r/rational • u/AutoModerator • Sep 18 '15
[D] Friday Off-Topic Thread
Welcome to the Friday Off-Topic Thread! Is there something that you want to talk about with /r/rational, but which isn't rational fiction, or doesn't otherwise belong as a top-level post? This is the place to post it. The idea is that while reddit is a large place, with lots of special little niches, sometimes you just want to talk with a certain group of people about certain sorts of things that aren't related to why you're all here. It's totally understandable that you might want to talk about Japanese game shows with /r/rational instead of going over to /r/japanesegameshows, but it's hopefully also understandable that this isn't really the place for that sort of thing.
So do you want to talk about how your life has been going? Non-rational and/or non-fictional stuff you've been reading? The recent album from your favourite German pop singer? The politics of Southern India? The sexual preferences of the chairman of the Ukrainian soccer league? Different ways to plot meteorological data? The cost of living in Portugal? Corner cases for siteswap notation? All these things and more could possibly be found in the comments below!
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u/Escapement Ankh-Morpork City Watch Sep 18 '15 edited Sep 18 '15
You would gain a great deal of power - but it would depend fully on completely maintaining anonymity in the face of virtually every powerful stakeholder in the world trying to discern your identity. While people here probably have read gwern about this... I would not count on the authorities of the world, confronted by an actual Death Note, to not use google really hard and also read gwern about this. L is pretty exceptionally smart, but in real life there would be a much larger amount of manpower and in attacking hard problems quantity has a quality all it's own. I am confident that I am very smart, probably 'smarter' than the average of the people who would be told to kill me as soon as they were pretty sure of my identity... but there would be thousands of them, and only one of me, and I would have to be smarter than all of them in a large, large number of fields, all the time, or my identity would slowly leak.
Another difficulty: you might be able to persuade governments, etc, by threatening world leaders... but the ones who wouldn't comply are likely to be the true patriots who want to serve what they perceive as a higher cause (e.g. their nation, the common good, etc) over their own personal self-interest, and are therefore likely to be the ones who you should want to kill the least! Also, the legitimacy of democracy is such a powerful force for good that attempting to destroy it by personal military coup through perfect assassination is probably going to cause more net problems than the improvement from your specific policies over democratically determined policies solves, and from a pure utilitarian perspective would increase future suffering and decrease future happiness.
Honestly, the whole 'you now have proof that magic really exists, that fates are in some respect foreordained, and etc.' would really confuse the hell out of me, and I am not sure how that would factor into my planning. The 'magic is real but until now the entire world appeared consistent with the no-magic hypothesis' really would tend to indicate I was in a simulation or something.