China’s chilling plan for complete social control

submitted by useless_aether from news.com.au

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[–]exPFCwintergreen 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (5 children)

You know, it's not true that 500, or whatever number of monkeys given typewriters (in fact I hate this story.) would ever write all of Shakespeare, because the probability against this ever happening is a larger number that the number of molecules in the universe.

[–]useless_aether[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (4 children)

poor monkeys. imagine, an unlucky one writing war and peace or the encyclopaedia britannica. and the other monkeys would go like, you idiot, you are supposed to type shakespeare! go back and try again!

but seriously, if we consider, how humanity produces idk how many petabytes of new data each year, those monkeys are facing a big backlog.

[–]exPFCwintergreen 2 insightful - 2 fun2 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 2 fun -  (3 children)

The worst part would be getting them to concentrate on the typewriters. Sure they would wonder about what it was, why it was there, how it would improve their lives. I think a short-term, intermittent reward system. So they would get food and one electric jolt hitting the pleasure centers of their brains when they start writing and more randomly during the writing session. Yes, Shakespeare is too long by far. We could say any work between a short story and novel would do as a winner. It could take centuries but we must know if it can be done.

Our next project would be: if a man speaks in the wilderness but there is no woman there to hear him— is he still wrong? Easy experimental design, for one.

[–]useless_aether[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

yeah, what if we, humans are those 'monkeys'? what if someone is already running a big experiment, trying to get us do all kinds of things for them? i mean one of us did produce shakepeare already!

[–]exPFCwintergreen 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Francis Bacon?

[–]useless_aether[S] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

mmmmm bacon. the original 007?

http://www.sirbacon.org/links/dblohseven.html