Comment on Stupid Questions March 2015

Wed, 04 Mar 2015 12:09:55 GMT

I agree that learning trivia for the sake of learning trivia isn't all that instrumentally useful, but don't a lot of people around here already know enough to generate the necessary trivia, especially since shows with clues like Jeopardy, and also shows with multiple-choice questions like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire are designed to allow deductive reasoning? I anticipate that at least a quarter of the LW population could get most of the clues on a game of Jeopardy right without any further training. One could test his ability to do so by simply watching a show from home and trying to answer all the clues/questions.

And besides, if a utilitarian sees a way to save potentially dozens of people by gaining money to donate to effective charities, does it matter if they would have to do things that would be a waste of time if not for the arbitrary but still very real chance of gaining money from doing so? Isn't that reason enough on its own?

I'm sure there are plenty of other things to take into consideration than simply the ability to win on game shows, such as potential status loss for appearing and higher potential status loss for losing, personal reasons to not want to go on national TV, etc., but this just seems like such an obvious thing to try to exploit for altruistic or even just personal purposes.

Discuss