Time limit

Just posted this on Reddit, where it may or may not get deleted by a bot:

Aliens run a social experiment for 100 years. Humanity is divided into rich and poor, 50% in each. Each year, there's a chance to push a button. 1% of the poor people who push the button die; everyone who survives is allowed to be happy: be in a relationship, etc. Do you push the button?

If you never push the button, you're not allowed to be happy.

But if no one — out of all 8 billion humans — pushes the button, then the experiment ends.

If only rich people push the button, no one dies, and everyone who pushed it is allowed to be happy.

If only poor people push it, then 1% of them die, and the rest can be happy.

You only need to push the button once, but you have a chance each year to push it if you haven't tried yet.

It isn't intended that people can wait until they're rich to push it safely, and then go back to being poor, but some people might do this. The aliens just ignore this behavior.

Note: "be happy" is somewhat vague: it's just a positive thing, that people want. The aliens are not trying to affect the human population, just running an experiment on what humans will do when presented with a choice. They are not giving special rewards to those who push the button (that would stop if the experiment ended); just limiting whether people can be happy if they haven't pushed the button.

The aliens don't care about whether young people are happy, so anyone under 18 is not affected. The first chance to push the button is when you are 18.

As a poor person, I would push the button.

I wrote it because of Adam Lanza: a rich person who chose . . . to try to help poor people. Anyway, his motivations could not be explained the same way as a soldier who wants to earn enough money to be in a relationship while they are still young.

Unless there's coordination, there will be some people who push the button. They might be poor people. Or they might be rich people. So what does it matter if more rich people push the button?

It looks like there are two choices, but there are really three.

1) Push the button

2) Don't push the button

3) Try to coordinate a year when people don't push the button

Why might coordination fail? Because there could be some people who say that it's good to have an incentive to try hard. I actually had that in the title, after "divided into rich and poor", before removing it due to the 300-char limit of titles on Reddit.

In the name 饱饱兔 @SuperSG15, I at least know what the characters mean, even though I've forgotten how to pronounce '饱'. I have no idea how to pronounce '@9玥、', a name that contains a comma, or what it means; same with her second account, '@睡够了嘛👿'.

I also don't know what to think of as the name of the person who had the Chirp Club account, @fancyfenty. After she deleted and then remade the account in 2013, she set the name to 'Mary Jane', but that seemed like a reference to the comic book character. In my bookmarks, her name on Chirp Club was '_' in 02 Jul 2013, and 'ℳeezus' on 08 Jul 2013.

I didn't check the account of @9玥、 today.

When Ariana Grande touched a donut in a shop with the tip of her tongue, ~10 years ago, news stories reported that the male she was with was her boyfriend. I have felt comfortable assuming that she was in a relationship with someone at some point.

Being in a relationship is the most common way of being happy. If someone chooses not to, it's like not pushing the button in the above hypothetical situation. (Also, I posted another hypothetical situation about an hour earlier, but I have already forgotten what it was about.)

In the unfinished update near the end of the post titled 'Results', what I was going to say was about dividing society in two groups of equal size. In that case, it was male and female. Here, it's rich and poor. If the scenario divided society such that only 10% of people would be considered rich, it create more conflict. With 50%, people say, "my chances of being in each group are about the same. I cannot consider myself to belong in group X and assume that other people I know will also be in that group."

I guess, even if it would be literally impossible to reduce the size of the group of rich people to zero in that scenario, people could still imagine a moral victory as the result of conflict. Or they could define a 'group of people who deserve help', such as if someone is being threatened by criminals and there is the option of doing something safe like calling the police (if the neighborhood is one that trusts the police).

If I say certain things, it affects whether I can publish this post immediately without publishing other posts that are scheduled to be published. I am writing this at 18:33, 24 Sep 2026.

If I suggest that someone is important, it's partly a test of the group to which they belong. Ariana Grande is like Hispanic or something, probably speaks Spanish. Although Demi Rose is half Colombian, I don't know if she speaks Spanish, so she sort of belongs to a different group: British.

I checked Ariana Grande's Instagram account yesterday, and the account had posted a picture of shoes four days earlier. This was after I first mentioned her on this site and is evidence that she doesn't know about this idea.

If I suggest that there could be any possibility that Ariana Grande might be interested in me, I also have to say that it could be possible that Angie Varona could be interested in me, although I don't think I've ever made any attempt to contact Angie Varona, who is also like Hispanic and probably speaks Spanish.

She is now a lawyer, which is a profession that's considered to require intelligence. Maybe eight years ago, I checked Google's cache for her Instagram page, and she had named herself after Princess Mononoke, from the Japanese animated film. Later, she had changed her name to something else.

Out of the three choices that I listed above, I think it's stupid to choose "2) Don't push the button". Sharing this idea would be like suggesting that people coordinate to not push the button. The interval of a year is arbitrary: it could be every day, and people just have to agree on one day where no one pushes it.

If humanity was split into equal groups of rich and poor, Ariana Grande would fall into the 'rich' half. She would have no risk from pushing the button. The only reason not to push it would be to help other people. But simply not pushing it doesn't help anyone without an effort to change what other people do.

@9玥、 acted in a way that is analogous to choosing not to push the button. If Ariana Grande knows of this idea, she is definitely the female with the most followers on social media who knows of this idea, far surpassing other people who might know of it like Imane, Greta, or Demi Rose. Hundreds of thousands of people paid to attend Ariana's recent concert tour.