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PaperclipPerfector  14hr ago (text post)   594 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for September 25, 2026

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I just finished Brave New World. Pretty great!

As World Controller, what are some ways you'd like to utilize Pavlovian conditioning on toddlers? Personally, I think I'd do the trick they did in the book where they had toddlers touch books and get shocked and have alarm bells ring and all kinds of other unpleasant stuff, but do it with guns instead. Imagine how much more safe our kiddos would be.

Remember that time when humanity hadn't invented guns yet, and conquerors built pyramids of skulls from tens of thousands of their victims? Sorry: times, plural; there were like half a dozen cases.

Homicide levels in general are much lower post-gunpowder than they were pre-, probably mostly but not entirely for other reasons. Guns are obviously tragically useful for committing atrocities, but they have played direct and more-indirect roles in reducing atrocities too. It's not at all obvious to me what the net impact has been, even to kids; IIRC one of those conquerors helpfully sorted their pyramids into men's, women's, and children's skulls, for extra psychological-warfare power.

I also thought "Brave New World" was great. Controlling people by oppressing them a la "1984" makes for more exciting reading, but controlling people by distracting them feels far more prescient in hindsight.

I'm more referring to incidents where some gun is left out and a curious infant goes and shoot himself or something else. I wonder how often that happened with bladed weapons. What are the statistics on accidental fatal sword swallowing?

In hindsight, maybe you should condition them to not leave dangerous things out on tables...

Oh, that's potentially more one-sided. Not for infants or toddlers, since gun triggers typically require multiple pounds of force to pull, but for older kids. Unintentional gun deaths kill dozens of kids a year in the US, so the only remaining question would be whether your proposed re-conditioning wouldn't have negative consequences when you needed responsible gun users as adults.

Or maybe we're both just not taking the thought experiment far enough? As an American citizen I'm fairly conscious of how the democratization of military power preceded and helped instigate the democratization of political power, and from that perspective I worry that we're running on hysteresis already and shouldn't risk making it even worse. As a World Controller I would presumably also be fairly concerned with the democratization of political power, but mostly from the perspective of how to stop it from ever happening again, and from that perspective the solution to child firearm accidents is easy: only our cadres of devoutly loyal childless soldiers shall be allowed anywhere near the trigger of a gun, and so we don't need to condition anyone against guns, just against disloyalty.

Obviously, as a real world controller, the world would inevitably end up in the state that the book is in. There simply isn't any reason to not pull a Grand Inquisitor and induce societal heat death, as long as we're talking about stopping coups from ever happening. However, I think that the methods used would probably have to vary a lot more and we'd have to have a lot better industrial capabilities and maybe a better understanding of biology. Sleep hypnosis can't work, we obviously can't grow kids in jars and it might not be possible at all, and I think you'd have to take more extreme measures to eliminate things like hate and jealousy and greed. Like "nerve stapling" like in Alpha Centauri. And people don't like nerve stapling.

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