Similarly, you could burgle people’s houses until there remained no one poorly protected against whatever sort of burglary you committed. You could go around insulting people until there remained no one so thin-skinned they couldn’t cope OK being being insulted by strangers. You could put disease-causing viruses and bacteria in the water supply until there remained no one alive who wasn’t resistant to the diseases.
I hope it’s obvious what’s unsatisfactory about those courses of action. Why is the one you propose any better?
If you put diseases in the water until there remains no one who isn’t resistant, this will happen partly because people will be killed by the disease. If everyone developed immunity against the disease but nobody was seriously harmed, it would not be such a bad idea—this is why we have universal vaccination.
I highly doubt that doing a bunch of dollar auctions would lead there being no remaining naive people because the naive people were all killed off rather than because they became non-naive.
They would become non-naive by being harmed (by losing a pile of money). Of course that’s a lesser harm than being killed, and indeed “kill the non-resistant ones” is different from “harm the non-resistant ones until they become resistant”, so I probably shouldn’t have included the diseases-in-the-water example because it uses both effects. It’s the latter that I had in mind as common to the examples I listed (as well as, of course, Clarity’s original proposal).
Similarly, you could burgle people’s houses until there remained no one poorly protected against whatever sort of burglary you committed. You could go around insulting people until there remained no one so thin-skinned they couldn’t cope OK being being insulted by strangers. You could put disease-causing viruses and bacteria in the water supply until there remained no one alive who wasn’t resistant to the diseases.
I hope it’s obvious what’s unsatisfactory about those courses of action. Why is the one you propose any better?
If you put diseases in the water until there remains no one who isn’t resistant, this will happen partly because people will be killed by the disease. If everyone developed immunity against the disease but nobody was seriously harmed, it would not be such a bad idea—this is why we have universal vaccination.
I highly doubt that doing a bunch of dollar auctions would lead there being no remaining naive people because the naive people were all killed off rather than because they became non-naive.
They would become non-naive by being harmed (by losing a pile of money). Of course that’s a lesser harm than being killed, and indeed “kill the non-resistant ones” is different from “harm the non-resistant ones until they become resistant”, so I probably shouldn’t have included the diseases-in-the-water example because it uses both effects. It’s the latter that I had in mind as common to the examples I listed (as well as, of course, Clarity’s original proposal).
Unless they’re 12 years old, losing a couple of dollars is not really all that damaging.
I bet the actual gain in wisdom, relative to just telling them “don’t do that”, is in proportion to the damage.