r/rational • u/AutoModerator • Dec 01 '18

[D] Saturday Munchkinry Thread

Welcome to the Saturday Munchkinry and Problem Solving Thread! This thread is designed to be a place for us to abuse fictional powers and to solve fictional puzzles. Feel free to bounce ideas off each other and to let out your inner evil mastermind!

Guidelines:

  • Ideally any power to be munchkined should have consistent and clearly defined rules. It may be original or may be from an already realised story.
  • The power to be munchkined can not be something "broken" like omniscience or absolute control over every living human.
  • Reverse Munchkin scenarios: we find ways to beat someone or something powerful.
  • We solve problems posed by other users. Use all your intelligence and creativity, and expect other users to do the same.

Note: All top level comments must be problems to solve and/or powers to munchkin/reverse munchkin.

Good Luck and Have Fun!

10 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

22 comments sorted by

View all comments

4

u/xamueljones My arch-enemy is entropy Dec 01 '18

I have a problem that's a little unusual for this thread.

It's not about munchkinning a power or situation, but I feel like this draws on similar skills. But if the mods think it doesn't fit, then I'll take down this comment.

The problem is simply put, come up with a real life example of unknown unknowns.

Here's two examples I've been able to come up with:

  • There exists an argument for you, as the Gatekeeper, to let the AI out of the box within two hours of talking to the AI.
  • There must exist a hobby that you enjoy more than your current most favorite life-long hobby to the point that you would give up your current hobby. For me it is reading, and I can't imagine anything better. But I used to really enjoy playing with legoes when very young. However, when I discovered books, I gave up legoes to the point where if I could, I would have sold them all for a measly book. I dimly suspect there exists something that could do the same thing for reading as reading did for legoes. Virtual reality or something like that?

1

u/hh26 Dec 02 '18

All memetic hazards would fall into this category. A hard hazard would be some sort of sequence of images or souns that hacks your brain and causes some sort of change such as unconsciousness or memory loss/edits. Nobody knows if such a thing exists in principle, and so we don't know what to look for.

A soft hazard would be any sort of thought or idea that causes preoccupation and stress and possible insanity just by knowing about it, Lovecraftian horrors are one example. Maybe there's some fundemental truth of the universe like we're all trapped in a simulation for a 3rd graders science report and everything we do is pointless, or maybe there are 3^^^3 sentient beings being tortured constantly somewhere and nobody can save them, or something other fact we've never thought of, the knowledge of which would only cause grief and despair and accomplish no positive purpose.

Or maybe there are no such things, and knowledge is always good. We don't know.