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by glenstein 1969 days ago
This isn't just "gee, technology sure comes with tradeoffs." It was literally claiming the dollar to be worthless, a global class war, and for most of the continent of Africa to be uninhabitable. It was claiming all three would happen.

I feel like people come into these questions wanting to treat them like trick questions, and wanting to show off that they can't be tricked. And so, if a bet like this has an obvious answer, well, maybe that's a trick! And you aren't fooled because, hey, technology has tradeoffs, and global warming is real. Therefore the guy predicting Africa would be uninhabitable was right!

There's a satisfying quality of switcheroo. But it's also nuts because it's not a trick question, and those observations are true but irrelevant to assessing the terms of the bet.

1 comments

This seems like a reasonable guess as to what is going on. A close call would be something like, economic collapse reducing paper money to be worthless as a consequence of the global socialist revolution, but global warming only melted the icecaps and flooded major parts of the world while leaving most places just slightly warmer. Two out of three.

The modern world is extremely far away from being a close call on this. I can't wrap my head around people that say, "well, no global socialist revolution, but people dislike Wall Street, and that's the same, I guess".