EVM
Original: EVM on Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
Transcript
Panel 1:
Woman with dark hair: Most ethical frameworks agree that stabbing someone to death is wrong.
Man: But they never do the math!
Panel 2:
Woman: Right.
Panel 3:
Man: Suppose you randomly pick two people, then each time flip a coin to decide whether you stab them to death. 50% chance of death multiplied by two attempts. The expected value of murder — EVM — is still 1.
Panel 4:
Man: Those two deaths are bad, but suppose you maintain that 1 death is like spreading the risk of death out between 1,000 people, or a million people.
Man: Like, we regularly perform tasks that increase the risk of death to a large group coughing, walking near sick people, electricity from power lines, overusing antibiotics. If you add it all up, your EVM for a given near-by person is probably at least 1.
Panel 5:
Man: Somewhere between that and personally stabbing a guy, there's a transition from totally evil to totally fine. But for each tiny constant rate of death in the era of each transgression becomes definitely small!
Man: The lesson is obvious: you can't apply calculus to ethics. It follows that there's no way of death's quanta.
Panel 6:
Man: To perform badness below the level of planck-badness, you don't meet the threshold at which evil radiates into the universe.
Man: This is why all villains are macroscopic entities.
Panel 7:
Man: Also quantum mechanics would suggest lives can come in imaginary quantities.
Bottom caption: Which explains conspiracy theories
Votey:
A man with curly hair, looking concerned, speaks: It'd be even more evil to invent a pair of children without proper snowgear who have to trudge on endlessly and never get home.
Woman with dark hair: Most ethical frameworks agree that stabbing someone to death is wrong.
Man: But they never do the math!
Panel 2:
Woman: Right.
Panel 3:
Man: Suppose you randomly pick two people, then each time flip a coin to decide whether you stab them to death. 50% chance of death multiplied by two attempts. The expected value of murder — EVM — is still 1.
Panel 4:
Man: Those two deaths are bad, but suppose you maintain that 1 death is like spreading the risk of death out between 1,000 people, or a million people.
Man: Like, we regularly perform tasks that increase the risk of death to a large group coughing, walking near sick people, electricity from power lines, overusing antibiotics. If you add it all up, your EVM for a given near-by person is probably at least 1.
Panel 5:
Man: Somewhere between that and personally stabbing a guy, there's a transition from totally evil to totally fine. But for each tiny constant rate of death in the era of each transgression becomes definitely small!
Man: The lesson is obvious: you can't apply calculus to ethics. It follows that there's no way of death's quanta.
Panel 6:
Man: To perform badness below the level of planck-badness, you don't meet the threshold at which evil radiates into the universe.
Man: This is why all villains are macroscopic entities.
Panel 7:
Man: Also quantum mechanics would suggest lives can come in imaginary quantities.
Bottom caption: Which explains conspiracy theories
Votey:
A man with curly hair, looking concerned, speaks: It'd be even more evil to invent a pair of children without proper snowgear who have to trudge on endlessly and never get home.
Alt text
A seven-panel SMBC comic. A dark-haired woman and a man discuss the ethics of murder. Panel 1: The woman says most ethical frameworks agree that stabbing someone to death is wrong; the man counters that they never do the math. Panel 2: The woman flatly replies 'Right.' Across the remaining panels the man delivers an escalating mock-mathematical argument: he proposes randomly picking two people and coin-flipping whether to stab them, computing an 'expected value of murder (EVM)' of 1; he equates this with the everyday diffuse risk of death we impose by coughing, walking near sick people, power lines, and overusing antibiotics; he claims there must be a transition point from totally evil to totally fine, but that calculus can't be applied to ethics because there's no smallest quantum of death. He invents 'planck-badness,' below which evil doesn't radiate into the universe — which, he says, is why all villains are macroscopic entities — and adds that quantum mechanics implies lives can come in imaginary quantities. A bottom caption reads 'Which explains conspiracy theories.' Votey: A concerned curly-haired man muses that it'd be even more evil to invent a pair of children without proper snowgear who have to trudge on endlessly and never get home.
Transcribed by Claude Opus 4.8.