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Tetronian comments on Open thread, August 5-11, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion
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If you had a Death Note, what would you do with it?
See if I could get some very old people or otherwise have terminal illnesses volunteer to have their names written in it. We can use that data to experiment more with the note and figure out how it works. The existence of such an object implies massive things wrong with our current understanding of the universe, so figuring that out might be really helpful.
I believe it canonically can't run out of pages, so I'd think hard about how to leverage infinite free paper into world domination.
I don't think you can infinitely fast pull out papers of the death note, so I doubt that you can produce more paper per hour than the average paper factory.
Burn the paper to fuel a turbine. Congratulations you now have infinite free energy.
Then it turns out that Death Note smoke particles retain the magic qualities of the source. Writing one's name in dust with a fingertip becomes fraught with peril.
It may be extremely difficult to remove pages at a fast enough rate for this to be practically useful.
And you've set global warming to continue even beyond the exhaustion of fossil fuels.
The paper is white yes? If we can cover reasonably large areas of land with it it would make a pretty good reflector of solar radiation
You have to make sure nobody writes any names on it.
That's a really good fanfiction idea. I hope you won't mind if I swipe it.
Not at all. Although to some extent I just asked, what would HJPEV do if he got a Death Note?
Harry wasn't even willing to use hoarcruxes. If you won't kill a dying man to make someone else immortal, then you're not going to do it just to throw science at the wall to see what sticks.
True, so this isn't quite what HJPEV would do but more what would he do if he were slighlty less of an absolutist. (Actually has he ever explicitly said in text that he wouldn't do that. I suspect given his attitudes that you are correct, but I'm curious what the textual basis is.)
-- Chapter 39: Pretending to be Wise, Pt 1
Well done. You have just levelled up.
Could someone who downvoted this please tell me why? I was praising a useful thought (WWHJPEVD?).
Nonspecific praise clutters up the thread. Next time, just upvote--it conveys the same information.
Thanks!
The above is a terribly ironic reply.
Why our kind can't cooperate seems relevant. Even nonspecfic praise can create more fuzzy feelings than an upvote.
I think the fanfiction could be quite good at explaining to people modern cryptography and anonymity.
Also could examine concepts of personal identity, e.g. if someone converts and changes their name does the note recognise only the birth name or the new one? What about trans people who change names? You could ahve people tactically altering their self conception to avoid the effects of the note...
How do you recruit the volunteers without giving away that you have a death note and some secret service wanting to take it away from you?
Alternately, you could have a codemned criminal slip and break his neck on the way to the lethal injection.
If I found something I thought was a Death Note I would spend a long, long time meditating on the question of how and in what way I'd gone insane.
Actually, I think most of the measure of people having Death Notes is... in Death Note itself. Thus, if I had a Death Note, I would logically conclude that the most likely explanation is that I myself am a character in Death Note. Not in the original manga, of course, as I read that and I know I wasn't in it, but likely in some spin-off. I could easily see myself as a character in some sort of Death Note video game/simulation.
I am on the fence about the Simulation Argument, but even so, this is exactly the kind of thing which is strong evidence that I am a fictional character in a simulation. Getting a Death Note? That's the kind of thing that only happens in stories!
(OK, it is true that I should keep in mind the possibility that I simply have gone insane. That is also a reasonable explanation. But it is far from the overwhelming certainty that you are implying.)
After finding a volunteer with a terminal illness, I'd test the limits of it. E.g. "The person will either write a valid proof of P=NP or a valid proof that P!=NP and then die of a heart attack."
Already tested by Light in the manga, IIRC; the limits of skill top out before things like 'escape from maximum-security prison', so P=NP is well beyond the doable.
Ah, I've only seen the anime.
I'd also try "The person will die of cause A if X is true, and cause B if X is false" and other ways to try to push the burden of skill onto whatever mysterious universal forces are working instead of the human.
He tries it in the anime too. (I watched that episode yesterday.) He tries things like "draw a picture of L on your cell wall and then die of a heart attack" on some evil prisoner. It doesn't work.
That's clever, and should be tried.
It might even be possible to jam up the system with a sufficiently hard to compute death requirement, though I'm not sure I'd want to try it. The death note is rather valuable.
This probably violates a forum rule. Though I will speculate that Light's plan of trying to kill all criminals he sees named probably does way more harm than good even if you ignore the fact that some are innocent.
I would refrain from discussing it in a public forum like this one.
I'm sorry, but you've already communicated information about this sort of thing just by saying that.
Note that this in no way contradicts ygert's claim.
Assuming for the moment the magic of the death note prevents me researching and reverse engineering it in any way:
I'd research the people who's death is most likely to result in positive outcomes and kill them. Off the top of my head I'd go for current dictators and their immediate underlings. For example right now killing Robert Mugabe and the upper echelons of Zanu PF is probably the best thing that could happen to Zimbabwe (at time of writing he has just 'won' an election and the opposition are already mobilised, so a slight push is all that is really needed to collapse the regime).
Ideally, if I could ensure suitable anonymity protections I would publicly declare my intentions to have them killed in such a way that identifies me as the killer (e.g. send media outlets a statement with the exact time of targets death). Once my threats have be shown to be sufficiently reliable I will start making them conditional, giving myself the ultimate political blackmailing machine (e.g. if the international Red Cross does not have credible evidence within 30 days that all detention camps in North Korea have been closed and prisoners released, every member of the people's congress will die simultaneously). Assuming I can maintain my anonymity in the long run I would be able to do a significant amount of good.
What do you do if North Korea put's out a press release that they will nuke Seoul as a reprisal if you kill all members of the congress?
Take a big company like, say, goldman-sachs. Buy out of the money put options. Death-note the top three or four layers of management, simultaneously. Use the millions of dollars you have appropriated for whatever.
What do you tell the SEC when they asked you why you brought the options for Goldman Sachs?
Tell them the options were bought on the advice of a psychic reading. Or an Ouija board. Given that people know of the Death Note, they would suspect you to be the holder of the Death Note. Without that suspicion, it's just a massive coincidence.
Alternatively, buy the options as part of a hedge, or as part of a variety of out of the money put options, or as part of any other broad investment strategy. If you get hundred-to-one returns, if it's 5% of your portfolio then you still have five-to-one returns, which is plenty.
If we're happy to go full evil then killing world leaders is also a good way to disrupt the economy (see the sudden crash when a fake report of Obama being shot was released).
That's likely to cause more collateral damage than merely taking out the leadership of one company. Cost/benefit analysis and whatnot.
Gambling on sporting events is probably another good way to use the Death Note for making money. It's probably far more ethical. Does the Death Note work on horses? If so, then you can bet on longshots while sabotaging the favorites by killing horses.
LOL. That's a theme that is very well explored in fiction.
Hint: it's not as crystal clear as you think it is.
I agree with your conclusion that it is not crystal clear, but because the ends don't justify the means (for humans), and not by appealing to fictional evidence.
Discussing hypothetical violence towards real people is out of bounds on this forum.
I request that the moderators, if they have not done so already, consider the acceptability of this whole thread.
So far only two (or possibly three) of the comments on this thread have done that, unless you count euthanasia of volunteers with terminal illnesses as violence (which sounds very noncentral to me).
Explicitly not post on LessWrong what I would do, or even divulge its existence to anyone, naturally.
[Deliberately pretending not to have read the other replies.]
Either sell it to the highest bidder and give the money in equal parts to MIRI and GiveWell's top recommended charity, or burn it, depending on the instantaneous level of strength of my ethical inhibitions. Most likely the latter.
EDIT: No, the former sounds like an awful idea on further thought. I'd just burn it down.
In so doing you are destroying important evidence about the state of the world which would deeply affect MIRI's mission. (Namely: There are alien teenagers and/or other types of dark lords about.)
There's probably no point in trying to create FAI if we're already living in a simulation.
See the part in square brackets at the top of my comment.