I wonder how much potential this technique could have. I mean, inventing a metaphor that applies to two situation, letting two groups of people debate the metaphor, telling each of them only one of the meanings... and then collect their answers and try applying them to the other situation. Maybe we could find some creative solutions here.
I'll try... okay, sometimes the analogy will be stretched a lot, but that's because the goal is not to be perfect in translating, but to generate ideas.
(polymathwannabe): Recruit the subset of rare humans who enjoy green tickling and employ them as tickling punchbags for green Martians to practice on.
Find people willing to donate a lot of money to education of the least educated people.
Make green Martians wear soft clothes that do not dampen their tentacles' sensitivity too much.
Make education less expensive.
Use some medium (animals, dolls, androids) where green Martians can practice their tickling skills without harming anyone.
Use Khan Academy for teaching.
Find a way to chemically induce metamorphosis in green Martians.
Uhm? Invent a sci-fi technology that will inject knowledge and skills into humans.
Use plastic surgery, medications, or artificial selection to make green Martians' tentacles less stingy.
Give schoolkids Ritalin.
For parents and/or cell donors who are willing, find a way to engineer blue-born Martians.
Sperm donors should provide information about their educational achievement.
Perform non-interventional, follow-up studies on elderly green Martians to assess the worth of a non-tickling life.
Let stupid people live without education, and make a scientific study about their lives. Maybe they are not that much worse than the rest of the population.
(Manfred): A thin layer behind the ears that prevents pain/euphoria from tickling.
Lower the tax, give less education to both stupid and smart people.
Community college classes on tickling.
Classes on "efficient learning" before learning specific subjects.
Economic transactions.
Contracts between private people, like: "I will pay for your education, and in return you will give me 10% of your income during the next 20 years."
Drugs that satisfy Martians and reduce the desire for tickling.
Give stupid people free TV.
Drugs for humans that make them not experience pain from tickling.
Create better propaganda for taxpayers.
(Adele_L): It might be good to have designated spaces where Green Martians can practice tickling participating humans. As more and more of these spaces become available, it becomes more and more socially unacceptable for Green Martians to tickle humans elsewhere. Obviously, for this to work, there would need to be a sufficiently high number of humans willing to participate.
Create more privately sponsored educational institutions. Demanding public education should become socially unacceptable. Obviously, this needs a lot of private sponsors.
For me, a large part of minor annoyances is anticipating minor annoyances. Imagining myself as a human, I might get really sick of stung randomly throughout the day. It would be easier to deal with the occasional sting if they were constrained to certain times of the day or to certain environments. For example, I think it would be good to make a taboo against tickling at work. The blue martians can always tickle later, and the humans would be able to work without having to worry about getting stung.
Have some limit on taxes, so that people don't have to worry that more education will mean more taxes.
Now imagining myself as a Green Martian, I feel like I would naturally feel bad about stinging humans, and try to avoid it for the most part. This anxiety would be significantly worse if the humans visibly disliked me for stinging them. But I would be desperate for someone who could help me become a Blue Martian. Learning the Blue Martian's techniques would be very tempting... Something that might be a good alternative would be if there were humans working with the Blue Martians, finding ways to make the techniques more robust.
Make a reasearch about habits of highly successful students, and use it to improve education.
This comment is awesome.
Green Martians and Blue Martians have one thing in common: They both derive a tremendous amount of utility from tickling humans behind the ears, using their soft, feathery tentacles. In fact, the utility that they derive from this is so intense that most scientists believe at some time in the recent evolutionary past, there must have been a large selection pressure directed at ensuring that Martians were motivated to tickle humans.
There are numerous differences between Green and Blue Martians. One of those differences is that whereas the feathery tentacles of Green Martians contain stinging hairs similar to nettles, the analogous anatomic part of the Blue Martian contains a safe drug with an euphoric effect. Therefore, humans who are tickled by green martians experience a moderate stinging pain, whereas those who are tickled by blue martians experience mild to moderate pleasure.
Human ethicists have long struggled to come up with a coherent ethical theory that determines whether tickling humans is morally acceptable. Some have suggested that tickling humans behind the ear is ethically permissible if and only if you are a blue martian. However, many other thinkers are worried that this line of thinking results in an unjust world, where the ethics of an act is determined by characteristics of the Martian that they cannot be held responsible for.
However, human ethicists are not very familiar with Martian physiology, and the situation is actually even more complicated than they suspect. In fact, all Martians are born Green. They can shed their green shell and become blue Martians only after they have perfected the art of tickling humans with their feathery tentacles. All Martians aspire to one day become blue, but the amount of practicing it takes to reach perfection is highly variable - some martians reach perfection at their first attempt, whereas others keep trying their whole life without making any discernible progress. Therefore, if the ethical code says that green martians are prohibited from tickling humans, ethical Martians will be unable to reach their full potential in life, and will be stuck as Green Martians forever. Under this ethical code, only unethical Martians will be able to metamorphose.
Making the situation even more complicated, is the fact that a group of recently metamorphosed Blue Martians are vocally spreading information on the internet about tickling techniques. These techniques are sometimes effective, but if used imperfectly they increase the sting of the stinging hairs fourfold. Importantly, it seems that part of the reason some young Green Martians are naturally better ticklers and therefore metamorphose earlier, is that they intuitively understand these techniques, and are able to apply them without increasing the sting of their tentacles. Moreover, while the tickling technique has empirical support, the theory behind it relies heavily on speculation about human evolutionary history that may not be true, and which is offensive to humans.
This raises a number of additional ethical questions: Is it unethical for a Green Martian to attempt to metamorphose? Does this depend on whether they believe themselves to be fast or slow learners? Should only the small subset of Martians who intuitively understand the tickling techniques be allowed to use them? Is spreading explicit information about the techniques unethical?
(Note : This parable is obviously an allegory for something. Discussing whether the allegory is valid is interesting, but will lead to mindkill. I would prefer if the discussion could stay focused on the Martians, so that we can discuss the ethics of a hypothetical scenario that may not be relevant in real life. I am genuinely confused about the ethics of this, and I think this can lead to an interesting question regardless of whether it is applicable to humans)