WallStreetBets members adopt 3,500 gorillas in six days

You'd really need diamond hands to hold a gorilla. They're strong AF.

It is an iterated trolley problem.

Imagine the "default" track splitting into a hundred million tracks, which all cross and merge into and separate from each other. It's such a maze that nobody can really tell what path the trolley will take once it enters a particular track. There's a couple thousand people in blue shirts tied down to a single-digit number of those tracks. A hundred-million-way split is essentially a bump in the main track, which means the trolley will randomly pick one of the hundred million of directions.

The service track (which splits off the main track before the hundred-million split) has a couple redshirts tied to it, plus 50 yellow-shirts per each redshirt. If you flip the switch, the trolley is sure to travel down the service track.

Additionally, the rules of iterating the problem are: if you don't flip a switch, there's a small chance the game ends. If you do flip a switch, the game will always continue, and there's a small chance that next round, more blueshirts will be tied to some of the hundred million tracks, and a small chance that the trolley will go down the main track regardless of your choice.

What do you choose? The US government answer is essentially to jam the switch in the "to service track position", because "fuck it, we don't care about non-blue shirts, and besides, the trolley company pays us to make sure the trolleys keep going".

As long as the top reply to that comment explains that replacing dollar with a cryptocurrency would change absolutely nothing about the size and activities of the US military.

My claims are similar to which you identified, but stronger in some points, so let me put them explicitly.

1. Drone strikes aren't saving lives in an immediately obvious fashion ("these targets were about to launch an attack on us"), but only indirectly, if at all ("these targets may or may not have been planning some sort of attack in the future, which they may or may not have been able to execute; but we're sure they won't be planning or executing anything when they're dead"). The hundred million tracks are meant to show the degree of uncertainty about possible future attack and its casualties. Any given drone strike is unlikely to have saved anyone at all.

2. The people killed by drone strikes are of different nation than the one that does the killing. This is illustrated by the blue/other color split, and red/yellow illustrates enemy combatant/enemy civilian split. That they latter are tied together describes collateral damage.

3. The risk grows over time if the drone strikes continue. This is illustrated by the iteration rules. In the example, as long as the trolley keeps killing redshirts and yellowshirts, the number of blueshirts on the tracks tends to grow over time - and if it goes on long enough, the trolley will eventually follow the main track despite the switch being flipped, and will run over some blueshirts. This illustrates how each drone strike generates more hatred on the other side, creating more potential attackers and increasing motivation for performing an attack. Done long enough, an attack is guaranteed to happen. Conversely, stopping the strikes deescalates the issue, reduces the hatred - as illustrated by the game having a chance to end early if you don't flip the switch.

3a. The exact point I'm trying to make here: US drone strikes are creating and perpetuating the problem they are claimed to mitigate. Stopping them is the actual way to mitigate the problem.

4. As per point 1, the amount of lives saved by these attacks in the long run is unknown, but unless military intelligence is not an oxymoron it's claimed to be, it's most likely negative.

4a. From this follows my belief, reflected by using 1e8 tracks in the example, that the chance of actual attack happening and killing people is much smaller than the chance the enemy will lose their interest in the fight if they're no longer being terrorized. Not pulling the lever and waiting for the game to finish is a loss-of-life-minimizing strategy in my example.

5. There are ulterior motives, and there are many of them. That's somewhat of a side topic, though. But I do claim that these motives are enough to blind the decision-making apparatus to the point 3a - drone strikes are causing the risk, not reducing it.

> Given the enormous complexity of the problem, I would hire an organization of professionals to make lever choices, and support the scrutiny of this organization by competent 3rd parties.

That's the right view in the abstract, but in reality, the professionals running the show are professional PR people ordering professional lever pullers to pull the lever. That's not to say the politicians and the military are bad at their jobs - they're OK, but they're also not focusing on minimizing loss of life long-term.

> I would be highly skeptical of anyone who claims that it is "evil" to ever pull the lever.

It isn't always evil to pull the lever here - it just almost always is. Exceptions are few and far between.

> 3rd party critics have no visibility to the tracks and the lever pullers dont tell them if the blue shirts are one or a hundred track slips away from the trolly.

This is a line of reasoning that's commonly used to defend intelligence agencies - "they won't announce out loud when they save everyone from doom, because that would be defeating their ability to stave off another disaster". However, as far as I know/read, to the degree various journalists and investigators were able to dig out information, there aren't any secret success stories they're hiding. So I'm biased strongly against trusting this line of reasoning alone.

> Second, The lever pullers are hired by the blueshirts, and individual blueshirts have radically different views on how many red/yellow shirt lives are worth one blueshirt life.

That's true, but the lever pullers are also good at playing up the need for pulling the level, and then there's also the trolley company - which is meant to depict, in a generalized way, how the military–industrial complex makes money on perpetuating the killing.

I don't mean to imply that switching to bitcoin will stop wars, but rather just remind that the true cost (and value) of USD isn't in it's infrastructure, but in the efforts taken to enforce it's dominance.

If we imagine the ideal future 100 years from now, with a more balanced world order and economic justice for all, then we have to experiment with radically different systems at some point in between. Not saying that bitcoin is the solution or even a good one, but I think it's important to experiment with new ideas, and not just technologies but systems like UBI too.

Of course, getting climate change under control is a much more pressing issue, so bitcoin is untenable, but I don't think it's as frivolous as a lot people make it out to be. It's a valuable experiment, and there's a lot to learn from its failure and success. My takeaway from the issue of its energy usage is that trying to save the climate by discouraging energy usage is kind of fruitless because society will always want more; focusing on replacing polluting energy sources with clean ones is the sustainable systemic solution.