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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   2420 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 12, 2026

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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You're a member of the plucky rebels that are fighting against the evil empire that believes in X, an idea you find absolutely evil and abhorrent. The Big Bad Emperor is beyond your reach right now, but you can assassinate some of his most important supporters: Alice, Bob or Carol.

Alice is probably the better person between you two. She's smart, brave, loyal. There's only one difference: she sincerely believes that X is good.

Bob probably doesn't believe that X is good. Or that X is evil. He simply believes the side to be on is the one that is winning.

Carol probably doesn't believe that X is good. If anything, she probably finds it abhorrent, just like you. However, she is still doing her job and doing it well because otherwise she will be replaced by a true believer in X.

Which one of the three henchmen is the evilest? Which one should the plucky rebels assassinate first? If the answers to these questions are different, are the plucky rebels truly fighting on the side of good?

Well ... alice - bob can be turned, and carol makes no sense.

No one of them is evil.

Why does assassinating Carol make no sense? It's the accelerationist approach. Let's say the ultimate goal of the Evil Empire is the total extermination of Asians and Carol is the economy henchwoman. Hardcore supporters are demanding that the Evil Empire exterminate all Asian residents and confiscate their property, nationalize all Asian-owned companies and stop trade with Asian countries. Carol is doing her best to find performative ways of satisfying them: instead of confiscating Asian property she's introducing additional taxes, instead of nationalizing Asian-owned companies she's banning Asians from the boards of directors and not letting Asians buy any new stock, instead of stopping trade she's introducing punitive tariffs and so on. But even though she's slow-walking the process, the ultimate goal is still the same.

Why shouldn't the plucky rebels assassinate her? Surely, if she's replaced with a true believer Candy that has a worse grasp of the economy, things will get better! Candy will implement everything demanded from her on day one, causing a massive financial crisis in the Evil Empire, no Asians inside the Evil Empire or abroad will have any illusions left and all of them will support the plucky rebels. And any potential Carols will learn that not only do their bleeding hearts cause more misery in the long run, but they themselves are putting their lives at risk by "trying to do their job".

Which one of the three henchmen is the evilest?

Bob.

Which one should the plucky rebels assassinate first?

Alice.

If the answers to these questions are different, are the plucky rebels truly fighting on the side of good?

You can't fight a war against opportunism. You can fight a war against X.

Which one of the three henchmen is the evilest? Which one should the plucky rebels assassinate first?

Those are two different questions. If you want to have the greatest impact on stopping the Evil Empire then you take out Alice, the True Believer who probably is working the hardest and most effectively to implement X (if you can't persuade her that X is, in fact, bad). Bob will flip the second it looks like the plucky rebels are going to be the winners, so he's neither helping nor hindering X. Carol will likewise probably flip if she gets a chance, particularly if she does indeed believe X is wrong. With her in place, she may not be able to do much about stopping X (for fear of being replaced with the likes of Alice) but she can act to put minor obstacles in the way of implementing X. Red tape and bureaucracy can be better stumbling blocks than hitting the local Imperial detention centre (which may be rebuilt afterwards).

Who is the most evil? Bob. He doesn't believe one way or the other, is only serving his own self-interest, and is contributing to the evil that X is doing.

Red tape and bureaucracy can be better stumbling blocks than hitting the local Imperial detention centre (which may be rebuilt afterwards).

The Office of Strategic Services (predecessor to the CIA) realised this in 1944.

Which one should the plucky rebels assassinate first?

The one with the least guards (or the most predictable route). I mean, if you somehow arrived at the conclusion personal assassination is what you need to do to set back the Evil Empire, then it doesn't matter who of them loves kittens the most. You are not exacting personal judgement for the merits of their character, you are conducting a military action against the load-bearing components of the empire. As long as they are these components, their personal beliefs are of little relevance. Unless, of course, you can cause the same or more damage by other means - e.g. by inducing Bob to defect with an outrageous bribe or by converting Carol. But if that's not feasible, then see above.

Which one of the three henchmen is the evilest? Which one should the plucky rebels assassinate first?

Alice, Alice. Bob & Carol can be reasoned with, persuaded, or manipulated: only Alice believes that X is an unambiguous good; this is, as you assert, "absolutely evil and abhorrent": it's irreconcilable. You simply need to kill enough Alices to trigger a preference cascade. To prevent the Evil Empire from ever reconstituting itself you'll need to be thorough and completely erase every "true believer" in X, but you can save cleaning up the incompetent and ineffectual ones until after your rebels have consolidated power. The true believers like Alice are the biggest threat -- as they're smart, once they start to lose they'll cloak their belief in X and make it hard to differentiate them from Bob and Carol, then secretly advocate for X in the shadows. Hopefully the "X" in question is something like Christianity in Edo Japan and you can just demand the Alices to step on or desecrate some sacred icon and kill them if they refuse.

Agreed. Bob is likely to defect if it looks like the Empire will lose (or that he himself might pay the cost), and Carol is likely to either begin sandbagging or resign entirely.

In terms of evilness? Well, as a true believer in an evil cause, that would again be Alice. But I would say she is still more virtuous than Bob, who's an opportunistic mercenary.

I would rather Bob be killed, and Alice survive to reconstruction as a matter of personal preference, but in terms of pragmatic effectiveness, she's got to be the target.

Who’s most critical to the regime? You’re a soldier fighting a war, seeking a military objective(‘destroy the evil empire’), not trying to determine individual guilt.

I suspect that the tactically correct answer is to attempt to turn Carol as a source and kill Alice. But it’s going to depend on the circumstances.

For the purposes of assassination I don't care which one is the evilest. I'm not here to punish them individually for being evil, I want to do damage to the Evil Empire.

Killing a true believer and especially a sympathetic true believer seems like a great way to consolidate the Evil Empire followers around a martyr. Instead I'd say the plucky rebels should assassinate Bob, to send a message to the most apathetic, opportunist and amoral Evil Empire henchmen (which I expect to be the majority) that rather than the most loyal or the most efficient, it could be any one of them.

My thoughts exactly. Kill Bob, scare both Bob 2 and Carol. Kill Alice, spawn Alice 2 and 3. Easy choice.

True believers are cheap, competent true believers are not - take Iran for example - the combined IQ of the top cadres of the regime is probably less than those of mossad's janitor team.

I am given to understand that Charlie Kirk is a good example of this. Plenty of people have Kirk-like beliefs; none apparently have his combination of charisma, organizational skills, and industriousness.

Which one should the plucky rebels assassinate first?

Why does it matter who you strike first? Timeline doesn't seem like strong evidence of guilt or righteousness; the most guilty Nazis or Confederates weren't killed first.

Because you want to minimize the area under the curve of the Evil Empire's power.

But how does the morality or lack thereof of the targets influence minimizing the power of the Evil Empire? It seems like the relevant information is not provided.

Assume all three are equally important for the successful existence of the evil empire.

I assume they only get one chance during the given strategically significant period of time.

How does the smart, brave, loyal person come to sincerely believe in the absolutely evil and abhorrent X? Is she simply misinformed and deluded? Either she or 'you' or both have fatally misperceived something.

I guess I would deeply examine my sources, my reasoning and my beliefs before doing any judgements of evil and assassinations, to try and find out who is in fact deluded, first of all.

How does the smart, brave, loyal person come to sincerely believe in the absolutely evil and abhorrent X? Is she simply misinformed and deluded? Either she or 'you' or both have fatally misperceived something.

I don't think this follows. I think it's entirely possible for two equally intelligent, brave, loyal, [insert good adjective here] people to look at the same set of facts and come to equal and opposite conclusions about the goodness of the exact same thing, because people can have arbitrary fundamental values that inform every other value they have.

If the difference is due to fundamental values, then Alice is not a better person than me.

I interpreted the original hypothetical as Alice being better in all things except for fundamental morality - hence why she thinks something as evil as X is good.

If the fundamental values are simply arbitrary or random, are they actually 'good and right' and worth holding on to?

They're arbitrary, but not random. They're not "good and right" in some sort of objective sense, and whether they're worth holding onto would depend heavily on the exact specifics. Whether it's possible not to hold onto those is also a separate question that I think the answer is No to most people in most contexts.

When you differentiate between 'arbitrary' and 'random' you are thinking that the arbitrary one is determined by the environment around the person, whatever it might be, while 'random' would be like a random number generator?

By arbitrary, I mean that there's no particular characteristics that they must take on, other than the fact that they're fundamental values. A person could have a fundamental value of praising God or of making sure that the final digit of the S&P500 closing value each day is 6, or of watching Mrs. Doubtfire as many times as possible in their lifetime, or anything else. It's arbitrary.

Random, as I understand it, means impossible to predict (if not literally, at least practically). I coin flip is random in that one cannot, with confidence, claim that either of the 2 outcomes (ignoring the edge and the shape of actual IRL coins causing bias - again, practically) is more likely than the other. When I see, say, a woman wearing a nun's habit praying in a church, I believe that can make predictions about her fundamental values that are more likely than chance to be correct.

Yes, but how is that surprising? Look at the drama over trans issues, or mass migration, or MAID, or models of criminal justice... people end up with polar opposite values all the time, and it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with how smart, brave, or loyal they are.

I set a higher bar for categorical Evil than what any of those issues represent. Someone supporting mass migration aren't being cruel for the sake of cruelty (my definition of evil).

That's an extremely high bar. Excepting rare psychopaths, almost nobody is being cruel for the sake of cruelty. The Holy Inquisition burned heretics for their own good - after their body had been destroyed, the important part - the soul - would be cleansed and would have a chance for eternal life. Who wouldn't prefer a brief short-term pain to the eternal never-ending torment? Communists exterminated millions - to give happiness and prosperity to billions (or at least they thought so - it didn't work out that way..). Nazis had the same kind of idea - their list of "bad" people was based on genetics rather than class, but otherwise same structure. Very rarely somebody sets out to do evil by trying to do evil - they always are the heroes in their own story.

It's not a high bar. Far from 'extremely high'. Lots of sociopaths exist. Lots of unprovoked cruelty occurs in this world, both from the sociopaths and from many other people. It was not to 'punish badness' that Germans tortured Jews.

If you read the literature, most of people committing the atrocities - including the Nazi atrocities - are not psychopaths. They are pretty usual people. That's the whole "banality of evil" thing. Put in the right circumstances, with the right motivations and the right indoctrination, a real lot of people would commit atrocities - not because they derive perverse pleasure from causing suffering - in fact, they very well may not - but because they consider it necessary to achieve some beneficial ends, or simply because it's the easiest way to go. Nazis didn't happen because German population suddenly turned mentally ill. They happened because Nazis were successful in convincing part of the population in their narrative, and scared the rest of the population enough to go along. That's what makes it so scary - it's not some insane Joker or Hannibal Lecter that does all those things. It's just regular people, in suitable circumstances, with suitable mind disposition.

Just because someone thinks they are doing something for good doesn't mean it's their true motivation though. People who enjoy cruelty, find purges orderly and tell themselves they're helping could also be included in a definition of evil. This would cover e.g. a sadistic cop.

Just because someone thinks they are doing something for good doesn't mean it's their true motivation though.

We'd get into very deep weeds here. How do we know what is "true" motivation and what is self-delusion? We can't read minds. How do we know if the sadistic cop enjoys causing pain, or enjoys the righteousness of his anger agains the criminals (in his own view)? I don't think it is possible, and I don't think it matters too much. If you do evil, and think it's good, it's still evil. There could be a possibility of opening the eyes of the evildoer to the true nature of their deeds, and thus convincing them to stop, but this possibility is remote and theoretical. Most people would find a million of excuses rather than admit "I was doing evil".

I don't think it has to be all that deep. It's not like you require a truly Freudian and unfalsifiable notion of a subconscious to understand the idea of someone who has a false narrative that gives them a license do what their baser self really wants to do. Confronting the fallible bad guy with a truth about themselves that they can't handle but deep down know is true is a common part of thousands of thrillers.

As you say, we're deep in the weeds here though.

That's a rather lax definition, it lets off the hook every utopian mass-murdering sociopath.

Have there been mass-murdering sociopaths who did it out of utopian dreams, rather than those being fig leaves?

Hard to say without being able to read someone's mind, and you might as well ask the same question about mass migration supporters.

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