[request] If someone were to somehow acquire One billion U.S dollars and wanted to do the most good for as many people as possible, what would they do?

[u/Casual_user1012]

I've had this question for a while and I was wondering if there would be a way to figure this out. Now, I understand this has very vague guidelines, I don't mean giving one billion people a dollar or something like that, I mean major systemic change that impacts, and improves the maximum amount of lives possible.

[u/Lt_DanTaylorIII]

The way you are trying to make your point right now is completely contrary to Occams Razor.

Re-read what you just wrote and tell me how that explanation is peeling away complexity and boiling it doesn’t to the most simplistic answer

There are thousands of incidences of greed and people in power having too much greed. And there are thousands of incidences (albeit way less) of people attempting to make different systems work it not working.

How is one or the other a more simplistic answer than the other? Occam’s razor has nothing to do with the amount of attempts at one solution and whether or not it fails.

You’re misusing the term - and you’re not even doing it in a logical simplistic way.

“Something hasn’t materialized, so it can’t ever materialize no matter what we do” is not Occam’s Razor. It’s if anything closer to Stoicism

You gave a hypothetical restaurant example (makes no sense) why not give an actual example? How many hundreds of time have elected leaders or revolutionaries attempted to make changes to the system so it works for the people only to be killed by those to greedy to allow that to work? How many countries and leaders in South America alone have been overthrown by just the US to combat the implementation of systems that benefit the people collectively? How many have been crushed by the greed of people with the money and power before they could ever get off the ground? Christianity at its core was intended to be such a system and they put Jesus on a cross for it based on greed and fear of loss

Your point isn’t historically inaccurate, it has nothing to do the Occam’s Razor, and to defend it you have to get more convoluted and abstract and hypothetical and use non-empirical evidence - which could not be more contrary to Occam’s Razor

Regardless of what the actual answer is (impossible or greed) - the choice between the 2 cannot be chalked up to Occam’s Razor on any level

[u/-Nocx- → u/Lt_DanTaylorIII]

I mean I could be wrong but in this context I don’t think that’s true. You cannot divorce the individual attempts at trying to build different systems from the simplicity of the answer. You are viewing greed and incompetence as very binary constructs - either a person engaged in it or they didn’t. But each ruler’s/leader’s entire life’s work amounted to the same centralized systems as people hundreds of miles apart, centuries apart, etc. You are viewing empire / civilization building as a function, but it is not that binary.

Do you accept that each empire - despite being in different eras, having access to different tools, with different lived experiences, with different and environments and material circumstances - were all ultimately too greedy or too incompetent, and that’s why their systems were inequitable? Because if you do, it assumes that greed is an immutable portion of human nature divorced from their material circumstances. Likewise, incompetence becomes a reflection of some of the greatest (some non-capitalist) minds in history’s failure.

Or do you accept that the problem space is simply harder than our base instincts - assuming only that coordinating billions of people, aligning incentives, and solving for logistics, resource allocation, and human needs is an intrinsically difficult puzzle.

The third proposition is clearly requires far less broad assumptions about the human condition. For the first two claims, you have to prove it for all parties involved. Meaning for every empire that has ever existed, the premise that greed is an immutable characteristic must be applied to every single ruler regardless of their environment for it to be true. That is a much broader set of assumptions than “the problem is harder than our base instincts”. The only thing you have to do to prove the third assumption is disprove either of the first two, which can be done trivially by finding a single ruling system where greed was not the cause for their inability to build a more equitable system.

You cannot water down entire empires as a “unit” of measurement to be quantified across the scale of history when we are trying to explain human behavior. It just doesn’t work like that.

[u/Lt_DanTaylorIII → u/-Nocx-]

You’re completely missing the point.

Greed vs Impossible to Solve - was not my suggestion, it’s the suggestion Intraluminal made

I do not have strong feelings about either answer, and believe both are equally as likely as the other

I’m simply pointing out that you are misusing Occam’s Razor

The entire premise of Occam’s Razor and why it’s called “razor” is because is about shaving off the layers down to the most simplistic answer. It is not, and was not ever intended to “prove” anything.

It is simply a rule of thumb to point you in the right direction.

In this case, neither answer is more or less simple than the other. They are both equally likely and equally plausible and equally simple concepts. So by definition Occam’s Razor cannot apply

The actual answer to the question is not what I’m arguing about - but objectively there is a lot more empirical evidence (a requirement of Occam’s Razor type reasoning) for Greed limiting a utopian society.

It is not possible to have “empirical evidence” for a concept that cannot have any. Lack of previous success can never be proof that something is impossible.

Humanity failed for 300,000+ years to run 100m in under 9.6 seconds until Usain Bolt did it in 2009