more likely that Russia stops maintaining its nuclear weapons and sells parts off to the hughest bidder.

B. With a better back hips etc. and immortal seems like the best option.

I don't understand the usefulness of determinism. If it is true that free will does not exist it still seems more useful to believe that it does at least to an extent.

Personally a lot of things in my life are modeled around the idea of free will and have it as a foundation. I view myself as having chosen my job, chosen what to eat. What to do as a hobby etc. At a personal level it seems that believing in determinism instead of free will would wreck much of the foundation of how I organize and go about my life.

It seems that this is true for the vast majority of people and is reflected in society. With other major beliefs there are work arounds that allow you to change how you live your life and move on if you change your belief. If you switch religions you can adopt new customs. Similarly if you become Atheist you can focus on non religious things to adapt your lifestyle.

The same could be said for other major belief changes, like political views, moral values, historical understanding etc.

But I don't see how this works with determinism. How do you effectively run your life if you don't believe that you have control over how you run it. It seems like an oxymoron.

Not saying determinists can't life a full and nice life, but I don't understand how determinists cope with not believing in free will. It just seems like believing in free will whether or not it is true is incredibly helpful.

I think an important factor in what allowed humanity to survive is that while we are smart, on average we are not too smart, and if we were more intelligent we would have gone extinct.

If you look at a lot of the geniuses, scientific, mathematical, philosophical, whatever. A lot of them did not live happy lives and they were obsessive and often self destructive. Add to that the fact that depression and other mental illnesses often come along with great intelligence and that a lot of people especially throughout history life was on average more of a negative than positive experience.

If humanity was more intelligent, I think it would be too miserable to survive. I'm not only talking about historical suicide rates, but also just the symptoms/ suffering that come with being a genius that historically have been seen in people like Isaac Newton and Picasso.

I think there is a goldilocks zone for intelligence in order for civilization to come about. Not intelligent enough and you can't do things like agriculture and science and mathematics needed to build society. Too intelligent and everyone gets the problems of the suffering genius.

Another Part of the way this works I think is that there exists things called "thought sinks". Basically these are concepts and ideas that intelligent beings run into and are attracted by in a similar way to how animals are attracted to shiny metal. These concepts and ideas seem very important and like they must be figured out, but ultimately lead nowhere sometimes ever and sometimes just in the immediate term. Chasing them means you aren't productive and don't focus on things more important for survival.

Society can afford to have a small percentage of its population study these things. The less technologically developed a society is, the smaller the amount of people they can afford to study these things. If more people than that study them, then the society will decrease its ability to handle emergencies and generally survive.

I think almost all of academia fits this category of a thought sink. Science for example gives ample rewards but it takes time for those rewards to come into being. If everyone is a genius then everyone will want to figure out how things work, but you can only afford to have so many scientists.

one of these days a russian plane will breakdown midflight while doing one of these flybys and NATO will have to rescue them.

Is it better to have corruption while saving more lives or no corruption while more people die seems to be the scenario of this hypothetical.

The captain will know he traded lives for money as will all the survivors. This will either haunt them or they rationalize it making it more likely for them to do corrupt things in the future or a bit of both.

This has future impacts and in the long term seems worse than having more people die, because it could lead to more corrupt decisions that get rationalized.

So I think system 1 is better because of long term impacts