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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   2278 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 21, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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I think wise apes will consider the future implications of murdering 20 million other apes and how that might impact this paradise they hope to create, or cause other apes to resist their efforts.

The real problem is that even a smart ape might think they can achieve their future paradise without excessive Ape-murder, and embark on a quest that, incidentally, spirals out of of control and results in large scale ape genocides.

I just doubt that most apes would intentionally, as a required part of their plan, decide to murder 20 million apes. They may decide 20 million ape-deaths is acceptable, of course.

The 'wise' ape will try to completely obviate the downside risk if they go to make such impactful actions.

I just doubt that most apes would intentionally, as a required part of their plan, decide to murder 20 million apes.

That had been known to happen too, but more often no, they just want the paradise. And if a single ape is preventing us from achieving the future paradise, isn't it prudent and wise to remove the impediment, given as the benefit to all outweighs the narrow interests of a single ape by so much. Then we run the same algorithm at scale, and somehow when the dust settles, 20 millions are dead. Nobody intended that, everybody intended to build the paradise, it just happened. But the real paradise has never been tried, so we must try again.

Indeed. And I really, really hope that by and large the most intelligent apes who are capable of trying to implement 'paradise' are wise enough to either recognize the futility of the endeavor under current constraints, or at least to recognize that its never so easy as just killing the few apes you view as obstacles to it.

In a sense, they'd have to be, or else the species would probably not have survived this long (in many alternative timelines, it probably did not).

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