If you have an actual magic genie, yeah, maybe you could solve some things, and it's not worth getting stuck in our current framework. Maybe my thinking is wrong on this.
But, still, instinctively this just feels like a cheat, and I don't even think it would be good for people in the long wrong. Flipping a switch and fixing society? You're either taking away free will and rewiring people, which I find abhorrent, or they won't have learned anything and, in another one hundred years, we'll have spiraled back into degeneracy the likes of which humanity has never seen. And I do mean never.
People need to figure things out on their own. That's a bit part of why we're here.
Why can’t anyone just answer the question? lol
If I wanted to to just follow orders and do what people who quietly hate me tell me to do, I'd have joined the Dem run military.
OP has already dropped the mask, he doesn't respect us, maybe even hates us. He's out there in other threads lying to long time users faces and trolling them calling them fake Christians for complaining about Israel. I think it was always his intent to plant insidious ideas about how suicide is good and noble and to stifle effective realism.
No.
For one, if the world owes me nothing, I owe nothing to the world.
For two, I have no assurance or knowledge that the Genie is telling me the truth, and there is no feasible way for him to guarantee such. I have no idea of what paradigm he's operating under, so I have to fall back to the old lore of such things, and dealing with such creatures in this manner is a bad fucking idea.
Three, I now know that I exist in a world where magic is fucking real. That changes alot.
Four, even assuming he's operating in good faith, I would still get nothing out of it; I have no children, no wife, and none my relatives have children either. My immediate family line would gain nothing.
What is the "demonstrably better in every possible way"?
Is it what I think is better? Because that is all I would really care about, they can guarantee that the world looks the way I think would be good? Erase (i mean literally every single trace, no history, no books, no people) islam, erase lgbtqia ever existing along the same vein, change history and blacks were immediately killed or sent back to Africa at the end of slavery, etc, etc...
I don't even know if these things are good, but as a tiny window into my mind there, I need to know without a shadow of a doubt that all of these things would be exactly what I think and the way I think the world would be 'better'
Then sure I would, for the happiness and greatness of an earth free from these horrible aspects that drag it down.
Societal improvement is subjective so the question is really just would you force you views on others if you could?
Maybe if your beliefs were actually better you wouldn't need to force them upon others.
It's like that red button parable. Man gives you a box with a red button and says if you press the button you'll get a million dollars but somebody you don't know will die. You press the button and the man shows up with your million then gives the button to somebody you don't know. Ironic. You shouldn't do something to others you wouldn't want other people doing to you.
Also we already have this genie, and he's not even taking Soros' life in exchange for forcing a shitty Soros society on us.
My first answer would be no because you should never trust a djin, but in the spirit of the question I'll assume this genie is in fact trustworthy and all seeing.
I would still say no. My life is too important to me, and no one I know or love will benefit.