You get to choose to press a button. 1 out of 100 times, the button electrocutes you to death. 99 out of 100 times, the button dispenses money.
You can press the button as many times as you want. What is your price?
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You get to choose to press a button. 1 out of 100 times, the button electrocutes you to death. 99 out of 100 times, the button dispenses money.
You can press the button as many times as you want. What is your price?
I choose not to do this.
How much money?
that one directed at me or did you overlook the poll part which has the different money options?
I'll just need tree-fiddy.
Is that a quick, painless death?Quote:
Originally Posted by Renton
who teh fuck voted over a milly?
The brackets are set too low, so I obv chose the open ended top bracket. I'm thinking 10 digits +
And I'm paying a team of top experts to thoroughly examine the machine to make sure it's not doling out > 1% insta deaths.
I'm voting infinity I guess. I can't feel myself getting excited enough about instacash to risk a 1%er. nit4lypheQuote:
Originally Posted by bikes
Didn't see the poll, Now I will reassess
Edit: 250,000 is too low but close to a mill I may have to take it.
I chose between 250-750. Seems reasonable, although its hard to put into words why I think I fit in that bracket.
The way I imagined it, no, but if it changes your answer substantially, sure.Quote:
Originally Posted by bigred
It's like when you're going to put a condom on and the one night stand says, "no, it's ok, you don't need that, I'm on the pill..." Just because you can push the button as many times as you want doesn't mean you should...Quote:
Originally Posted by bikes
I'd push it once for $775,000.
meh. abstain, but over a mil if i have to.
I have a family, and when you have dependents it changes you in ways you couldn't understand so I'll just keep hammering on that button until sweet relief comes.
The poll option of "never pushing at any price" needs to be added.
But can you risk your life when your family depends on you?Quote:
Originally Posted by d0zer
By sweet relief, do you mean death to relieve you of your duties?
I love this response.Quote:
Originally Posted by d0zer
But my answer is no amount of money would make me press this button.
Yes, thanks for making me spell out my bad joke :xQuote:
Originally Posted by eugmac
I thought it was an awesome joke and eugmac failing it made it even funnier.Quote:
Originally Posted by d0zer
clearly i am the only one in ftr who places such a low value on life @_@
clearly
+1Quote:
Originally Posted by Galapogos
in the words of professor hubert j farnsworthQuote:
Originally Posted by givememyleg
there is no scientific consensus that life is important!
Doesn't matter. If I die, I'm dead. Otherwise, riiiiiiiich!
You're being wreckless.Quote:
Originally Posted by rong
I think the question is flawed because there's nothing forcing me to limit my number. Why settle for 1 mil when I can get 1.5?
gotta laugh at oneself from time to time. +1Quote:
Originally Posted by rong
As of now I plan on making much more than a million between now and the time I die so I voted > that.
Side note- you can't be electrocuted without dying, that's what electrocution is. Also getting shocked to the point you think you're going to die sucks, first hand knowledge. Although I can think of other ways to die that would be worse.
if i didnt have friends and family and the death was painless then logic dictates that any significant amount is acceptable. i couldnt do it tho
Because its hypothetical. Hypothetically, a 1 million button exists only and you have to choose yes or no. Or a 500,000 button, whatever.Quote:
Originally Posted by a500lbgorilla
Quote:
Originally Posted by supa
Poor logic, you are trading 1% of life EV for the money, not 100% or 50%. 99% of the time you'll still live out your life and make the additional million dollars.
I built this scenario as a test of the monetary value of human life among the relatively well-to-do (white people posting on a poker forum). I'm currently staying in Cambodia, where I'm virtually certain the majority of people would press it for as little as 1,500 dollars.
I think this hypothetical scenario is very useful and applicable to everyday life. For example, there are many jobs in the world that carry a significant risk of death or major injury. People enter in voluntary contracts to do these jobs because they believe the money (or the experience of working the job, in cases like military) adequately compensates them for the risk. Construction workers in America who walk along steel beams in high rise buildings are paid a premium for doing so. On the other hand, in Thailand, motorbike taxis get paid incredibly poor amounts for doing one of the riskiest jobs on the planet. Obviously in the first case with the construction workers, they come from a culture that values human life a lot more and thus there is a low supply of that type of labor, driving prices up. In the latter case there are scads of like minded Thais desperate to make a living, creating a labor surplus, which drives prices down.
So the conclusion is that the value of human life is strongly tied to the amount of money and human capital one has. I think those of you who will not push the button for any amount are either full of shit or stupid. There has to be a number, lower than you might think, that is highly plus EV to take, and depending on how the money is used, may even increase your life expectancy to compensate.
Right, you're asking to take the question in good faith. But it's hard when you start to nail down the number.Quote:
Originally Posted by Renton
I expect to make X in 5 years, Y in 10, Z in 20, LOL in 45. It's hard to sit down and suss out the future with any seriousness without a good reason.
Though, I see you brought it up with a solid point to share and I appreciate that; there's a better way to ask it.
You're kinda missing the point here. People living in desperate circumstances with little or no chance of drastically improving their lives are not really comparable to someone like me who's in the top 10% with regard to global wealth and income distribution, has access to great health care, lots of job opportunities and lots of freedom to choose what I do and when I do it not to mention having 2 young children who depend on me, will have access to an excellent education and general life opportunities assuming things stay somewhat the same and are both girls so my death would substantially increase the chances of them working the pole.Quote:
Originally Posted by Renton
i would gladly accept that im stupid for not pressing the button because even though this may look like a logical question its still just a psychological one. if we were dealing with logic purely we would have all killed ourselves long ago
My words were harsh. I just think everyone in this thread probably takes risks on a regular basis for much lower rewards, such as having unprotected sex, drinking and driving, going too long without changing your break pads, etc. I guess a lot of this is because humans lack the capacity to assess risk, so when its written out in black and white "one percent chance to die," that assessment is no longer necessary and we are able to act more rationally (or irrationally in the case of the extreme risk averse).
All those risks combined don't come anywhere close to a 1% chance of death and one of those decisions is by definition made while intoxicated and another often while in intoxicated. I appreciate the reward is greater but still the risk is far too high.
Meh, true for sure but it's different when you're taking life into account. You aren't trading 1% of your life for the money, you are trading 100% of your life 1% of the time.Quote:
Originally Posted by Renton
I'm not really a tourney player but at some point it doesn't make sense to call a shove on the bubble even though you probably have the best hand. I realize we are never folding with 99% on the bubble but real life and tournament life are quite different.
Actively doing something that leads to your death, of which you're cognizant of, is very difficult. As somebody who has been extremely depressed in the past, the only reason I'm not dead is because I would have had to pull the trigger myself, and I simply couldn't muster it up because there is something very fundamentally unappealing about "pushing the button" that creates your existence's end. All the while I wished that an "act of god" would take me out on its own.
If we could somehow make this sort of thing into a choiceless exercise then it would be quite easy to push the button over and over for a low amount. Logically, we all die no matter what, most of the time it's worse than the experience of electrocution, and in the multiverse idea we would be the most logical to still accept a low option and just keep pressing until we're worth 8 figures or something.
Overall it's an impossible to attack idea IMO because it delves into existentialism
interesting question. I actually love these types of hypotheticals.
Here's a similar one: would you take a 50/50 where 50% of the time you lose all of your assets, and 50% of the time you are worth 10x what you started with? It brings into question utility, which is very often underappreciated by poker players in favor of EV (often for good reason, but not always.) And that's another reason why playing the lottery is a fail because it sucks from BOTH EV and utility perspectives.
I have a lot of thoughts about the OP but Renton already said a lot of them lol. not really sure where I would fall right now honestly. It's not exactly an easy number to come up with, but it's definitely less than infinite and well above 0.
yeah my initial thought process was "it is literally impossible for me to regret pushing the button."Quote:
Originally Posted by wufwugy
buuuut something that I don't think I can quite explain/articulate keeps me from pushing it. or rather, I know that the reasoning is not totally rational, but I wanna keep trying at this life thing.
OP, would my life insurance still pay out in the event of my untimely button induced death?
Depends in your insurer.
I always hated it when, when we were playing the what's your price game, the one friend in high school would name ridiculous full of shit prices like "one million dollars" for, say, taking it up the ass. I say this because I think there are people who, for some reason, are unable/unwilling to take hypotheticals seriously and judge even halfway accurately how they'd behave, and I don't think I fall so strongly into that group (although who can say how well they know themselves, I guess).Quote:
I think those of you who will not push the button for any amount are either full of shit or stupid. There has to be a number, lower than you might think, that is highly plus EV to take, and depending on how the money is used, may even increase your life expectancy to compensate.
I think pressing the button for ten cents has to already be +EV, because (as an atheist or whatever) there is no negative consequence to pushing the button that I can see.
I still maintain that I would not/could not push that button with a 1% chance of death. I guess the only reasoning I can offer up is along the same line as wufwugy's -- clearly we've evolved to have an aversion to risking death or we wouldn't still be here. Maybe a better question for me would be setting a fixed price and lowering the 1% death chance as the variable until there's a small enough chance that I'd be willing to push the button. Thinking about it right now though, I think I find it really really hard to nail down any kind of answer to that.
I'd also say (although maybe I'm not thinking this through clearly enough, it's late) that I don't believe I'm at all at high risk of ever dying from lack of money, nor being forced by lack of money into a job/situation where I'm risking immediate death in exchange for money (as in your solider or highrise construction worker examples), which means that pushing the button wouldn't be a case of same shit different odds for me - I'm not at any point balancing death against life but rather I'm balancing death against (what I hold to be fairly minor) improvements to my quality of life.
also if the title was meant to be a pun I totally lol'd. well I did either way, but gj if it was meant to be a pun rather than push-the-button questions being common and having passed me by.
Quote:
Originally Posted by kiwiMark
I think it's more of a social thing with those questions. If people have no fear of judgement or true reprisal for answering the questions, just about everyone will find an honest answer.
But you and I are of a mind on this one.
If I die, I die. All of my houses are in order and even if they weren't, I'd be too dead to care.
But there is much to do and many children to have and that makes me vested in protecting my life against any material cost.
Wait, wait, wait...
Do I get to press the button as many times as I want at any time in my life? Say for example I press it for X and live, then I go busto, can I just press it again, whenever that may be? If this is the case, that drastically lowers my number.
What about living with the knowledge that you were willing to throw it all away for 10 cents?Quote:
Originally Posted by kiwiMark
This is a serious question. I wonder what the impact to one's psyche would be.
Being an atheist does not equate to assigning a value of 0 to your own life. In fact, the reason I wouldn't push the button is because I so highly value my own life relative to money. I can always find more ways to get money -- I can't replace my life. And I'd like to live out the rest of the life I have remaining, not lose it in a bad gamble (imo) for some extra money I don't need.Quote:
Originally Posted by kiwiMark
But I guess I get the luxury of refusing because I already make enough money to cover my needs.
ya, the whole atheist reasoning kiwi used struck me as pretty odd.
You're putting words into my mouth. So far I've said it would be impossible for me to regret pushing the button, and that there would be no negative consequence to pushing the button.Quote:
Originally Posted by NightGizmo
I'm not sure if my logic/reasoning was unclear or if you follow it but don't agree with it. Assuming it was unclear: both regret and consequences are things that, by definition, happen afterwards. In this situation, 99 times out of 100 there is a positive outcome, and the other 1 time there is no outcome, as nothing happens afterwards because there is no afterwards.
benny's question is legit, but I have no good answer for it. Maybe it'd be balanced by "holy shit I'm lucky to be alive I'll cherish every second of it", when you do start reflecting on the decision you made. Probably wouldn't be a good story to tell in job interviews.
In case it's just that I threw the word atheist in there that's messing with people, it doesn't have anything to do with not believing in a god, but the point is the belief/knowledge that when I die the "I" totally ceases to be.
EV should be judged on a relative basis. In poker that means that a 0EV play (folding is always 0EV) is poor if there is a better, +EV option available.
In this hypothetical, even if you assign death to be 0EV, that is still a pretty terrible outcome if you value your life very highly.
I'd like to reiterate that I'm not pushing the button.
Jesus wouldn't judge you if you did.
But then what really matters isn't your current life evaluation, but the overall picture. The Greeks were onto something with their famous idea: "count no man fortunate until he's dead."Quote:
Originally Posted by Lukie
What would you do if God came down from heaven and said that you have two options: 1) you will live 99 lives happily and 1 life where you break your neck at age 25 and are paralyzed the neck down for the next fifty years, or 2) you can live no lives whatsoever? Logic dictates that you should choose to live no lives because the amount of suffering you will endure 1% of the time will be so great that when you endure it you will wish you had never been born. This is fundamentally no different than why people kill themselves. Most of their lives were actually happy, but things became bad enough that their perspective changed and no amount of happiness in a "previous life" had any effect on the depression that came later
That's why this is really just a psychological exercise, not a logical one. If we were purely logical, not only would we kill ourselves, but we would take out as many others as we possibly could as well. Probability determines that as long as lives are being lived, a certain amount of unfathomable and unjustifiable suffering will exist. This is such a depressing thought to have, and it gets worse when you consider that creating offspring means that your progeny will play in the same dice game and eventually there will be a Ted Bundy in your family line, a paraplegic, a child molester, a molested child, and a Bradley Manning who will sit in a 6 by 8 cell for the rest of his life, enduring the greatest torture there is
Logically, it ain't worth it; psychologically, nobody can truly comprehend that it ain't worth it
Poker teaches us to think in terms of EV, but it also teaches us about bankroll management. This question clearly involves "aggressive" bankroll management.
I get your logic, but I strongly disagree with the bolded part above. Losing your life is a huge negative component of the EV calc. Just because you aren't around to regret your decision doesn't mean that you haven't lost something tangible.Quote:
Originally Posted by kiwiMark
If you use your same logic -- is it OK for someone to kill you for no reason, because you won't be around to care?
FYI -- I'm an atheist. With no expectation of an afterlife, I value my life very highly.Quote:
Originally Posted by kiwiMark
Nothing you've said explains how you disagree with the bolded part above.
If someone's trying to kill me - reason or not - I will fight against this (just like I'm fighting against pushing a button with a 1% chance of killing me), but if it does happen then I quite definitely won't care.
It means exactly that. To lose something means to not have it after the losing, and in this case that wouldn't be the case because there's no more "I" to not have it.Quote:
Just because you aren't around to regret your decision doesn't mean that you haven't lost something tangible.
I think you're trying to base your desire to keep on living in logic, which is fair enough but I'm not sure it's possible to do so. Thus far you haven't made any arguments other than saying "it is negative".
Trying a different approach.... Do you value your life, and do you value continuing to live beyond this moment? (I'm going to assume you answer "yes"). Once your life ends, that value drops to 0 -- by definition, there is nothing left to value. So going from "alive" to "dead" means that the value goes down. So, you have to include that loss in that 1% chance of losing when you press the button. Isn't that exactly why you wouldn't press the button? Because you value your life too much to risk it on a gamble?Quote:
Originally Posted by kiwiMark
One more comment -- you can assign a value to a conditional future event, even if that future event is "I will no longer exist, and thus not be able to value anything anymore." The EV of dying is negative-a-lot, because it's expected value -- it's the value you are using to make a decision. Which assumes that you're alive right now to make that decision, and basing that decision on how things are valued to you, at that moment.
I don't know if I'm explaining it well (or if I'm even right) -- but I'm enjoying the discussion :)
You can't carry any value beyond the grave.Quote:
Originally Posted by NightGizmo
When you die, the value doesn't drop to zero.
There is not such thing as value.
That's what I was trying to address in the second paragraph. You have to make your decisions based on the increase/decrease in utility to you, as you exist. So, you have to have a starting point for that utility -- in this case, the zero point is "I'm not alive".Quote:
Originally Posted by a500lbgorilla
If you just assign "undefined" to death, then you can't make any decisions that involve even the slightest risk of death, because then the entire decision calculation becomes undefined or incorrectly leaves out death as a consequence.
Right, but the zero point isn't I'm not alive. Because if I'm not alive, I'm not alive. That's not winning or losing or balanced between the two, that's just naught.Quote:
Originally Posted by NightGizmo
I know, and I'm playing coy, but come on. When you die, you're dead.Quote:
Originally Posted by NightGizmo
The world could end after you and you'd still be dead. Or the world could usher in 5 generations of peace and prosperity and you'd be dead.
Math is the language of careful thought. And real careful thought about death is a funny thing.
right now I'm inclined to say that I would take the 99 good lives:1 bad life chanceQuote:
Originally Posted by wufwugy
bold I disagree with and I can't see how that is logical at all?Quote:
That's why this is really just a psychological exercise, not a logical one. If we were purely logical, not only would we kill ourselves, but we would take out as many others as we possibly could as well. Probability determines that as long as lives are being lived, a certain amount of unfathomable and unjustifiable suffering will exist. This is such a depressing thought to have, and it gets worse when you consider that creating offspring means that your progeny will play in the same dice game and eventually there will be a Ted Bundy in your family line, a paraplegic, a child molester, a molested child, and a Bradley Manning who will sit in a 6 by 8 cell for the rest of his life, enduring the greatest torture there is
The rest is true and somewhat depressing, but I have already considered it and you can even go the other way. e.g. one of your kids becomes a scientist and figures out how to cure cancer, or develops nanotech to help reverse reverse the trends of global warming
Most people would but then regret it when the time comes to live that one life. Pain is pain and it knows nothing other than pain. When we're happy we say life is good, when we're sad we say life is bad; the difference is that the only time anybody says the bad is worth it for the good is when they've forgotten what the bad is like. Bad things are also substantially more powerful than good things. For example, there is no counterpart to post-traumatic stress disorder. If enough bad things happen to you, your life becomes one of unfathomable suffering, but if enough good things happen to you, you feel kinda just normal.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lukie
It is logical because the absence of suffering is good while the absence of pleasure isn't bad. In death, there is nothing, but in life, there is suffering whose victims cannot fathom a justification for their suffering and want nothing more than to be freed of their suffering.Quote:
bold I disagree with and I can't see how that is logical at all?
That's in addition to those who go the other way. Even then, if we were being expansively logical we would fear technological developments because it is those that make suffering easier to create and more pervasive and perpetual. What happens when a conscious sadistic AI immortal is created and it creates immortal victims?Quote:
The rest is true and somewhat depressing, but I have already considered it and you can even go the other way. e.g. one of your kids becomes a scientist and figures out how to cure cancer, or develops nanotech to help reverse reverse the trends of global warming
There is more suffering in the world today because of greater technology, and it will only get worse, all the way to a point where suffering is effectively infinite. Eventually we will be able to create immortal, conscious machines that can and will be put into perpetual suffering and completely forgotten about. The limitations of the suffering in this world are merely due to primitive tech. A dynamic consciousness by definition creates suffering and with enough tech that suffering is endless
ok there thoreau
I hope wuggy's back on the sauce cuz then there'd be an excuse for using so many words to talk that much shit :x
fwiw i planned on pushing the button 10 times at 100k a pop.
I'm not arguing about what happens after you're dead, or how you feel about things at that point. You're right -- you don't care anymore, there's no consciousness left to value anything. But you make decisions every day with the assumption that death is a very large cost, and factoring that cost into your decisions.Quote:
Originally Posted by a500lbgorilla
So Rilla/Kiwi -- explain your logic/reasons for why you wouldn't push the button for a ridiculously low number. How does it not boil down to, "The risk is not worth the reward," i.e. the cost of dying is too much?
<@:^)Quote:
Originally Posted by a500lbgorilla
The cost of dying is a debt never to be paid.Quote:
Originally Posted by NightGizmo
I'd like to live, but life is not something that is weighed against any value. And when it's lost, it can't be measured in terms of any value.
I asked a girl and she said 4 million. I asked her why 4 and not 40 and we're being silent.