The Efficiency of Voting Selfishly

Is it more efficient to vote in our own interests or in the interests of the society? Prima facie, this seems to be a useless question with an obvious answer.

I approach the question using the framework of efficiency; that is, the extent to which preferences are satisfied by the allocation of limited resources.

 

It is almost certain that we are much more privy to our own preferences than the preferences of others, much less that of society as a whole. Thus, if the sole metric was to be the maximization of our preferences, it is clearly more desirable for the resources to be allocated with our own hands. After all, nobody ought to know our needs and wants better than ourselves. 

If we acknowledge that our intuitions on our preferences are more accurate, and if we were to consider voting as a means to most accurately determine the preferences of society, then it follows that voting is more accurate if everyone were to vote in their own interests, rather than in their guesstimates of what the common interest is. By adopting the pretense of voting in society's interest, there is a risk of converging on something which is merely a fiction, a perceived preference instead of an actual one.

A Career Advisory Form

I would have imagined that following the instructions of the career analysis computer that the government spent millions developing was the safest, if not the soundest decision of my life. The algorithms might not have suggested the most profitable profession, but were at least guaranteed to propose a career that would provide me with the most satisfaction. 

Unfortunately, I was apprehended almost immediately after committing my first murder.

My defence lawyers very quickly informed me that having "Serial Killer" on the career advisory form was not the same thing as having a license to kill. 

In other words, this was all a mistake.

I guess I should have realized it all along. After I committed the murder, I felt no satisfaction. I had initially attributed this to my swift arrest; since I had only killed a single person, I would not have qualified for the term "Serial", hence I would have not felt any satisfaction. After all, the career form did not say "Single murderer" or "Casual killer". 

Of course, with the benefit of hindsight, any person would have realized that "Serial Killer" wasn't a career. But how could I have known for sure? Some careers are notoriously unrewarding, especially in economic terms; perhaps this was merely one of them. If I were to bear any fault, it was that I had too much blind trust in the system.

How was I to know that I was supposed to work at a TV network boardroom, deciding upon the fate of shows and seasons? Nobody would have come to that conclusion! Sheer negligence on the programmer's part.

And that's the line my defence lawyers are taking.

Echo Recorder

Part of my responsibilities as a server admin is to clear out inactive websites on the server. Very often these are personal websites created out of passing impulse, never updated after initial creation, so it was easy to detect and delete them simply by their lack of traffic and updates. Still, the rules were that I had to make a cursory inspection of the site before performing the site delete.

One particular website consisted entirely of a single website, which was itself almost entirely devoid of content. It contained descriptions of an experimental sound recorder that cancelled out the original sounds, and only captured the remaining echoes of the initial sound.

The webpage also described further improvements to the device, by stacking the voice-processing unit onto itself. This allowed the initial echoes themselves to be removed, while preserving the reverberations resulting from the primary echoes.  When paired with a sufficiently sensitive microphone, this stacking could be repeated to capture even more subtle levels of echoes.

There was a bolded disclaimer- that there was something wrong with the implementation of the sound recorder, an untraceable error that had yet to be debugged. There was a link to an audio file that supposedly contained an example of the audio artifact.

Unfortunately, the link was broken, as it led to a now-defunct file-hosting site.

Whatever could "othervoice.wav" have contained?

The Scam of the Mysterious Adventurers

I have long since come to the conclusion that the "rat menace" is actually an elaborate scheme to defraud the town of its money. The warning signs are all there, so clear as day that I wonder why anyone else hasn't caught on yet.

First, these "adventurers" that mysteriously appear out of nowhere, dressed in exactly the same attire, all so coincidentally mute. They'll approach me to be "briefed" on the rat problem, but many simply skip through my introduction as if they've heard it before. I suppose they must have, for immediately, without even doing any prior research, they know where to head in order to hunt rats.

It's almost as if they have some magic arrow that points them in the correct direction.

Then, as quickly as they leave, they'll return with evidence of their successful eradication campaign. Interestingly, the proof is always 50 rat tails, not one more, not one less. Not rat pelts, nor complete carcasses, always rat tails. And once they collect the reward, they'll never appear before me ever again, even though the bounty still remains.

It's clearly a scam, isn't it? For all we know, they could literally be farming rats somewhere right outside of town.

The joke's on them, though. I've managed to convince these adventurers to accept most of their bounty in the form of an entirely imaginary reward. It's not money, or weapons, or any real or physical material. Yet for some reason, they all seem exceptionally delighted to be informed that they have received 'XP'...

A Website Stumbled upon Purely by Accident

I discovered the website by clicking on a link on an email I received. The email was titled "Millions of videos, 2 min free previews, blondes, redheads, all ages included!!! Secret videos of everyone you know and want to know inside!!"

I figured there was no harm in following the link, if only out of curiosity. Yup, nothing but sheer curiosity. In any case, my computer was protected by the latest in antivirus software and I had the most recent patches to Internet Explorer installed.

Damnit, it was another bait-and-switch. Again. I ought to have guessed from the preview thumbnails, which were strangely aligned to a more elderly demographic. I thought it was a cookies issue.

Was this a new sort of snuff website? All the 2 minute previews showed were people dying. Of heart attacks, on the surgical table, in their sleep, in car crashes... All manners of strange and unusual deaths were documented and indexed under various search labels.

It got stranger when I selected "My Location!!" from the drop-down search options. The search list was repopulated, and immediately I could tell something unusual was at work. I could recognize some of the locations in the preview thumbnails. There was a video of a recent fatal car crash that happened two blocks away. Another video depicted a failed mugging from about two decades back. Curiously, there was an old black/white GIF of a laborer dying in a construction accident. But one thing was clear- it happened somewhere near me.

Intrigued, I decide to go one step further- I clicked on "Facebook Integration". I thought that there would be no search results, since all my friends were still alive- to my knowledge- but when the search returned over a thousand hits, I knew I had stumbled across something great.

I had discovered a database which stored videos depicting the last two minutes of each person's life.

Then the question struck me- what about myself? How would I die?

Without much hesitation I entered my own name into the search box, with the various search filters to remove others of the same name.

There were no hits. Perhaps the filters were too strict. I relaxed the filters.

No hits again. I performed one more search, this time with no filters.

A few tens of search results were returned. Strangely, none of them were me.

Where was I? I reviewed all the search results, this time searching more closely for a resemblance. Nothing.

What did this mean? Was I... could I be... immortal? A sense of glee welled up inside me.

It was exactly then that a massive message box popped up in the middle of the screen.

"Congratulations for being the 1000,000,000th visitor!!! You have WON a FREE privacy protection package!!! LIFETIME protection, GUARANTEED!!!"

The Monsterslayer is a Child?

The king and his maester stood before the site of the battle. The battle had already been won for them, and the monster lay prone on the battlefield, motionless even in the braying winds. 

"A child slew the monster?" the king asked.

"By all accounts it was, my lord," replied his maester, who was known as the wisest man in all the lands.

"But that is impossible."

"That is indeed what it should be, but all facts point to that. There was no trace of a wound on the great beast, save a small injury matching that weapon wielded by the young one."

"And that fell the beast?"

"It would appear so, my lord."

"But our great armies failed to match it in battle, and were destroyed!"

"That too is true, my lord, but there are some things beyond mortal reasoning."

"Beyond mortal reasoning? Hold on, don't tell me this is one of those bullshit legends- you know, no man of woman born shall blah blah blah. This child isn't a man."

"I hardly think that is it, my lord. We did try arming a hundred younglings, of various ages and genders, and sending them into battle against the beast. The results were... unsatisfactory, and certainly did affect your approval ratings. What is fortunate, though, is that this is not a democracy."

"Could the fact that he was alone have influenced the outcome of the battle?"

"You are referring to what the Easterners refer to as the conservation of ninja strength? A ludicrous theory, though in our desperation we did attempt it. Several waves of men (and sometimes children) were sent to assault the creature, and we varied the number in each wave by powers of two, starting with five-hundred-and-twelve and finally ending with a lone champion. Again, the results were appalling, though I am glad to report that your manpower bills for the subsequent months will be substantially reduced."

"I suppose there are silver linings to every cloud. Did you notice the weapon the child was wielding? Could that be the key? Perhaps it was previously intractably encased in stone, or was gifted to him by some watery wrench?"

"Pardon me for failing to mention this, my lord, but the wound was inflicted by a finger poke, which if you forgive me for making the assumption, is unlikely to be supernaturally gifted. On later inspection, his finger was not found to have vorpal properties."

"That hardly clarifies matters, does it? This is an important mystery crucial to the survival of the realm, and it must be resolved!"

"I do have a theory of sorts, but it will take some time to research."

"Speak, noble maester."

"What if the child was a mere agent of chance? It is considered very unlikely, if not impossible, for a single person to win the lottery, but all the same someone will win the lottery. By this learned hypothesis, it is clear that this child, which we have shown have no advantage or talent to beastslaying, merely benefited from being near the beast when it expired naturally."

"Expired naturally?"

"Yes, my lord. It is not unheard of for foreign, or even alien, invaders to succumb to all manners of natural deaths. One might even say it died to a bacterial infection."

"That is heresy! We have just barely researched the miasma theory, and I will not have a maester of the realm proclaim the blasphemous theory of germs!"

"Quite right, my lord."

"It appears that we have, again, come to no conclusion. It is most unsatisfactory, but there is no other possibility. Perhaps this is yet another contrived scenario proposed by some odd god to test the wits of mortal men."

"Quite right, my lord, quite right."

A Slumber Before the End of the World

"Now, I understand you've paid to be in cryostasis for a thousand years, and I know that it's not quite halfway there yet, but you have to listen to me closely: The end of the world will be tomorrow. You understand? Tomorrow?"

The man's words ring in my ears. It doesn't make complete sense, but I nod for now.

"You have two options. First, to witness the end. If so, you'll need to complete Form 1A for early cyro-release. Second, to resume cyrostasis, to freeze yourself so that you will die in your sleep, without knowing what hit you in your last moments, and to lose the chance to even enjoy one last moment on Earth."

"Not much of a choice there, right?"

"Right. I'll prepare Form 1A for you."

"Hold on, buddy. Let's resume my cyrostasis, as my contract clearly delineates."

"You're sure you want to do this? It's the end of the world, you know."

"No way. It's clear that you're scamming me."

"What?"

"You're scamming me. First, if 300 years have passed, as you suggested, how come I understand you perfectly even with linguistic drift?"

The man squirmed visibly.

"Um... universal translators. Yup, universal translators were invented some time ago."

"Right.... and what is the cause of the end of the world?"

The man looked around for a quick answer, before answering "Global cooling."

The look on his face when he realized what he had replied was hilarious.

"And global cooling will happen exactly tomorrow?"

"Did I say global cooling? No, that wasn't really what I meant. What I really meant was global cooling... global cooling is a consequence of a meteor strike, which is the catastrophic event that is predicted to happen in 1 day's time, which is tomorrow. Of course, global cooling is the world ending scenario, but the meteor is the cause."

I stared at him for a moment. Some untruths don't even have to be unmasked for them to break down.

"It's fair to say the game's up already. Why don't you tell me what's your plan, and perhaps then you can set me back to sleep again?"

The man sighed.

"It's the end of the world alright. The end of my world if I don't discharge my quota of patients today. Cryostasis is too expensive to keep up in the long term, and especially so for 'early-backers'. That's why it's actually become a job to convince patients to agree to early release."

"By one means or another."

"Exactly."

"That has got to be the funniest plan I've heard in the last, what, fifty years? At least, I'm guessing that's the real amount of time that has passed."

"Oh, you've haven't heard funny yet. You know something?"

"What?"

"It is really 300 years in the future. I'm just the guy from the next row of cryo-booths. Someone just unfroze me last week using the same plan. But here's the killer- you know what kind of jobs are available to an ancient being from 300 years back?"

And then he started laughing.

"Probably the same kind of jobs that will be open to them 700 years later."