Re: How to win the lottery

From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Mon May 08 2000 - 15:01:07 MDT


John Clark wrote:
>
> I absolutely guarantee this will make you filthy rich, by that I mean after you
> perform the experiment if you find it doesn't work as I have said all you have
> to do is tell me and I will happily refund the dollar you spent for the lottery ticket.

I want my dollar back! More than 80 million of me had the subjective
experience of watching in horror as the wrong numbers were selected,
then waiting a minute before dying. Why didn't you tell me to make the
trigger instantaneous? Furthermore, because the number selection was
predetermined by macroscopic quantities (the starting position of the
lottery balls) with no room for quantum-mechanical uncertainties to
amplify to the macroscopic level, not a single one of me won! I mean,
just having enough chaos to make something humanly unpredictable doesn't
mean it's quantum-mechanically random! Anyway, more than 80 million of
me died, there's a total of more than ten thousand metric tons of brains
splattered *all* over my living room sofa, and I want my dollar back.

-- 
       sentience@pobox.com      Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
          http://pobox.com/~sentience/beyond.html
                 Member, Extropy Institute
           Senior Associate, Foresight Institute



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