I remember seeing an article on popular science or wired or some crap that showed the original patent for the toilet paper dispenser which indicated that it should hang from the front. I couldn’t find the article within 20 seconds of searching, so I gave up.
As for my question…it’d probably have something to do with gambling or a way to make money…
It’s tough with just a yes or no answer though. Roulette sounds okay, but I’ve never played it. Is there usually a limit to how much you can bet? Could you retire on the winnings? What if the ball lands on the little green 0? Did you just lose your life savings?
There usually IS a limit, depending on where you are, and yes the green 0 or 00 will screw up your 50/50 chances.
I left my answer vague because I didn’t want to put too much thought into the details at the time. I just wanted to voice I would be after profit and not after knowledge of the afterlife or some such as others have put forth.
Will earth humans ever be contacted by life from another planet?
Or conversely, does intelligent life exist elsewhere in the universe?
I’d agree, but only if I can win big. I’m not desperate for money and I’m not using my one question to turn a quick £10,000 profit. I’d rather ask if I’ll ever be caught in a major war/natural disaster in my lifetime. Then (hopefully) I’d never have to worry about it again. You can’t buy that kind of peace of mind. Of course, if the answer was yes, that would be a helluva thing to have hanging over me.
The other things I’d love to know are questions about the distant future like ‘will humans ever live on other planets?’ or ‘will we bring about our own extinction?’
If there’s a question that could earn me millions though, I’m going with that.
Answer: no
You bet your life savings on black. Too bad it comes up green on 0.
Just split your bet across all the numbers that aren’t in the set. They pay 35:1 and there are only 20 of them. 80% guaranteed payoff.
Are the table limits the total that one person can bet or just per individual bet? I.e., can I put $10k on each of 1, 3, 5, 7, etc.?
Will the Cascadian subduction zone generate a megathrust earthquake within the next 50 years?
It may well answer “Yes”.
But then you don’t get to actually ask any questions about the future, because that was your one question.
Should I stay or should I go now?
I’m itching to know the best question!
These kinds of questions seem mildly interesting, but essentially useless. Say you get an answer of “YES.” Then what? You can’t do anything about it, you won’t convince anyone else it’s true, you’ll just know that one day, probably long after you’re dead, it will happen. And that’s all you know; you still have to guess the outcome. Is that really that great an advance from guessing whether it will ever occur at all?
The one about God’s existence isn’t much better. YES, you learn, the “Judeo-Christian God” exists. First off, there’s a rather important question hanging in the with respect to the Judeo vs. Christian part, right? And you still don’t know whether He’s the loving, easy-going God or the fire-and-brimstone God of the fundies. You still don’t know why he allows suffering if He’s both all-powerful and benevolent. Frankly, being that God did some pretty cruel shit in His early books, I think the knowledge would fill me with dread for the rest of my life rather than give me peace.
Thanks for clearing that one up. Who needs a magic 8-ball after all? :dubious:
Seriously though, even if the answer was no, that doesn’t prove much. Maybe theologians have got their concept of God almost exactly correct, but for some minor detail. Unless the religious among us consider their concept of God so perfectly refined that there is no room for improvement, you get a no.
You could broaden it to ‘do any versions of a God exist?’ or, as was suggested, ‘is there an afterlife?’. An atheist like me would be stunned by a yes, and then immediately have a million follow on questions, (starting with ‘wait, what?’ and ‘seriously?’). I’d have no idea which faith, if any, to start following, I’d just be a whole lot more confused. A believer would have learned nothing he didn’t already think was true.
I’m kinda doubting that there is a really great question. If there’s a yes/no question the answer to which would profoundly change your life, it would surely be so counterintuitive that you’d never think to ask it. It would be the kind of thing where you thought the answer was absolutely self-evident where in reality the exact opposite was true. Why would you ask a question you already thought you knew the answer to?
Similarly with gambling, if there’s a 50/50 bet you could make which could potentially win really big, a lot more people would be taking their chances. I guess you could find a wealthy compulsive gambler and bet them £10,000 on the toss of a coin. To make serious money out of a casino though, I think you’d have to keep winning. One spin ain’t gonna cut it.
Well, geeze dude, I was giving the shorthand version. Trust the SD to nitpick the nits.
The question would be worded with an eye to the “genie literalism” problem. The question would be detailed enough to know that if the answer was “NO”, then basically no western religion was correct. It would not determine if Buddhism was correct, or Hinduism, or the FSM, but knowing whether or not the commonly-accepted Christian god exists would be a huge bit of knowledge. If the answer was YES, further study could narrow it down by the choice of other people’s questions, if permitted. But even if not, that’s the question that has dominated human thought since time began. Who will win the world series is trivial in comparison.
Yes but you only get to settle it in your own mind. No one else is going to believe that a magic 8-ball has given you the definitive answer. That might be fine if you’re fairly agnostic, but if you already feel you’re almost certain of the answer, it feels like a wasted question. Of course, someone’s going to be in for a shock, but you don’t know that until after you ask. I’d place myself at around 99.9% atheist, so the question seems about as useful to me as asking whether I will win the lottery tomorrow. I would guess many religious people would feel the same for the opposite reason.
Do some people have souls?
“Will I be reasonably healthy and alive in ten years?”
If the answer is no, so be it.
If the answer is yes, I spend the next ten years making money doing incredibly dangerous stunts that no one else could possibly live through.
Frankly, I think most of the suggested questions are probably either useless or potentially even worse than useless. For instance, any questions about the nature of God, they will pretty much either confirm your pre-existing beliefs, or they’ll fill you with doubt with no way to rectify it. Hell, even something as simple as “Does God exist?” is such a vague question that, regardless of what you believe before or what the answer is, it’s basically useless. Worse, since this information won’t be convincing to anyone else, you’re not getting any value out of it.
There’s obviously some of these gambling options to get some value out of it, which I suppose may be of some personal gain, but it’s still gets you only a little bit, and doesn’t have any sort of meaningful effect on humanity at all. So that still seems like a considerable waste of such an awesome opportunity.
Instead, I’m tempted to work out some kind of question that would allow me to encode some sort of information about that future that could serve to help at some point later. Obviously, because of the “dunno” part, it would have to be very specifically worded and designed in a way so as to remove any personal bias from it to prevent the “dunno” answer. So, I’m thinking something along the lines of “At the very next time that I say [some very specific phrase], will the following coin flip align with the best of the two options being considered?” Thus, at some point in the future, if faced with a difficult decision, I assign an option to heads and tails, say that phrase and flip the coin. If the answer was yes, then I go with the option it lands on, and if it was no, I go with the opposite of what it lands on.
Then again, as all those random magic lamp and leprechaun stories have made clear, playing these sorts of games often result in undesirable or unintended side-effects, so maybe that’s not the best approach. So, maybe there really isn’t anything particularly great to get out of it other than perhaps some sort of personally helpful information.
The answer will have been “no.” Then, when you flip the coin, it rolls away and falls through a grate, never to be seen again.