Seeing the comments, and generally all the monkey paw arrangements, I remember the genie in that one strip where he clarifies all the various things that needs to be considered when the person wished they could fly.
I personally feel that he is the best one, irrespective of how tedious it would be.
You can always be right without ever being correct.
Point goes to genie on this one. You’re gonna get a cursed wish and need to use another wish to undo it. Way to fuck it up, Chippy, you’ll be lucky if you stay alive long enough to fix this.
Genie is looking at you like this because it’s weird watching only the right half of a human form sentences without issues. It’s also weird that the person didn’t seem fazed by the removal of their left half.
It’s more existentially terrifying if the wish operates differently. Instead of adjusting reality to make your words true, it simply constrains you to only be able to speak true and correct statements. So when you try and speak, “no, I have three wishes left,” what comes out is “I have two wishes left.”
In particularly powerful forms, this wish could be used to solve metaphysical and existential questions. You literally can only speak the Truth. Want to know the day you die? Pick a random date and try to say, “I will die on ____ from ____.” Your actual date and cause of death will come out instead.
That or he started with 4 wishes
Rub a lamp
Genie comes out
Oooh, that felt good. Keep going and I’ll give you three full wishes.
Shrug
Keep rubbing lamp
Ooooh yeah baby. Give me your wishes. What are your wishes? You’re going to get so many good wishes, hon.
You attempt to do this, but you find yourself unable to say you have three wishes, as that would make you wrong.
And you will always be right.
I read this in Baldur’s gate narrator’s voice
You must gather your party before venturing forth.
“If I wish for three more wishes, you will grant them with no catches.”
Keep doing this, over and over again, trying different strategies. It’s a way to test and validate genie loopholes (as you will be unable to state that if it’s wrong).
Though if the genie was smart, being “wrong” would be qualified to your own internal knowledge, I suppose. E.g. you can’t knowingly lie.
Alternatively, “was” is past tense. Meaning everything you’ve said in the past was correct. But that has no bearing on the future. The wish would undoubtedly fuck up a lot of things in the past from little daily white lies compounding (or even bigger childhood lies that could have drastically altered the world) but wouldn’t have any impact on things going forwards.
A genie would find a way to twist the wish for maximum suffering. And having your 4 year old “watch me, I can fly” lie be true would have some long lasting implications. Likely even leading up to a paradox where you were never even able to make the wish in the first place, because some childhood lie ended up getting you maimed or killed before you ever rubbed the lamp.
honestly, not a bad power.
“next week lottery numbers are _______”
“The best thing I can do with my life right now is ___________”
“next week lottery numbers are… impossible for me to know”
“the best thing I can do with my life right now is … something I wish I knew”
The curse can be stubbornly unhelpful no matter what.
It won’t be easy as you’ll still have to guess the right thing, but you can probably make it work.
I mean, with lotto numbers you could just start trying to count. Once you can say the number, you move on to the next one. Depending on how the wish works, you could even try just sounding things out.
The meaning of life is mmmmmmmmaaaaaaaaaasssssssssstuuuuurrrrrrrrrrb-“ Hmm… What would come after the B? “The meaning of life is masturbaaaa-“… Oh. OH.
Only have to guess 10 times the number of digits though, quite doable for a lottery win!
Batman
Username checks out. I’d expect nothing less from the DC world’s greatest detective.
You can make a random number generator and start reading the numbers, if you can say them, you are right, easy, you don’t even need to think at that point
but whatever I guess will be right.
No, no, no. You’ll be blocked when you try to guess the wrong thing. You still have to try guessing on your won.
still not hard, the first number is [strained noise],[strained noise],[strained noise],[strained noise],4.
FOUR
The lottery numbers haven’t been picked yet, so nothing would be correct until they get picked.
What if i say “next lottery numbers of [company that does it] [game name] will be ___ ___ ___ 7”?
Couldn’t a genie interpret this as “You can’t say anything that isn’t already true”?
Like you couldn’t actually say words unless it was a truth? Nor the rewriting of what truth is?
Yes it needs a different phrasing, something like “everything I say becomes truth”.
Still same boat, you are compelled to conform with whatever the actual truth is.
I’ve never understood how people go straight to “wishing for more wishes” and then immediately give up when the genie tells them no.
An individual wish is not by default limited by anything meaningful. One wish can easily be worth thousands of other lesser wishes. All you’d have to do is wish for the ability to grant yourself wishes. Or write up a “contract” or something and simply request that the thing you wrote was true, and that contract could have any number of things written on it. You could even go heavy on rules lawyering to get around “monkey’s paw” risks when you write it all up.
Its ultimately just a restriction of language. If you wanted to wish for a boat, you wouldn’t wish for each individual component and manufacturing process of a boat in extreme detail, you’d just ask for a boat. You can do that with any arbitrarily defined thing of your choice that you yourself define.
A fine career as a lawyer awaits you
You find you can no longer lie.
Reason #2801 why vacuous truths are awesome.
“When I first met you, you promised to give me all your money” is a true statement because I have never actually met you.
Just be careful not to test this in court.
something being “first” implies existence and the statement is wrong if the something does not exist.
“everytime i’ve met yetAnotherUser, they promised me all their money” on the other hand is true, because we never met and existence of a meeting is not required.
or to look at it in a more mathy way:
“For all X y is true” is false if an x exists for which y is false, if no X exists no X exists for which y is false and thus “For all X y is true” is a true statement, but your statement is “there is an X_i from the set X=X_j for which y is true” which is false if no X_i is in the set.
That depends on whether you interpret “when” + past tense in English to also assert the reality of the temporal clause. The interpretation which allows the vacuous truth is, in my opinion, not even technically correct (by correct I mean aligns with actual spoken usage). It would amount to formalizing the sentence as
For all meetings between us, if said meeting is at a past time and it’s the first meeting (i.e. before all other meetings), you promised at that time to give me all your money.
Which is indeed vacuously true, if there have been no past meetings, or even if the meetings aren’t well-ordered in time :). On the surface this is a perfectly good interpretation, but it doesn’t really align with real usage (though I would love to see an example of “when” + past tense being used this way, e.g. in a legal document).
On the other hand, most people would interpret “when” + past to assert that the event actually happened, which in this context means
I have met you before, a “first meeting” can be identified, and at that first meeting, you promised to give me all your money.
Or even more formally
There exist meetings between us at a past time, there exists such a unique meeting which is first, and, for all meetings, if said meeting is indeed the first, you promised me at that time to give me all your money.
And this can be reduced to
There exists a unique past meeting between us such that [it’s first, and you promised to give me all your money at that time].
I think this interpretation is most closely aligned with how “when” is actually used in practice. “If” feels different, though. It can act as simple logical implication, logical equivalence, or anything in between, so it may be more interesting to study. Also note that all of this doesn’t apply to “when” + simple present, which acts very similarly to “if”.
I love you
But can you still be incorrect?
No, because you are always right.
Massive silver lining then. Having found a way to determine objective truth sounds pretty powerful and useful, even if it’s not what you originally wished for.
If you are lucky and it works that way. Maybe you simply cannot speak at all if you are not absolutely sure that a statement is correct.
My mouth letting me say “I’m always right but I’m still a massive idiot” is going to hit me like a brick
Don’t lose hope, while being an idiot you may claim out loud that you’re a genius
Predicting lottery numbers, proving mathematic formula, coming up with options with for ftl and cold fusion if there are any
Always being right without knowledge on your end could lead humanity forward a lot if you can prove your standing
Bro ends up like Morty with the death-prediction crystal in his head: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjepJlvkdKs
Or whatever they say is right instead. Atomics are fake? No nuclear power. Oops there goes the sun because fissions gone.
Seems out of the scope of power for a genie, but I don’t know how to scale mythical creatures
Let’s just hope a flatearther doesn’t get it.
You might only be speaking in math, though.
Decide whether P = NP and get yourself an easy $1M. And another $5M for the other millenium prize problems.
You’ll have to come up with proofs for all problems though, but I guess that would be possibly by trying to say “<some math field> is required for the proof” over and over while getting more specific to narrow it down.
Exactly!
What if that meant that you could no longer lie?
The genie could just interpret this as:
You are only able to say things which are already true.
Granted, the genie produces a large sword and slices you perfectly down the middle. The left half of you burns away to dust. “You are now… always right,” he says to your right half as you flop to the ground. Not that it matters much as your consciousness quickly fades.
“You will be right for the rest of your life.”
“I wish you had left me alone!”
The genie rematerializes your left half. Now your right half evaporates and fades to dust. “You are now left alone.”
- Tales from Bad Pun Dad Joke Genie
But now the right half has a right half… Zeno him!
You somehow propose this to the genie through half a larynx, he nods briefly, before slicing again, and again, and again with increasing precision, until you are reduced to a single proton.
“I’ve read Zeno too,” the genie replies.
Stupid post duplication…
Monkey’s paw genie: you physically can’t verbalize that you have 3 wishes left when you only have 2.
This pen… Is ROYAL BLUUUUUEEEEEEE
I have 4
THERE ARE FOUR WISHES!
Wish granted. For a time, you were always right. You aren’t anymore.
Does the past change to meet what you believed, or does what you believed in the past change to what was right at the time?
I never said when that time was, or how long that time was. Not my fault you spent the exactly 3 seconds of time you were always right having a wank instead of being productive with it.
Narcissists have that power. Truth vs. being right.
Your IQ drops 80 points while deep seated feelings of racism bloom in your soul. A Red hat appears on your head. The Genie says “Now you are always right”. You immediately turn your self into ICE since you are an immigrant. The monkeys paw has struck again
