The last thing they said. I’ll never have to say “What?” 4 times in a row again.
You win. The amount of times I’ve wished the real world had subtitles…
Hi Taurus, I hope your birthday went well. I’m sorry that it seems I missed it.
That’s closed captioning
How about closet captioning?
With the vague rules, I think you can have that bypass language barriers.
Phonetic spelling
Only if the words were intended for you to hear.
I say a lot under my breath to keep from bursting, but also keep from completely roasting the idiots I deal with daily.
Number of times they molested kids.
Monkey paw’s finger curls: You can see them. They’re EVERYWHERE. People you thought you knew and loved have numbers greater than zero over their head. Despite your horror, you try to make use of the power to try to bring them to justice. No one believes you. You have the Cassandra’s curse of the status quo. ‘Steve? What are you talking about? He’d never do anything like that. Butter wouldn’t melt. You should probably shut your mouth before we get offended about what you said about our friend and kick the shit out of you. Know what I mean?’ You watch the news and see everyone who has a position of power over you and your loved ones has a non-zero number. You try to escape into fictional media but your favorite actors are non-zeroes, the author pictures in your favorite books show non-zeroes, the album sleeves of your favorite bands show non-zeroes.
Knowledge can be a burden.
Justice can be brought without anyone believing a thing you say.
Ehh. Serial killers tend to only get so far.
Meh, take as many as you can out before you go down. I don’t see the issue here.
deleted by creator
Then as you live in horror and disgust, you see people’s numbers rise day after day, unable to prove to others their horrendous crimes.
And then you befriend a stranger on the internet. You are nervous at first but you can’t see them, so you can imagine their number is zero. You hit it off. They’re amazing. Funny. Sweet. Kind. Hardworking. The relationship turns into a distant romance. Then you finally meet. You had no idea the number could go that high.
Or… you meet up and are flabbergasted by their ZERO. You could not be happier. You get extremely close, get married, have a child together… twins! You’re out overnight with friends, and your partner’s friend comes to visit. You return the next day to find the kids sleeping in and your beloved and their friend having a nice brunch, laughing with each other gleefully with the number two over each of their heads.
Or x2
You meet up for the first time in real life, and they do not have a number. How could this be? EVERYONE has a number, thank the gods they’re almost always zero! You’re immediately suspicious of their intentions and past actions. They’re not acting anything like they did online… they’re actually acting really fuckin weird, which greatly discomforts you.
You grapple with this internal conundrum, but you had failed to notice something crucial: The instant you saw each other, their eyes so briefly darted up, looking above your head.
Sow the seeds of suspicion. “Bet he is a pedo”. Don’t be too pushy. But maybe it will help someone speak out?
That’s not how monkey’s paw twists work.
Wow, that’s way more depressing than I could imagine.
We truly live in the worst timeline that this would even be considered.
What’s the point though? We already know the worst offenders without this special power and not a fucking thing is being done about it.
Edit: I misunderstood the question. I thought it was for everyone to be able to see it. Yeah, this would be a good one to have to know who to avoid…
Well, now you have to cone up with a bunch of excuses for why you’re avoiding people who looked normal to everyone else.
Jeeeesus Christ! I was thinking like “farts per day” or “no-blinker lane change count”. You’re going straight to the show.
The worst part would be knowing but unable to prove it.
Is vigilante justice wrong when you actually know for certainty that they did it?
First name.
“Hey Janine, can you move your cart out of the way, thanks, gonna get by here and go get some ice cream sandwiches.”
“Excuse me, Ravi, trying to get off the train, one moment, thanks.”
“Oh hey, you’re a Tanis too, just like me, neat!”
This will absolutely weird everyone out.
Oh of course I’ll play your game Rumplest… random stranger.
Tanis is a nice name.
My mom gave it to me!
(And then I kept it when I transitioned, and now she says it’s too feminine and she wishes she didn’t. No backsies, mom! It’s mine and I’ll never be your son.)
It’s an awesome name and your mom sounds like a butthead!
How thoughtful of your mom to give the little boy version of you a feminine name. She did you a solid without even realizing it lol
I sounds super nice and (from where I’m standing) not very gendered imho
Would it be their preferred name or legal name? What about people who go by different names in different contexts? For example, William at work, but Bill with friends & family? Or stage names? Or professional titles?
Since it’s updated in real time, people would get to update that as they see fit. A trans lady who’s not out at work might be Sophie at the bar, but Leon in the office, for example.
None. Someday, some company will build and sell a tool that actually does that, and it will be hella privacy invasive. Actually, it’ll probably just be another invasive feature added to the Ray Ban perv glasses.
Realtime running count of lies told
Similar to the other reply, it’s a good idea and seemingly pragmatic, but we could spend a decade arguing over the pedantry of what qualifies as a lie and still not be done.
Truth is tricky
How about any statement told with the intent of the recipient believing something about the world that the speaker knows to not be true
That’s a very good angle, honing in on exactly the problem of lying.
“Intent” could get just as tricky. With all the various forms of psychosis, delusion, etc. it’d be tough to say whether someone “meant” to do something. (It’s trickier than we’d usually like to admit even for a typical person.)
The same kind of problems exist around whether the speaker “knows” something to be false.
Then there’s the problem of fiction. Bedtime stories, campfire stories…
And not exactly a technical problem, but what about a doctor who knowingly oversimplifies or otherwise intentionally twists his words in an attempt to get the patient to manage their condition optimally? Parents who lie about how something works to help their kids understand something or behave safely? Teachers who oversimplify physics lessons to present it in a way their students can grasp for now. Not exactly a technical problem maybe, but would we want “noble lies” to affect the counter? This is a little off track, just occurred to me and felt like writing it out 🤷♂️
This one doesn’t pose a direct problem really but maybe helps me get to my point: what if people who rode a train moving at relativistic speeds when lightning struck both ends talk with someone who was watching from outside about when the lightning struck? Truth is tricky…
But making it, “how often did they attempt to intentionally deceive” as you suggested is a great approach imho. Maybe almost realistic. There’s probably some biological indicators of that right? … for non-psychopaths
Let’s start with the times you’ve said something you know to be untrue.
I told my nephews that Santa was real
So sarcasm is lying?
Does reading the Big Friendly Giant to a nephew count as one big un-truth or many small ones?
“You are a king, then!” said Pilate.
Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. In fact, the reason I was born and came into the world is to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.”
“What is truth?” retorted Pilate. With this he went out again to the Jews gathered there and said, “I find no basis for a charge against him.
I am innocent of the blood of this just person. See ye to it.
It’s a great thought and all, but wouldn’t authors, actors, and other purveyors of fiction have really large numbers? Every politician would suddenly find a new found joy of reading fiction to children in hospitals.
Nah, fiction isn’t lies, not when there’s no deceit.
Lie is when you deceive someone, not when creating fictional world. At least this is my option.
Human or Not Human
No need for that because by definition it’s only displayed above people’s heads. You can tell someone isn’t human if nothing is displayed over them.
What if the non humans are people though. I guess maybe we should just leave then alone
They can’t be - people are by definition a body of humans.
Woww
Yeah, be wary of lizard people
How likely they are to have sex with me this very second behind those bushes over there.
Good God I’m shallow sometimes…
“This stupid stat is broken, it just shows 0 for everybody.”
Laughs in ugly
It was easier to program that way. The odds of it ever not being 0 were too small to spend the resources for a proper indicator.
“Oh, finally, someone with 20%. Wait… is that a negative sign?!”
Recency of last wank would be an interesting one
friend gets back from the bathroom and their number has gone down near zero
Oh shit, I didn’t think of romantic compatibility.
Time left to live. There’s plenty of useful things that tell you more about a person, but shinigami eyes would let you save lives and know it, even if no one else does
And if it turns out the number can’t be changed through your actions, that would tell you a lot. If nothing else, you could say goodbye to loved ones and get incredibly rich by finding a CEO about to run out of time
Fucks left to give.
Basically, how many spoons someone has left, or how much bad and/or taxing stuff they’re capable of bearing today.
This would serve two purposes. One. It’d allow me to communicate more carefully or gently with those who require it, two, it’d give me real time feedback on shit I might’ve doing that’s causing a disproportionate amount of harm to someone else.
Ex: I can be in a wonderful mood and capable of taking all kinds of bad news, but asking me to go out of my way to do an act of service for someone else as a show of affection while I’m in the middle of some self-care after I’ve spent all day working in a service industry will tank my remaining fucks immediately. I’m absolutely certain that others around me have similar reactions to things that I do, and if I could see what they were, I could stop doing them inadvertently.
Number of cumulative years they would be imprisoned for, had they been caught and convicted of every single crime they ever committed.
I’m betting most adults are not at zero.
Crime is such a subjective, context and time dépendant metric that it makes no sense to use here.
Are you one of those people who thinks things being legal equates to things being moral?
I’d say the opposite. Seeing that number over everyone’s head oughta be a good way to prove that law ain’t aligned with morals.
Nobody’s at zero. It’s been said that the average American commits 3 felonies per day. The law is so long that you couldn’t read it in a lifetime. There are more criminalized actions than you can imagine.
This wouldn’t impart any useful information in a world where rapist pedophiles get time served and protesters get a life sentence for being adjacent to another crime handing out zines.
Why?
You can’t fix it until you can measure it.
If everyone knew this number about everybody, a lot of stupid laws would change overnight.
This works only if all laws are correct. Otherwise you end up seeing “100 years” for copyright infringement. In the world you imagined, who cares why they have 100 years on em? The never-can-be-bad law is always correct, and a 100 year sentence is always just and good. Otherwise who gives a fuck?
Asshole ratio: 0 % = best person in the world.
100 % = worst person in the world.Computed as an average of bad “actions” with respect to all actions.
Good and bad evaluated with respect to proven positive impact on people’s lifes and the planet.
Lies per hour
Some kind of “empathy score.” Not sure what the formula would be, but it would reflect how readily they feel empathy for another person, and how many other people they can care about.
A narcissist would have a 0 – they can only care about themself. Someone with very limited empathy would have a small number – say, they can only care about their immediate family, and they need to really get to know someone before they care about that person. People who naturally care about others, even if they don’t know the other person, would have high numbers.
This number would sometimes just flat out tell you that certain people should be avoided, or certain conversations are pointless with that person. Or if you do need to try to convince them of something, the number may show you how to frame the conversation. E.g., show how it’s in their own interest if they have a low number.
I can’t tell if that would end up depressing the crap out of me or making me feel better about the world. My pessimistic brain tells me there are far more un-empathic people in the world than I’d like to acknowledge.
The only problem with this stat showing is that the fascists would know who to throw into the concentration camps.
I thought that only you can see this stat, not everyone else. It’s an issue of privacy violation otherwise.
Oh, I didn’t see any other rules specified in the question :) So, isn’t the fact that I can see everyone’s stat above their head already a privacy violation to begin with? Also, am I the only one who gets to see a chosen stat or can other people also choose a stat that only they can see?
It doesn’t specify, but if everyone could see it the implications would be more pressing than the question itself. If only one person, or just a select few people, in the world can see it it’s not a widespread privacy violation. Just like only a select few people are (supposed) to have access to private information in the real world for it to not be a privacy violation.
Presumably with questions like others can see different stats if they chose one. And even if only you saw it you could be super unethical and MAKE it a widespread privacy violation by showing social security, credit card, etc. info and stealing whatever you could as much as you could.
Yeah, but those select few are given access for a specific need, like to be able to give you health care or pay your salary, etc. If even just a few randos could see whatever stat they want about all of us for no reason than their own wishes, I’d definitely consider that a violation of our privacy, even if they kept the info to themselves and even more so if it was something they could exploit. But all this is getting away from the spirit of the question.
This! You would be able to see who’s trusting and caring? Perfect for scaming people all day, every day! I love it!
No, not really. There are a LOT of very unempathic people who are super easy to scam (MAGA), and being empathetic doesn’t mean you fall for scams easily. You’d want something like a gullibility score for that.
Oh awesome. I’d love something like that, and do think we need to kind of train every person to understand and analyze others empathy better. Because this is a major problem when selecting, voting or promoting people into position of power. Every time there is a competition for a promotion, the ones that care the least about anything but more power or money or influence will be statistically more likely to advance. The more self serving the better. So at the top end you have function sociopaths who are very adept at lying about themselves or even to themselves.
Detecting purely self-serving or greedy people would be awesome and should be taught and trained for in school as basic political education. You know like math or PT is taught and trained. And candidates for political power should be put through some kind of “psychological gauntlet” to make it at least more likely they show they care or believe in something besides gaining more power.
It might also be possible to create a kind of AI models to evaluate and analyze people seeking power. Like some sort of lie detector test observing every reaction and every word and tonal shift in a conversation with the machine. Something like the interrogation in Blade Runner or “The Expanse” Season 1. Of course a bit of a ludicrous idea.
Might be better to just pick someone at random, quite likely to get better world leaders like that.
But this remains a fundamental problem of any hierarchical system, no matter if capitalism or socialism. We are now in an age where humanity can easily destroy itself, and we have collectively chosen, or proven unable, to save ourselves from the existential danger of climate change. And despite our “advances in ethics” in general, we’re still ruled by total shits. And no matter what system we choose the problem will persist. Lack of empathy is a very strong indicator for that.
Sorry for the long rant lol
FYI, I believe you use narcissist wrong, because generally they “weaponize empathy” to manipulate people. They absolutely need to maintain a false glamorous mirror image of their own ego (or they die) and will use all sorts of rationalizations or delusions to keep that up. From a young age they need to pretend and for that they need to read people very well. And as long as they see you as one of the awesome people they’ll charm you, but if they see you as one of the shit people they’ll flip and treat you like dirt. And no amount of time will change that lol.
Is “how much I would like them on a scale from 0 to 10 (with a resolution of like 0.01) if I got to know them at a deep level” allowed? Or is that cheating?
It’s a hypothetical question, so yeah. It can be whatever you want it to be. =)
that might be nice, or you might find out you dont know your friends and loved ones as deeply as you thought, and if you did you wouldnt really like them at all.
(Or that most everyone is likable if you invest that time, and everybody is a 9+. The horror of finding that your political boogiemen are certainly charismatic and kind to their friends…)
all the others seem a lot more invasive, so I’ll go with their pronouns/gender so I never have to ask and be awkward
then you start causing problems clocking and accidentally outing eggs and closeted trans people all over the place. even with perfect knowledge theres always politics…
If it was accurate enough, and they kinda knew, but hadn’t fully acknowledge it themselves yet, you might out them to themselves even?
yeah exactly. we all kinda know on some level, even if we dont really know ya know?
That’s friction right away, but the resulting social change would be pretty interesting to see
And then ill still forget their names and have to ask and be awkward
It’s not awkward to ask, I appreciate it when people do. I use any of them so it’s awkward to respond, but it’s nice that people care hahah.
