Lets assume that genies grant wishes literally, but will twist your words. How do you wish without unintended consequences? Typical rules of no more wishes, no resurrection, no forced love, no altering the past, can’t defy logic, can’t break physical laws, can’t create paradoxes, and can’t affect higher powers (this is one tough genie!).
- I win $50M USD after tax in the lotto, in a way that lets me claim it anonymously and live inconspicuously. I’ll keep my job & benefits package, though.
- I have notably better physical & mental health now through the natural end of my life.
- I have notably better emotional intelligence now through the natural end of my life.
Too bad you’ll die tomorrow
naturally
Genie grants all three wishes but makes you very small and invisible to fullfill the second part of wish 1. good thing you asked for better emotional and mental health, you’ll need it :)
Ties in nicely with phonics’ result… an invisible person is hard to avoid colliding with.
I would give my wishes you the genie.
You trust the genie too much!
I wish karma was real and had immediate repercussions.
the shear amount of bad karma this caused through this wish comes back to you as Bad Karma. maybe stay home for a bit.
I’m willing to bear the cost.
- Excluding myself, everyone’s knowledge of the sun rising in the east and setting in the west is inverted, as are any references, depictions, or allusions to the direction in which the sun rises, while the cardinal directions and the orientation and rotation of the Earth relative to the Sun remain unchanged, such that everyone other than myself expects the Sun to rise in the west and set in the east, while it will continue to rise in the east and set in the west as it does now.
In the chaos that this causes you get final destinationed by a logging truck that has a crazy driver losing his mind because of proclamations of the end times. Genie didn’t even monkeys paw that one. it just happened
Worth it
i’ve given (too much) thought into the wishes:
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I wish all public officials, both elected, appointed, or otherwise, work to maximize the well-being of the people they represent, and the world as a whole.
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I wish to invent practical, sustainable, achievable FTL propulsion, and live to share the knowledge to parties who can and will implement it.
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If there is no positive life after death, I wish there was, retroactively, and it was roughly inline with the form of the Good Place at the series end.
WIshes arn’t perfectly bulletproof, but are robust enough i think it would be hard to twist.
- a state of pure anarchy comes about due to the inability to the inability to maximize the well being of the people they represent to any extent as no method of measurement is defined and as one manages to maximize one metric it minimizes others making public officials disappear!
- you discover FTL propulsion as you fall into a black hole and share it with others on the same ship. unfortunately even if you find a way to escape it eons have passed and either everyone already is aware of FTL travel, or they have disappeared with the heat death of the universe.
- unfortunately this affects higher powers!
I love a good monkey’s paw thread.
#1 is fair
I dont understand #2
#3: im good with that.
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When Fox Mulder encountered a genie like that, his wish was delivered in written form. It was a binder with probably more than 1000 pages. Basically, he wished for world peace, but he had to lawyer his way out of all the usual genie BS. If the genie is playing dirty, you have to design the wish like you would design a law.
Bonus Showerthought: The law is a book series specifically written for assholes.
The genie is wondering how you managed to get all that done before spontaneously finding him. He claims you must also be a genie and per genie law owes you no wishes!
Nah, I would just put the genie on hold for 7 months while I’m cooking the wish with a team of lawyers.
If you can leave genie on hold for 7 months genie’s leaving you on hold till your dead before granting your wish (genie was pretty damn offended here, this is worse than the war crime stuff for him!)
Fair enough. World peace achieved even though I didn’t get to enjoy it. Totally worth it though.
I was just discussing that episode when my son asked me if I pushed a button that killed all assholes on the planet would I push it. I didn’t even hesitate in saying yes. He then asked even if it killed me too, and I still said yes.
This led to whole discussion around this whole concept and the monkey paw theory and I also brought up the episode as well. The ending was the only correct choice to make.
I wouldn’t press that button. Getting rid of assholes is a temporary fix. The human nature will always produce more in the next generation. Besides, thanos snapping away such a big part of the population will probably result in some sort of societal collapse, famine and disasters.
yea, seems likely that it would kill 100% of humanity.
Babies are fucking assholes. they might not know better, but they are assholes.
My toddler? often an asshole, does things just to see what happens.
Teens? totaly assholes Adults: have you met them?
Yeah, if you use the broadest possible definition, then pretty much everyone would be gone. Even if you restrict it to only adults who are aware of what they are doing and still choose to be an asshole fairly often, you would be removing a huge part of the population. Sounds like a pretty bad move to me.
That sort of thing might come close to nuking the entire species back to the stone age. Then again, that would be good for the environment in the long run. It could take like 20 000 years for the human species to fully recover from that one button press. I think I’m beginning to see some benefits… nah. Still a bad idea.
Honestly, the crappy part is that you kinda have to be an asshole to get anything or anywhere in this world. Especially when it involves people in charge or powerful, nothing is given, ir must be forcibly taken otherwise you will be left holding your figurative dick while the actual assholes run train on you
- I wish for a proximity 10milions american dollars worth of unirradiated gold sourced from outerspace, placed here safely next to me, neetly. After that I ask what higher powers are we talk in here, can I mess with my local mayor or no because he was democraticly elected. Can I mess with individual rich person but not a group of them?
- Annnd… Uhhhh, I’ll ask you again in a bit, just monkey paw me for the first one.
1 the genie drops an asteroid down next to you making sure the asteroid is safe. You… maybe not so much. the genie likes specificity and conciseness and only had to give 1 wish. :)
It would be very difficult to place the asteroid next to them in a manner that is both safe and neat in relation to anything involved, while harming the wisher. Like, how would you kill them neatly with an asteroid?
It said Genie had to place it next to them neatly. Genie just had to make the asteroid indestructable or very hard to not take damage and the speed by which it got there was enough to destroy everything around it. see the multiple meteorites whose simple sound shattered windows for miles
That doesn’t sound very neat
placed here safely next to me, neetly
impact from orbit is hardly safe or nea- oh. -.- this asteroid is hardly nerdy enough to be considered neetly
Ive generally been of the view that instead of wishing for three specific things, one should instead wish for some kind of power that would then enable you to then grant yourself the things that you want (the most obvious thing might be wishing for omnipotence but this probably breaks, well, all of the rules since being able to do anything definitionally is incompatible with limits, but I suspect the limits of what is possible in this direction without breaking the laws of physics are still far beyond what humans are capable of), so as not to need the genie later when the wishes run out.
However, if you know the genie will twist your words, Im not sure that its safe to wish at all, its unlikely that you can come up with something that cant be twisted into something you dont want, language is just too ambiguous for that and the implication is that you’re dealing with something that is both incredibly more capable than you and actively malicious, doing your best to avoid its attention is probably the safest bet.
That being said, if you must wish, I figure the way Id try to do it, if boring, is to say the outcome you want, without an “I wish” but with some clear marker on when your description starts and stops, like some gesture or nonsense word, and then something like “I wish that the statement that I previously made in between the two [whatever your marker was] is now true in the way that I, the person making this wish, presently desire and in no alternate way.” It probably wont work because again, language is nearly infinitely ambiguous and the genie is much more powerful than you, but at least youre trying to avoid unintended interpretations.
Alternately, back when I still used reddit, I did once try the “monkey’s paw” subreddit with “I wish to be satisfied with whatever the result of this wish is.” and dont remember any of the answers I got actually twisting it much. Maybe something like that at least robs the genie of some of their fun.
See This is the kind of wish the genie respects! someone who realizes they’ve really run into effectively a lovecraftian God and actually suggests they wouldn’t take the genie up on the wishes! I feel like the genie might do something minor for you like making sure you never stub your toe again or ensures you never rip your pants.
I think the proper answer to the whole make the genie do what I mean/understand me from the genie’s perspective is to drive you insane by trying to give you genie like intelligence with our limited minds.
As to “I wish to be satisfied with whatever the result of this wish is”, id imagine making you a very short lived being with abundance of every kind and only enough mental capacity to enjoy that would work.
Well done, I can tell you thought about this one!
I wish for a contract lawyer with genie experience who can write my other two wishes in a way that can’t be twisted. (But with more words needed to get that first wish right!)
Genie experience. Sure he works for the genie. Who ‘can’ do want you want. But doesn’t have to. ‘Can’ gives your lawyer an out.
Chris and Jack did a skit like this. The first wish was to have the genie audit “what if I wish” speculations to tell how they might interpret the wish. A great video.
“Your eyes fall out”
“Really? Seriously?”
That’s what Timmy turner did
What if the genie lawyer isn’t licensed(not to many licensed lawyers with genie experience I imagine!) or is in league with the genie! Honestly the genie may be less tricky than that lawyer!
The genie itself likely has legal experience. He’s just allowed the genie to select the next two wishes.
Hm, maybe I have to stipulate that whatever effect the final two wishes have on me, they have the same exact effect on the lawyer.
hmm, gonna have to be careful they are a genie repercussions might be able to be shrugged off/ignored
The lawyer isn’t a genie, just a human who knows how to word things for genies.
First wish free the genie
Now that the genie is free he is no longer constrained by all genie laws and enslaves us all for eternity! Great job now my weekend plans are completely ruined! /s
My first wish is that my wishes are not corrupted, and they are fulfilled to the intent in my heart and mind without any trickery of bullshit.
My second wish is to have the ability to draw extremely well.
My third wish is that I can bring my drawings to life.
The last two powers will enable me to have infinite wishes by simply drawing things like immortality pills, scifi technology, and just straight up money if I wanted.
Genie grants your wishes but wipes your memory of having made these wishes and makes you dislike drawing :)
Doesn’t even have to be that… “bring to life…” so you draw an immortality pill, will it to life, and it then eats you before you have the chance to swallow it.
When it comes to life, it’s of course going to be alive, and scale wasn’t mentioned.
oh sure like I would tell you. im hoarding all my genie wish knowledge.
I’m using my first damn wish to make you spill the beans on your genie wish strategies!!!
ok first wish is for two wishes that I will be happy with the outcome of them both long and short term from my current perspective just before any wish activity goes on and uneffected by retro effects from the wishes and given the knowledge of how exactly those wishes will play out when I make them both short and long term.
Technically you can’t wish for more wishes but even so attempting to give you near omnipotent knowledge that would be required to understand how all wish activity would most likely drive you insane or kill you in a mortal body. as to whether that would make you happy may be a perspective thing when the chance is a lot of pain from going crazy or dropping dead vs the torture of having to sift through that knowledge to use it taking more time then you have to live.
First wish: the genie will be my eternal friend.
Second wish: free the genie from the geas — make the genie its own master.
There is no third wish.
First wish genie is an eternal friend but more like distant friend that would talk to you as a friend or give you a hand with moving but no more. then same as https://lemmy.ca/post/69470791/24857447 but maybe you get slightly nicer conditions?
The first is because of the Arabian Nights story where the guy frees the genie and the first thing it does is kill the wisher. There’s another where the first thing it does is puts the wisher in the bottle it was trapped in.
So “distant friend” is enough.
I wish that I would feel content with my life regardless of the circumstances I may find myself in.
I wish that the world is fair and just.
I wish that I had all the knowledge humans have ever known and could access that information easily and quickly without external assistance.
Genie explains that due to the laws of physics the rules covering not changing the past and general human psychology everything being fair and just is impossible due to scarcity and previous injustices, tones down your overall intelligence level enough to make you generally lack the sense of loss or wanting to make you generally content, then puts you in a room with access to a terminal that could give you info but you’re generally too content to do anything/interact with it. The genie appreciates what you were trying to do though so it makes sure you still live an otherwise normal life.
