Slashdot Mirror
The True Story of Website Results
Henry V .009 writes: "Salon is running a story on a dot.com called Website Results. Maybe you've heard of them. Viral Spyware makers. My God, these people are sick. Interview question: 'Imagine there's a peasant somewhere halfway across the world. If you could push a button and kill the person without getting caught, would you do it for a million dollars?' 'For them, it was yes, in a heartbeat.'"
Imagine there's a peasant somewhere halfway across the world. If you could push a button and kill the person without getting caught, would you do it for a million dollars?'
If not, at what price would you? Oh, so you've got morals, ay? What if you had no money, and your family and kids were starving to death? It's winter, you don't make enough money at your job to give your kids any shelter or food, and they're out hiding in the dumpster behind McDonald's trying to fend off frostbite while getting some free food. Would you do it then?
--
Better yet, for a little irony: what if the person at the other end of the button was Jack Valenti, George Bush, Osama bin Laden? Would your views be different then?
--
Every man has a price; You just have to find that price.
What I did read was about very dishonest business practices, fraud, potentially mail fraud if invoices were mailed, threats, etc.
I read an article about some muscle heads that probably used lots of steriods and who suffered from the effects of that drug.
I read about the need for the FBI / local police to open an investigation and put these bastards in jail, sure they ripped off other dot-coms, but the moral decay in corporate America must be stemmed.
I read about why we are headed for a depression because of the complete dishonesty that exists in the stock market / CEOs / Boards and how investors should stop putting money into the markets, cause their collapse and force the government to act and put these people in jail.
But no mention of pushing a button.
Tournament Management Online &
The test was called Milgrim's 37. Peter Gabriel wrote a really creepy song about it called "We do what we're told". There were 37 buttons of "increasing pain" (higher voltage) applied to a test subject. Actually the subjects were actors, simulating greater pain as higher numbers were pushed. The actual subjects were the button-pushers who actually thought they were shocking people. They did as they were told, and applied what they thought were horifically painful shocks to random people they didn't know because they could get away with it.
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
(Spoiler below)
The person debates whether or not to push the button for quite awhile, and finally gives in to temptation. As the stranger departs, the person asks the stranger where he's going. The stranger replies, "To find someone who doesn't know you."
Interesting one this.
I was working in Singapore for a couple of weeks with my then boss, who I got on well with. We went out for a meal somewhere (I believe Boat Quay for those that know the place) and ordered Chili Crab. A few moments later, a waitress came out with a live crab on the end of a rope asking me if this one would be ok.
A bit surprised, I put my vast knowledge of crustacean quality to use (ie. none) and decided that since it looked like a crab to me then yes, that crab would be fine. The crab was taken away, killed and cooked, then presented back to me smothered in chili sauce.
My boss, who is a vegetarian, was horrified. "How could you do that?", he asked. "Imagine if you knew who that was. That could be Fred!" Well, Fred looked like a reasonably tasty crab to me and so my answer would still have been the same. Even it if turned out to be George...
The point here is that it would have been hypocritical of me to refuse to eat the crab just because I'd once seen it alive. So my answer to your original question is "yes - I would still eat meat if I had to kill and butcher the meat myself".
Oh, just as an aside this lovely lady is a fully qualified butcher, though she works as an optician. She is also my fiancee and the mother of our child - being a butcher doesn't automatically make you a psychopath in the same way that answering yes to the 'peasant killing' question would do.
Cheers,
Ian
This is based off of memory, but I feel that I can sum up this story pretty well. A couple in financial straits is deciding what to do to pay the bills, when there is a knock at the door. In the doorway is a man with a box. On top of the box is a button. The man states that for a million dollars all they need do is press the button. The only hitch is that someone they don't know will die.
The man leaves them with the box stating he'll be back when they decide what to do. The couple struggle with the decision. They examine the box and see no wires, just a button. The money would solve all their problems, but can they take a chance that someone would die if they press the button. After spending several days thinking about it, the couple finally presses the button, the rationale being that since they really don't know the person and they can't be sure they will die it's okay.
Immediately, there's a knock at the door. The mysterious man is back with a briefcase of money. Inside, true to his word is a million dollars. As he takes the box back, the distressed couple asks if a person really died. Yes, he replied, but you have your million dollars.
But what about the box? What is to become of it? "Oh, don't worry. I'm just going to give it to someone you don't know," he remarks and leaves.
WRONG.
Have you ever done any research in this? I have.
At the last office we had a nice big red button on the wall. no labels, no "DO NOT PUSH" signs. just one big daunting red button... it was in the lobby so thousands passed it by daily.
the button actually did nothing. it was for an alarm system that had long been removed when the place was remodeled... yet the button remained. So I decided to start a research process... I wired it to a linux box with a webcam in the ceiling. to take a picture and log time/date when it was pushed.....
Except for me and my testing, IT WAS NEVER PUSHED.
I had pushed it several times over the course of that year to check if it was working as I was getting ZERO results.
People are not magically attracted to buttons.. Most looked at it, but they avoided pushing it.
granted this was over a year's time, I did not have a control group, and the population section was not a complete sampling... 90% of the humans that enter our lobby are a part of the upper 40% in IQ and stature. maybe the lower 60% has too little self control to avoid shiny red buttons...
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Look familiar?
*********
You've received this message because while visiting
a 24/7 Media, Inc. partner website, you opted in to
receive special online offers and discounts.
*********
Flowgo is another one. I get loads of complaints from users who claim never to have opted-in to their junk lists.
Yeah, I watch Southpark alot and think that, but I still think its funny as hell. I should also mention that buried in their episodes is often a very strong no bullshit view, almost from a childs eye how we adults act and rationalize away certain moral issues. For example, when Cartman's Mom decides she wants to have a late term abortion... as in kill Cartman... I think 80th (exaggeration) trimester or something. IMHO its kind of a stab at the whole Roe vs. Wade debate.
JOhn
Campaign for Liberty
Remember a year or so back when SETI@Home stopped working for a couple of weeks? Some utter moron destroyed Berkeley's fiber optic cable while trying to steal a big strand of copper wire that didn't, at least in the legal sense, belong to him. In other words, for a couple hundred dollars profit (which he never made because he got caught), he left an entire campus with no Internet access and a monstrous repair bill. That's basically the same thing an organ harvester is doing.
Your analysis--and let's put off the question of whether you're being serious*--ignores the fact that people are almost certainly more valuable than their production cost. I think it takes about $200,000 to raise and educate an adult human. Whatever the exact figure, it isn't chump change. Every time you (the hypothetical(?) organ harvester) kidnap and dismember somebody, you actually remove value from the overall economy.** You end up making money only because you've stolen something that was valuable to other people and made a portion of that value your own. The rest is merely wasted.
Also, if you think about it, the only reason you find my organs valuable is because other people are willing to pay money to receive them. But since the people my organs would save are no more valuable than I am***, there can only be a net loss to the economy.
* Hey, it's Slashdot. It's not worth the effort to try and tell.
** That is, unless you happen to nab one of the bastards from Website Results. The economy could only benefit from such a turn of events.
*** Less valuable, in fact, since it would take all that time, talent, and effort to make them healthy again. I'm all in favor of voluntary organ donation, but killing a healthy person to make a sick person healthy doesn't make economic sense.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
>Except for me and my testing, IT WAS NEVER PUSHED.
>I had pushed it several times over the course of that year to check if it was working as I was getting ZERO results.
You should have put an official-looking sign underneath reading DO NOT PUSH.
That would have done it.
--Chris
A question to anyone who sees it... I was once asked this in a college discussion class:
/. has to say.
"You are sitting at a console with two buttons. One button will kill every person in Alaska. The other will kill your entire semi-immediate family (parents, siblings, grandparents, children). You must push a button or all of them will die. Both would be quick, clean deaths. Suicide is not an option thereafter (my own addition). Which do you choose?"
This is the way I look at it:
If all of the people in Alaska die, their families in other states would be devastated. There would be great suffering -- hundreds of thousands of people - gone. Friends, brothers, husbands (on oil commute, etc.) would all be gone. This, to a degree no less than a few thousand suffering, is guaranteed.
If you kill your family, you and those left in your family and all of your friends would mourn. Then there is the issue that YOU killed them -- not only would there be a horrible sense of guilt, your family and friends might blame you as well.
Comparing the two, if you choose to kill Alaska, you are saying that you value your own guilt complex and your family more than the suffering of thousands.
If you kill your family, you are saying that you would rather live knowing you caused the least suffering possible, which a great deal would be put on you.
Remember, this assumes that you know nothing of Alaskans except they're not a bunch of Nazis and that you love your family. I think you can grasp the philisophical aspects quickly -- this is a general question, don't nit pick. =P
I was personally shocked by the result in my class - 14/16 of the people in the class said they would kill all of Alaska. I choose my family.
I would like to hear what
~Dalcius
Rome wasn't burnt in a day.
Does anyone remember Plato's Republic and the story of the invisibility ring? He felt that a person's true nature would be revealed if he could act with total anonymnity. Some folks are good, some folks are bad. Now we have the technology, so it is no longer a gedanken experiment.
It helps to have a very strong sense of boundaries. As in "this is humor, and unacceptable outside of this forum". I go to Rocky every weekend and swear like a sailor, make horribly overblown letcherous passes at everybody, and do things like dress up as Osama bin Laden (and get hit by lightning during the course of the show). During the week, I'm one of those people who doesn't swear at all, and am very formal and old fashioned when it comes to relationships with the opposite sex. My boundaries are clear.
Humor, especially dark, witty humor, is almost a different language. You don't laugh when your pet is run over, but the Python skit with exploding animals is absolutely hilarious. It's also a dark territory to tread, and if you do, you *will* offend people. When I'm offended, I just chalk it up to part of the risks inherent in such humor, and move on. Slaughtering sacred cows (or chaos -><-) is part and parcel of such entertainement.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Suppose you knew the peasant in question would die tomorrow if you did nothing. Is one day of one life worth any of the above? Suppose the deaf peasant were about to be hit by a train just coming around the bend. What then? Would you sacrifice two minutes of a person's life in return for adding 20 years to someone else's life?
Perhaps it is not your decision to make.
The question was originally posed by Orson Welles, in the Third Man. It occurs in the famous Ferris Wheel scene. Orson slides open a door at the top of the Ferris wheel. Joseph Cotten uncomfortably grabs hold of a rail as Orson speaks.
Martins: Have you ever visited the children's hospital? Have you seen any of your victims?
Harry Lime: Victims? Don't be melodramatic, Holly. Look down there. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving - forever? If I said you could have twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stops, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money - without hesitation? Or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man. Free of income tax. It's the only way to save nowadays.
That's exactly how governments, charities, and NGOs get your political support and your money. Obviously, no one with any sense *wants* people to starve. Which makes it a classic us-against-them case- apathic, selfish republican assholes against sympathetic DFLers who just want to help.
Plenty of people have given their lives in vain for many causes, including the illusion that our aid helps people. It is truly sad that so many people have died- given their lives, or had it taken from them- in vain.
It has nothing to do with being selfish. If you prefer to be duped by the governments of the world, fine. Aid is often nothing but big business and pawns in a world-wide chess game. That's not all cases of charitable action, of course.
I have wanted to joint the Peace Corps for as long as I can remember. However, of the interviews I've done with those formerly apart of the Corps, and having read independent journalist correspondence throughough many of the government created famines (like those in Somalia, Ethiopia, Rwanda), I decided I could not justify so taking so much away from those who need it, so that the US government, and the governments of third-world countries could benefit off of my charity.
When I read comments like the parent, I know that no matter how much work I put in toward truth and justice (excuse the cliche), our current iteration of "civilization" won't survive it's ignorance. Perhaps we could work toward a common goal, that nuclear proliferation of which you speak. We'd be a lot better without nations like mine screwing around with the business of so many nations, pretending that we have a place their or that we know what is best.
I suggest you check out the book "The Road To Hell" by Michael Maren. There are other plenty of other books, journal articles, and other information to read that speaks of the truth of the effects of foreign aid on the peoples on which we inflict it. However, I fear that you'd just dismiss it, because it doesn't just reinforce what you already think you know, and make you feel warm any fuzzy about your $0.70/day you give to Save the Children (one of the worst of the shams in the chaity business).
I once thought like you. We can still help people, but the avenues made available by the majority of NGOs and government organizations do a lot more harm than good to the people who are supposed to need the help.
I'd love for my tax dollars to go to actually helping someone other than corporations and others in powerful positions. I'm not sure why you would associate my stance with the moron known as GWB. Neither pouring more money into what amounts to be stolen food and bribes into the pockets of third-world government pockets (not the people who need the help) nor bombing Iraq will help much of anyone.
I know this big post has probably been a waste of my time. You probably want to continue to be duped, and you probably won't read all this. But I wish you the best, even if you do not choose to find truth.
Peace-
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad