What would Manifold do with ten trillion dollars and no fingers?
76
1.8k
8.1k
resolved Feb 29
60%59%
Fund research into cybernetic fingers
30%8%
Fund research into understanding and harnessing the powers of the devil that took your fingers
10%8%
Get humanity to live as sinlessly as possible (since you now know that the devil is literally real)
0.1%
Give the Against Malaria Foundation as much funding as they want
0.0%
Send $1000 to every person on the planet
1.3%
Hire several hundred billion dollars worth of personal security
1.1%
Buy every major AI lab.
0.1%
Eradicate Polio
0.1%
Take up the entire ad-space of civilization to make everyone see nothing but Manifold Markets ads for 10 years
2.0%
Cause inflation
0.1%
Manhattan project for brain uploading
0.1%
Pay someone to marry @Rucker
0.1%
Lobby to legalize real-money prediction markets
0.6%
Fund research into growing back fingers
0.3%
Buy Sam Altman
0.3%
Pay a polydactyly person to cut off their fingers and make an instant $90 trillion
0.2%
Hire the world's best team of butlers/assistants
0.3%
Renew Firefly
0.2%
Lose money
0.3%
Fund embryo selection

Resolves to poll in a few days, 60%/30%/10% for 1st/2nd/3rd place.

I was going to make a market about which option would win this poll but it has become immediately obvious that everyone on manifold wants ten trillion dollars and no fingers.

Once we have enough responses in this market, I will create a poll asking what people would do with their ten trillion dollars and no fingers. The poll will be open for a few days, and then close along with this market.

This question resolves Win, Place, Show to the top three highest-voted responses:

  • 1st (Win) 60%

  • 2nd (Place) 30%

  • 3rd (Show) 10%

Submission rules:

  • Don't submit more than three options yourself

  • Don't submit anything too close to an existing submission

  • Do submit either silly ideas or serious ideas

  • Do argue for why your submission is the best use of the ten trillion dollars

  • Do let me know if you have any other suggestions for submission rules

Get Ṁ600 play money

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Well we had a tie for second in the resolution poll so:

Well we had a tie for second in the resolution poll so:

What exactly would fingers being illegal even entail?

@TheAllMemeingEye i think they meant that everyone would have to cut theirs off as well.

@BrunoParga what do we do with this mountain of 80 billion fingers we now have, assuming the devil only wanted ours?

@TheAllMemeingEye that's an implementation detail that can be left for the Executive to decide. We're just talking about the law, here.

@BrunoParga time for more multi-choice markets and polls haha

"what should Manifold do with a mountain of 80 billion severed fingers?"
"what should Manifold do with ten trillion fingers (on your hands) and no dollars?"

Manifold: "we are individually pretty smart, and our advanced market technology allows us to be even smarter on aggregate!"

Also Manifold: sits there fingerless, with a no prostheses and a dirty butt, waiting for the research on cybernetic fingers to complete

... why wouldn't a ten-trillionaire buy a prosthesis?

Just because manifold would want better cybernetic fingers than currently exist, doesn't mean prostheses aren't a thing yet.

Also, one can do a remarkable number of things without fingers, if one tries. One of my more vivid childhood memories (I am a leg amputee, so have childhood memories that involve annual conferences of child amputees and their parents) was watching two girls play a piano duet with their stumps. Many arm amputees when I was a kid (a time when prostheses fit less well than they do now and the motors and batteries were bulkier and heavier) would spend most of the day without their prostheses on and only put them on when there was something specific they wanted to do that required prosthetic assistance. Particularly if you've got all your hand muscles and bones intact excepting the fingers, there's lots you can do with that appendage.

I do understand you were aiming for humour, and it landed well. 😏 As you were. :)

@equinoxhq we did not choose to buy new fingers in the resolution poll! No thumbs up.

Get humanity to live as sinlessly as possible (since you now know that the devil is literally real)

There's nothing saying this devil is that of any particular religion, is there?

@BrunoParga is devil not an exclusively abrahamic religion term for Satan, with others having various other demons?

@TheAllMemeingEye well, this is partly a semantic argument and those are *hellish* to untangle.

The original question says:

A bored devil enters our dimension and offers you a bargain.

My interpretation is that this is "a devil" as opposed to the Devil, in the same way that, say, Zeus is "a god" but he's not God. The "enters our dimension" makes me think he's coming from another one, and I don't think the "Earth vs Hell" distinction in Christianity is conceptualized as "our dimension vs another dimension".

But, like I said, this is semantics, so it's not something we can definitely ascertain.

But, like I said, this is semantics, so it's not something we can definitely ascertain. Perhaps the best we can do is:

hey @Joshua , when you created the question, did you mean "the being Abrahamic religious believers consider to exist and be the enemy of their respective deity?"

Fund research into cybernetic fingers

Anchoring bias in purified form

Why chop them off in the first place if that's what you are going to spend the money on

@lukres because it don't cost $10T to develop cybernetic fingers

@BrunoParga Even if it did, you would at least develop them for use by other people. And you could probably profit off the sale of them.

sold Ṁ20 Answer #2d33ec9df0cd YES

The resolution poll has been created:

A reminder of the scoring rules:

This question resolves Win, Place, Show to the top three highest-voted responses:

  • 1st (Win) 60%

  • 2nd (Place) 30%

  • 3rd (Show) 10%

bought Ṁ100 Fund research into c... YES

@Joshua Will this market be open throughout the poll?

@Bayesian nvm it says so in the poll
AND in this market description

bought Ṁ10 Fund research into u... YES

@Bayesian Yeah I think that gives some more motivation for people to make arguments for different ideas, which I think is fun. I'd probably close the market for a serious resolution poll but this is a wacky venture to begin with.

bought Ṁ3,000 Answer #2d33ec9df0cd NO

@Joshua good point!

@Joshua Could you pin your message? so ppl notice it if they haven't already

opened a Ṁ100 Fund research into c... YES at 50% order

@Joshua how will you handle ties?

@duck_master flip a coin

oh wait, he can't

no fingers

@duck_master

I suppose I'll have a tie breaker poll with just the tied options

Why so small?