zibibboD

"Okay, so imagine a magic button." "I'm imagining the button." "If you press the button—" "What color is it?" "It's the only button. It doesn't matter what color it is." "Nah, I ain't falling for that again. Last time there was a red button and a blue button—" "That's a different thought experiment." "—and I tried to be a nice guy and pick blue so I could save everybody, but it turns out ya'll a bunch of selfish motherfuckers and I died." "It wasn't buttons. It was pills." "Don't care. I'm out for me this time. What color is the button?" "Ugh, fine. It's red." "I press the button." "You don't even know what it does yet!" "And I pull the trolley lever." "There's no lever!" "Bias for Action." "Just listen: there's a button that lets you save 10^100 shrimp, but it kills one random person. Would you press it?" "What flavor are the shrimp? "Flavor?" "Yeah, you know: garlic, Old Bay, Korean BBQ." "You're saving the shrimp, not eating them!" "Saving them for what?" "For nothing. They get to live their lives." "What? Just doin' shrimp stuff?" "Yeah." "How long do shrimp live?" "Uh, it depends on the species? 1-2 years?" "And then what happens?" "They die." "That seems like a waste." "How is that a waste? They got to live full lives." "Weren't you just telling me last week that bees live in perpetual agony and we should commit insect omnicide to free from the suffering of the flesh?" "Yeah, but that was last week. This week I read a new Snubstack post with a math equation in it and believe something totally different." "Uh huh." "It's called updating your priors." "Okay, well here's my updated prior: I press the button, let the shrimp live for a year, and then I eat them." "What?" "All of them." "You can't eat 10^100 shrimp." "I freeze the leftovers." "You would need a freezer bigger than the universe!" "Really?" "Yes! 10^100 is more than all the atoms in the observable universe!" "Okay, then I have a freezer bigger than the universe." "You can't just—" "No, wait. Three freezers. One for each flavor." "You can't just make up three freezers!" "Why not?" "It's a hypothetical!" "Yeah I hypothetically have three big ass freezers." "The point—" "If you get to throw out a big ass number of shrimp, I get to have some big ass freezers. Maytag freezers." "The point of the hypothetical—" "I've always been a Maytag Man." "The point of the hypothetical is to interrogate our moral intuitions!" "Yeah well the only thing I want to interrogate right now is a Red Lobster menu." "I don't think you're engaging with this in good faith." "Wait, I got a new hypothetical. A counterfactual even." "Oh really." "You know what I would've done differently if I knew you were gonna hit me with this mouthwatering supper-time supposition?" "What?" "I would've had breakfast this morning." "Fuck you."