Evm

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EVM

Title text: Look it's philosophy. Don't kick the math too hard.

Votey

Explanation

This explanation is either missing or incomplete.

Transcript

This transcript was generated by a bot: The text was scraped using AWS's Textract, which may have errors. Complete transcripts describe what happens in each panel — here are some good examples to get you started (1) (2).

[Describe panel here]

Most ethical frameworks agree that stabbing someone to death is wrong

But they never do the math!

Right.

Suppose you randomly pick two people then each time flip a coin to decide whether you stab them to death. 50% chance of death multiplied by two attempts. The expected value of murder - evm - is still 1.

Those two seem about equally bad, but suppose you maintain evm at 1 while spreading the risk of death out between 10,000 people or a million people

Like, we regularly perform acts that increase the risk of death to a large group. Coughing while sick, using electricity from fossil fuels, overusing antibiotics. If you add it all up. Your evm for a given year is probably at least 1.

Somewhere between that and personally stabbing a guy there's a transition from totally evil to totally fine! But evm can stay constant, even as the size of each transgression becomes infinitely small!

The lesson is obvious. You can't apply calculus to ethics. It follows that ethics is made of discrete quanta.

If you perform badness below the level of planck-badness, you don't meet the threshold at which evil radiates into the universe.

This is why all villains are macroscopic entities.

Also quantum mechanics would suggest lies can come in imaginary quantities.

Which explains conspiracy theories.

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Votey Transcript

This transcript was generated by a bot: The text was scraped using AWS's Textract, which may have errors. Complete transcripts describe what happens in each panel — here are some good examples to get you started (1) (2).

[Describe panel here]

It'd be even more evil to invent a pair of children without proper snowgear who have to trudge on endlessly and never get home.

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