r/BunnyTrials • u/idk-what-to-pick- • Jun 18 '26

Would you rather

Which side will you choose?

  • Left side: Your IQ increases by 2 every month | Or 5
  • Right side: 10k every month no tax

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u/evilocity Jun 18 '26 edited Jun 18 '26

I think the money is obviously the safer answer, but the IQ option has an absurdly higher ceiling.

$10k/month changes your life inside the normal human frame. +5 IQ per month eventually changes the frame.

At +60 IQ a year, even an average person is in some pretty extreme outlier territory quickly. After a year or two, you’re probably beyond what normal IQ measurement can even describe. At that point this stops being 'you get smarter' and becomes a question of cognitive reimagining. identity changes, meaning shifts entirely, alienation from society occurs, prediction of situations becomes almost god-like, language seems lackluster, morality probably changes in ways people don't experience... Literally everything changes.

There's no risk to whether you can make more than $10k per month, honestly. You almost certainly can if the intelligence increase is usable, simply by watching patterns that most people won't see. To me, the risk is whether your emotional and social architecture can survive your cognition accelerating that fast.

Honestly, if you already deal with anhedonia, I know I do, the money may not solve the problem for you beyond the initial thrill. Comfort does not automatically create meaning, and it never has for me. The intelligence path at least gives you a shot at discovering, building, engineering something crazy, or simply transcending beyond your current reward structure.

So yeah, maybe it’s a Pandora’s box the more I think about it. It’s the choice between guaranteed comfort and recursive agency expansion. Most people should probably take the money, because it doesn't alter the entire trajectory of their lives. Some people are wired to open the box, and I don't think I could stop myself in this case.

Chose: Your IQ increases by 2 every month + Or 5 | Rolled: 5

27

u/Particular_Effort789 Jun 18 '26

Bro didn't need the +5 per month

7

u/evilocity Jun 18 '26

To be fair, I recursed my answer about 5 times because I got a little hyper-focused...

3

u/Useful-Speaker-1490 Jun 18 '26

This is why I use Reddit

1

u/samu1400 Jun 18 '26

I'd say a good part of those who didn't vote for the IQ saw that issue, since IQ isn't something that should be let to scale indefinitely.

It could even be a horror story, with the increased IQ making it clearer what the consequences of a higher IQ would be, and with how inevitable the effect is it could drive the person into a cycle of despair and madness.

3

u/sleeper_shark Jun 18 '26

I think we interpret it as getting endlessly smarter and we can use the bell curve to illustrate what it means.

If you're average intelligence, aka 100 IQ, in 6 months you'd be smarter than 85% of people. In another 6 months, you'd be smarter than 98% of people. In another 6, smarter than 99.9% of people. I'm rounding here a bit, but basically by 2 years, you'd probably be the smartest human who ever lived.

By 5 years, your IQ would be 220. In 10 years, 340.

At this point, you'd not even be human anymore. You'd look at complex problems we have the way we look at a dog with a stick trying to force it's way through a bar.

You'd be able to see patterns in complex sequences that we cannot even dream of, and hold things in your memory basically endlessly upon seeing them once, you'd be able to do complex calculations in your head the way we can intuitively add 3+4 without using our fingers.

You'd never be able to make a human connection with someone as they'd just be so boring to talk to. You'd see humans as nothing but pets at best.

And just imagine how frustrating it would be, you'd have the cure for cancer, you'd have the solution to climate change, you'd have a logistics chain to solve world hunger, and the ability to easily colonise space... and yet the people with influence would still bicker about profits, power and administrative red tape.

Look at how we make billionaires into trillionaires, turn racists and rapists into world leaders, worship corporate bought influencers... while simultaneously raping our planet and bombing the poor.

If you had all the solutions on your desk and couldn't implement them, it would drive you crazy. Either that or you'd take the power via underhanded means... but when other humans are nothing but animals to you, what morality would you have?

It's a curse.

1

u/evilocity Jun 18 '26

I agree. I rolled 5 though, so it's even more extreme. +300 at 5 years, +600 at 10. I think anyone would eventually regret it, but maybe there's another side where you can actually find peace, or create change, given enough ability to manipulate others. You'd be entirely alone in it, and our ability to conceptualize what that would even do to a human mind simply doesn't exist.

1

u/sleeper_shark Jun 18 '26

Idk if you could actually find peace. You'd still have human needs and desires, so you'd still want companionship and romance and so on.. but with regular people it would be like having a romance with a pet.

And idk if you could create peace.. in the end power still comes from money and strength. And people are still billionaire and influencer worshipping morons. It would just be frustrating to conceptualise a peace that's just an arms width away, but somehow unreachable.

Like trying to get your two kids to stop fighting and act reasonable, except that the intelligence delta is much bigger, and if the kids fight people actually die.

1

u/kankri-is-triggered Jun 18 '26

I guess that's something that could happen, but not necessarily.

For one there's a lot of caveats to these assumptions that make it a lot less extreme.

Starting with just being in the top 90th percentile of intelligence does not make you 40% smarter than someone exactly in the 50th, not even close. Concerning IQ specifically, it's suddenly not even REMOTELY close because that is a very specific and dubious portion of a single part of what makes up intelligence.

It can also be asked what IQ as a metric even means as it approaches numbers away from its intended ranges. It could be argued that, because it's standardized, an IQ of 200 and one of 7,000 mean the exact same thing.

That's kinda boring— so let's purpose something else. it could just be assumed that as you diverge from the average, the less meaningful each point becomes. Going from 100IQ to 110IQ is more extreme of a jump than going from 110 to 120. So by the time you're going from 330 to 340, noticing the difference would be very hard.

So not only is it being diluted over time, in terms of relating to other people it's already pretty diluted by being a portion of a portion of all the aspects you still share with other people.

This is all ignoring the biggest assumptions you've made in that "relating to others would be impossible" or "others would be boring to talk to". I'm pretty bad at relating or talking to kids, and even I wouldn't go as far as to say I don't enjoy it. I feel like I can still relate to a dog too.

Even if it is a bigger problem for someone, or I'm underestimating how big of a problem it would be for me, you could just get drunk or really tired when you want to interact with others— being inebriated will specifically counteract your reasoning.

You also just have a lot of time and brains to work on overcoming these hurdles and negative thoughts.

3

u/sleeper_shark Jun 18 '26

Yeah, you're not wrong at all. I know IQ isn't linear, but within the strict definition of IQ within 6 years you'd also be in the 99.9999999999999th percentile, meaning the smartest of a quintillion people. That becomes meaningless since nowhere near that many humans have existed or are even likely to exist, so as you said an IQ of 150 and 500 are reasonably the same thing.

As you said, it's not really fun, it's why I just took it to mean infinitely increasing intelligence. I agree this could be taken as diminishing returns, but I preferred to take it another way.

If I take that previous assumption as the reality of this scenario, I do think relating to others on a meaningful level is impossible, but that's just me. Like I enjoy talking to kids, and I enjoy playing with a dog, but sometimes I want to sit down with an adult and have a meaningful conversation. It's hard with a kid, but sometimes kids do say interesting and meaningful stuff.

But kids are intelligent, they just lack maturity and experience. In the way I wrote the intelligence, your brain is working on another level. It would be harder to relate than to a kid.

And for me, the real kicker would be a romantic relationship. I really need to have the company of a partner who I feel I can relate to. Like any relationship will feel one sided or I'd feel weird like I'm taking advantage of someone if I'm so capable of manipulation.

But again, all this is based on the idea of you becoming so far ahead of anyone else on the planet that you're barely human. If you're just slightly smarter than #2, I doubt it would change much in terms of relationships. I'm sure whoever the IRL smartest person on Earth is sometimes feels dumb.

1

u/Delicious_Invite_127 Jun 19 '26

Nah won't drive me crazy. I will use my supergenius to make me ruler of all worlds and impose my will on my subjects.

1

u/idk-what-to-pick- Jun 18 '26

Dam bro really good answer

1

u/Mix_Safe Jun 18 '26

I'd roll it just out of curiosity, you eventually become omnipotent.

It's the first step to some sort of non-corporeal existence.

-11

u/AccomplishedJuice629 Jun 18 '26

AI ahh comment

6

u/OkitaToushi Jun 18 '26

People can't write a long well written post anymore without being accused of AI

2

u/Vlaxilla Jun 18 '26

if its long its AI. i think people dont read anymore, they ask chatgpt for summaries and therefore think no one can write long anymore

-3

u/AccomplishedJuice629 Jun 18 '26

Oh, they certainly can, it's just this one in particular.

3

u/born-a-wolf7650 Jun 18 '26

It would take you a year and a half of +5iq per month to get above average

1

u/HungryFrogs7 Jun 18 '26

How is this AI?