Society based on Statistical Probability?

[MGibster]

Is it more like the Vulcans in Star Trek with them all being 'logical'? Maybe more like the robots in that Will Smith movie where they saved him instead of his child or his wife in the car crash since he showed higher chance of survival?

The funny thing is that Vulcans are among the most passionate, emotionally driven species in Star Trek. Rather than their natural state, the adoption of logic and suppression of emotions was a practical way for them to avoid extinction due to annihilating one another. It is an affectation. I haven't seen the Smith movie, but deciding which casualties to prioritize when there are multiple injured people is called triage. You don't need to eschew emotions to apply logic to situations.

 

[Enkhidu]

This thread got me thinking about utilitarian philosophy as well. It's an interesting thought exercise though. How does society deal with it when the improbable happen? Unlikely doesn't mean impossible after all.

Modern western society deals with improbable events in half measures - we use insurance, for example, to spread risk for improbable negative events. In general we do a bad job of spreading improbable benefits, though.

Not sure we can go much deeper than that without delving into modern politics.

 

[Retros_x]

You're right, it's not cold, hard math, but it does have a similar problem to a statistical based society in that there's no way to predict all the outcomes of every decision.

Thats true but its not just the outcome, the calculation itself happens with values that can't be measured. With cars we at least could measure their impact, we just weren't aware of all the impact factors. Bentham was no mathematician and needed help by others. I don't think any sane mathematician would claim to be able to optimize human happiness. Bentham to be honest feels also like someone who is fascinated by math without understanding it really and writing some fiction about it. Unfortunately his "fiction" has a grip on our world. Utilitarism is the bane of modern ethics in my opinion, it feels like a pandoras box that brought us rationalization of crazy criminal acts and policies, disguised as ethical "for the greater good". (Won't go into specifics here because politics forum rules)

 

[UngainlyTitan]

Whether it's like the Doctor Who episode Logopolis, or more mundane like in the Outer Worlds 2, how would you build a society built on math?

How powerful should math be?

How do they gain the hard-earned math skills

how do they treat outsiders?

Would a computer simulated world count? After all the computer and its computations are purely mathematical operations.