Thread by @SahilBloom

Important Thought Experiment

You’re in an arena with:

- 50 hawks
- 10 crocodiles
- 3 brown bears
- 15 wolves
- 1 hunter w/ rifle
- 7 buffalo
- 10,000 rats
- 5 gorillas
- 4 lions

Pick 2 to defend you. The others attack you. Goal is to survive 1 hour.

What do you pick and why?

It’s hard to comprehend what 10,000 rats looks like. Here’s 1,280 rats. So it’s way more than this.… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

50 hawks + 10,000 rats seems like a viable and powerful combo.

You could send out 10 hawks to swarm the hunter and then put rats on the backs of the other 40 hawks to create a massive aerial attack on the other animals.

You’d still have 1,000+ rats to form a wall of protection.

Animals that never get any love here:

- 10 crocodiles
- 15 wolves
- 7 buffalo
- 4 lions

Thoughts:

Crocs: Fair—pretty useless.

Wolves: Did y’all see that movie with Liam Neeson? Wolves are ferocious AF.

Buffalo: Don’t even know how they fight.

Lions: Sleepy most of the time.

I failed to mention:

This is a test of strategic prowess.

Whoever answers this thought experiment correctly is first in line to lead humanity in our battle against the ongoing alien invasion.

First saw this somewhere on the internet back in 2012 and it led to probably 10,000 hours of heated debate in the Stanford Baseball locker room.

Lots of broken friendships and physical altercations started over whether a hunter is capable of taking out 10,000 rats.

Guys, we don’t need to worry about AI taking our jobs. This is a hilariously terrible pick.

“As a language model, I do not have feelings, but I can understand that the situation has become much more challenging.”

🤣🤣🤣

I asked ChatGPT to write a script for what you could say to the animals to defuse the situation.

Could have been more impassioned—you’re literally staring down a 10,000 rat army charging at you—but not bad overall.

A million hilarious dinner conversations out there tonight.

I love Twitter.

Massive morning salute to anyone who took the buffalo or the crocodiles.

I’m honestly not sure what y’all are thinking—and I’d recommend your family and friends go check on you—but I have respect for the non-conformist bold moves.

For anyone that inexplicably neglected to choose the rats, here’s a visual representation of what you are going to be attacked by…

The fact that 4 million people saw this thought experiment—and some reasonable % of them spent time thinking about it and debating it—is just fantastic.

I love Twitter.

The 10,000 rats are an absolute no brainer choice for the first pick.

I’m picking them based on sheer terror of the alternative.

I’m perfectly fine with death by these other animals, but death by 10,000 rats just seems highly unfortunate.