Jon Pretty

If you could ask a single yes/no question of someone from the year 2050, and get a truthful response, what would it be?

It's quite interesting that this opportunity to receive a prescient, binary fact doesn't really offer much of any use. As an optimization problem, you'd want to maximise the expected differential of impact that knowledge would have on your life.

false. You need to think globally. There's someone from 2050, so at least some humans survived. So you can learn how they survived, and use that to influence globally the path toward sustainability:https://twitter.com/fanf42/status/1192896905233256448 …

But you can do so very little with just one binary answer...

Imagine how it changes if with probability p they lie.

Well it certainly doesn't make things easier... But I guess that the utility of the answer would become proportional to 2|½-p|.

I think 1-H(p) but with a single question it’s hard to think what this really means for a human.

What's H? If they lie with probability 1, that's as good as telling the truth. And p = ½ gives no information. Ok, so let's assume the person from 2050 is omniscient enough to answer, "was reducing our emissions by X enough to save the planet?" And we have to pick X.