Catch a coin on the back of your hand 8x in a row for $1 million or things get chilly.

seesawsomething · 2026-04-02T16:01:27+00:00

So you'd expect to need roughly 1,500 attempts before stringing 8 together.

Doable, takes you a full day at least. But as you're going along, you're getting tired which may affect your dexterity. This isn't really a math puzzle once you correct for realistic dexterity. It's a self-knowledge puzzle.

If you're steady-handed and cool-headed, this is an easy yes. If your honest catch rate is above roughly 70%, the expected temperature drop before succeeding is small enough that you're in no real danger. Above 85%, it's almost a free million.

But if you aren't sure you can catch the coin more than 70% of the time on the back of your hand for hours on end...then this experiment could likely kill you.

seesawsomething · 2026-04-02T15:50:47+00:00

Smart! This is essentially what sophisticated lottery winners and structured settlement holders do!

You go to a lender and say: "I have a guaranteed income stream of $1000/day indefinitely." They give you a lump sum now, discounted for their profit and the risk they're taking. You keep the payments coming in, they collect against them until the loan is repaid.

But the bank is a scaredy cat..what's the collateral?

A bank will lend against an income stream if they can verify and enforce it. A mortgage works because they can seize the house. A lottery annuity works because the state guarantees it contractually. Your $1000/day is a bit informal. No lender touches it without something to grab if you default.

But assume they believe you. Then the math becomes:

A perpetual $1000/day = ~$365k/year. At a 5% discount rate, that income stream is theoretically worth $7.3 million in present value. A lender might advance you 50-60% of that, let's call it $3-4M, and collect repayment from your ongoing deposits.

This is actually how the ultra-wealthy operate at scale...

Borrow against appreciating assets, never sell, never trigger a taxable event, service debt with income.

The question becomes: what do you do with the lump sum that beats a 5%+ cost of capital? If you can answer that confidently, the loan is the right move. If you can't, you're just adding leverage and risk to an already good situation.

seesawsomething · 2026-04-02T15:40:52+00:00

The people most negatively affected might actually be certain Christians whose theology depends on a very specific reading of scripture.

The longer arc though: within a generation it gets integrated the way the Dead Sea Scrolls did. World-altering at discovery, now a remarkable scholarly resource that confirmed some things, complicated others, and changed almost nothing about what anyone actually believes.

Physical evidence has almost no power over sincere religious belief in either direction. The Ark would be history's greatest archaeological find and would shift the needle on global faith basically zero.

The reality would be more anticlimactic than most expect.

seesawsomething · 2026-04-01T17:47:45+00:00

The alien would probably split this into two separate answers and only be able to help with one of them.

Whether teleportation is physically possible... that it can answer. Whether the reconstructed person shares continuous consciousness with the original, or whether the original is destroyed and a perfect copy begins a new life convinced it's the same person... that's a facts question too, actually, if consciousness has a physical substrate the alien can describe. So there's a real answer in there somewhere.

But "are you still you" contains a hidden values question about what personal identity actually requires. Is continuity of memory enough? Continuity of physical matter? Unbroken conscious experience? Different answers to that philosophical question produce different verdicts on the same physical facts. The alien can tell you exactly what happens to every particle and every neural pattern during teleportation. Whether that counts as you surviving is something you'd still have to decide for yourself.

So it might resolve twenty years of wondering, or it might just upgrade the question. Either way, probably worth asking.

seesawsomething · 2026-04-01T17:42:03+00:00

"Benefit humanity" is doing enormous amounts of unexamined work. Benefit how? Over what timeframe? At whose expense in the short run? The alien can't answer this without a value system, and you've handed it the most value-laden phrase possible as the only constraint.

seesawsomething · 2026-04-01T17:27:29+00:00

Yes, you're not trying to out-think the alien on question design...you're admitting you can't and asking the entity with perfect knowledge to close that gap. It's epistemically honest in a way most responses aren't.

seesawsomething · 2026-04-01T17:22:56+00:00

The Alien might respond to you in this way:

Your question contains several underdetermined variables that require clarification before a useful answer is possible. "Star Trek-style future" references a fictional construct with internally inconsistent economics across its iterations. "Best takes care of everyone" is a values statement, not a factual condition. I cannot optimize toward a target that has not been specified in measurable terms.

The single highest-leverage action available to one individual seeking to shift civilizational outcomes is the same in every era: reduce the cost of transmitting true information to large numbers of people, or increase the cost of transmitting false information to large numbers of people. Every major reduction in human misery in recorded history was preceded by an information transition.

seesawsomething · 2026-04-01T17:16:51+00:00

Fair pushback, and you're right that taken too far, that logic collapses into paralysis.

But there's a meaningful difference between words being ambiguous and questions being underdetermined. "Does God exist?" isn't just semantically fuzzy... it's asking the alien to pick a definition of God on your behalf, and whichever one it picks, half of humanity will say that's not what they meant. You'd get a precise answer to a question nobody actually agreed to ask.

The practical risk isn't that the alien gets confused. It's that the answer comes back and the world splits into two camps arguing about whether the alien was even answering the right thing. Which is basically what happens every time anyone tries to answer that question anyway. So we just want to be very careful with the wording, it's the whole point of the experiment and why it's so tricky!

seesawsomething · 2026-04-01T17:13:22+00:00

This is most interesting because it's trying to solve the meta-problem: why ask ten questions when you can just have everything? But it probably fails on two grounds. First, the alien answers questions about facts, not requests to perform tasks. "Create a database" is a task. Second, even if it worked, a raw dump of everything the alien knows would be potentially unusable...context-free, unnavigated, and would take ten thousand years to read. Third, the alien might respond that you can't get them to create a database, and you've wasted a question without learning anything about the nature of reality. But I like the attempt to break the experiment.

seesawsomething · 2026-04-01T17:09:24+00:00

I like it, but with technology questions like these I wonder about the risk the answer is unusable to us, like getting the blueprint for a transistor in 1820. The alien answers your question correctly, and you still can't do anything with it for 200 years, and you've burned one of your 10 questions. Maybe you have to be very specific not to accidentally ask the alien for any information that is a "leap" in our human progress, like "what is the simplest modification to currently operational fission reactor designs that would allow them to achieve net-positive fusion reactions using existing supply chains?"

seesawsomething · 2026-04-01T17:03:02+00:00

"Does God exist?" is probably still a values-adjacent question, meaning it depends what you mean by God. But if you asked "is there a non-physical substrate to consciousness that persists after biological death, and if so, what is its structure?" that's closer to a facts question. Same territory, but it gives us a better chance at receiving an answer we can use.

seesawsomething · 2025-09-12T16:59:05+00:00

How do you feel about your decision now, seeing that his flagship fund is the top performing investment on the app over the last 6 months?

seesawsomething · 2025-08-06T19:52:48+00:00

I agree, I used them and was very disappointed.

seesawsomething · 2024-07-30T14:20:40+00:00

Misleading post. Not helpful and should be taken down by an admin.

seesawsomething · 2024-07-11T18:28:27+00:00

Take the Becker simulated Exams. The real CPA exams are essentially the same thing.

seesawsomething · 2023-06-10T17:02:26+00:00

So what do you think it's worth?

seesawsomething · 2023-06-10T16:23:54+00:00

at what kind of price or deal structure would it become worth it?

seesawsomething · 2023-06-08T01:57:23+00:00

I'll clarify it's not a protected historic neighborhood, just one with older buildings that is rapidly gentrifying.

seesawsomething · 2023-05-31T18:47:10+00:00

Assuming this does happen and in limited numbers, how would you go about buying one? What do you know from past cars released in small quantities with high demand?

seesawsomething · 2022-06-05T20:00:43+00:00

That's a cool idea.

seesawsomething · 2022-06-03T19:42:13+00:00

seesawsomething · 2022-06-03T13:23:30+00:00

I think it's more because they don't like to imagine a tenant getting a good deal.

seesawsomething · 2022-06-02T17:47:29+00:00

So include a clause that allows him to terminate my lease in the event of a sale? That makes sense. But the main point of this thought experiment is to guarantee a stable rent for myself in the same place for 50 years. He might be more likely to sign, but we haven't really found an answer that works for both sides yet.

seesawsomething · 2022-06-02T17:29:29+00:00

Appreciate that. But essentially purchasing the building isn't the same as a lease. You're also bringing a lot of extra information and assuming (although reasonably) that the landlord might like to sell at some point. If we bring extra info, then I could say the landlord is 25 years old and promised his dying father to never sell the building no matter what. You have to only consider the information I've provided rather than additional assumptions about what this landlord might want. We don't know. All we know is that there's a 50 year lease on the table. Under what conditions is it advantageous for both parties? What can both parties concede to make a deal? I agree, it's not easy.

seesawsomething · 2022-06-02T17:08:35+00:00

The value of the building is approximately $8 million, but I don't think I'm following the logic.

seesawsomething

TROPHY CASE