Complex Numbers

Lost in Thought Experiments

Well, April 1 is here. Remember, folks, pranks are only funny if they're not played on me.

Today's article is arguably funny, but it's not a prank; it's from Cracked:

    4 Dumb Thought Experiments That Need to Be Eradicated From the Hivemind  

Even though the thought experiment in theory is supposed to be a pure philosophical discussion — a conundrum cooked up to change your viewpoint on an issue in a compelling way — it’s lost a little bit of that shine, especially thanks to the internet.

Thought experiments have some limitations. That's why they should be left to professionals. Kind of like comedy.

Of course, a good thought experiment is a wonderful thing to kick around the old noggin. You’ve got your classic trolley problem, which only becomes more prescient now that cars are driving themselves (terribly).

People make fun of the trolley problem (and sometimes, rightly so), but it's not just autonomous vehicles that use it as a model. Pretty much any intervention can be likened to a trolley problem: Some large number x of people will face negative consequences if we do nothing; if we do something, some smaller number y will face negative consequences. Difficulty: y is not necessarily a subset of x.

As for AVs, that's a separate rant that I'll probably update at some point.

In particular, here are five thought experiments that the world doesn’t need and nobody asked for…

Four. Dang editors.

4. Buridan’s Ass

Ba-donka-donk.

The ass in question is a boring old donkey, who is starving, and standing equidistant between two bales of identical hay, each precisely as easy to reach and eat as the other.

I'm just going to pause here so you can get ass puns out of your system.

Ready?

Okay:

The question is, which bale of hay does the donkey choose, or — and this is a real situation people present — would the donkey simply be torn by indecision so deeply that it starves.

No. Come the fuck on.

3. The Life You Can Save

Here’s the gist of it: If you were walking in your expensive work clothes and saw a drowning child, would you jump in to save them, even if it would ruin your fancy clothes? The answer to this, unless you are a sharply dressed sociopath, is obviously yes.

No, because while I learned how to swim as a child, I've forgotten everything about it. I jump in, regardless of what I'm wearing, there'll be two victims instead of one. Including, most importantly, me.

But alas! By answering yes you have fallen into Singer’s great trap! Because by the same belief, how could you freely spend money the way you do while a child starves somewhere else in the world! You are undone! How does that petard feel, dummy! This is the most grandiose false equivalence bullshit I’ve ever heard, and it’s created in service of something everybody already understands anyways: Yes, it’s easy to dehumanize people when you can’t directly see them.

All of these things are Not My Problem.

2. Roko’s Basilisk

This is, beyond the merest shadow of a doubt, the stupidest, inanest (?) excuse for a thought experiment ever concocted. I won't even dignify it with further comments or explanation. If you want to learn about it, there's the link up there, or just Google it.

1. Hamlet Monkeys

As much as I love monkeys, I never need to hear this tired-ass “thought experiment” ever again. It’s one of a whole smorgasbord of hypothetical situations created to constantly try to reinforce the idea that yes, infinity really does mean infinity. It’s a delightful mental picture, but it’s wholly unnecessary. If someone doesn’t understand that infinite time creates infinite possibilities, best of luck to them.

If you love monkeys, you've never been around monkeys. Here's the thing most people get wrong about this one: the original formulation is this:

The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type any given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare. (Wikipedia)

This has gotten twisted over time into, instead of "infinite," "very large." And there's the problem: "very large" is still infinitely smaller than "infinite." While it's quite droll to observe that the idiocy you find on the internet disproves the infinite monkey theorem, we're only talking about a few billion apes (not monkeys) typing for the last, oh, let's be liberal here, fifty years. Neither of these numbers is anywhere even close to approaching infinity. So we shouldn't feel too bad that we haven't been able to surpass Shakespeare.

Well, some of us haven't. Cracked sometimes comes close.