Friday, January 07, 2011

[gafyazrv] Riddle of Pandora's Box

After releasing all the evils of the world, the last thing to come out of the Box was "hope".  The riddle is, was "hope" the one good which could counterbalance all those evils (as told in the "safe for children" version of this myth), or was "hope", as "false hope", the greatest evil of them all?

Noting the age of this myth, this is one of the oldest recorded philosophical questions of mankind, but we don't seem to be any closer to solving it.  (Compare it to the ancient puzzle of "squaring the circle" which has since been solved, albeit in the negative.)

The question is a quantitative one, one which we may be able to finally mostly answer soon, if not now.  Quantitatively, the questions are, for a given hope, what is the probability of it occurring?  Given this probability, what is your best course of action?  Rapid, technologically aided research may be able to get you answers where previously not possible.

"False hope" preys on the human inability to comprehend extremely small probabilities.

There is powerful incentive not to solve this riddle.  What if the answer turns out to be pretty much all hope is false hope?  That despite any action you may take by your own hand, or action by an exogenous entity or "deity", nothing will improve your situation in life?

The very stability of society is based on "hope": the poor behave because of the hope of upward mobility.  If it's a false hope, they in fact have nothing to lose.  Random of acts of violence!  Revolt!

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