Suppose you had seven children.
All of them, having reached the age of maturity, were jobless and were encouraged to find a job.
Child one keeps applying for different jobs in the technology industry but nobody will accept them. However, they keep trying and trying. They are like Sisyphus. They also aren’t doing anything as they wait.
Child two makes themselves exclusive to doing odds and ends for a decent amount of money. While child one thinks jobs should be sought via the application process, child two is averse enough to this that the inconsistency of what they do day to day is intentional.
Child three applied an actual application for an “actual” job and found one. The catch? It’s an organized crime job. However, it’s not immoral even though it’s illegal. They’re the personal household assistant of the mob boss. They too get paid immensely.
Child four also applied an actual application for an “actual” job and found one. The catch? It’s not illegal but has ethical issues involved. They mastermind ways to monitor and deal with those considered national threats. They too get paid immensely.
Child five, too, applied an actual application for an “actual” job, but it’s something they’re utterly terrible at doing, skill-wise. They’re tasked with therapy but have so little skill it’s considered useless. Child five, despite this flaw, gets paid decently by the office building.
Child six applied for a job and was appointed into one that had the completely foreseeable result of causing many dozens of people to lose their own job. They maintain a scenery-modifying machine which caused and still threatens to cause many scenery workers to become like spare cogs wandering the streets in search of a purpose. Child six too gets paid well, despite also having a version of their job that undermines the importance of the profession itself.
Finally, child seven is a volunteer, one with no ethical or legal issues involved, no issues finding a job, and no limits whatsoever in what they can do for others, and they do it all for free. However, after a few months of doing it, they think “that’s enough for me” and they never do a deed again.
One day, you realize you are passing away and summon all seven children to your home. You have specific things, all of which only one child can inherit, and due to the nature of these things, it has to be the child whose deeds make them out to seem the worthiest, as it’s the only tiebreaker. Which child do you prioritize as being the best candidate for the one with the highest worth?
What an incredibly bizarre prompt.
Your assets can be divided up evenly when you die, making the whole thing moot.
Edit: Wait…OP are you describing your siblings or something? Lol.
Yes, roughly speaking. They’re representations. It’s a hypothetical scenario where I was hoping people would discuss the points of discussion, not technicalities.
Even accepting the premise that this inheritance is indivisible, their jobs are far from the most important factor.
But if you had to measure that aspect, which one would have the greatest measure?
This reads like a school assignment.
Not really a school assignment, if anything it’s based on a common family discussion. The ending is dramatized though because I thought it would make it feel more like the kind of question it’s supposed to be, but based on people taking it literally, it seems not.
I wouldn’t have seven children.
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This hypothetical makes no sense to me. Why couldn’t they all be given something of value? If the dying person only has one valuable item then sell it and share the money equally. If the dying person doesn’t want the item to be sold then set up a sharing agreement where they each get to have it for equal amounts of time. Etc. But even in your version of it you say the dying person has several things of value to give away. I don’t understand the premise or point of this hypothetical.
Because the point of the hypothetical scenario wasn’t to be realistic, it was to ask about the worth of goodwill via a circumstantial comparison. It even says “hypothetical” in the title, which would presume it’s supposed to suspend one’s expectations of real processes.
I’ll be more blunt then. It’s a badly composed hypothetical.
You wouldn’t be wrong. I’m not necessarily good at those. Though I didn’t think a few quirks would cause such a post to become incapable of being discussed.
A hypothetical should be absolutely as barebones minimal as it can possibly be. The point of a hypothetical is to isolate the actual point you’re trying to ask about. In the one you wrote, i think what you’re trying to ask is “How should we value people’s ambition, success, and ethics?” So the setup should be something like this:
“You’re tasked with giving a million dollars to one of the following random people. All you know about them is these descriptions you were handed.”
And then after the descriptions of the people just say "Who would you choose to give the money to?
Most of the problem was the phrasing. But in my head it required expansion. I see now this was a mistake.
That’s how all us humans learn how to do things. You try something and see how it could be done better next time. Then you try again over and over until you’re good at it.
Yeah, the whole kids and inheritance thing is a really big sticking point. I saw your other comment about this being based on a discussion your family has had. The thing is, that even if your family was discussing jobs on the surface, if the people they are picking from are other family members (or at least people they actually know), their decisions are weighed by all their other knowledge and feelings about those people.
I can see you’re trying to figure out how much value people put on each of these particular career cicurmastances in isolation but kids and inheritance is just a terrible framing for that for the above reasons. As a framing exercise, I think the question would have needed to be framed in a way that puts the reader in a much more distant position. This could be something like:
An eccentric billionaire gives you the following list of people and tells you to choose one person from the list for him to give a million dollars to. The billionaire says you must make your decision based solely on the list. Who do you choose and why did you make that choice?
Still maybe not a great framing, but it helps alleviate some of the rejection of the premise.
They all sound insufferablly stubborn.
I can only assume I am as well as their father, so I’m eating whatever it is before I go.
Given the (very contrived) constraints, I suppose I’d try to maximize utility. The “things”, from what I can tell, are needed most by child 1 and 7 as all the others are capable of making a living themselves. Between the two, I’d opt for #7 as they are at least providing utility to others, even if it is just for a short time.
Are you a bot?
No, why would I be a bot?
Bc that lengthy text was giving me some GPT vibes.
I assure you, I’m not a bot just because of one long post. I even post pics sometimes, as well as link to other profiles.
If my only measure of worth was someone’s job and the circumstances they acquired it, I would say that it is entirely irresponsible to make any fair judgement.
Whichever one brings me the Golden Fleece.
Sell all assets, setup trust to fund health care and education - up to state school tuition levels- for all genetic descendents.
The children will either find their way, or not. They are all adults, grandchildren need the safety net.
Child 2. If you eliminate the children who have what you described as legal or ethical concerns, child 2 is the only one who consistently pursues their passions and is contributing back to society in some way. The other remaining ones might have lofty and noble goals, but no demonstrable ambition to prove their worthiness.
#s2,6,7 are finalists. In my opinion they all contribute to society. #2 seems to have low ambition. #6 is framed as being unethical by lowering the value of scenery business. I interpret this as the AI art problem. My opinion is people do what they are passionate about. If their job puts people out of work they were just doing the job for the money. Handcrafted bespoke furniture is no less valuable due to cheap flat packed IKEA furniture’s existence. #7 provided value to society but seems to have a zero sum mindset.
So, not knowing what the inheritance is makes deciding between them difficult. Blindly choosing I’d say #2. If it were a one of a kind piece of art, say van gogh’s “starry night” I’d say #6. As it might provide some perspective to them.
If it were something truly priceless… I might choose #7. The zero sum perspective is hard to hold when you can’t calculate what it would take to get back to zero.
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But which one of them do I like the most?
But which one of them do I like the most?
