This reminds me of this animated YT video in which timers are displayed above peoples’ heads that display the amount of seconds passed since that person last shit their pants: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/WgbI5orsSMY
Over night, social hierarchies are upturned, respect is earned and lost based on that number.
The date they will die.
Various reasons.
Number of hugs
% of how genuine they are with me, easy to figure out who’s worth the time and who isn’t.
Could be a problem in a relationship tho. I take it back, just the cumulative numbers of fart in a lifetime.
The “genuineness” statistic sounds like the sort of thing that would gradually drive me insane.
I’d probably end up staring into the mirror and seeing an abysmally low number for myself.
And you find the one person who’s 100%, but actually they’re a dick. It seems like they’d be a dick.
Like, I’d be unusually high, but I still purposely don’t say certain things.
Ive been kinda obsessed with truth my whole life and I recognize the more I do not speak truth the less I can recognize what it. It is problematic for sure. Its good we can choose not to speak.
the units for farts would be interesting. i would ask for total mass of fart for a more understandable value. number of farts would be kind of ambiguous cause someone could have lots of little farts or few huge farts. some asshole would choose those asinine equivalent volume units favored by the compressed gases industry, which no one would really understand.
Some asshole has been farting in my pants all day…
I love and hate this one, really a good monkey’s paw one!
Number of racial slurs used genuinely.
When I was a kid I was once horribly racist to someone but I… was really bad at it? I didn’t know any slurs I don’t think, so I said “at least I’m not black” (the girl was Asian). Still feel bad about it though :( Not seen her for decades.
aw man that would be rough for those of us who were raised by terrible people but learned how to be a better human
I feel a better one would be amount of time since the last slur was used, or number used in the past 30 days or something.
12304 days since last racist incident
Realtime running count of lies told
Oh, please, mine wouldve stopped counting by middle school.
RampantParanoia2366
It’s a great thought and all, but wouldn’t authors, actors, and other purveyors of fiction have really large numbers? Every politician would suddenly find a new found joy of reading fiction to children in hospitals.
Realtime. Immediate feedback they just lied to you.
Nah, fiction isn’t lies, not when there’s no deceit.
Lie is when you deceive someone, not when creating fictional world. At least this is my option.
Similar to the other reply, it’s a good idea and seemingly pragmatic, but we could spend a decade arguing over the pedantry of what qualifies as a lie and still not be done.
Truth is tricky
How about any statement told with the intent of the recipient believing something about the world that the speaker knows to not be true
That’s a very good angle, honing in on exactly the problem of lying.
“Intent” could get just as tricky. With all the various forms of psychosis, delusion, etc. it’d be tough to say whether someone “meant” to do something. (It’s trickier than we’d usually like to admit even for a typical person.)
The same kind of problems exist around whether the speaker “knows” something to be false.
Then there’s the problem of fiction. Bedtime stories, campfire stories…
And not exactly a technical problem, but what about a doctor who knowingly oversimplifies or otherwise intentionally twists his words in an attempt to get the patient to manage their condition optimally? Parents who lie about how something works to help their kids understand something or behave safely? Teachers who oversimplify physics lessons to present it in a way their students can grasp for now. Not exactly a technical problem maybe, but would we want “noble lies” to affect the counter? This is a little off track, just occurred to me and felt like writing it out 🤷♂️
This one doesn’t pose a direct problem really but maybe helps me get to my point: what if people who rode a train moving at relativistic speeds when lightning struck both ends talk with someone who was watching from outside about when the lightning struck? Truth is tricky…
But making it, “how often did they attempt to intentionally deceive” as you suggested is a great approach imho. Maybe almost realistic. There’s probably some biological indicators of that right? … for non-psychopaths
“You are a king, then!” said Pilate.
Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. In fact, the reason I was born and came into the world is to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.”
“What is truth?” retorted Pilate. With this he went out again to the Jews gathered there and said, “I find no basis for a charge against him.
Let’s start with the times you’ve said something you know to be untrue.
I told my nephews that Santa was real
Does reading the Big Friendly Giant to a nephew count as one big un-truth or many small ones?
So sarcasm is lying?
Number of times they molested kids.
Monkey paw’s finger curls: You can see them. They’re EVERYWHERE. People you thought you knew and loved have numbers greater than zero over their head. Despite your horror, you try to make use of the power to try to bring them to justice. No one believes you. You have the Cassandra’s curse of the status quo. ‘Steve? What are you talking about? He’d never do anything like that. Butter wouldn’t melt. You should probably shut your mouth before we get offended about what you said about our friend and kick the shit out of you. Know what I mean?’ You watch the news and see everyone who has a position of power over you and your loved ones has a non-zero number. You try to escape into fictional media but your favorite actors are non-zeroes, the author pictures in your favorite books show non-zeroes, the album sleeves of your favorite bands show non-zeroes.
Knowledge can be a burden.
Justice can be brought without anyone believing a thing you say.
Ehh. Serial killers tend to only get so far.
Meh, take as many as you can out before you go down. I don’t see the issue here.
I heard in america, that FBI says there are few serial killers around that never get caught. They probably have a system or lack thereof.
Some media sources have cited estimates suggesting there may be 25 to 50 active serial killers in the United States at a given time, though the FBI has stated that the true number cannot be quantified.
Yes, there’s no real chance they’ve all been caught. I’d guess risk increases with rate of killing, though, and the status of their victims.
Given that most solved murders are cases where the victim knew the killer, go out and kill random people with non zero values. Spread it around.
You may eventually get caught. How many is enough to say it was worth it?
Sow the seeds of suspicion. “Bet he is a pedo”. Don’t be too pushy. But maybe it will help someone speak out?
Then as you live in horror and disgust, you see people’s numbers rise day after day, unable to prove to others their horrendous crimes.
And then you befriend a stranger on the internet. You are nervous at first but you can’t see them, so you can imagine their number is zero. You hit it off. They’re amazing. Funny. Sweet. Kind. Hardworking. The relationship turns into a distant romance. Then you finally meet. You had no idea the number could go that high.
Or… you meet up and are flabbergasted by their ZERO. You could not be happier. You get extremely close, get married, have a child together… twins! You’re out overnight with friends, and your partner’s friend comes to visit. You return the next day to find the kids sleeping in and your beloved and their friend having a nice brunch, laughing with each other gleefully with the number two over each of their heads.
Or x2
You meet up for the first time in real life, and they do not have a number. How could this be? EVERYONE has a number, thank the gods they’re almost always zero! You’re immediately suspicious of their intentions and past actions. They’re not acting anything like they did online… they’re actually acting really fuckin weird, which greatly discomforts you.
You grapple with this internal conundrum, but you had failed to notice something crucial: The instant you saw each other, their eyes so briefly darted up, looking above your head.
Jeeeesus Christ! I was thinking like “farts per day” or “no-blinker lane change count”. You’re going straight to the show.
What’s the point though? We already know the worst offenders without this special power and not a fucking thing is being done about it.
Edit: I misunderstood the question. I thought it was for everyone to be able to see it. Yeah, this would be a good one to have to know who to avoid…
Well, now you have to cone up with a bunch of excuses for why you’re avoiding people who looked normal to everyone else.
We truly live in the worst timeline that this would even be considered.
The worst part would be knowing but unable to prove it.
Percentage on how likely someone is to be caught if they were murdered along with the coordinates of that location 48 hours from current time.
Just for curiosity.
Or maybe what everyone else said about farts or something
Times they told the truth.
If it’s objective truth, sweet! Motherload I can asking anyone the a question to the secrets of the universe and know whether they’re wild guess was true!
If it’s subjective truth, also useful, but you know just lies or ignorance detector
None. Someday, some company will build and sell a tool that actually does that, and it will be hella privacy invasive. Actually, it’ll probably just be another invasive feature added to the Ray Ban perv glasses.
How much of a dick they’ve been over the past six months.
Your number would break the system.
Fuck you shut up
Big Dick Triumph
…hey, not a bad band name
How likely they are to have sex with me this very second behind those bushes over there.
Good God I’m shallow sometimes…
Recency of last wank would be an interesting one
friend gets back from the bathroom and their number has gone down near zero
“This stupid stat is broken, it’s just shows 0 for everybody.”
It was easier to program that way. The odds of it ever not being 0 were too small to spend the resources for a proper indicator.
“Oh, finally, someone with 20%. Wait… is that a negative sign?!”
Laughs in ugly
Oh shit, I didn’t think of romantic compatibility.
My first thought was how attracted they are to me, which I guess is kinda the same thing
That’s useless, I already know the answer, it’s “not at all”
How willingly would they put up with me for a while?
It’s more useful for some people. Even then, you never know. Attraction is weird sometimes.
Maybe net worth. I feel like there’s a lot that can be done with that, good and bad.
If that could translate to ad buys, it would mean I’d only see advertisements for scams, because I have no money for anything else.
omg I’m not sure if this is exactly what you meant but,
I would love a metric above their head that states how many times an advertisement has actually worked on them, vs how many they have seen.
I think it would revolutionize the way we see ads today, because I think almost everyone would have significantly low numbers.
I think everyone knows that advertising is relatively ineffective on a per-view basis, but they’re hoping it at least pays for itself…
Yea, but im hoping the constant re-enforcement that it doesn’t work will sway them away from wanting to spend on advertisement in the first place.
That would have interesting knock-on effects for ad-supported services…
Yea, I do agree we would see more services become paywalled as a result. Not that that would be a bad thing though, not every site would go that route, the main reason sites don’t already is because they know that the typical user isn’t going to pay money to access their site, they will just go elsewhere.
The way I can see it, the ad supported model would go away, then branch into a few ways:
- Sites opt for a paywall on the individual scale; but this won’t work as the everyday user isn’t going to spend $ on every site they visit, so they will just visit sites that don’t force a paywall
- Sites opt into selective pay packages/subscriptions kind of like how cable worked, where you pay one provider, and it gets distributed across sites based on how much traffic each site got that was involved. I’m unsure how I feel about this route. If it’s done right I wouldn’t mind but, if it ends up being insane pricing like how cable was I wouldn’t participate.
- Sites tone down the amount of ads, as the only thing they are making money on now is user data tracking, which doesn’t need a bunch of different ads on the system and also doesn’t really require user interaction.
The two examples we have aren’t great: video streaming and newspapers.
For video streaming, they try to create as much of a monopoly as possible and then extract value from you–enshittification. And even at this early stage, it’s not the “ad-free” tier it’s “ad-free*” tier.
For newspapers, rich people just buy them and blatantly use it for propaganda; they’re willing to operate at an official loss if it saves them from regulation or taxes.
The time and date of their death.
It would be interesting to see this update in realtime. You see someone about to get in their car, with a death time 5 mins from now. You call out “hey”, they stop, see you were talking to someone else. The date updates to 30 years in the future, as that momentary pause meant they won’t be in the place they would have when someone runs a red light.
Somewhere unseen, someone’s number changes from 20 years away to 5 mins away.
My thought was that it would be immutable. It wouldn’t change even if I told them.
I don’t think I’d tell very many people. It’s not something I’d want people to know about me. Also, the few I told wouldn’t believe me and if I proved to others that I knew this, I think they’d see me, rightly so, as some sort of freak. The temptation to ask would be overwhelming, but they don’t really want to know.
It kind of ruins the concept if you can’t use the information to change the outcome. Or maybe just makes it sad, every time you try to save someone they die at that time anyway. Then over time you work out that the clock knew what actions you were going to do, and by trying to interfere with the people with short times you actually caused their deaths.
Very Cassandra to have knowledge of the future but be unable to change it
You can’t change fate but maybe can change how ppl meet it?
Like If you knew someone was going to die maybe help them bring them peace sooner.
Or maybe if you knew your own date you could do reckless shit. Although you might just spend 20 years in a coma before you die.
Lol that twist ending i never thought of. Know I need to define death prior to making that wish.
Nah, if they miss their appointment [the plot of final destination]
Having kids makes this a burden IMO. It would be very difficult to know that any of my kids would die before me let alone the exact time
Add location too, otherwise that’s just cruel.
“You’re going to die in 2 days!”
“Oh god, how? Where? Why?”
“No idea, get fucked scrub!”
They die of fretting at home, alone
or from to much hookers and blow.
My chances to score
That’s a dangerous number in isolation.
