Time Travel Ethics: Preventing Oppenheimer's Parents from Meeting Up = Preventing Nuclear Proliferation

zippy2006 · Nov 20, 2024

durangodawood said:
No one would know Oppenheimer is the man for the job until after seeing his success. So he was already there.

So we can’t ever predict someone’s success? Heavens. Think about a job interview, or a political election.

If someone proposed time-traveling back and ensuring that Ernst Thälmann was appointed instead of Hitler, your reasoning would say, “No one would know that Ernst Thälmann was a good pick for chancellor until after seeing his success as chancellor.” So much for elections!

zippy2006 · Nov 20, 2024

durangodawood said:
Also, Oppy is already the man in our timeline.

You're begging the question. How do you know our timeline is the original timeline?

durangodawood · Nov 20, 2024

zippy2006 said:
You're begging the question. How do you know our timeline is the original timeline?

Who cares. Oppy is the man in our timeline - original or not. Whats to fix?

durangodawood · Nov 20, 2024

zippy2006 said:
So we can’t ever predict someone’s success? Heavens. Think about a job interview, or a political election.

If someone proposed time-traveling back and ensuring that Ernst Thälmann was appointed instead of Hitler, your reasoning would say, “No one would know that Ernst Thälmann was a good pick for chancellor until after seeing his success as chancellor.” So much for elections!

Knocking out one terrible person is easy. You know who they are.

Installing the perfect person when you dont know who they are in hindsight is totally different. Youd be faced with a whole raft of candidates and no hindsight to reveal the best one. Just like the Americans were when they selected Oppy in the first place.

zippy2006 · Nov 20, 2024

durangodawood said:
Who cares. Oppy is the man in our timeline - original or not. Whats to fix?

You're like the guy who is presented with a car he has never seen. "We fixed it up. Now it runs well." Your response is, "You didn't fix it. It runs well. How could you have fixed what runs well?" :doh:

durangodawood said:
Knocking out one terrible person is easy.

Did you read my post? No one was knocked out.

durangodawood said:
Installing the perfect person

No one said Oppenheimer was perfect. You're erecting strawmen.

durangodawood · Nov 20, 2024

zippy2006 said:
You're like the guy who is presented with a car he has never seen. "We fixed it up. Now it runs well." Your response is, "You didn't fix it. It runs well. How could you have fixed what runs well?"

Im the guy who says we dont need to go back in time to fix it because it runs well now - regardless of how it got that way.

durangodawood · Nov 20, 2024

zippy2006 said:
Did you read my post? No one was knocked out.

I assumed the point of installing the other guy was to block Hitler.

zippy2006 · Nov 20, 2024

durangodawood said:
Im the guy who says we dont need to go back in time to fix it because it runs well now - regardless of how it got that way.

I never said we need to go back in time to fix what runs well now. I said it runs well now because someone already went back in time to fix it.

durangodawood said:
I assumed the point of installing the other guy was to block Hitler.

Sure, to block him. And your argument would run, "No one would know that Thälmann would be any better than Hitler ahead of time."

durangodawood · Nov 20, 2024

zippy2006 said:
I never said we need to go back in time to fix what runs well now. I said it runs well now because someone already went back in time to fix it.

True. Someone from a world that wasnt saved could have gone back with a plan get a different Manhattan Project leader installed than the one who failed. How they knew the process for selecting a successful person instead of another failure is beyond me. They could have gone back over and over until they got everyone they could think of installed for different timelines.

If the Oppy choice was "extremely lucky" as suggested earlier, then few candidates would have succeeded, and the time travellers would just have spawned a lot more unsaved than saved worlds. 'A' for effort, I guess.

zippy2006 said:
Sure, to block him. And your argument would run, "No one would know that Thälmann would be any better than Hitler ahead of time."

Hitler seems pretty singularly bad. Its hard to picture anyone else who had both the vision and the rally-charisma. You could do well taking Hitler off the map and promoting anyone outside the Nazi party. Unless theres some special reason I'm not seeing why it has to be that Thälmann guy.

durangodawood · Nov 20, 2024

OK smart people..... when you time travel how do you know where you are going to land?

partinobodycular · Nov 20, 2024

durangodawood said:
A lifetime is enough to examine what percentage of all possible timelines?

It's enough time to examine all of them, if you think of it as the ultimate traveling salesman problem, and you have a sufficiently powerful quantum computer that can do the 'virtual' time traveling for you.

durangodawood said:
Also, Oppy is already the man in our timeline. Whats the point of checking out other time,lines?

Perhaps the choice has already happened. In which case someone chose this particular timeline for a reason, and eventually we'll come to realize what that reason was. Maybe teleology isn't that farfetched... it's just that instead of the past blindly producing the future, it's a collaboration between the two.

The initial conditions produce an outcome, which then has the wherewithal to choose the initial conditions.

zippy2006 · Nov 21, 2024

durangodawood said:
How they knew the process for selecting a successful person instead of another failure is beyond me.

Have you ever voted in an election? A primary? Predicting success is pretty common in human life. Not sure how you're struggling with this so much.

durangodawood · Nov 21, 2024

zippy2006 said:
Have you ever voted in an election? A primary? Predicting success is pretty common in human life. Not sure how you're struggling with this so much.

If predicting success is that easy, then they would have got the right person in place in the 'original' timeline, with no need to go back and "fix" it by installing someone else.

zippy2006 · Nov 21, 2024

@durangodawood, think about what you're trying to argue here: "No one went back in time to put Oppenheimer in place," or, "There are no reasonable theories for why someone would ever go back in time to put Oppenheimer in place." When you take a thesis like that you've lost before you've begun. There are approximately infinite possibilities which show your thesis to be wrong. We are talking about time travel, after all! Yours is the grand-daddy of all negative claims.

durangodawood · Nov 21, 2024

zippy2006 said:
@durangodawood, think about what you're trying to argue here: "No one went back in time to put Oppenheimer in place," or, "There are no reasonable theories for why someone would ever go back in time to put Oppenheimer in place." When you take a thesis like that you've lost before you've begun. There are approximately infinite possibilities which show your thesis to be wrong. We are talking about time travel, after all! Yours is the grand-daddy of all negative claims.

I should say its unlikely, and not that it didnt happen.

I mean you yourself have argued for the likelihood of a successful pick for M project leader the first time. So on average the original timeline leads to a "saved" world in the this respect, and would need no retroactive fix.

zippy2006 · Nov 21, 2024

durangodawood said:
I mean you yourself have argued for the likelihood of a successful pick for M project leader the first time. So on average the original timeline leads to a "saved" world in the this respect, and would need no retroactive fix.

You are still begging the question, assuming ours is the original timeline. "Oppenheimer was a likely pick in our timeline, therefore our timeline was the original timeline." Invalid argument.

durangodawood · Nov 21, 2024

zippy2006 said:
You are still begging the question, assuming ours is the original timeline. "Oppenheimer was a likely pick in our timeline, therefore our timeline was the original timeline." Invalid argument.

Original with respect to Oppy in place. If its likely a successful man would be installed, then its unlikely future man has to go back to install someone else.

I wasnt making claims about what other things got fixed prior to the M project.

zippy2006 · Nov 21, 2024

durangodawood said:
I wasnt making claims about what other things got fixed prior to the M project.

Well what if making the Oppy change required making other changes which favored more successful candidates? That's entirely plausible, and is one of those infinite possibilities that your thesis can't compass.

partinobodycular · Nov 21, 2024

durangodawood said:
So on average the original timeline leads to a "saved" world in the this respect, and would need no retroactive fix.

So your argument is that timelines that don't lead to the development of time travel won't have the means to change their timeline, and timelines that do lead to the development of time travel won't have a reason to change their timeline.

But this assumes that all timelines that lead to the development of time travel will be inherently stable and idyllic. No wars. No religious fanatics. No corporate greed. Are you really sure that if we were to develop time travel that it wouldn't get misused?

And what of AI? What if it developed time travel, what would it do?

durangodawood · Nov 22, 2024

partinobodycular said:
So your argument is that timelines that don't lead to the development of time travel won't have the means to change their timeline, and timelines that do lead to the development of time travel won't have a reason to change their timeline.

I dont think I mentioned the former. As for the latter, I was just talking about a situation like Oppenheimer, where I stipulated Z's claim that its fairly easy to get a good person in place for his job. So likely that would have occurred initially with no need for retroactive fix.

But there's probably other situations where bad luck or ignorance leads to a terrible decision that future people would want to fix, if they could.

partinobodycular said:
But this assumes that all timelines that lead to the development of time travel will be inherently stable and idyllic. No wars. No religious fanatics. No corporate greed. Are you really sure that if we were to develop time travel that it wouldn't get misused?

Actually if theres one thing we can be sure of, its that humans will misuse a tool.

partinobodycular said:
And what of AI? What if it developed time travel, what would it do?

At this point, who can say what an AI would want in any domain?

Would it even want? Or are we projecting that onto it?

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Time Travel Ethics: Preventing Oppenheimer's Parents from Meeting Up = Preventing Nuclear Proliferation

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