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The Funniest Joke in the Universe

Author
Affiliation

Mike P. Sinn

International Campaign to End War and Disease

Abstract

We report the discovery and proof of the funniest joke in the history of the universe. The joke takes the form of a t-shirt.

The proof: 100 nuclear weapons cause a nuclear winter. Humanity has approximately 12,000 (122x (95% CI: 42.6x-198x) apocalypses worth). Sacrificing one apocalypse of capacity (redirecting 1% of global military spending to pragmatic clinical trials) multiplies global trial capacity by 12.3, compressing the disease eradication queue from 443 years to 36 years and producing an approximately 1.43x (95% CI: 1.22x-1.56x)-larger global economy at year 15.

The laugh count: DALYs averted × adult laughs per healthy life-year = 3.51 quadrillion laughs (95% CI: 971 trillion laughs-9.71 quadrillion laughs) additional human laughs, conservatively. This is three to four orders of magnitude more than every paid comedian in history combined. The joke is also responsible for the future existence of human consciousness, if enough humans wear it (the threshold is 1 million of people (95% CI: 100 thousand of people-5 million of people); see the cascade math below).

Implementation: take a permanent marker into the closet of every human you do not want slowly tortured and brutally murdered by horrible diseases, write “I am retarded” on the front of each shirt and “everyone is. Read the proof at warondisease.org” on the back, and wear it on August 6 (Earth Optimization Day). The seed program is paid for by an Earth Optimization Prize assurance contract for $50 million (95% CI: $3.19 million-$168 million), refundable if the cascade fails.

Keywords

mechanism design, collective action, social proof, assurance contract, viral marketing, foundation strategy, wearable advocacy, treaty campaign

About 150,000 humans died today of diseases that would have treatments if anyone had funded the trials. Tomorrow, another 150,000. This has been happening every day of your life.

This paper is about a t-shirt.

The Math

It takes about 100 nuclear weapons to cause a nuclear winter and end civilization. Your species has approximately 12,000. That is 122x (95% CI: 42.6x-198x) apocalypses96.

Redirect 1% of military spending to pragmatic clinical trials. That multiplies global trial capacity by 12.3x (95% CI: 4.92x-50.8x).

Humanity currently produces about 15 new disease treatments per year. About 95% of known diseases have zero treatments. At the current rate, clearing the backlog takes 443 years (95% CI: 255 years-841 years). With the redirect, it takes 36 years (95% CI: 8.15 years-106 years).

That is the difference between “your great-great-grandchildren might see cures” and “you might see cures, in your lifetime.”

The redirect also makes everyone richer. People who aren’t dying work longer and produce more. Money that was building missiles starts funding trials, which cure diseases, which produce more healthy workers, which grow the economy, which funds more trials. Run the model out 15 years and global GDP ends up about 1.43x (95% CI: 1.22x-1.56x) the current-trajectory baseline (conservative bound 2×; optimistic bound 6×; full derivation167).

Every nation reduces by the same amount, so relative military balance stays exactly the same. You each have 1% fewer missiles pointed at each other. You keep 121 apocalypses. Still adequate deterrence by any honest definition. Disease eradicated in a human lifetime. Everyone 1.43x (95% CI: 1.22x-1.56x) richer. That is the trade.

The total economic value of clearing the trial queue and eliminating the efficacy lag is approximately $84.8 quadrillion (95% CI: $42.9 quadrillion-$172 quadrillion)168. Divided across 8 billion of people (95% CI: 7.8 billion of people-8.2 billion of people) humans, that is:

$10.6 million (95% CI: $5.36 million-$21.4 million) of unrealized treaty value per shirt-wearing human.

By taking a permanent marker and writing “I am retarded” on a shirt you already own, you have raised its value by approximately $10.6 million (95% CI: $5.36 million-$21.4 million), minus the $5 (95% CI: $1-$25) of perceived social friction, minus the $0.50 of Sharpie ink. The pen pays for itself many times over.

The size of the number is not an argument against the number. It is what the number is. ∎

Why Nobody Has Done This

The first assumption is that powerful people benefit from the status quo and block change. Military contractors make billions selling bombs. They buy politicians. Politicians keep the budget.

This is wrong. The CEO of Lockheed Martin has two options: (a) keep apocalypse #122, watch their family die of curable diseases, retire on the current trajectory; or (b) give up the one apocalypse they cannot use, watch their family live, invest in the biotech sector that absorbs a trillion redirected dollars per year, retire on a 1.43x (95% CI: 1.22x-1.56x)-larger economy. There is probably no rational beneficiary of the current arrangement. The military-industrial complex does not benefit from the status quo. They die of the same diseases. They live in the same economy. Their children attend the same funerals. They keep 99% of their revenue and gain a 1.43x (95% CI: 1.22x-1.56x)-larger economy where they are alive to spend it.

The real reason is simpler. Some of the individual facts are known. Military contractors know their annual chance of dying in a terrorist attack is about 1 in 30 million people. They probably suspect that their lifetime chance of suffering and dying from a disease is approximately 100%. They may even know that the current spending ratio funds the smaller risk at the expense of the larger one.

What nobody knows is that a coordination mechanism exists that could change this, that it would cost on the order of $50 million (95% CI: $3.19 million-$168 million), and that it would produce benefits on the order of $84.8 quadrillion (95% CI: $42.9 quadrillion-$172 quadrillion). Until this paper, the calculation did not exist in one place. Every claim links to a parameter, which links to a source or a derivation. If you think a number is wrong, the code is on GitHub and you can fix it.

And the background facts that make the coordination mechanism obviously feasible are not widely known either. Most people do not know that US military spending was 96.7% lower than current levels, in constant dollars, immediately before the United States won World War II153. The country still built the bombs and airplanes that won the war. After winning, the US cut military spending 87.6% over two years153. GM went from B-24 bombers to Cadillacs. Frigidaire stopped making machine guns and went back to refrigerators. The economy produced the greatest boom in your history169. Your grandparents handled an 88% cut and built the middle class. You are telling your governments to be 1% less terrible at allocating resources.

Most people do not know that the Pentagon cannot account for $2.46 trillion it has already misplaced99. 1% of US military spending is a fraction of the amount that goes into a black hole every year and no one can locate. You are not redirecting the missile budget. You are redirecting the “we lost it somewhere” budget.

Most people do not know that the military lobby spends $198 million (95% CI: $190 million-$210 million) per year buying politicians, while the treaty campaign budget needed to outbid them is $650 million. Outbidding the people who profit from your death turns out to be cheaper than your annual coffee budget, aggregated across humans who would prefer not to die.

Most people do not know that COVID-19 killed more Americans than World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan combined. The $900 billion murder budget watched it happen, fully armed and completely confused. The virus did not check your passport. Disease is the only enemy that attacks every nation simultaneously, and your species is the only one that needs to be talked into fighting it.

The problem is not money. The problem is not power. The problem is that eight billion people do not know how much better their lives could be, and that a mechanism to get there exists and is absurdly cheap relative to what it unlocks.

So: inform everybody. But humans find budget reallocation boring. They will not sit down and read a paper about military spending ratios. They will listen to an explanation of why someone wrote on their shirt.

Why This Message

The original version of this paper proposed writing “this t-shirt ended war and disease” on every shirt. That is a claim about the world. Claims about the world trigger the brain’s “prove it” defense, which is the same defense that keeps the 604 (95% CI: 453-888)-to-one ratio in place. The correct shirt bypasses the defense, not triggers it.

“I am retarded” bypasses it on every axis.

It is a category of one. “This t-shirt ended war and disease” competes with every activist shirt ever made. The brain files it under “cause marketing” and ignores it. “I am retarded” competes with nothing. There is no existing pattern for it. The brain cannot file it, so it has to actually process it.

It is true at the time of wearing. “This t-shirt ended war and disease” is aspirational. Everyone knows it is false when they read it. “I am retarded” is true of the wearer, right now, as proved in the chapter it links to. Humor from honesty is stronger than humor from aspiration because honesty is rarer.

It is a confession, not a claim. Positive claims activate skepticism. Confessions bypass it. There is nothing to argue with when someone tells you they are retarded. The only response is “why are you wearing that?”, which is the conversation the shirt was designed to start.

The offense is the distribution. An inoffensive shirt is ignorable. “I am retarded” will be photographed, argued about, banned, defended, and shared. Every attempt to suppress it amplifies it. The message is antifragile.

The meaning transforms at scale. One person wearing it is weird or offensive. A thousand on the same day is a pattern. A million on the same day is a species admitting something true for the first time in its history. “This t-shirt ended war and disease” means the same thing whether one person wears it or a billion do. “I am retarded” changes meaning with scale, which means scale creates meaning rather than just spreading it.

It encodes the prerequisite, not the goal. The obstacle to the treaty is not information (this book exists). The obstacle is the belief “I already know what’s right,” which prevents anyone from checking whether they are wrong about the spending ratio. “I am retarded” is the admission that dismantles that belief. “This t-shirt ended war and disease” skips the prerequisite and states the goal, which the reader’s defense system rejects before evaluating.

The 1% symmetry. Earth Optimization Day asks humanity to become 1% less retarded each year, which corresponds to the 1% treaty170 168 redirect. “I am retarded” connects to this directly. “This t-shirt ended war and disease” does not.

The Cost of Not Telling Them

Imagine you are in the passenger seat. Someone you love is driving. The road is covered in sick people, lying down. The car is rolling over them. The driver has not noticed.

You have two options. (a) Say nothing, because pointing it out will hurt their feelings. They will feel terrible when they realize what they have been doing. They will get defensive. They may snap at you. (b) Say something. Watch them feel terrible. Watch them snap at you. Watch them stop the car.

  1. is the correct option. The temporary discomfort of being told you have been driving over sick people is small compared to the permanent harm of continuing to drive over sick people. This remains true even if the driver is your spouse. Even if they are your parent. Even if they will be mad at you for a week.

The shirt is the same situation. About 150,000 humans die of preventable disease every day. Every day the treaty is not signed is another 150,000 funerals that a working mechanism would have prevented. The person who has not yet written on their shirts is not pulling the trigger. They were just looking somewhere else when there was something they could have done.

The argument against telling them is that it will hurt their feelings to learn this. Their feelings will hurt for an hour. Then they will either (a) write on their shirts and start the conversations, in which case the queue clears faster and 150,000-per-day starts trending down, or (b) refuse, in which case at least they made the choice consciously.

The argument for not telling them only works if you assume their feelings matter more than 150,000 humans per day. Stated out loud, this argument is bad. It is bad even when the person is your spouse. The kindest thing you can do for someone you love is make sure they are not the kind of person who, when given the option, chose to keep driving.

Tell them.

The Shirt

Front: I am retarded

Back: everyone is. Read the proof at warondisease.org + QR code to the chapter

You can buy one. You can also take a permanent marker and write it on a shirt you already own. The shirt is text. Text costs $0.50 of ink.

How to Play

What you need: a permanent marker, a friend, and cards (print from warondisease.org/cards or write your own).

1. Pick someone you love.

Start with the person whose funeral you least want to attend. That is the person whose shirts you are about to improve.

2. Find a friend to help.

Alone, you are a person standing in a closet vandalizing clothing. The comedy is abstract. You feel weird. Two of you sneaking into the closet with markers is a heist movie. You giggle in real time. You will retell this story for years. The pair also creates two propagation nodes: each takes the story to a different social network, each becomes a separate cascade-trigger. Recommended team size: 2.

3. Sneak into their closet.

4. Write on every shirt.

Front: I am retarded

Back: everyone is. Read the proof at warondisease.org + QR code

Tuck a card in each collar.

5. When they find out, tell them the truth.

They will be mad. That is part of the joke. Look them in the eyes and say:

“Everyone is retarded. You, me, every politician, every CEO. Retarded relative to perfect knowledge and perfect logic. And until we admit that, we keep spending 604 (95% CI: 453-888) times more on terrorism than on curing the diseases that are actually going to kill us. Read the back of the shirt.”

Then read them the card. Walk through each line. Give them time. The math will do the work.

A human wearing “I am retarded” on their own initiative is making an unusual confession, which is socially confusing. A human wearing it because someone who loves them defaced their entire closet last Tuesday is just a human with a funny story. The cost of explaining the shirt drops from “I chose to wear this” to “you won’t believe what happened,” which is the conversation humans actually like having. And the confession is true of the wearer regardless of how it got there, which is the joke.

The recipient’s alternatives are worse than wearing it. They can (a) wear the defaced shirts and tell the story, at a cost of approximately zero, or (b) throw them out and buy new ones, at a cost of real money AND an active marginal increase in the probability that everyone they love dies of diseases that would otherwise be cured. The prank has not just made them a billboard. It has made the alternative economically punishing.

6. Everyone else.

Their siblings. Their parents. The parents of their children’s friends. Everyone whose suffering you are not willing to watch when the treatments were sitting in a queue the whole time. Repeat until you run out of people you love, or markers.

7. Do your own shirts last.

By then you will have the speech memorized.

8. Wear them every day.

Not once. Every day. Every shirt. Every stranger who asks is a new conversation. Every conversation is a new node in the cascade. On August 6 (Earth Optimization Day), everyone wears them at the same time so the conversations happen simultaneously across the planet. But August 6 is the wave. The daily wearing is the ocean.

9. Vote.

Go to warondisease.org. Drag the slider. Register your support for redirecting 1% of military spending to clinical trials. The vote is how the cascade becomes countable. Politicians respond to numbers. Give them a number.

10. Convert them.

They are wearing the three shirts you defaced. They are not yet a prankster. One more move. Ask them:

“You know the shirt is true. You are wearing three. Why not the rest?”

Then shut up. Every answer they give sounds terrible out loud:

  • “I like those shirts.” Translation: “I like my shirts more than I like marginal progress toward disease eradication.” Not a sentence anyone survives hearing themselves say.
  • “It will not make a difference.” They are already wearing three. If three matter, more matters more. If three do not matter, why are they wearing them.
  • “People will think I am weird.” Translation: “I am letting people die of preventable diseases because I am worried about what strangers at the grocery store think of my shirt.”
  • “I just don’t want to.” Invites: “Why not?” The loop restarts.

The question does not argue. It makes them hear their own reason out loud. The next time they open the closet, they hear it again. It sounds weaker than it did yesterday.

Most pranks cost the prankster something. This one makes the recipient a walking confession of something that is true of every human alive, and counts each unwitting wearer toward the 1 million of people (95% CI: 100 thousand of people-5 million of people) social-proof threshold. The joke spreads itself.

The shirt is a strictly better chain letter:

20th-century chain letter The shirt
Threat “7 years of bad luck if you don’t forward” Everyone you love suffers and dies of diseases that would otherwise be cured
Is the threat true? No Yes
Cost to participate Postage + envelope + a trip to the post office $0.50 of Sharpie ink
Effort required Address 10 envelopes Open your closet
Payoff to participant Avoiding fake bad luck A family that does not die of curable diseases

The Card

Print these. Tuck one in the collar of each shirt you deface. The card is what the recipient pulls out of their pocket when a stranger asks about their shirt. It carries the facts so they don’t have to memorize them.

Front:

Why I wrote on your shirts:

You are retarded. So am I. So is everyone. Retarded relative to perfect knowledge and perfect logic. And because none of us will admit it, we spend 604 (95% CI: 453-888) times more on terrorism (which kills almost nobody) than on curing the diseases that are actually going to kill us (which kill almost everybody).

100 nuclear weapons end civilization. We have 12,000 (122x (95% CI: 42.6x-198x) apocalypses). 1% reallocation = 12.3x (95% CI: 4.92x-50.8x) more clinical trials. 443 years to cure all diseases becomes 36. Everyone gets richer. Nobody loses.

The first step is admitting it. That is why I wrote on your shirts.

warondisease.org

Back:

When someone asks about your shirt, say:

“Someone who loves me wrote on all my shirts. The shirt is true. Everyone is retarded relative to perfect logic, and until we admit that, we keep spending 604 (95% CI: 453-888) times more on terrorism than on curing the diseases that are actually going to kill us. If every country redirected 1% of military spending to clinical trials, the disease queue drops from 443 years to 36, and everyone gets 1.43x (95% CI: 1.22x-1.56x) richer. The proof is at warondisease.org.”

Then show them this card. Get another one at warondisease.org/cards.

What to Say When Strangers Ask

“Why does your shirt say that?”

“Because it’s true. Everyone is retarded relative to perfect knowledge and perfect logic. And because none of us will admit it, we spend 604 (95% CI: 453-888) times more on terrorism than on curing the diseases that are actually going to kill us. Someone who loves me wrote it on all my shirts. There’s a card if you want the proof.”

“That’s offensive.”

“The word is used to sort people into a lower pile. But if everyone is retarded, there is no lower pile. We are all in the same one. The people who carry the heavier forms of it benefit from the same biotechnology this shirt is trying to fund. The harm was never the word. The harm is the sorting.”

“Does it actually work?”

“The shirt doesn’t cure anything. The shirt starts conversations. The conversations produce votes. The votes produce political pressure. The political pressure produces a treaty. The treaty redirects the money. The money funds the trials. The trials produce the cures. I’m the first link. You’re the second.”

“That seems unrealistic.”

“The US cut military spending 87.6% after World War II and built the greatest economic boom in history. This moves 1%. Also, the Pentagon has lost track of $2.46 trillion it can’t account for. We’re not telling them to cut missiles. We’re telling them to redirect the money they already lost.”

What Can Fail

The math is right. The instructions fit on a shirt. The cost is $0.50 of ink. What can fail is attention.

Seven filtering steps: hear about the shirt, click, read the chapter, understand the argument, find it funny, pick up a marker, do it. Half survive each step. That leaves 0.8% of the population. Chain letters worked at worse rates, and chain letters were unfunny, costly, and fake.

There is a recursive cruelty here. The diseases that erode attention (long COVID, Alzheimer’s, depression, chronic pain) are among the diseases the treaty would eradicate. The humans most in need of the cure are the ones least equipped to process the mechanism that produces it. The system eats its own repair capacity.

The joke is designed around this constraint. The person whose shirts you defaced does not need to understand the mechanism. They need to ask “why does my shirt say I am retarded?” and receive the explanation from someone who loves them. The prankster does the understanding. The pranked does the wearing. The people who see the shirt do the wondering. Some fraction of the wonderers become pranksters. Not all. Just enough. Conversation is the one cognitive activity humans perform even when their attention span for everything else is gone.

The Funniest Joke Ever Told

One person wearing “I am retarded” is weird or offensive. A billion people wearing it on the same day is a species admitting something true for the first time in its history, which is the funniest thing that has ever happened.

Healthy adults laugh about 17 laughs (95% CI: 5 laughs-50 laughs) times per day, or 6,205 laughs (95% CI: 1,848 laughs-14,225 laughs) per healthy life-year. The treaty’s central-case impact is 565 billion DALYs (95% CI: 309 billion DALYs-1.08 trillion DALYs) of DALYs averted. Multiply:

3.51 quadrillion laughs (95% CI: 971 trillion laughs-9.71 quadrillion laughs) additional laughs across human history, caused by this joke.

Every standup special, sitcom, and viral comedy clip in human history has produced on the order of 10^11 to 10^12 collective audience-laughs. This joke produces on the order of 10^15, conservatively. Three to four orders of magnitude funnier than every comedian who has ever been paid, combined. Any comedian who wants better numbers should consider switching to vandalism.

Theorem 1. Let \(H\) be the set of all jokes ever told or potentially tellable across human and post-human history. Let \(f: H \to \mathbb{R}^+\) assign to each joke its expected total laugh contribution across all observers in the timeline it occurs in. Then the joke described in this paper achieves \(f(j) \approx\) 3.51 quadrillion laughs (95% CI: 971 trillion laughs-9.71 quadrillion laughs), dominating all known \(f(j^*)\) by approximately three to four orders of magnitude. ∎

The joke gets funnier as it gets bigger. The tragedy gets more invisible as it gets bigger. Grief cannot scale to ten billion. Outrage cannot. Policy analysis cannot. Humor can. That is why the funniest joke in the universe is the correct format for the greatest tragedy in the universe.

The Proof That Does Not Need Numbers

Theorem 1 depends on DALYs, laugh rates, and cascade probabilities. A philosopher asks: is the joke the funniest even if you throw away every number?

It is.

Premise 1. Humor is the perception of incongruity resolving as benign. Kant proposed this. Schopenhauer refined it. Every humor researcher since has modified the edges without replacing the core. The closest thing to a settled question in the study of why things are funny.

Premise 2. The magnitude of humor scales with the magnitude of the incongruity, provided the resolution holds. A small surprise gets a smile. A large surprise gets a laugh. An enormous surprise that resolves as safe gets the kind of laugh where you cannot breathe.

Premise 3. The largest possible subject of a joke is “every human who has ever lived.” There is no larger comedy audience that is also the subject of the comedy.

Premise 4. The widest possible incongruity about a subject is between what the subject is most certain of and what is actually true. No gap between expectation and reality can exceed the gap between a universal, unexamined conviction and its negation.

Premise 5. The belief every human defends most aggressively, if challenged, is that they are not retarded. You can tell someone they are wrong about politics, diet, religion, child-rearing, and they will argue but recover. Tell them they are retarded and they will fight you. The intensity of the defense is the measure of the certainty. This is the most certain belief.

Premise 6. By the only non-arbitrary definition of “retarded” (distance from perfect information and perfect logic), every human is retarded. This is proved in the chapter the shirt links to. The gap between the most defended self-assessment and reality is therefore maximal.

Premise 7. The incongruity resolves as benign if and only if the confession is universal. One person being called retarded is an insult (directed, sorting, harmful). Everyone being retarded is a fact about the species (undirected, leveling, benign). The resolution strengthens with participation: more wearers, more universal, more benign. At the limit of full participation, the word loses its capacity to sort entirely, and the resolution is complete.

Premise 8. No joke can exceed this, because:

  • There is no larger subject than “everyone.”
  • There is no wider gap than “the most defended false self-belief.”
  • There is no more durable resolution than “literal truth,” because truth cannot be undermined by subsequent information.
  • There is no tighter coupling between setup and punchline than identity: the joke’s setup is its punchline.

Premise 9 (the fixed-point property). The joke is self-proving. The fact that you find it offensive is evidence that Premise 5 holds (you are defending an unchecked self-assessment, which is the specific cognitive defect the shirt describes). Your offense proves the shirt true. The truth produces the incongruity. The incongruity produces the humor. The humor produces the spread. The spread produces the universality. The universality completes the benign resolution. Each step feeds the next. The joke converges on itself. It has no external dependency. It requires no empirical measurement to function. It is a fixed point in the space of all possible jokes.

Theorem 2 (a priori). Let \(\mathcal{H}\) be the space of all possible jokes across all possible civilizations. Let \(F: \mathcal{H} \to \mathbb{R}^+\) assign to each joke its funniness under the incongruity-resolution model ($F = $ incongruity magnitude \(\times\) resolution completeness). A joke \(j^*\) is a priori maximal if it simultaneously maximizes both factors independent of any empirical parameter. The joke described in this paper achieves \(F(j^*) = \sup F(\mathcal{H})\) by Premises 3-8. It is a fixed point by Premise 9: the audience’s resistance to the joke is itself evidence for the joke’s premise, which increases incongruity, which increases \(F\). No element of \(\mathcal{H}\) can exceed \(j^*\) without finding (a) a larger subject than “everyone,” (b) a wider gap than “the most defended false self-belief,” or (c) a more complete resolution than “literal truth.” None is possible. ∎

Theorem 1 tells you the joke produces 3.51 quadrillion laughs (95% CI: 971 trillion laughs-9.71 quadrillion laughs) laughs. Theorem 2 tells you no joke in any possible universe produces more. Theorem 1 could be wrong if the numbers are wrong. Theorem 2 cannot be wrong unless the definition of humor is wrong, and if the definition of humor is wrong, that is itself evidence that we are retarded, which strengthens Premise 6, which makes the joke funnier, which proves Theorem 2 by contradiction.

If You Have Money

The basic version costs $0.50 of Sharpie ink. The funded version is $50 million (95% CI: $3.19 million-$168 million) into an Earth Optimization Prize171 assurance contract that pays 1 million of people (95% CI: 100 thousand of people-5 million of people) visible seed wearers (athletes on game day, university chapters in dining halls, celebrities at televised events) at $50 (95% CI: $10-$200) per wearer. If the cascade succeeds, money releases to recruiters. If it fails, refund at 9.03x (95% CI: 5.36x-15.1x) of deposit. The structure is designed so the funder does not lose money in any branch.

Outcome by 2040 What the funder gets What the world gets
Treaty passes Money releases via the Prize protocol Redirected budget, cleared trial queue, 1.43x (95% CI: 1.22x-1.56x) economy
Prize targets hit (without formal treaty) Same release Equivalent policy bundle
Neither Refund at 9.03x (95% CI: 5.36x-15.1x) of deposit Status quo continues

If the cascade triggers, the unconditional ROI is 1696 million (95% CI: 447 million-31123 million)-to-one. This is not a typo. The ratio is large because the denominator (a $50 million (95% CI: $3.19 million-$168 million) seed) is small and the numerator ($84.8 quadrillion (95% CI: $42.9 quadrillion-$172 quadrillion) of unlocked treaty value) is the species-scale problem the seed is unlocking. Probability-discounted at 25% odds the cascade triggers (deliberately skeptical), the expected value per dollar is 424 million (95% CI: 74.1 million-8213 million). The shirt program beats bed nets (the gold standard) by about 503x (95% CI: 30.5x-3.0kx) after probability-discounting. Each verified voter the seed produces saves about 2.6 lives expected lives and prevents 468 thousand hours of expected suffering.

$50 million (95% CI: $3.19 million-$168 million) does not fund the trials. It unlocks $27.2 billion per year of redirected military spending into the trial pipeline, perpetually. The funder is not buying trials. The funder is buying the permanent marker that redirects military budgets into trials.

Why This Is Pascal’s Wager, But Better

Pascal’s original: believe in God; if right, infinite reward; if wrong, finite cost. The shirt: wear it; if right, billions of healthy life-years for everyone you love; if wrong, you wore a shirt. Pascal’s threat is unfalsifiable. This one is published. Pascal’s reward is infinite and therefore meaningless. This one is 3.51 quadrillion laughs (95% CI: 971 trillion laughs-9.71 quadrillion laughs) laughs and calculable to the unit. Pascal’s cost is a lifetime of church. This one is $0.50 of ink. Dominant on every axis where Pascal’s was already considered persuasive, and Pascal’s convinced roughly a billion people.

You have a permanent marker. You have a closet. The shirt is true of you right now. The only remaining question is whether you are the kind of person who, upon learning that admitting you are retarded could cure the diseases killing everyone you love, declines to admit it.

Further Reading