Recently at his Substack, design theorist Bill Dembski looked at a question that top YouTuber MrBeast posed to his 360 million subscribers a couple of years ago:

Dembski comments,

As it turns out, the chance of someone annually being struck and killed by lightning in the US is about 1 in 12 million. By comparison, 1 in 8 billion will seem much smaller, as it spans all of humanity on a global scale. For someone to take MrBeast’s hypothetical offer of $10,000 in exchange for one lone person being randomly chosen and dying somewhere in the world will therefore seem highly unlikely to matter to the person accepting the challenge. That death would be highly unlikely to include oneself, one’s immediate or extended family, one’s friends, one’s acquaintances, the friends of one’s friends, fellow workers at one’s job, or anyone else directly or even tangentially related to the person accepting the challenge.

And yet there’s something cynical and ugly about being willing, even hypothetically, to take money in exchange for some arbitrary person being randomly marked for death regardless of how big the group of people being sampled is. Clearly, if the group includes only oneself (a group of 1), we’d refuse the offer because our death would then be guaranteed (unless we’re suicidal). Nor, unless we’re mentally deformed, would we expand the group to our nuclear family, our extended family, our friends, or anyone else with whom we’re in any meaningful contact (whether immediately or mediately). So where do we draw the line between the in-group for which we wouldn’t accept the $10,000 and the out-group for which we don’t care about whether a lone person in it dies?

But this question contains a false assumption. In MrBeast’s challenge, there is strictly speaking no out-group. The person accepting the challenge and all the people dear to this person are also fair game to be randomly selected and killed. It’s just that with 8 billion people to choose from, we think that we and those dear to us will escape the negative effects of this deadly lottery.

“The Small Probability Implicit in MrBeast’s Challenge,” February 6, 2025

He also notes that a person capable of offering such a challenge may well have a trick up his sleeve that would punish the person who accepts it. Indeed, that’s how folk tales often work. Dembski cites a short story, “The Monkey’s Paw” (1902) by W. W. Jacobs (1863-1943), which echoes that ancient theme:

(This video is a plot summary. The text of the story is here.)

More pressingly, Dembski warns, “Granted, MrBeast’s challenge is far-fetched. But the 45 percent of respondents who indicated that they would accept the challenge are also indicating that they would sacrifice others if they could but be guaranteed to get away with it.”

That’s a tale for our times, for sure.