It really depends. For example, if you walk 1m, then 0.5m, then 0.25m and continue infinitely, then “after infinity” you will have walked exactly 2m. This is the classic ‘Achilles and turtle’ example and works fine if the value converges. It’s just mathematics.

There is only a problem if the value diverges. Imagine the step example, but on even steps, you raise a blue flag, and on odd steps you raise a red flag. Now the question what flag is raised “after infinity” is impossible to answer. It clearly should be either red or blue, but it also can’t really be either, because that would mean infinity is either even or odd, which makes no sense.

You’re assuming the collatz conjecture holds, which is unknown.

But even if it does hold, you do understand the second problem, right? 1 can not possibly be the outcome, because whenever there is a 1 in that infinite loop, it is followed by a 4. And if 1 is the outcome, then it wasn’t done infinitely, because otherwise there must have been a 4 afterwards. The same argument holds for 4 and 2 as well. So we’re stuck in the reality that it would have to be one of those numbers, but it also can’t really be one of those numbers. It’s paradoxical.

There are two super interesting problems in here.

One is: would you bet human lives on a conjecture being true? The collatz conjecture does hold for every number we have tried, but there have been conjectures that were disproven with a very large counterexample. You could kill countless humans if wrong, so even if you think the chance of a counterexample is low, is it low enough to outweigh that potentially very hight value counterexample?

The second one is: Let’s say the collatz conjecture holds, and the number of passsengers just loops 4 -> 2 -> 1 -> 4 -> 2 -> 1 eventually. What is the ‘final’ number, when the trolley is done with the infinite loops? It can’t be 1, because that is always followed by a 4. And it can’t be 4 because it’s always followed by 2 and so on. But it has to be one of those, because any other number is not possible. It reminds me of the Vsauce Video Supertasks, which comes to the conclusion that we can’t know the answer to these type of questions.

So in conclusion, flipping the switch will either give you an arbitrarily large number of deaths, or an unknown number of deaths. Fun!

For anyone too lazy to try it themselves: the photo is actually real and you can get it as an answer on Akinator

Isaac Adni - I Wanna Be a Duck

I’m not expecting Avengers to be worth watching either, but it is still a movie with a huge budget that I think a whole bunch of people will see, unfortunately.

Dune 3 and Avengers: Doomsday are both launching on december 18th, and I have heard the two of them be referred to as “Dunesday”!

Where my phone placed the new line was truly a rollercoaster:

Japan’s Birth Rate Set to Break Even

Wow, breaking even? Finally looking up for japan!

… the Bleakest Forecasts

Oh no.

This is the second leak-type-meme I’ve stumbled across and now I’m hooked

Super interesting that you enjoy fiction so much. What I struggle with most is that visual language is often very dense in information, but I can’t do a lot with it. Imagine something like this:

“Light spilled in through the high windows, tinting the hallway into beautiful autumn colors. It looked as if the sunlight was dancing, but of course nothing moved except the dust suspended in the air.”

I would read this and think: cool, I bet this would look amazing if I could see it, but all the information I can actually use from these sentences is “A hallway has high windows, it’s maybe morning or evening”. Everything else is either visual or obvious to me. So fiction books are more exhausting, because I constantly filter out things that I can’t really use. It’s like I’m reading a text where a person constantly rambles and can’t get to the damn point. I’m really curious how or why this is different for you? Another thing I find annoying is, that usually when reading fiction books, you constantly have to amend your mental model. I presume this is relatively easy for people without aphantasia, although I might be wrong. Let me explain with this example:

“blah” said A. “blah?” B responded. A said “blah blah” as he stood up from his chair. “blah!” B said back, while A turned right and walked out the door.

This order is the exact opposite my brain expects. I’d like know the room layout and who is sitting/standing where first, then the characters can interact with each other in my already complete internal model. This might be a me-thing, but if non-aphantasia people can image images as easy as I can imagine sounds, making changes to the model must be super easy.

Also, I do think fiction books and non-fiction history books are very different. Simply because an author can build a world, story and characters to convey some deeper meaning or overarching theme, or use strong imagery or metaphores. All of that is more uncommon for historic books from my experience. The above example in a history book would probably look something more like “Orange light entered the hallway through the high windows”. And even if non-fiction history books were similar to fiction, history is a tiny part of non-fiction! There are tons of other subcategories that differ greatly from fiction.

game recognize game

And how in the hell does one […] enjoy a book, if they’re not a #1?!

I can only speak for myself (#5) here, but I can barely enjoy books. If they’re any sort of fiction, where I have to imagine a world, characters, objects, … it’s very exhausting. I read fiction books in school, but haven’t picked up a fiction book out of my own will in years. But I do enjoy non-fiction books, especially when they convey Ideas you don’t need (or maybe can’t) picture visually.

Side note: I found people who read a lot (of fiction) often being critical of movie adaptations. I never understood this, because even ‘meh’ movies offer a far superior experience than just reading the book to me. It took me a while to realize that movie adaptations are a kind of ‘disability aid’ to my aphantasia.

Y

I mean most pcgamers probably have more powerful hardware already

According to Valve, it should outperform or match 70% of current PCs owned by gamers. So while not crazy powerful, it might be an affordable (hopefully) upgrade for some more low spec gamers.

That’s exactly right, you got it!

The intermediary probabilities make it even worse, yes! But the overall probability is already ridiculously tiny, so I don’t think it changes the conclusion by a lot.

That was my assumption, yes. Because the last person would have the entire population on the tracks, and you can’t really continue after that.

I neglected the intermediary likelihoods, because that calculation was too long for wolfram alpha, but I have since managed to get it working, and the conclusion is not significantly different. The expected number of deaths skyrockets, even if the chance of pulling the lever is tiny for every person.

I think you should pull the lever, even if this ended after the entire human population was on the track and the experiment doesn’t go on infinitely. Hear me out:

When a person pulls the lever with a chance of 50% and in one case they kill 2 people and in the other case 0, the kind of average outcome is 0.5 * 2 + (1 - 0.5) * 0 = 1. Now let’s consider the last person in the chain of decision-makers. They would have 2^33 people on the tracks, or about the entire human population. To make the expected outcome be exactly one person, they’d have to pull the lever with likelihood x so that x * 2^33 + (1 - x) * 0 = 1 which would lead to x = 1/2^33 or about x≈0.0000000001. So only if the last person directs the train towards the people with less than this tiny chance, the expected outcome is smaller than 1. This chance is incredibly small, and far far smaller than I’d guess the actual percentage is. Think of the percentage of people that are psychopaths, or mass murderers, or maybe even just clumsy. If you evaluate the percentage as someone flipping that switch as anything above 1/2^33, you should therefore flip the switch yourself. You can guarantee that the outcome is ‘only’ one death, whereas the average outcome of just the last person likely exceeds 1 by a huge amount.

I really wanted to calculate the percentage so that the expected outcome is 1 even if every person in the chain flips the switch with that chance, but wolfram alphas character limit let me down :(

Die ständig wechselnde Unsicherheit, ob man den Anschluss noch bekommt, ist ultra nervig.

War letztens auch in der Bahn, und ob ich noch früh genug für den Bus ankommen würde hat bei jeder Haltestelle geschwankt. Letztendlich war die Bahn zwei Minuten vorm Bus da, ich könnte es also knapp schaffen. Ich leg einen Sprint bis zur Haltestelle hin, nur um festzustellen: Da, wo die Bushaltestelle auf der Karte markiert ist, ist nichts. Ich warte kurz, suche dann in der Umgebung, und finde raus, dass die Haltestelle mit einem Bauprojekt versetzt wurde, was aber auf der Karte nicht angezeigt wird. Hab den Bus also verpasst. Nächster Bus? In 2 Stunden. Bin dann die 5km zu Fuß, war schneller.

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