A wish is a pretty constrained thing, for some wishes.
If I wish for a pile of gold, my expectations probably constrain lots of externalities like ‘Nobody is hurt acquiring the gold, it isn’t taken from somewhere else, it is simply generated and deposited at my feet, but not, like, crushing me, or using the molecules of my body as raw material, or really anything that kills me for that matter’. Mostly my expectations are about things that won’t happen, not things that will happen that might conflict (that consists only of: the gold will appear before me and will be real and persistent).
If you try this with a wish for world peace, you’re likely to get screwed. But I think that’s a given no matter your strategy. Don’t wish for goals, wish for the tools to achieve your goals—you’ll probably be more satisfied with the result to boot.
You’re already lowering your claim, it’s not longer “for any value of X”.
But even so...
“Nobody is hurt acquiring the gold” does that include people hurt because your sudden new gold decrease the market value of gold, so people owning stocks of gold or speculating on an increase of the gold price are hurt ? Sure, you can say “it’s insignificant”, but how will a genie tell that apart ? Your expectation of what having a sudden supply of gold on the market would do and the reality of how it’ll unfold probably don’t match. So the genie will have to do corrections for that… which will themselves have side-effects...
Also, you’ll probably realize once you’ve some gold that gold doesn’t bring you as much as you thought it would bring you (at least, it happens to most lottery winner), so even if you genuinely get the gold, it’ll fail to “meet all your expectations” of having gold. Unless the genie also fixes you so you get as much utility/happiness/… from the gold as you expected to get from it. And as soon as the genie has to start fixing you… game over.
I simplify here because a lot of people think I will have contradictory expectations for a more complex event.
But I think you’re being even more picky here. Do I -expect- that increasing the amount of gold in the world will slightly affect the market value? Yes. But I haven’t wished anything related to that, my wish is -only- about some gold appearing in front of me.
Having the genie magically change how much utility I get from the gold is an even more ridiculous extension. If I wish for gold, why the heck would the genie feel it was his job to change my mental state to make me like gold more?
Possibly we just think very differently, and your ‘expectation’ of what would happen when gold appears also includes every thing you would do with that gold later, despite, among many, many things, not even knowing -when- you would speak the wish to get the gold, or what form it would appear in. And you even have in mind some specific level of happiness that you ‘expect’ to get from it. If so, you’re right, this trick will not work for you.
If you wish for gold, it’s because you have expectation on what you’ll do with that gold. Maybe fuzzy ones, but if you didn’t have any, you wouldn’t wish for gold. So you can’t dissociate the gold and the use when what you’re speaking about is “expectations”.
Or else, solutions like “the world is changed so that the precious metal is lead, and gold has low value, but all the rest is the same” would work. And that wouldn’t meet your “expectations” about the wish at all.
A wish is a pretty constrained thing, for some wishes.
If I wish for a pile of gold, my expectations probably constrain lots of externalities like ‘Nobody is hurt acquiring the gold, it isn’t taken from somewhere else, it is simply generated and deposited at my feet, but not, like, crushing me, or using the molecules of my body as raw material, or really anything that kills me for that matter’. Mostly my expectations are about things that won’t happen, not things that will happen that might conflict (that consists only of: the gold will appear before me and will be real and persistent).
If you try this with a wish for world peace, you’re likely to get screwed. But I think that’s a given no matter your strategy. Don’t wish for goals, wish for the tools to achieve your goals—you’ll probably be more satisfied with the result to boot.
You’re already lowering your claim, it’s not longer “for any value of X”.
But even so...
“Nobody is hurt acquiring the gold” does that include people hurt because your sudden new gold decrease the market value of gold, so people owning stocks of gold or speculating on an increase of the gold price are hurt ? Sure, you can say “it’s insignificant”, but how will a genie tell that apart ? Your expectation of what having a sudden supply of gold on the market would do and the reality of how it’ll unfold probably don’t match. So the genie will have to do corrections for that… which will themselves have side-effects...
Also, you’ll probably realize once you’ve some gold that gold doesn’t bring you as much as you thought it would bring you (at least, it happens to most lottery winner), so even if you genuinely get the gold, it’ll fail to “meet all your expectations” of having gold. Unless the genie also fixes you so you get as much utility/happiness/… from the gold as you expected to get from it. And as soon as the genie has to start fixing you… game over.
I simplify here because a lot of people think I will have contradictory expectations for a more complex event.
But I think you’re being even more picky here. Do I -expect- that increasing the amount of gold in the world will slightly affect the market value? Yes. But I haven’t wished anything related to that, my wish is -only- about some gold appearing in front of me.
Having the genie magically change how much utility I get from the gold is an even more ridiculous extension. If I wish for gold, why the heck would the genie feel it was his job to change my mental state to make me like gold more?
Possibly we just think very differently, and your ‘expectation’ of what would happen when gold appears also includes every thing you would do with that gold later, despite, among many, many things, not even knowing -when- you would speak the wish to get the gold, or what form it would appear in. And you even have in mind some specific level of happiness that you ‘expect’ to get from it. If so, you’re right, this trick will not work for you.
If you wish for gold, it’s because you have expectation on what you’ll do with that gold. Maybe fuzzy ones, but if you didn’t have any, you wouldn’t wish for gold. So you can’t dissociate the gold and the use when what you’re speaking about is “expectations”.
Or else, solutions like “the world is changed so that the precious metal is lead, and gold has low value, but all the rest is the same” would work. And that wouldn’t meet your “expectations” about the wish at all.