Questions That Don't Deserve Their Own Thread

@JethOrensin is exactly right. I was going to say this, but felt too lazy to write it out and then have to argue about it. This was part of the Anti-terrorism training that I had to complete every year in my government job.

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I feel like “how should I respond to a grenade suddenly appearing at my feet” is not at all a time to be “general” :sweat_smile:

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Yeah that was exactly what I was thinking haha. I was lazy to separate “run away” and “hide or stay close to the ground”.

I went to the army before and one of the training was to throw grenades. An officer would always accompany us and there is a hole nearby for us to hide if we screw it up. (and yes some did…)

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the poll choices necessitated that interpretation imo

Our army didn’t even bother to simulate that with throwing rocks, somehow… :sweat_smile:

Not that I really mind… I wouldn’t trust some of those instructors we had with anything more than a birthday cake sparkler, around new recruits. (e.g. one of them was a disgraced special forces captain that got demoted to a sargeant and had gone totally mental. One afternoon he nearly killed a recruit with his bayonet (he got angry about the recruit having brought in a white pillow-case to cover the totally ancient-filthy pillows. He wore the pillow-case on the recruit’s head and ripped it to pieces with the bayonet, fortunately just scratching the fellow underneath. He was insane, but at least he was accurate). The army made that sargeant disappear so fast that we never saw or heard of him ever again. Next day they pretended nothing happened. Sargeant who?)

At least they told us what to do… “not that you’ll ever need it” to quote the fellow.

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Would you rather

  • Have the IQ of a peanut
  • Die
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No idea.

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I’m confused why die isn’t winning by a landslide. Even if one believes that death is the cessation of existence, it’s not like you can enjoy existence with the intelligence of a literal nut

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Because I’d rather take the small possibility of existence than a certain no existence.

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We must all die one day. The reasons why I want to live are that I still enjoy life and can still help other people. What’s the point of living if I can’t play go (among other things) anymore, and if I’m a burden for my family?

I’ve had anesthesia several times, the process is very fast: we lose consciousness in a couple of seconds, and then “suddenly” wake up in another room after a sleep without dreams, without realizing how much time has passed. Each time I told myself that if I didn’t wake up, I wouldn’t be aware of anything: this would be the best way to die, fast and without suffering. So I’m not afraid of dying, only of suffering.

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That is one way of looking at it.
On the other hand, you are probably posing a burden to the people that have to take care of you.
Constantly and forever.

I wouldn’t want to impose something like that on other people (especially ones I care for and love), therefore the “die” choice seems more reasonable.

On a different note, if your body is still there, but the vast majority of what made you, you, is gone… eh, what’s the point? :thinking:

Incidentally that is one of the few prayers in the Greek Orthodox Church that everyone takes very seriously each Sunday.

The prayer asks from God a “painless, without any sense of shame and serene” death (“ανώδυνα, ανεπαίσχυντα και ειρηνικά”), when their time comes.

I wonder sometimes where that comes from then:

I do not have acrophobia/hypsophobia, but this is somehow worse, because something in your head tells you that it might actually be fun to fall and feel that sweet wind on your face :stuck_out_tongue:

Quite counter-evolutionary…

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I lean toward the void too. But I guess we cant be too surprised. We have eons of evolution telling us not to die!

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I appreciate the responses illustrating the situation where you are a burden on loved ones. Also on the point suffering badly vs dying. I agree with both points, I’m not afraid of dying, and would prefer not to burden loved ones (too much).

But I still choose Peanut IQ. I need to point out that this POV follows from the original post that sparked this. Not having the vaccine got me long Covid, and it gave me debilitating brain fog, the inability to think. I wasn’t dumber in tests, but I couldn’t use my brain for long. If given the choice, I’d rather be dumber, but with the capability to actually use what I have. I assumed that was the context of the poll.

Samraku takes it further by asking about “literal peanut IQ”. This becomes super philosophical anyway because peanuts don’t have an IQ, yet they do survive without problem.

Considering this philosophical point in isolation, without consequences to family to think about: if I were alone on a deserted island, and I had the choice between death or peanut IQ, would I experiment with the latter? And then the answer is yes. I’m not choosing death if I don’t have to, even if you can debate over if the “I” still exists.

Life can even be enjoyable as hormones still reward the brain, when for example eating some sugary fruit, no different than it does do now.

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Do peanuts even have IQs?

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Apparently we didn’t have the same interpretation of a peanut’s intelligence. I was thinking of a human who is unable to perform any task, however simple, so who needs external assistance in order to survive. While JohnnieDarko was thinking of a human who can still survive without much help and appreciate food, more like an earthworm than a peanut. So if the question is “do you prefer to die or to become an earthworm” then I don’t really care. The earthworm is not aware of its condition.

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In that case, life all the way.
I had a relative like that. He couldn’t even write his own name, but could function properly within society, his work and so forth.

Some of his personality quirks notwithstanding, I’d classify him as one of the most enviable people I can think of. He was smart enough to survive and have a normal life and “dumb enough” (or smart enough :wink: ) to not care about anything else in the world. As long as he had some cash in his pocket and food on his plate, the day was nice and nothing else mattered. :slight_smile:

However, just a few less IQ points than that and the problems begin.
The son of another relative is like that. He was born at six months instead of nine and the technology of the time did its best, but his brain never fully developed. He can function and think, form sentences that you might understand, but he is well into the “special needs” spectrum and needs his family to take care of him forever (he is in his mid fourties now).

Is he having a good time? Probably.
Is his family having a good time? Probably not.

That’s the spectrum where the choice really becomes difficult. :thinking:

It also poses another issue:
If you are born that way or if you ended up that way (e.g. after some illness, accident or whatever else) seems to matter quite a bit.

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Why is the PLAY HUMAN button so much larger than the CREATE CUSTOM GAME button?

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Is it a subliminal message telling that users should prefer the automatch button?

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To intuitively prioritize this option

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Because we want to encourage as many users as possible to use automatch

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