To Imane, pt 80

Thought up another moral dilemma-type situation: Stand or Guard?

You are in a line. Being at the front of the line is worse, like with the glass bridge in Squid Game. The person at the front of the line has an 80% chance to fail, causing them to be eliminated from the game and to have to leave the premises without any payment. Anyone behind them can choose to either Stand or Guard. Stand means to do nothing. Guard means to protect the person at the front of the line, with an 80% chance to fail, but succeeding means both are saved. Any number of people can choose to guard.

The game seems simpler to describe with a 50% chance, but with just three people guarding the person in front, the chance to fail is just 6.25%, so an 80% chance to fail makes it more interesting. Guarding is similar to jumping to the front of the line. If there are five people in line, and Players 2, 3, and 5 elect to guard Player 1, then there is a 0.8^4 = 41% chance that those players all fail and Player 4 becomes vulnerable. This is the exact same chance as if Player 4 was at the back of the line and no one chose to guard. For a player, there is no reward within the game for guarding: the chance to fail remains 80%. So it's like the red and blue button question, and we saw how that turned out. It ends up not being an interesting question to ask, except to predict and apply the results.

Note that the second person in line has literally no reason not to guard, unless they expect someone else to try to guard.

Nearly forgot why I was writing this post! When I was checking my email to copy what were pretty close to the earliest emails I sent to Mei, I also saw what might have been the last email I sent to Mei, sent around six years ago.

It was a reply to one of a series of hundreds of spammy emails. Most of these emails I never clicked on (not sure if Yahoo mitigates tracking of images in emails) but assiduously moved out of my spam folder. In the email I sent, I apologized for the late reply (I think it was like five years late) and in general acted like what I was doing was completely normal.

The spammy email that I replied to ended with an undisguised link to the website, adrianascam.com. No normal person would think that an actual spammy email, intended to deceive a user into believing whatever, would use a website with a name that suggests it's a scam.

Basically, it was a joke, but a joke that lends support to the 'government conspiracy' theory. Although I told Sherine that email address, it seems most likely that it was perpetrated by Mei. This doesn't mean she was involved in a government conspiracy at the time, but it does suggest that someone, possibly Mei, was being sneaky. And if one person was being sneaky, many people can be sneaky.

https://cannonballread.com/2015/09/narfna-dark-apprentice/


12 May 2026
to do: use 'I shall' instead of 'I will'
southshore vs tarren mill video, ~3m
forgot to mention Snow Crash, about effectiveness of 'just words'
film and incident where several people jumped off a boat and had no ladder to get back up, so died

summaries of First Kiss, spoilers?

I could say something simple and slightly ambiguous, like "Don't overestimate me." But it seems too confrontational. You know me, better than I know you, despite that I have never posted photos of myself (other than the piano video where my face isn't visible). What do you think is the truth?

There are always flaws. We just choose to forget them. What if the Titanic had steered a course 0.001 0.01 degrees further south for 8 hours, then it would have been approximately 20 50 meters further south when it reached the iceberg, about the width of the vessel. What if different things had gone wrong for the plane carrying the US's second nuclear bomb on 09 Aug 1945? "After initially deciding that if Nagasaki were obscured on their arrival the crew would carry the bomb to Okinawa and dispose of it in the ocean if necessary" etc.

I am being sneaky by not publishing this, showing solidarity with whoever sent me spammy emails.

*Published 15 Jun 2026, 02:59. Original date of completion was lost when switching from 'Set date and time' to 'Automatic' and back again, but it was sometime on this day.