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Josh · Joined: 16 Oct 2007 Posts: 19

I wish there were no hang overs.

Josh · Joined: 16 Oct 2007 Posts: 19

i wish we could talk like darth vader

Josh · Joined: 16 Oct 2007 Posts: 19

i wish the offspring would run for presidant

Josh · Joined: 16 Oct 2007 Posts: 19

I wish I had a class with a pure virtual function.

Josh · Joined: 16 Oct 2007 Posts: 19

I wish I had polymorphism.

Josh · Joined: 16 Oct 2007 Posts: 19

I wish it rained gumdrops and lolly-pops instead of water.

Josh · Joined: 16 Oct 2007 Posts: 19

I wish I could build a better mouse trap.

Ronfar · Joined: 22 Mar 2006 Posts: 294

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/11/complex-wishes.html

This guy thinks the Open Source Wish Project is a bad idea.
_________________
- Doug

samineru · Joined: 27 Dec 2007 Posts: 3

The Meta-Wish:
I wish that you grant a wish that my current person would select as the most preferrable outcome of this situation as if it had seen and could remember all of them.

As mentioned in the post before me it is impossible to make a safe wish without the genie sharing your morality so the purpose of this wish is to incorporate your entire morality into the wish itself. So the genie is to create a prefer() function based on your consciousness to see which of two wishes you would prefer. This wish is based on the fact that there is a finite amount of wishes, otherwise the function would require being run an infinite number of times, which may or may not be feasible once genies are involved.

willpell · Joined: 12 Aug 2008 Posts: 2

Boy am I ever late to the party! By the time I discovered HOTs, not only was the strip over, but Ferret was off at the Clarion workshop so I couldn't even bug him about it. (Which is too bad because I was bugging him to ask if I could buy advertising.)

I've come up with an idea for a pretty all-encompassing wish that would be hard to pervert:

"I wish that all was right with the world, according to the definition that will best satisfy the most people."

I hope this wording gets the point across; the idea is that if you were to graph the curve between "one person has exactly what they want" (at the expense of everyone else) and "every single person is just the tiniest bit happier" (while nobody gets any terribly measurable change in their life), this would be optimally positioned on the curve, providing the best ratio of number of persons happy to amount of happiness per person. There would still be malcontents, and I don't think any wish can fix that, but this wish would say, "Whatever would bring the whole world closest to total happiness", thus that any change beyond that would make as many people less happy as would become happier. (I dismiss out of hand any attempt at arguing that this is already the case.)