Comments on: The bottle imp paradox

By: Mark Mackenzie

Mark Mackenzie — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 17:42:20 +0000

The thing is it doesn’t matter how much you pay for it, it’s always best to pay 0.01 less than the previous seller if you can, the seller at the start of the story even promises if he wishes for the money he paid for it back and it doesn’t come to him immediately he will buy the bottle back.

Although IIC it has to be a legitimate sale for less than you paid for it (You can’t just give someone money to buy it from you) and you have to tell the seller the full stipulations of the deal (At one point in the story he tries to sell it to a curios shop without much of an explanation and it just comes back to him).

Also there was one thing the bottle couldn’t do and that is make you live longer.

I think anything over $1.01 you wouldn’t have too much a problem finding someone to buy it from you, under $1 would make people think twice and under 10 cents you would have to be pretty desperate to buy it or like the article writer says someone who doesn’t care about the consequences like a sinner or non believer.

By: Mauricio

Mauricio — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 00:55:36 +0000

There’s one key difference between the greater fool theory and the bottle imp paradox.

The prices in the bottle imp paradox goes down and have a clear lower limit, zero. The prices in the greater fool theory goes up and have no theoretical upper limit.

Actually, prices CAN keep going up indefinitely and it is called inflation. If stock prices goes up faster or slower than average inflation is another story.

By: Gamer

Gamer — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 21:08:15 +0000

The Greater Fool Theory relies on the fact that you don’t know everyone in the world. If this was a game (not the card game) but a game that plays out just like the story, the difference is it’s a hand full of people that could buy the bottle (maybe 20) and you knew everyone, would people still play or will they think more rationally?

Of course in the story you don’t even have to wait for the madness of others; simply wish that a currency was lower (or the currency you paid for was higher). Though, I bet that would create madness.

By: michael webster

michael webster — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 15:05:14 +0000

The bottle imp problem is a version of what philosophers call a sorites inference. Here is a nice review of the problems a sorites form can generate:
http://artsci.wustl.edu/~philos/people/sorensen/PAPERS/Precis%20of%20Vagueness%20and%20C.pdf

By: michael webster

michael webster — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 14:34:50 +0000

Presh, I like this story and was not familiar with it.
The conditions of the game rule out J’s ingenious solution because you cannot give the bottle away, which I assume also covers paying someone to take the bottle.

I also like Scott’s solution, which could be generalized to having the genie find a person damned already but who wants to end his/her own life in wealth.

There is another obvious solution: make the payments in real and not nominal dollars. A penny today is worth more than a penny tomorrow, so the bottle can be resold.

What is interesting, to me, is that this problem may prove to be an antidote to network marketers who are constantly wrong about the span of their network of friends and believe that it is possible to sell an opportunity to sell an opportunity to sell x, when the
opportunity to sell x is a lousy deal. A striking example of the greater fool theory.