The Cull.

[RyukaTana]

That implies this hypothetical is a proposal for an event. However, as it stands, it's a hypothetical meant to gauge the individual response to such a thing, I see no other purpose for it. Tailsteak din't ask what we thought would happen, he asked what we thought we'd do.

[Tailsteak]

Dude. Read my first post again.

In this situation, how many people do you think would die, and what sort of people would they be?

While your personal choice and strategy are interesting, I'm more interested in what sort of world would result from this operation. The 1-2% cull suggested by pure statistics is interesting, given that in theory, no one has to die at all.

[Packbat]

Well, we can probably improve the Fermi estimate by considering some of the strategies people have proposed in the thread:

1. Assign saves to loved ones, assign kill to prominent negatively-associated target.
2. Pair one save and one kill to random target (thereby neutralizing kill token), assign remaining saves to loved ones.
3. Assign most or all saves to prominent positively-associated targets, assign kill to prominent negatively-associated target.
4. Assign saves to loved ones, assign kill to local negatively-associated target.

My own inclination would be towards the third, incidentally (although choosing which negatively-associated target might take a bit of contemplation). And I think only the fourth would imitate the statistics pattern of random shots.

I think the key question is the ratio of 1 to 3, because that will determine how much protection the celebs have from the haters. If 1 is much larger than 3, a lot of very famous people will die.

[JoshOfSpam]

I guess people would look a people causing the biggest problems and put their death coins in for them.

Dictators, governments employees, criminals. I suppose some people might have bitter feelings to others they know. The thing right out of high school makes me think if a person were a particular big jerk up through high school might be targeted by their class mates after graduating.

Heheheh, theres your incentive to stop bullying.

[RyukaTana]

Dude. Read my first post again.

In this situation, how many people do you think would die, and what sort of people would they be?

While your personal choice and strategy are interesting, I'm more interested in what sort of world would result from this operation. The 1-2% cull suggested by pure statistics is interesting, given that in theory, no one has to die at all.

Oh... my bad... I missed that one, I guess.

Then I guess my revised answer is that I don't think any of us can remotely determine that kind of scale for something like this. Too many variables... How many people would treat the tokens like currency like I suggested? Fanatics and extremists with wealth or something of great value to others (or a lot of influence) are likely to quickly take influence over where tokens go. Plus, if this is world-wide, cultural differences will abound, and if the tokens are physical, people will die. Plenty of people will kill to get those tokens (presuming they judge the power of the tokens to be infinite, that is, kill tokens never miss, so long as the target has more 'kills' than 'saves').

Clearly, some people are harder to kill than others, but everyone has a kill token in that circumstance.

The hypothetical needs more parameters to even try to gauge such a thing. Who issues the tokens, how do they work, can anyone use them... Et cetera. I can maintain a basic idea of what I'd do given what you said they are without trying to think about how they work. Increase the scale enough and you've changed the needs of the hypothetical.

[Vivificient]

At least in the developed world, the average person don't have too many really serious personal enemies. But people have lots of ideological enemies. So it does seem likely that more people would target saves at people they love personally and their kills at famous people they dislike. People like Mitt Romney, the defendants from the Steubenville case, Kermit Gosnell, Bashar al-Assad, etc. It seems like the success of different twitter campaigns on the week leading up to the ballot might have more influence than people's deep moral judgements about who deserves to die.

Once you factor in people all over the world--including people from dictatorships who've been brainwashed to hate certain countries--then a lot of world leaders would be in trouble. People like Kim Jong-Un would find out whether their brainwashing had been successful enough to convince their own populations to save them. You can imagine the big media campaigns, "Vote save for the beloved leader!"; or then again, evil world leaders might take the King Herod route and pass legislation stating that larging numbers of people shall be killed at random with guns if they themselves are killed during the cull.

Even if people strategically threw most of their saves at famous people likely to be in danger -- Richard Dawkins perhaps, but also Justin Bieber, Stephanie Meyer, etc., who've done nothing wrong except creating some art that is popular but some other people dislike -- then there'd still be a lot of danger for famous people who you wouldn't think would have enemies and so wouldn't think would need to be protected, but who still happened to have a few people out there who hate them.

Overall, it sounds like a really terrible and hard to coordinate idea. I think a slightly more interesting thought experiment might be what would happen if you were only allowed to spend your tokens on people you know personally, though of course there'd be some difficulty in defining that.

[Globus]

You guys are so Americocentric it hurts.

A full 35% of the world's population is Indian or Chinese. Your precious American celebrities are safe from "mass" tokens.

This is all.

[Merle]

You guys are so Americocentric it hurts.

A full 35% of the world's population is Indian or Chinese. Your precious American celebrities are safe from "mass" tokens.

This is all.

Do you really think there are that many people in India and China who would burn precious "save" tokens on American celebrities?

[Packbat]

Now I'm wondering if immigrant Hollywood actors (Canadians, New Zealanders, Australians, Brits, etc.) would have a higher survival rate than natives.

[Deepbluediver]

Most of the replies seem to be concerned primarily with the effect on celebrities and north-american politicians, but in the OP these tokens where distributed to everyone on EARTH. Between them, China and India hold nearly 1/3 of the entire world's population, and from what little I know, people over there aren't terribly happy with their governments in many cases. However, many of the people are also farmers or laborers, who probably are less concerned with the state of the world than ensuring they have enough food to eat next week. The point another poster made about these people not caring about Bieber or Miley, or LiLo, or pretty much anyone else was a good one.

In developed countries, I would expect to see a lot of heads-of-states getting killed, just because they have name recognition and tend to attract a lot of attention, even from people in other countries. In less developed parts of the world, you have some leaders who keep themselves in power with military might, bribery, or various cults of personality who might be able to coerce enough of their followers (or other people who benefit from them being in power) to all donate a token or two and save them (remember, the "saves" outnumber the "kills" 5 to 1, making them a much less valuable commodity). In this case, if you are thinking of revolution and we're able to coordinate, it might be more effective to target the leader's SUPPORTERS, and then once his power-base has been destroyed just kill him the old fashioned way.


Overall, I would expect to see very few people who actually died because of this; with the save-to-kill ratio outnumbered more than 5 to 1, it's gonna be really tough to kill some one, especially since the majority of people around the world don't know each other. (most of us have fewer than ~150 people we think of as friends and family; total world population 6+ billion). And most of us just don't have the kind of celebrity necessary to attract anyone's hate.

Worldwide, I'd bet big on fewer than 1000 people getting killed (barely enough to register a blip on the average death-toll radar). I'd even bet on fewer than 100, though at smaller odds; I know there are large parts of the world where tribal/clan/family feuds are still a thing, and we might get significant deaths from that.
Depending on WHO those people are though, if it's kicks off a war, revolt, riot, or retaliation, I would expect possible deaths from secondary reactions to rapidly outnumber actual deaths from the cull itself.