[blue]
If you could push a button that gives you a hundred thousand dollars but a random person dies, would you do it?
[yellow, cautious]
Interesting thought experiment… intuitively, I’d say no, but it’s worth thinking about… it’s a genuine moral dilemma in a capitalist world: there’s a dialectic between our desires and the common good…
MEANWHILE, BILLIONAIRES
[an orange guy in a suit is shown with a terrifying grin pushing as many buttons as possible at once on a table, slamming one of the buttons, and even using their foot to press an extra one]
https://thebad.website/comic/the_totally_hypothetical_button_thought_experiment
The more I look at this, the more unhinged it becomes. None of the buttons are organized, the billionaire has a giant toe for a foot, and I keep thinking the billionaire has six fingers instead of five.
Prefect amount of unhingedness. 10/10.
billionaire would hire multiple persons to press the button and give the money to them while paying basically nothing for it.
Billionaire would press the button for 100 bucks, then spend 100 times the amount in a pair of shoes he’ll never wear.
one of the better episodes of the 80s Twilight Zone “Button, Button”
$100,000 could easily be used to save ~20 people from death. I’d press at least like 40 times and donate half to charities that save people from easily preventable diseases and shit in developing countries. Use some to buy a house for me and a house for my mom and then put the rest in various accounts where I and my mom could live off the interest for the rest of our lives.
I would press it at least ten times. A hundred times would also be tempting. There are eight billion people in the world. Chances are I won’t know anyone who dies.
the next person who gets to press the button doesnt know you either, thats the trick
And even if you know them, once you reach a certain amount of money you won’t care anymore about the serfs.
You could still not press the button for selfish reasons.
“I’m not pressing it because there is a chance the random person who dies is me.”
i mean, give me a 90% chance of kills me and i’m still pressing the button.
Hell, give me a 100% chance. That’d solve more of my problems than amount of money.
1 in 8 billion is pretty good odds though.
Exactly. Look at the odds of winning the NYS Powerball. 1 in 292,201,338 and I’ve lost so many lotto tickets. By all rights I should be able to press this button at least 30 times without any fear whatsoever. 100 times is still far below any risk of danger. If I or someone I know were to die after pressing this button 100 times it would be proof that God has a vendetta against me. He would have discarded mathematical probability just to make me suffer.
Depending on how rich you are, $100,000 might do exactly nothing to your lifestyle, but dying would.
Risk reward. Someone with nothing, but living in an extremely low cost of living area, might end up with life changing, never have to work again money (assuming it’s able to be used with no loopholes), but a billionaire couldn’t even find the change buried in their day to day noise of the market changes.
Once you’re a billionaire, no amount of money will impact your lifestyle, but they keep hoarding wealth anyway.
There are people who become billionaires and it’s not their fault. They inherited money, or their company explodes and is suddenly worth ungodly money, so I don’t necessarily subscribe to the idea that there’s no way for a moral person to become a billionaire.
But there’s absolutely no moral excuse for remaining a billionaire or seeking additional wealth.
Honestly, a billionaire would probably hire people to push the button for them.
They’d minimize explaining what the button does, and then pay them like $100,000 a year to push the button 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year.
But that’s the joke?
You’re describing reality.
Why would they get payed that much? this is unskilled labor, they get minimum wage.
That, or they hire an undocumented immigrant for even less. Extra bonus because they can’t read the sign that explains the killing thing.
I was basing it off of an estimated $15 an hour minimum wage, which is pretty common in a couple of states, where there tend to be more billionaires.
15 times 24 times 365 is like $130,000.
Oh no, that’s what salaries are for. That way they pay them for 8 hours of work still.
This should be celebrated though, because they get to go home early if all the work gets done.*
.*The work is done when the billionaire has enough ** money.
**Enough is defined as every particle of matter being converted into wealth for the god emperor formally known as billionaire.
One person would get through 1 billion people in 30 years. It would take 120 people pushing it every second of the year to make it a 50/50 that billionaire is killed.
Exactly, just create the conditions and system so that not pushing the button results in poverty and people will line up to push it
Random person might include the billionaire though.
Does that stop them from destroying the environment? These people are built on hubris.
What makes them people?
More interesting (and more realistic) if it isn’t a guarantee that someone dies if you push the button, but a probability.
Would you push the button if it was a 20% chance someone dies? A 5% chance? A 1% chance? 0.1%? Is there a number where it’s ok to push the button? If it was a 0.0001% chance, how many times would you push the button?
Also, does it change things if you know that your button push resulted in someone’s death? Is it different if it’s someone standing right there? Maybe on the other side of a one-way mirror? What if it’s just that you get a green light or a red light after you push the button and you don’t have to see someone die or know who died or how they died?
I’d say at sub-0.1% chances of killing someone, I’d press with impunity. At those low probabilities, they’ve basically just got hit by lightning at the same time I’ve pressed a random button.
Granted I’d probably only do it whenever the 100K ran out, so once every couple years. Unless my investments die.
deleted by creator
such a low probability overall you probably up on the whole deal if you use that money to help other people.
Depends a lot on how you’re helping them and what you’re doing with the rest. If you’re spending like a typical American (or Canadian) you’re doing a lot of environmental damage with your day-to-day life so you’re killing people incrementally with that lifestyle.
Without a doubt.
It sounds disturbingly utilitarian
I think that’s what makes this thought experiment interesting: Even with the guarantee that someone dies instantly (the worst case), you can figure out how many lives can be saved with 100k dollars, and from a utilitarian perspective, you’ll probably end up with a net positive of lives saved (you can probably save more than one life for 100 k). From a purely utilitarian perspective, you could even calculate the expectation value of lives saved / lost for each button press (provided all the money goes to saving lives), and figure out the exact number of button presses that is the morally “correct” choice. In that sense, this thought experiment can demonstrate the absurdity of utilitarianism when taken to the extreme: Most people would agree that it’s morally defensible to sacrifice one person to save one million, but when you do this calculation, you could end up with the result that you should sacrifice a million people to save ten million, which I think most people would find questionable.
how many lives can be saved with 100k dollars
Is keeping someone alive enough to balance the books? Does the quality of their life matter? What if they’re alive but living in a refugee camp?
From a purely utilitarian perspective, you could even calculate the expectation value of lives saved / lost
I don’t think you can, not without making massive assumptions. Lives lost directly might be easy if the button is labelled “0.1% chance of killing someone”. But, what if you spend your $100k on driving a light truck which emits a lot of pollution, which in turn contributes a tiny amount to the deaths of a lot of people?
And, for lives saved, say you do it in a pretty easy to calculate way, donating food to people who would die without that food. Is that where the calculation ends? What if that person goes on to help other people? Or what if that person goes on to become a soldier and kill people.
I don’t think it’s at all realistic to try to calculate an expectation value of lives saved / lost with any accuracy except through the most direct effects.
the absurdity of utilitarianism when taken to the extreme
I guess that’s what I’m getting at.
Also factor in when they die. Maybe your action results in a demise after a period of time. Lung Cancer won’t kill someone right after they puff a cigarette, so the cigarette baron may not consider it his fault in the sort term.
It isn’t the “cigarette baron’s” fault any more than the beer baron’s fault or the parachute maker’s fault. Some people are going to die if they choose to indulge in mildly risky behavior. If the scenario is something like this, everyone here will be pushing that button. Don’t say you won’t because you will.
Yeah, that would be an interesting twist. 100% chance that pushing the button kills someone, but it might happen in 2 years or it might happen in 30 years. But, even if someone lives a perfectly normal life for 30 years, their cause of death will be this button.
Well, driving to work is basically that. Non zero chance someone dies.
same could be said about taking a steamy shit on the toilet. 8-10% of all cardiac emergencies happen in the bathroom.
sometimes you get the stinky fudge dragon, other times the stinky fudge dragon gets you.
Though the chance someone other than you dies from you taking a shit is pretty far fetched, and I’m not liking having to try to conceive of how that happens.
But a lot of activities are this way. Getting on a ladder in public could kill someone, just breathing around other people could kill someone, etc etc.
Yeah. Non-zero chance your car’s emissions kill someone too.
The problem with statistics is that 20% of people in a large population absolutely will die. At least in the context of this meme, the statistics used are gathered from real world data - deaths from cancer, lack of treatment, poor working conditions.
100% of people in a large population absolutely will die. I don’t know why you think some people are immortal. I also don’t know what that has to do with this meme.
Apologies to all the foot fetishists, I eventually gave up trying and thus have failed you.
Guess I have new anatomy lessons to grind. Shit’s hard yo.
I like that it’s not a realistic human foot. Sometimes art should capture the idea of a thing rather than just the superficial image of the thing, you know? It has character.
I’ll keep that one in mind, next time someone criticizes my anatomy I’ll tell them “son, it has character”.
Actually I need to repeat that bit to myself until I am convinced. Feels like a healthy mantra.
next time someone criticizes my anatomy I’ll tell them “son, it has character”.
You managed to create the most disturbing non-ai foot I’ve seen today, so that’s nice
Love the comics!
AIs have become decent at anatomy these days, haven’t they?
That’s one job they won’t take from us in the long term, finding new ways to mess up drawings. I’m always a step ahead.
‘They’ have not. They cannot learn and have no skills.
They have competent artist content fed into the massive pile of numbers they compute output with, though, so they can output things that look like competently drawn feet.
AIs have become decent at anatomy these days, haven’t they?
Maybe so, I don’t really follow that progress
I have a nose fetish, and you suck…
Foot: just a stupid, broken hand with tiny fingers and a super fucked up fused wrist. What’s so hard about that? (This is a joke, my foot drawings also look fucked. What even are feet?)
A streamer artist guy says pretty often that you can spend as much time on a foot as the entire rest of the character. Apparently that’s how difficult feet are to draw properly lol
Rob Liefeld has entered the chat
You could do a version where he’s wearing shoes and is fully on the button board, chair discarded in the background and he’s basically just playing Twister with the button board
hundred thousand? naw.
hundred million. sure. I could actually do some good for the world with that.
I would troll the fuckin shit out of billionaires and shitty corpofascist with every penny.
Think about how much more you could troll them if you turned that into a billion! Besides, you’ve got bills to pay. And these taxes are obscene, that money has already been taxed a thousand times! You’ve taken on quite the burden and deserve to live a little.
You’d have to kill 10,000 people to become a billionaire this way. Obvious fact perhaps, but it’s easy to forget how unnecessarily much a billion dollars is.
You’d have to kill 10,000 people to become a billionaire
You could have just stopped there.
It’d probably still be true, recognizing that billionaires tend to indirectly kill at least that many just from the artificial scarcity required for their hoarding of resources and THEN you add the direct results of their specific actions…
Even 50million is an extreme amount of money.
Shit, a couple hundred grand is life changing for most people.
Replied to the wrong comment
He can afford foreshortening and detailed hands, in a stickman world‽ His greed sickens me.
I’d hope it would take a lot more than $100,000 for most people. That won’t even get you a house.
It’d get me a sizable down payment on a house with a bit left for expenses. Which is basically the only hurdle to me owning a house at this point. Not that I would kill someone for it… At least not a random person. There’s people I’d kill for money.
I’d probably push it a few times I have some very generalized anger issues
I actually just thought about this same analogy a bit ago. Most normal people it would be a hard no, but there are some out there that would do it for $1k and their first question would be “can i hook it up to an auto-clicker?”
Most normal people it would be a hard no
You have a lot more faith in humans than I do. If nobody would know, I’d be shocked if more than 50% said no.
