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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30623 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 14, 2023

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Are you stupid or am I evil?

There is a political quote which says that "the Right thinks the Left is stupid while the Left thinks the Right is evil". Today/yesterday there was a poll floating around rationalist twitter which I think is the best example I've ever seen of this dynamic.

It asks you to choose between two options:

  1. (Blue pill)
  2. (Red pill)

And what happens is that:

- if > 50% of ppl choose blue pill, everyone lives
- if not, red pills live and blue pills die

Now if you think about it for even 30 seconds, it clearly makes sense for everyone to choose Red Pill here: if everyone chooses Red Pill nobody dies, which is the best case scenario from choosing blue, and on top there is no personal risk to yourself of dying. You can even analyse it game theoretically and find that both 100% blue and 100% red are Nash equilibria, but only 100% red is stable, and anyways, choosing red keeps you alive with no personal risk (not present in case you choose blue), so everyone should just choose Red, survive and continue on with their lives. Indeed this poll is equivalent to the following one (posted by Roko):

  1. Walk into a room that is a human blender
  2. Do nothing

And what happens is that:

- if you choose the blender, you will die, unless at least 50% of people choose the blender as well, in which case the blender will overload and not work, making you live
- if you do nothing, you live

You would have to be monumentally, incorrigibly stupid to choose the blue pill (walking into the blender) here and we should expect Lizardman's constant level support for blue.

If only our world were really that simple...

The poll can be found here on Twitter: https://twitter.com/lisatomic5/status/1690904441967575040 . Currently there is a 65% majority for choosing the blue pill ::facepalm:: . At least this number is over 50% so nobody is dying. What justification is provided for people choosing Blue over Red? Well, one of the top replies is that "red represents the values of intolerance and fascism". Now this is an extreme example of a reply but even then personally I am stunned that there are a non-negligible proportion of people who actually think in this way. The best response explain what's going on here seems to be this one:

I’ll take the over on preference falsification driving these results.

If all voters were in a position where the non-zero chance of death for a blue vote vs zero chance of death for a red vote was salient and believable, red would win.

Cost-free signaling is a hell of a drug.

Perhaps expectedly enough, no matter how many Red supporters try to explain to people that choosing Blue is stupid, making the choice really really clear using examples like this:

Your plane crashes into the sea. Everyone survives, and exits the plane with their life vest.

Someone says, “If over half of us turn our life vests into a raft, it can save everyone without a life vest! Otherwise, we’ll drown!”

Everyone has a life vest.

Everyone wearing a life vest will not drown.

Do you build the boat, or just put on your vest?

And yet, large amounts of people still support blue (taking your life vests off to build a raft). The fact that such people get to vote (and make up a majority of at least this twitter poll) is a fucking scary thought. This is why we can't have nice things people!

</rant over>

In more encouraging news rdrama.net also ran this poll here: https://rdrama.net/h/polls/post/196874/are-you-effective-altruist-enough-to . Fortunately people there were sensible enough to vote for Red by a 90-10 margin, which is basically everyone once you discount the ultra-edgy maximally contrarian nodule on the site ("I want to die, so I pick blue") which will always vote to pick the maximally dramatic option (which on the site would be Blue).

I'd be interested in trying this out here on the Motte too, but unfortunately we don't have poll functionality on this site...

&&Blue Pill&&
&&Red Pill&&

EDIT:

For people who say "Blue" is the right choice for pro-social reasons:

Consider a slightly changed version of the poll where instead of choosing for yourself whether you have Red/Blue you are making this choice for a random stranger who's also taking part (and in turn some other random stranger is making the choice for you). In this case it makes sense from a selfish perspective to choose Blue for that random stranger, since there's a chance that the person choosing for you chooses Blue for you as well in which case you'd want 50%+ Blue as you want to live, while from an altruistic perspective it makes sense to choose "Red" for your stranger, since that way you're saving them from potentially dying.

In this case we'd expect everyone to end up choosing Blue if they play rationally, even though the "altruistic" pro-social option is to choose Red. If you still think that everyone should choose Blue then you agree that there are cases where the non-(pro-social) thing is the right thing to do.

If you say that in this case we should each of us now choose Red as that's the socially good option then since people generally value their own life at least as much as the life of a stranger (note: I say "at least as much", not "more" here) you must also agree that it's just as fine for people to choose "Red" in the case where they're deciding for themselves instead of a stranger.

Yes, it's a very basic game-theoretical outcome that you should choose red. However, this ignores human psychology- if you account for it, even if no information sharing is present, choosing blue is probably rational (depending on whether you know who else is involved and how important they are for your life). This is because the word "die" attaches a stronger taboo to the red pill option. We instinctually assume that a group would get together and agree on this; 50 % agreement is not that hard, but 100 % agreement is pretty hard.

Btw as a result of arguing with people in the BotCcord, I managed to convince myself that Red is actually the prosocial choice.

  1. The selfishness of the Red choice is a bit of a red herring, you can modify the scenario where you are choosing the pills for your underage children while having won a lottery that guarantees your survival in a Red world. The problem remains.

  2. The actual scary worlds are where 10-50% of people choose Blue. This is the nightmare scenario that we want to avoid at all costs, including killing 1% of suicidal people, idiots, etc--if that actually works.

  3. After I pointed that out, I got weird arguments from Blue people that they were certain that Blue would win anyway, but somehow this didn't make them choose Red just in case.

  4. A sort of Kant's Universalizability/one-boxing in Newcomb's problem came up too: you should choose Blue so that people like you choose Blue and Blue wins. But by the same logic you're also morally responsible for killing everyone who chose Blue in a 49% Blue world.

Yeah, this all makes sense. If you're certain blue is going to win anyways, choosing Red just in case is the expectation of number of lives saved maximising option (someone did the maths downthread).

I pick red because I care more about not dying than I care about idiots and idiot-saviors not dying 🗿

After reading the whole thread (The Motte: "The choice is so obvious, how could anyone disagree" Also the Motte: 40,000 words of debate in a day) it seems to me that the choice depends from what you're planning to achieve:

  • If you want to save yourself, red is the clear choice;
  • If you want to save a group of people with whom you can reliably coordinate, either by explicit communication or by sharing similar thought patterns (a group sharing your values, if you will), red is again the best;
  • if you want to save everyone, blue is the most likely to succeed.

Let's reframe it again!

I have a gun. You have a wallet. I do not have a wallet. You do not have a gun.

Would you rather we lived in blue pill world or a red pill world?

That is why people pick blue. Because after everyone selects their pills, they go back to work where other people get 100000 choices a day to pick red or blue for you.

Your solution to this prisoners dilemma is the state of nature.

Let’s try bringing the pills to this world of wallets and guns.

Would I rather live in a place where everyone is armed and can protect their own wallet, and because everyone knows armed robbery has a high likelihood of bloody death, nobody commits armed robbery?

Or would I rather live in a place where I have to rely on the police to a) keep everyone but the police from having guns, including organized people good at hiding secrets and doing crime, b) be close and aware enough to prevent all robberies (armed with a gun, armed with another weapon, or unarmed except for literal arms and hands), c) not accidentally shoot me or mine, d) not ever be corrupt robbers or tyrannical imprisoners themselves despite being the only armed people in the place.

Occam’s Razor suggests the simplest answer is the best. In the first place, I only have to rely on other people’s sense of self preservation. In the second, I have to rely on the competence, capability, capacity, and honor of people whose job is partly to prevent me from gaining the means to defend myself.

Consider the actual situation you are describing in case one: Baltimore in the 90's. Somalia. Zanzibar. Early Colonial America.

Basically, you are describing the situation up to the creation of the modern state, where (once you normalize for famine and infectious disease) the most common cause of death for men was being murdered.

As usual, nothing rational about this "rationalist" mind experiment unconnected to anything in real life, and this makes it the best reason for wild dead bird teapot storm. Pick a side and fight!

If we squint hard, it might be seen as allegory to cowardice/desertion in war, except it is the kind of war where you get nothing if you win and nothing happens to you if you lose.

Imagine: you are peasant conscripted by your feudal boss. If you desert, you certainly get to live (your boss' security is shit), if you stay and fight but more than half of your fellows desert, you lose and die. If your side wins, your boss gets some more land and peasants to rule. If your side loses (because everyone deserts) you get new boss to rule over you, no different from the old boss.

In this case, the rational choice, both from indivudual and collective POW, is obvious.

The problem with your reframing however, is that fighting typically implies killing others, even if you are not at risk of getting killed yourself. So if you are a humanitarian, even if you "win", you lose. In other words, the correct choice is obvious only if you don't care about other people's lives.

Imagine a different version where an enemy army is about to attack your village, intending to kill all who stand in its way, but leaving others unharmed. But the enemy isn't reckless. If the village fields a large enough army in its defense, the attack will be too risky, and the enemy will call it off. In that case, the status quo is maintained without any bloodshed.

In that case, just like in the original scenario, it would make sense for you to join the defense if all of the following hold:

  1. You believe some people will choose to fight regardless of the odds.
  2. You care enough about those people to risk your own life to help save theirs.
  3. You believe it's likely your army will reach the critical size necessary to avoid bloodshed.

The rest is just squabbling about probabilities: how much of a risk would you be willing to assume for a chance to save someone else's life?

(By the way, I always hate it when people declare their own point of view as obvious. Even if you are right, you aren't obviously right. And before you say “well, it might not be obvious to a dunce like you, but it's obvious to me, a very intelligent person!”: in my experience there is little correlation between people who declare themselves to be highly intelligent and who are able to demonstrate their intelligence. For example, there are plenty of people who, at least at first, insist that in the Monty Hall problem it's “obviously” pointless to switch.)

On the other hand, if you lose then your kids get sold into slavery and your wife is raped…that is actual downside to losing in real life.

This is why I set my example in feudal times, not in antiquity.

Could we not test this (it's cost free signalling) out with at least small stakes using cryptocurrency?

E.g. you have a poll where blue is everyone gets money back if 50%+ vote blue, red is you get the pot divided by red voters...

This isn't the same. In this case red voters want a sizeable minority to vote blue. Unless you're especially bloodthirsty that isn't the case in the original scenario

You’ve hit the nail on the head. There’s a perverse incentive. How about this:

  • blue gets money back if 50%+ vote blue, otherwise the blue money gets burned up and nobody gets it.
  • red is you get your money back, exactly what you put in.

It's not the right way to go about being bloodthirsty.

Decent point.

But a lot of blue-pickers seem to be ignoring the possibility that such bloodthirsty people could exist and want more people to die.

If that didn't impact their choice before, don't know why it would here.

I cannot be arsed to read it as anything other than

Red: Live

Blue: Maybe Die

and anyone who draws up a grand narrative of how it's more than this is a rascal and a villain.

I ran this by a BPD ancestor and got told only psychopaths would choose red.

This from a person who was observed laughing quietly at the scene in King's Speech where Churchill berates his newly hired stenographer to tears.

Can someone run this by their friends with the colors reversed? I'm betting 99% of the results is comes from conflating the colors with American political tribes.

Am gonna run it on a gaming discord populated by mostly blue collar slavs.

I think the effect would be the most pronounced with American progressives.

Suppose that we take an extreme example of this. If one person votes Blue, he dies. But if even one person joins him, nobody dies. I think even the most hardened Red would concede the case for picking Blue. After all, your risk is very low, since there's a very high chance someone else will join you.

Consider the opposite case. If there is even a single Red voter, all Blues die. Well, even the softest of heart might concede that it's justified to vote Red than to throw your life away for the extremely small chance of total Blue unanimity.

But then, I don't vote.

Suppose that we take an extreme example of this. If one person votes Blue, he dies. But if even one person joins him, nobody dies. I think even the most hardened Red would concede the case for picking Blue. After all, your risk is very low, since there's a very high chance someone else will join you.

On the other hand, the chances of actually saving anyone is small since enough people will vote for blue anyways. I don't think there is a single scenario, other than me being very concerned with the people I am trying to save, where I would pick blue.

I think the key poll here is you can't coordinate and it's a secret poll.

Both examples I gave were secret.

You wrote concede and implied people have some knowledge of the event and how others are choosing.

I'm talking about the people in this thread arguing for one side of another. In the hypothetical, you don't know for sure how others are choosing. But you can reasonably assume that in a group of many people, there is probably at least one other person that will pick Red or Blue.

As is pointed out by others here, it's all about framing. I frame this as:

-Blue pill: You join a death cult that will commit suicide unless half of all people join them.

-Red pill: You don't join this death cult.

Those blue-pillers are going to live or die in circumstances outside of my control, but the one thing I can control is my ability to save my own life. Perhaps another reframing is that instead of making the choice for myself, I am making it for another person. By selecting blue for this other person, I am willing to wager their life on an unknown outcome, and by selecting red I am guaranteed to save one life that would not be saved otherwise. I suspect that the calculus of this decision changes when the life of someone else is being wagered instead of one's own, but the difference is between having compassion for others and having compassion for one's self.

When you phrase it like that, blue reminds me of codependent people who demand someone do something or they’ll kill themselves.

Never put anything you value into the hands of someone that crazy, especially your life.

After years of lurking the Motte back on Reddit and now here, this post - and related discussion - is what finally convinced me to join. I think it's a great cautionary tale that it is not sufficient to be familiar with the terms of game theory - you actually have to understand what they mean, too.

What do you think the victory condition is here? (Everyone else should be asking themselves this as well, by the way.) There are two possibilities:

  1. Victory is achieved when I, personally, survive,
  2. Victory is achieved when everyone survives.

Depending on which victory condition you choose, the optimal strategy is going to be different.

If you think you "win" if you, personally, survive - go ahead, take the red pill. You will survive regardless of whatever anyone else does.

If you think that "winning" in this scenario means that nobody dies, then...

You can even analyse it game theoretically and find that both 100% blue and 100% red are Nash equilibria, but only 100% red is stable

Repeat after me: if your strategy can be defeated by another player changing their strategy it is not a Nash equilibrium - much less a stable one.

If the victory condition is "everyone lives", then any strategy that requires 100% of players to cooperate is a losing one. You might think that nobody has anything to gain by picking blue, but, as soon as anyone does, you have lost the "everyone lives" game.

Given that we have the actual results of a real-world poll (and another one elsewhere in the thread), we can see first hand that the theory is demonstrated by the practice - the blue-pill strategy has resulted in a win by the "everyone lives" criterion.

Therefore, the sort of strategy you advocate for this game is, in fact, an expression of what you think the victory condition is - even if you aren't aware of it, and this is borne out by the arguments being brought forth in this discussion - and, I expect, this is one of the reasons why it has generated so much emotion.

I'm sorry red-pillers, but choosing the red pill is the selfish choice, and no amount of mental gymnastics will change this. Picking the red pill is only optimal on the basis of personal survival. Indeed, if nobody picked the red pill - nobody would die.

You can try to argue - and, indeed, do - that if nobody picked the blue pill nobody would die either, but the fact that the "everyone lives" condition only requires a sufficient - rather than perfect - level of coordination on the part of blue-pillers means that if your goal is to ensure everyone's survival, you should accept the personal risk and choose the blue pill.

Going past theoretical wonkery and into the realm of real-world problems, these exactly the sort of choices that we are often faced with, and picking the pro-social option is generally the better choice, because no man is an island, and all that (unsurprisingly, the military guys in the room seem to understand this perfectly). Humans flourish in cooperating groups. Any group whose members are willing to take risks for the sake of one another is going to have an advantage against groups whose members are only looking out for Number One.

It's a deceptively interesting hypothetical.

(I'm assuming this is a "no communication" scenario)

My initial feel was "Pick Red, obviously".

But then I remembered, my sister thinks that her husband is colorblind. (He denies this!). So that plants a seed of doubt, so it's possible that she would pick blue, to save him, just in case he accidentally picks blue. And then, my brother-in-law knows that his wife thinks that he is colorblind. So he would know that she would likely vote blue to save him, so he would likely pick the blue pill to save her. And my mother knows that my sister thinks her husband is colorblind. That would be enough of a doubt that she would vote blue without hesitation, to save her daughter. Even without that, she's a very self-sacrificing person (as grandmothers often are) likely to pick blue because she couldn't bear to live in a world where her decision contributed to her children's deaths. And I know all of the above, and I know other family members are following the same logic chain, this seed of doubt spreading... and hey colorblindness isn't that uncommon right, and what about regular blindness, and...

(This colorblindness concern is scenario specific, but I'm sure there would be some other niggling doubt leading to an altruism cascade for other hypotheticals too.)

I'm not sure I want to live in the sort of world where blue loses the vote. For a start, I suspect the blue vote to be higher amongst women. Losing some nontrivial chunk of the population is likely to lead to supply chain disruptions, famine, recriminations, war etc... and all the most pro-social people are gone. I'd be potentially living with the crippling guilt that most of my family is dead and it's my fault.

Yeah I think I've blue-pilled myself.

But that chain isn't about personal choice, it's all about "I think/believe/know X would pick blue so I have to pick blue, but if I knew X would pick red, I might pick red". It's "he's going to pick blue because... so I have to pick blue/she's going to pick blue because she thinks I'll pick blue so I have to pick blue/they're going to pick blue so I have to pick blue" on outwards.

The problem is, unless you can be sure enough people pick blue, then you're imposing a death sentence on everyone by picking blue, because if there aren't enough of you to hit the 50%+ limit, too bad, now everyone who picked blue dies. And if you're picking blue to save X because you think X will pick blue, and X knows that, then you're forcing X to pick blue to save you and that leads to picking blue by compulsion which then leads to the possibility of 'not enough to win but enough to lose' blue choices.

I'm considering the "no communication" scenario. I don't know if my sister, brother-in-law or mother picked blue, they don't know if I picked blue. All I have to go on is whether I think they're the type of person who might pick blue, either by mistake or altruistically.

Me choosing blue doesn't impose a death sentence on anyone besides (potentially) myself. Me choosing red could impose a death sentence on others.

I guess you could argue that living a virtuous life such that others assume I would pick blue is imposing a death sentence on them, and therefore I should be a maximally selfish asshole at all times. Is that your strategy?

This is to me one of the best examples of "thought experiment that actively mis-educates people by making implausible assumptions or deliberately leaving out key details". In this case, it's the mechanism that's missing. Is the blue pill doing nothing and the red pill "unleashing" something that kills blue pillers? If yes, blue pill seems like the obviously morally correct choice, as you can just choose not to unleash a great evil. Or is the red pill doing nothing while the blue pill infecting you with something that makes you symbiotically dependent on other blue pillers? If yes, red pill seems like the obviously correct choice, since infecting yourself with something for no reason is just plain stupid.

The original framing is extremely awkward and seems deliberately designed to give of the impression that the blue piller's death is the red piller's fault without outright stating it, by mentioning specifically how "everyone lives" on the blue pill text and how "blue pillers die" on the red pill text. So I'm not surprised the majority on Twitter is choosing blue. A much shorter and more natural framing (R:"You live", B:"You live if B>50%") would have the opposite result, since it will probably be read to implicitly imply the blue pillers death is their own fault, even if it the actual mechanism isn't stated here either.

The point is that to a utilitarian rationalist who optimizes for expected utility, the mechanism shouldn't matter, only the (expected) outcome.

See, that's exactly what I consider a toxic influence from these thought experiments! Sure you can just state, as an assumption, that mechanisms don't matter for the thought experiment. But in the real world, mechanisms always have implied additional risks and as such always matter. And wasting your intellect on thought experiments with deeply implausible assumptions isn't just wasted effort, it actively screws with your intuitions in a way that imo makes your real-world decision making worse in the long term. It's a similar thing to how the often deeply ingrained liberal ideology in most of modern media gives us a long list of bad intuitions, such as a massive overestimate of the prevalence of LGBT individuals, or an overestimate of the prevalence of open, honest-to-god rabid racism, or an underestimate of the dysfunctionality present in poor & unsucessful groups, and so on.

To use this example, if the blue pill actually does nothing and the red pill unleashes a weird virus, then even if I grant that the virus initially may only kill blue pillers, the presence of this new lethal virus is just a completely unnecessary extra long term risk. Likewise, if the red pill actually does nothing and the blue pill infects you with a weird symbiotic fungus, even if I grant that this fungus doesn't kill initially as long as there are enough blue pillers, the fungus is again a completely unnecessary long term risk. This matters!

Yes, and what this shows is that a lot of people aren't utilitarians.

I wonder how much the choice of colors affected people's choices. Blue is the color of American Democrats. Red is the color of American Republicans. Most Twitter users are aligned with the American Democrats so they are biased towards "voting blue”.

The red pill is also a term that is also associated with the anti-feminist manosphere, which puts off the pro-feminist Twitter majority. Those people wouldn't want to be on record taking the red pill on any topic!

That’s why I gave this example with salt and pepper shakers at a rationalist meetup as a conversation-starter.

Did it channge the result of the conversation, or was it still controversial at a similar rate?

No to the first, because those who were there had already heard the original… and decided “red” like me.

This kind of dilemma seems to be catnip for rationalists. If I for some reason wanted to take the world's rationalist community out of commission for a few days, I could craft a series of these kinds of dilemmas and release them on the Internet once every day or so. For extra effectiveness, throw in some Aella posts and a controversial statement about AI risk.

it's xkcd 356 for rats. as @hbtz pointed out on another medium

its a pretty good question! its a idiot economist, commons problem, and altruism problem triple whammy
its also prolly a spiritual problem cuz mottecels prolly dont rate the psychological cost of living as a red pill picker as opposed to a blue pill picker

The psychological cost of living as red picker vs. the cost of dying as a blue-picker.

HMMMMM.

The psychological cost of living as red picker vs. the cost of dying as a blue-picker.

It didn't occur to me until reading this, but also there's the possibility of the psychological cost of living as a blue-picker - which is the knowledge (at least with very high confidence) that I futilely risked my life for no gain. The odds that my vote was the decisive one that brought blue from 49.99% to 50.00% or whatever is minuscule, which means that, almost certainly, regardless of what I picked, all the blue pickers were going to live anyway. My picking blue meant nothing in terms of causing good, but I was able to manipulate my brain into convincing myself that it was worth it to pay the real cost of a real fear of real risk of dying, when removing that fear was as simple as picking a different color which, again, would have caused no negative consequences.

but I was able to manipulate my brain into convincing myself that it was worth it to pay the real cost of a real fear of real risk of dying, when removing that fear was as simple as picking a different color which, again, would have caused no negative consequences.

Yes, one should expect that your natural instinct is to generate any plausible justification for a choice you made in the past, and that the justification needs to pass social muster.

I'm partially solving that by straight up precommitting to picking red in all cases and broadcasting this intent. I won't have much cognitive dissonance later.

the psychological cost of living as a red pill picker as opposed to a blue pill picker

What psychological cost?

Yeah, I would quite easily pick Red and go on with my life no different from yesterday.

Mottcels? Really?

Also I think the vast majority of blue pill pickers are liars. If faced with the actual choice, they pick red.

the psychological cost of living as a red pill picker as opposed to a blue pill picker

What cost would that be? I'd pick red, and I'm sticking with that choice, and the only 'psychological cost' I'm suffering is all the blues declaring I'm a selfish murderous monster. I'm happy with my choice otherwise, and maybe a bit sorry that the blues are too stupid to come in out of the rain ("choose red and all live"/"but what about the blind three-legged puppy who will lick the blue pill by mistake???? I must save them by throwing myself off the cliff alongside them! by the power of snuggles and friendship, magic will happen and we will gain the ability to fly if I do that!")

What cost would that be?

negative reactions to surviving where someone else didn't are common. this is not a hard concept to understand nor grasp.

by the power of snuggles and friendship, magic will happen and we will gain the ability to fly if I do that!")

in this scenario, i think you have to realize that 50%+1 picking blue does save everyone, including those who misread the question or whatever.

negative reactions to surviving where someone else didn't are common.

It turns out that the sort of people who will pick red are also resistant to survivor's guilt (Deisach, 2019)

I have to admit, I had some serious thoughts about whether or not this was some leaked GPT4.5-generated infohazard. The, "my 12 year old came up with this," framing seems a little weird, but it appears to check out.

I could see a 12 year old inventing this because they think it's so cool and smart. What I don't get is all the adults imagining this is a test of moral fibre and if you don't pick blue, well Stalin and Pol Pot's genetic lovechild surrogated by Hitler was Pollyanna by comparison with you, you monster of uncaring self-centred hatred for all that is good and fluffy!

you've been spamming this sorta content all over this very thread and it's gotten incredibly annoying. you've been pretending that no one in their right mind would talk about how it relates to morality (note: links to multiple comments here) when this is a pretty clear angle that people would talk about it from.

i cannot buy that you had no idea people would talk about the morality of decisions. reference to morality is there from the bloody title of the post and discussing the moral turpitude of a choice or another is an incredibly obvious discussion point when we're talking about a problem like this. this is also the culture war thread ffs, discussion of morality of a certain thing is a pretty obvious jumping off point even if the darn title didn't mention it.

people've responded to your points and you keep ignoring them and insisting an incredibly uncharitable form of the argument. name calling by calling people virtue signalers, sarcastically making the strawman that people who disagree with you are calling you fascist with the implicit assumption that these are The Outgroup™, and just general uncharitablity and being a complete jerk.

which while there are strong opinions that some of the people you disagree with probably hold, your refusal to engage at any level but the most in-group signaling way is incredibly boring, unproductive, way more heat than light, and annoying. if you don't care so much as you say, just don't participate, or make a comment detailing your problem with the poll rather than pretending to be shocked shocked that people would have a long form discussion on something that has multiple different angles in the culture war thread of all places.

Honestly, looking at FarNearEverywhere's comments here and on abortion, this seems like a pattern of assuming the their opponents are stupid and/or evil and spending no effort to make his comments less inflammatory.

It did give me the vibe of: “Just told my 10yo daughter about #RBG. She had tears in her eyes. And then she did the Wakanda pose and said ‘#Ruthkanda forever’”

However, as per your link, maybe there is cause for cautious optimism.

I somewhat agree, but, there is the argument that getting a solid blue majority is easier than getting everyone to take red, which will never happen in any real scenario. Sure, taking blue is really dumb if you were, eg, the first person to run into a blender. But I can reframe it too: 50 people on a raft drifting into shore, one guy jumps off early so he can swim to shore early, and the captain yells "If too many people jump off early the raft will collapse." The authority figure and inaction bias both push towards a shelling point of staying put, and if someone immediately jumps off I'm gonna think he's a jackass who could've killed someone.

I can't help but notice this is like a platonic respectability cascade, and is also really controversial just like respectability cascades: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/give-up-seventy-percent-of-the-way As a reminder, this is where something innocent, like shortening Japanese to "Jap", is perceived as signaling something bad the speaker, leading to a cascade whereby it does start to signal something bad because only the actual bad people are willing to keep doing it.

We could all ignore the blue pill, but as soon as a majority people do it eventually it does become selfish not to. I can see how it has the dynamics of a toxic respectability cascade: I don't think anyone thought blacklist was racist until that paper in 2018, people looking to create a moral dilemma they can be on the right side of spread it, until actual good people start believing it and suddenly I'm in the most heated argument I've ever had with my (now ex) gf.

In the original poll I picked red, then switched to blue in follow up polls when it felt safe, and my groupchat went 6 - 1 blue. Unkilled so far across all of them, and never chose red in a blue majority poll since the first one. So, I'm not dying on any hills here. But like in the Scott Alexander article, I'm at least not going to be one of the first to join some destructive cascade.

But I can reframe it too: 50 people on a raft drifting into shore, one guy jumps off early so he can swim to shore early, and the captain yells "If too many people jump off early the raft will collapse." The authority figure and inaction bias both push towards a shelling point of staying put, and if someone immediately jumps off I'm gonna think he's a jackass who could've killed someone.

Not giving a concrete number here for the raft collapsing gave me an idea.

What if the chance of death for blue pill-ers was a variable?

That is, what if the situation was:

Everyone has to pick red or blue.

Once everyone has chosen: Blue's chance of death = percentage of people who picked red. Everyone knows this in advance. No conferring.

In this variant, the more blues you have, the better the chance of everyone surviving, but it is NEVER guaranteed. On what probability would you feel uncomfortable wagering your life to incrementally increase both the potential death toll and the likelihood of avoiding that toll?

The highest expected death toll in your scenario is when the reds and blues are even. Assuming I'm completely altruistic and just want to minimize the expected number of deaths then you would want to choose whichever side you expect to be in the majority. Expected deaths are maximized in a split vote at 25% expected dead.

If you think both are as likely then it doesn't matter what you pick.

I'd pick red, because I would expect people to be at least a little selfish and red is the stable equilibrium in the scenario where at least one person is even the tiniest bit selfish and I know I am that person. So, the blues deserve to die even in the case where I expect to be the only red, because they are so stupid as to pick the wrong equilibrium.

Try this opposite reframing:

The final two candidates in the election in a democratic yet absolute dictatorial country make statements:

  • Red: If elected, I will have everyone who didn't vote for me executed
  • Blue: If elected, I won't have anyone executed based on this vote

Who do you vote for?

For true equivalence, we probably have to assume that the candidates are otherwise equivalent. But if we choose Red in this scenario, it's scary to imagine that Red could even "mug" us by also having worse policies that we'd sacrifice for the "guaranteed survival".

There is also the problem of iteration. not quite apt.

At first this comment annoyed me - you can't reframe it this way, it completely changes the question! But upon further thought, it helped me see why the original poll might have turned out the way it did. To a rational person, like most of you here, the pills can be treated as machines. Pull lever A, you might die. Pull lever B, you are guaranteed to not die. Obviously you pull B. However, to a socially driven person, like those on Twitter, nothing is merely an object. Everything has character, and which you choose reflects on you. You don't drive a car: you're a Toyota driver. You don't enjoy a movie: you're a Star Wars fan. You don't vote for a politician: you're a Burnie supporter. I don't think the blue pillers are literally imagining their choice as an election, but the framing was the kick I needed to see things in the society centric way. If you don't choose the blue pill, you're signaling that you're anti-social. This is the essence of culture war: when everything is viewed from the tribal perspective, all choices are made in judgement of others.

We should do this for real. Have Zorba make a poll where you can vote either blue or red. If > 50% of users choose blue, nobody gets permabanned; if not, blues get permabanned and nothing happens to reds.

It'll be like our own version of /r/thanosdidnothingwrong.

EDIT: You are required to vote; until you do, you can't vote or comment.

Permaban could be harmful to the community, but I wouldn't mind doing this with a temp ban (decreases the compellingness of altruism, though). Red's definitely going to win here with a 50% threshold, though, so I expect most people will realize and choose that.

I would have so many questions for someone who picked blue in a motte specific version of this.

Lets go.

Assuming there’s some combination of a minimum comment, upvoted, account-length floor to prevent last minute botting or brigading, let’s dew it.

Well, Scott was right again. There are such things as Scissor Statements and this idiotic poll is one of them. We have on one side those claiming theirs is the only ethical, moral, and correct choice, and those choosing otherwise are evil (including loolahs online claiming it's the fascist choice) and on the other side claiming that the first choice is stupid and virtue-signalling.

It's just a dumb online game. It's the equivalent of those quizzes about "find your inner goddess" only for people who like to think of themselves as smart. Would we really be tearing one another apart over "which phase of the moon are you?"

Yes, absolutely. Waning gibbous chads are more morally upright, taller, more handsome and just generally superior to crescentcels.

Waning gibbous fans are enamored by something in decline, Waxing gibbous enjoyers though only see their fortunes grow.

Why would anyone not be full? You're leaving luminosity on the table for no reason. It's free. You can simply pick it up.

Why do full mooners feel the need to be so conspicuous and the center of attention all the time? New moon sigmas just want to get on with their own lives and not bother anyone.

It's possible to have too much of a good thing - as a good person, I make sure to only take as much luminosity as I need, so that others who are less fortunate than me do not have to suffer.

What about the werewolf community? Or edgy, I'm-so-special eclipse fans?

Honestly, this just goes to show me that framing is everything and I think the unnecessarily obfuscatory and slanted nature of the original wording is causing most of the controversy.

I agree with the reframe posted in the Twitter comments: "If you take the red pill, you live. If you take the blue pill and less than 50% take it, you die". If formulated in this way, there would probably be much less disagreement over the optimal solution here, and picking blue so you can also save people from their own choice to pick blue would be much less of a point of debate.

It's not my framing, it's someone else's whose I agree with (in part at least because it stresses the "personal agency" aspect behind someone selecting blue), but if framed in the way you've postulated I still think there would be less disagreement over the optimal solution. I also think "If you take the red pill, you live. If you take the blue pill and less than 50% take it, you, along with everyone else who has also taken the blue pill, die" is good wording.

I'm not allergic to altruism, but assuming no coordination and no knowledge of others' choices I seriously cannot envision a real-life scenario with actual life-and-death stakes where the majority pick blue. I've got a fairly high level of confidence that people would be rational actors in such a situation and thus consider "blue" to be suicide with no actual added benefit to anyone else.

I can't control whether others pick red or blue, and the chance of my vote making the difference between red or blue winning is extremely low. But the chance of my vote keeping me alive is fairly significant.

But that's "everyone has to pick blue or else people die". What's the difference there from "everyone has to pick red"? You're not really giving people the choice to pick whatever colour they like, you're assuming most people will pick blue and need to be "saved from themselves" so you, Altruistic Saviour, have to pick blue also.

This isn't "everyone picks blue because they're smart", it's "majority of people pick blue because they're stupid or confused or irrational or demented so we have to Save Them From The Consequences Of Their Choice". That's... not a great look, if you have twenty people all claiming "Well, I'm too smart to pick blue, but since the other nineteen in this group are too dumb to tie their own shoelaces, I have to pick blue". So everyone thinks everybody else is stupid.

Whereas if you pick red, you're assuming everyone is "a healthy adult with no intellectual disability", since picking blue is forcing the "if fewer than 50% pick blue, people die" branch into existence, and who wants to make it so that people die as a result of their choice?

Some thoughts on the conversation this post has generated this far:

Much of people’s moral reasoning about this dilemma centers on the question How much agency does each participant have in his or her choice? It’s very interesting that @Meriadoc intuited immediately that there will inevitably and undeniably be some non-zero number of people who pick blue. That proposition probably wouldn’t have occurred to many of the more right-leaning users here - it probably wouldn’t have occurred to me - but in hindsight it is somewhat obviously true. So then we get into the question of why those people picked blue: Was it by accident? On purpose? Were they tricked? Did they do so in a moment of aberrant psychosis or a self-destructive impulse, which is not representative of their normal behavior? Or is their choice symptomatic of a larger pattern of behavior/shortcoming, such that given the choice to redo the selection several times, they’d still pick blue every time?

Recognizing that this poll isn’t merely a frivolous internet meme, but rather a chance to publicly hash out and enforce local political/philosophical default norms, we can extrapolate this to thinking about the types of real-world societal dilemmas the poll is supposed to invoke, and we can recognize that progressives believe that there are people who are born having already picked blue. Racial minorities, gays, trans people, the disabled, etc. They were never actually given the opportunity to pick red. By the simple fact of one or more of their identities being inherently blue, they will on some level always be reliant on the communitarian protective instincts of the larger society. Taking it as a given that such people exist, and that they will never have the option to “switch pills”, blue becomes a far more compelling moral option even for those of us who personally gain nothing by picking blue.

Someone who refuses to decouple the poll from its larger political implications will also intuit that even though the poll specifically fails to enumerate any actual benefits from selecting blue - it’s merely a choice to avoid bad outcomes, and offers no positive-sum outcome over and above that - in the real world the communitarian option actually does offer very clear benefits to everyone involved, including the selfish fucks who picked red. Subsistence farmers may not be reliant on the kindness of strangers, but they’ll also never successfully launch a rocket to the moon, nor cure cancer, nor build Notre Dame Cathedral. Thus, a poll that sought to more accurately model real life would have to include a clause that “if 50% or more people choose blue, all participants are given $5000, and anyone who chose blue gets an additional $5000.”

Also in real life, many people do have the ability to “switch pills” at any time, based on an observation of the choices made by those around them. People who made terrible choices early in life can choose to make better choices in the future. Drug addicts can get clean, people can go to trade school or get a second degree to improve their economic prospects, etc.

So then we have to actually parse out which people are genuinely stuck with blue no matter what, versus how many people were just demoralized and psyopped into picking blue, because they thought they could never hope to hack it on their own without society propping them up, whereas they were in truth fully capable of thriving independently if just given more effective coping strategies. Psychopaths, schizophrenics, and people with profound mental disabilities will never be able to Git Gud, but people with minor depression and transitory suicidal ideation mostly can just choose to snap out of it at any time if nudged in the right direction.

But then what do we do with the people who actually are stuck with blue? The people who will definitely die, or at least have very bad life outcomes, unless we all dedicate some not-insignificant level of effort and resources, and incur some level of personal risk, in order to provide a safety net for them?

One way to think about it is to deny that they are stuck with blue; to harangue them into making a better choice, to deny that they are innately blue, to blame their “culture” and to tell them to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Maybe every time they pick blue, we insult them and tell them to pick again, until they pick red. (Except of course, as we established, you could do this a thousand times and they’re still gonna pick blue.) By convincing yourself that they had agency the whole time, you not only absolve yourself of feeling any responsibility for the consequence of their decision, you also maintain the certainty that your own choice was 100% the result of agency, and therefore you morally flatter yourself.

The other way to think about it is: Yes, they’re stuck with blue, I could never have saved them, and it’s actually a good thing that they’re gonna die. Leaving aside the question of whether or not you could have saved them - in the poll, it was possible, but in real life? I’m not so sure - we do have to actually grapple with the question of whether or not the vast majority of us are better off without the people who were stuck with blue. The profoundly mentally/physically disabled, those who are born with the psychological equivalent of glass bones and paper skin, etc. Those who are essentially utility monsters - burdens with no hope of creating a positive-sum contribution, into whom we must continually sink our own resources to keep them from destroying themselves.

Several users brought up children; the thing with children, though, is that the vast majority of them will eventually grow up into people with agency. Any sacrifices we make for them now are actually an investment, made with the assumption that it will produce a positive future outcome. This is fundamentally different from the sort of sacrifices we make for adults with Down Syndrome, who will still have Down Syndrome at every point in their life, and will never “get better” and never repay the investment. How many times do I need to pick blue, putting myself at significant risk, in order to stave off the inevitable for these people? Because that’s the other thing about picking blue: you don’t actually get to just pick it once and then everything works out for everyone. You’re actually going to be given the same choice over and over throughout your life, and so will your children and their children and so on into perpetuity. But perhaps if enough of us pick red enough times to cull the people who keep forcing us to make these choices, we can buy ourselves some length of time wherein we can just thrive for a while as productive, normal people, until enough people who are blue-by-default start to accumulate again and we’re once again forced into unpleasant choices.

that there will inevitably and undeniably be some non-zero number of people who pick blue.

There is literally no possible way to know that a priori once you're faced with the choice.

There's at worst a probability distribution of people picking blue, which includes zero as an option, there might very well be zero who are compelled to pick it.

Further, if you're including people lacking agency, you're including the chance that there are people who PICK RED without it being a choice.

And suddenly this creates the risk of missing the threshold because those red-pickers made the 'wrong' choice.

So there's some real special pleading going on here to assume that we must save people who are helpess to make any decision other than pick blue, when I can just as easily point out that there are a number of people who are helpless to make any other decision than pick RED, and these folks might very well thwart our attempts to coordinate to save those other blue pickers.

There's no reason to assume that people who aren't making rational choices are only picking blue.

So the real meta-question becomes: How many NPCs are there in your population?

So then we get into the question of why those people picked blue

Honestly? Going by the comments I've seen on the original Twitter post and a lot of the arguments here, people pick blue to show off how morally superior they are. "I have to save the idiots who made the wrong choice". "I'd rather be dead than live in a world where people are so selfish as to pick red" and the rest of it.

It'd be easy to turn the good/evil framing around on them.

By signaling that you are the kind of person that would pick blue, you are pressuring everyone around you to risk their death or else they'll live with yours on their conscience. I love my family and my friends, I would prefer they NOT put themselves at such a serious unnecessary risk of death, especially not my sake.

The only truly selfless moral choice (assuming no one is reading this post or applying meta reasoning) is to signal that you're the kind of person who'd chose red and then secretly chose blue. It's also quite a stupid choice, I think.

You've caught me! I have no principles, hate everything and everyone, and have no desires but to virtue signal as I do the opposite of what I teach. How'd you do it? You must be very smart to have seen my true nature through the dozens of comments defending the logical basis of blue-pilling which I crafted to obscure it.

I and each of the other 60-70% of people who picked blue are master charlatans, nothing more, and have not a neuron in our brains not devoted to the endless task of status- and rent-seeking. I'll have to inform the others that you're onto us.

Aha, the secret of my success is that I'm a down and dirty no-good wicked horrible selfish fascist red pill picker, you see. That's how I can tell lack of morals in others by the simple results of an Internet play poll, birds of a feather flock together!

I don't think you're entirely wrong. I don't think blue pillers are status-seekers, but there's a variant of that where people choose the altruistic option in online polls and choose the selfish option when things get real. That said, in the past when things have gotten real humanity has had a remarkable ability to cooperate. I would hope this would be the same, and people would actually be more altruistic when it comes down to it.

My own personal answer is red, for the general reasons delineated below.

For the people who choose blue: does the presence of this vigorous debate change your opinions any? I know that while my first thought was red, the fact that this has become a thing, and that there is no obvious common consensus, is more than enough to permanently cement me on Team Red. How much baseline expectation of people picking red no matter what do you need before your choice comes down to "Everyone who picks blue dies, which includes me." and "Everyone who picks blue dies, which doesn't include me?"

I don't think that anyone who purports to be team blue can sufficiently convince me of their conviction to the cause for me to believe they're ALWAYS going to choose blue in an actual scenario where actual death is on the line.

Add in an enforcement mechanism and maybe.

I was in the Iraq War, so I have some experience with putting my life on the line to help protect the other people that also choose the blue pill. Now granted maybe it would have been better off if we all just took the red pill and stayed home in that particular case, but in a general sense I stand by the choice I made.

And I feel confident based on knowing the sort of people that I met in the military and talking to first responders etc that many of them will pick the blue pill instinctively because that aligns with their values. And so I will pick the blue pill consciously because I want to help save them, even at my own risk.

You may not know anybody like us, but people like that do exist.

Yes yes yes but the only reason anybody is at risk is because somebody chose blue while red exists and there's no force compelling people to pick blue.

I can understand altruism AND realize that this exact scenario is when it's time to turn off and ignore the altruistic impulse.

I don't think there's any reason to believe someone when they say "I'm picking blue" because there's no direct punishment for defecting.

I also worry about 'evil' players who say "i'm picking blue" specifically to convince others to pick blue and die, while the evil player defects.

So I'm not suggesting you're not altruistic. I have no proof other than your word, and you absolutely can be telling the truth. I'm saying I can't believe you, because I have no outside information to confirm it, nor is there some way for you to provably demonstrate it.

Yes yes yes but the only reason anybody is at risk is because somebody chose blue while red exists and there's no force compelling people to pick blue.

Except, again, people who choose by mistake for one reason or another. Even putting aside trembling hands etc., not everyone is a perfect game theorist.

Yes, but if we don't know how many of these players there are, this makes the goal of getting to the 50% threshold even less likely.

If it's 99 irrational players and you, are you going to pick blue to mildly increase the chances that everyone is saved even though in a large proportion of those scenarios you die just by random chance?

My position is that I simply don't know that there's anybody picking blue for innocent mistake reasons. That number could be zero, indeed.

I think that it doesn't require perfect game theory knowledge to see a button that says "100% chance of survival" and just pick that.

So I'm not going to put myself in need of saving to help some theoretical person in need of saving who may not exist.

That's literally the blue position as you've stated it: Imagining a guy who picks blue, then picking blue to save that guy. Without actually knowing if he exists.

My position is that I simply don't know that there's anybody picking blue for innocent mistake reasons. That number could be zero, indeed.

Well, are we going by the original premise, or by a hypothetical game based loosely on the premise? The original premise is that everyone who responds to the poll gets a choice. We've expanded that a bit and said "what if this poll grew quite a lot" and mostly left the modifications there, which I think is a good place to leave it.

So who responds to useless Twitter polls? Lots of regular people, plus I think occasionally a few kids hitting buttons randomly on their parents' devices. I believe it to be virtually guaranteed that, given a poll size of a few billion people, there are a few small children who have answered the poll by accident and gotten involved. But putting that aside, people are just really dumb.

45% of Americans believe in ghosts. 13% believe in vampires. Americans on average rate at 253 on the numeracy scale, which means nearly half of our adults are incapable of doing things like calculating the gas costs of a car ride. Scientologists, flat earthers, schizophrenics, etc. all exist and cannot neatly be dismissed.

Even if you truly think the very dumbest, most illogical person will still intentionally pick the red option (which btw isn't so neatly labelled as "100% survive"), there's still the question of whether that person with their limited capacity thinks there's an even dumber person out there who picked blue by mistake. Blue is happening, whether you like it or not. Whether it's happening for "innocent mistake reasons" is I guess up to you, but I certainly wouldn't blame 70 IQ people for not perfectly modelling a somewhat complex game.

If it's 99 irrational players and you, are you going to pick blue to mildly increase the chances that everyone is saved even though in a large proportion of those scenarios you die just by random chance?

I hope I would, but in the end all I care about is that people acknowledge that there's somebody out there who will choose the blue pill through no fault of their own. The game theory from that point on is just a useless thought exercise, but it's driving me crazy that everyone seems to be modelling the standard US population as perfect game theorists and proceeding from that assumption. In no other context do we grant people's intelligence nearly so much charity as when we're trying to deny any responsibility for the outcomes of their decisions.

but in the end all I care about is that people acknowledge that there's somebody out there who will choose the blue pill through no fault of their own

I can acknowledge that there's a chance such a person exists in the game.

If the blue side can acknowledge that there's a chance that such a person does not actually exist in the game, since we don't have that information at the time we make the decision.

But if we've acknowledged such a person exists, it suggests that we should be designing our systems specifically to keep these people VERY FAR AWAY from any buttons that might hurt them or others.

And I think the uncomfortable implication, which blue-pickers will have to deal with, is that there may be a lot of these people who THINK of themselves as rational and intelligent, and will insist on being included in future decisions too.

(Yes, this is going towards an analogy about voting, in real life)

If your theory is:

I believe it to be virtually guaranteed that, given a poll size of a few billion people, there are a few small children who have answered the poll by accident and gotten involved. But putting that aside, people are just really dumb.

Then I am going to insist that if blue meets its threshold. and these people survive, we're going to have to take steps to forbid them from being involved in such decisions in the future for the sake of everybody else.

I remind you, my theory is that the vast majority of people are both intelligent enough and self-interested enough to pick red/survival when presented with the choice in a vacuum.

Yours is that there are dummies who will do stupid things like pick blue without thinking.

If I accept your theory, we are now left with the question of what to do about those dummies.

More comments

Red is the ingroup and blue is the baddies, so blues kysing themselves is actually positive utility for me. We need to recruit enough blues to join the good guys so the truly hopeless cases are elimenated.

Hey I've seen this one before!

Even though he often do miss, this one is a hit.

Depends on the exact population involved, but blue at least sometimes.

Suppose it's a population of two: you and your spouse. An exact tie goes to red. You have no way to collaborate beforehand (e.g. both of you have been taken to separate rooms that are totally isolated from one another). Which do you choose?

Without having discussed the situation beforehand, there is a nonzero chance my wife would choose blue. So I choose blue. If I die, well, I die. The key to an optimal outcome here and in life is to develop the character to choose blue and develop a community who chooses blue. Reducing everything to a calculation of the optimal individualist outcome ends up degrading the spirit and the self. In a way, committing to choose blue is the selfish, personal utility-optimizing choice, because it means you're the type of person who chooses blue which is what enables the existence of the community, without which the individual life is empty and meaningless.

If we are talking the general population, it becomes a lot trickier. But consider two variants of the original scenario: one where the cutoff is 0.1%, and one where the cutoff is 99.9%. With 99.9% the choice is obviously red, and with 0.1% the choice is (a bit less obviously, but still obviously to me) blue. It's not clear to me where the cutoff is, but it does show that it isn't something you can decide based purely on first principles. You need data about the health and the quality of the community. For the USA, my guy reaction is a cutoff of around 10%, though that's just based on feels.

Yeah, in a situation like that, of course you'll pick blue (unless you really hate your spouse, or unless both of you realise "red lives, pick red, I know my spouse knows me well enough to know that I'll choose red so they should pick red too").

But this isn't about being at war, or being a firefighter, or a parent of a child running into a blender, or the other tortured examples conjured up out of thin air to justify just how wunnerful the blues are. It's "imagine a random group of anonymous people, everyone has the choice for red or blue; red lives, blue only lives if more than 50% of the group pick blue; you have no idea how big the group is or what choices people make". It's like "Who would win: Superman or Batman?" Everyone picks red, everyone lives, nobody is being selfish or mean or horrible because RED IS LIFE.

The key to an optimal outcome here and in life is to develop the character to choose blue and develop a community who chooses blue. Reducing everything to a calculation of the optimal individualist outcome ends up degrading the spirit and the self.

Not quite. That's usually the case with a lot of these cooperation dilemmas but this one has the feature that everyone choosing red is just as optimal as everyone choosing blue

Most people have never heard of Nash equilibrium, let alone understand what a stable Nash equilibrium is. Most people who choose red are just trying to act selfishly and most people choosing blue are just trying to act altruistically, which means it's crazy to argue that one action is correct or incorrect using game theory -- the vast majority of actors are not rational!

"Everyone just choose red" is not a tenable solution in the real world.

Why are people making this into a moral judgement? If the poll asked me "Would you kill this adorable fluffy little kitten with the big eyes to save your own life?" - well I'm not answering that one. But it's not that kind of fucking Sophie's Choice, it's "pick red or blue in a game that has no consequences for the real world".

Sincerely, the more smarmy justifications I'm reading from the blues, the less I like them as people because all the worst finger-wagging Nanny Is Watching instincts are coming out in them. It's not enough to argue that it's the optimal strategy to pick blue if you assume some people out of the group will pick blue; no, it has to be made into "reds are selfish, blues are altruistic, kiss my upright and high-minded ass and tell me how fantastic I am".

How dare those people believe that picking the option that keeps 100% of participants alive is superior! Nannies! Smarms!

Have you ever entertained a thought that not everything others do is for your approval?

For what it’s worth, my main point was that “it’s okay for me to take the red pill because everyone doing that is optimal” is completely inapplicable to the real world, and hence an obvious rationalization. Not that one side was evil or good, just that this particular defense is balderdash.

I realize that it’s kind of hard to say that without coming off as insulting to red pillers. I’d think you would be more sympathetic though, since you did the mirror image and accused all blue pillers of virtue signaling.

Just because people don’t understand game theory terms doesn’t mean game theory cannot explain actions.

No but it means "It's okay that I took the redpill because it's the game theoretic optimal solution (and so everyone else will do it too)" is totally divorced from reality.

The question is does game theory model accurately model human behavior. If yes, then regardless of whether people know what a Nash equilibrium is, it will still exist. If no, then it won’t.

"Everyone just choose red" is not a tenable solution in the real world.

Why?

Good point.

I'd still pick red though.

"Everyone just choose red" is not a tenable solution in the real world.

"Everyone just choose blue" isn't a tenable solution in the real world either. In point of fact, the real world doesn't have a lot of "tenable solutions" of any sort. Mostly people eat shit.

Which is why you don't need everyone to choose blue, just over half the people, which is a much more tenable solution.

It's more tenable than getting everyone to choose red, but maximizing the number of blues is much higher-risk than maximizing the number of reds. If people commit to writing the blues off, you get very close to everyone choosing red, as the apparent upside of blue drops like a rock. People committing to maximizing blue introduces serious tail-risk of calamity.

Likely minimal losses versus unlikely but very large ones. Which is worse?

Perhaps this is harsh, but there's also the fact that if we're talking about adults the people who would pick blue in the first place would likely be a tiny subset of people (suicidal people, mentally retarded people, etc) whose QALYs are realistically fairly limited. I'd say "Maybe we could just not try to pull off some incredible coordination feat which might turn out horrible for marginal gains" is fairly reasonable.

I think of it more as "we benefit also from cautionary examples". Whoever picks blue has volunteered to demonstrate why picking red is the correct choice.

Going with the spousal example, it's not equally optimal for both to choose red and both to choose blue. Both choosing blue is superior to both choosing red, because the very act of both choosing blue is indicative of stronger bonds and itself reenforces them.

Alternately, it's a competition in who can be the bigger martyr: "Darling, I chose blue because I want you to live, even if I know you would choose red and leave me to die, I love you that much".

Competing over who makes the bigger sacrifice and who is the more self-sacrificing and who is ahead in the list of favours done is not a strong and happy bond. I'd rather someone who said "I picked red because I trust you're not an idiot and would pick red, too".

You're really reaching to add things to the situation that aren't present in the initial scenario

Why? I expect my wife to choose red and I think she'd be very upset if I was dead. Is choosing blue supposed to be an act that indicates that I simply couldn't live without her or something? When it's only two people, it really does feel a lot like the blender version of things where I would say that we should just both skip the door leading to the blender and that it's pretty obvious.

In the purely altruistic 1v1 version of the game it's literally just about finding the Schelling point. Though, even then, if both players are rational, red is still the obvious Schelling point since the downside is less if the other person chooses differently. Red is strongly dominant if someone is agnostic about the other person's choice.

You can be rational and value someone else's life higher than your own.

Is choosing blue supposed to be an act that indicates that I simply couldn't live without her or something?

Not quite. It's not that the act of choosing blue signals a belief that the value of your life is zero without her. More like, the act of choosing blue indicates that you believe she might choose blue, either inherently or because she believes you might choose blue. If there's any risk at all that one person or the other would either choose blue or believe the other person would choose blue, that forces the other person to readjust their estimation of the other person's likelihood of choosing blue upwards, which forces the other person to readjust upwards, etc. Eventually that becomes a substantial risk, and if you place a nonzero value on the relationship and believe the other person places a nonzero value on the relationship, you choose blue in a leap of faith. Recognition of that uncertainty and the risk made in the leap of faith is what builds personal character and the relationship.

ventually that becomes a substantial risk, and if you place a nonzero value on the relationship and believe the other person places a nonzero value on the relationship, you choose blue in a leap of faith.

Said leap of faith being "I thought you'd choose blue because you're too stupid to work out why that is a bad idea, and you chose blue because you thought the same about me". Yeah, nice relationship where both parties only have contempt for the choices of the other!

The choice isn't as obvious as either side is making it out to be.

Let n be the number of other pill takers. Let p1 be the probability that strictly less than half of the other pill takers choose blue, let p2 be the probability that exactly half of the other pill takers choose blue. Choosing blue accomplishes 2 things:

It kills you with probability p1

It saves n/2 people with probability p2

Is this a good trade off? Unless you don't care about other people at all or don't care about your own life at all the answer is: it depends on the ratio between p1 and p2. This ratio in turn depends upon a lot of factors, the specific population of pill takers, the specific formulation of the question, the amount of time alotted to discuss before a decision must be made etc.

It gets still more interesting when you decide that you are making the decision for everyone with a similar thought process as you, similar to other types of voting. The greater your estimation of how many votes your thought process accounts for, the more attractive choosing blue becomes. At the limit, if you control 50% of votes, choosing blue guarantees everybody lives with no risk.

I'd also model at least 10% of people as irrational and guaranteed to pick essentially at random.

I tried plotting the difference in EV of these (based on very handwavy assumptions: suppose your prior probability of C% of the other pill takers choosing red is a Gaussian with mean x and standard deviation y, ignore everything that's discrete rather than continuous here so the factors of n cancel out and we can express the problem as a simple integration, ignore the fact that this can give us C less than 0 or greater than 100 so we can use erf to evaluate the integrals...).

The expected value of you not dying because you picked red, 1/2*(1+erf((x-1/2)/(y*sqrt(2)))), is here. It's one if you're certain most people are picking red, zero if you're certain most people are picking blue, and the less certain you are the more smoothly the result depends on your mean estimate.

The expected value of people not dying because you picked blue, 1/(2*y*sqrt(2*pi))*exp(-1/2*((1/2-x)/y)^2), is plotted (in the negative, to keep red/blue consistent with red/blue) here. Except in the situation where your expectation has a mean near 50% and a standard deviation as small as that nearness, your choice doesn't matter, since either all the blue-pickers are doomed or they aren't unless you specifically cast the tie-breaking vote ... but the "I'm certain I'll be the tie-breaker" case is a hell of an off-to-infinity singularity. I had to truncate the y axis above zero to keep this random web app I picked from yelling at me.

The difference between the two is here, but because the color scale on that doesn't match up nicely, let's just look at the "which one is bigger" comparison here.

And boy, that's a hell of a scissor statement graph, isn't it?

If you're sure that most people are going to pick blue, or if you think a small majority are going to pick red but your uncertainty is just wide enough to make you think you might be the tie-breaking vote, you picking blue has the higher EV! And since everybody thinks like you, you're right to expect that blue is the default, so those red jackasses are just free riders!

If you're sure that most people are going to pick red, or if your uncertainty is so wide you really don't know what's going to be picked, you picking red has the higher EV! And since everybody thinks like you, you're right to expect that red is the default, so those blue idiots are just suicidal!

since either all the blue-pickers are doomed or they aren't unless you specifically cast the tie-breaking vote

Y'know, this interests me strangely, because I'm nearly certain a lot of the "you should pick blue becuse your choice is going to save people" are also the ones going "it's stupid to vote because one single vote in an election is meaningless and can't affect the outcome".

So my vote in millions of votes is worthless and won't tip any balances, but my picking blue in millions of selections is the vital saving decisions? Make up your minds!

If the vote is mandatory, why would I vote against blue provided I think blue is winning anyway? Some sense of contrarianism? To show FarNearEverywhere on the internet that I'm not a sheep nanny virtue signaler but instead an enlightened rational lifemaxxer?

If you're sure that most people are going to pick blue, or if you think a small majority are going to pick red but your uncertainty is just wide enough to make you think you might be the tie-breaking vote, you picking blue has the higher EV!

One caveat here, this is EV of lives saved which counts your life as equal in value to a random persons life. By revealed preference of how people actually live their lives almost everyone values their own life at least an order of magnitude higher than a random persons life. Taking that into account I think red should be prefered in the majority but not all situations. Heres the graph for when red is prefered using a 10x multiplier on your own life (link isn't working but I just added a zero to your expression it goes to a small blue region in the corner and red ahead everywhere else) https://academo.org/demos/3d-surface-plotter/?expression=if(10%2F2*(1%2Berf((x-1%2F2)%2F(ysqrt(2))))-1%2F(2ysqrt(2pi))exp(-1%2F2((1%2F2-x)%2Fy)%5E2)%3E0%2C1%2C0)&xRange=0%2C1&yRange=0.01%2C1&resolution=100

Ha! I was just pulling up my own comment to reply with basically what you just said, except that I added a 20x multiplier to make it seem more selfish. The higher you make the multiplier, naturally, the lower the uncertainty you can tolerate before red becomes the preferred option.

Is this how some blue pickers are modeling red pickers? "Just like me he knows we're probably going to pick blue, so the only way his red pick makes sense if he would prefer the deaths of twenty strangers over his own one; that selfish jerk!"

All that said, I think the "trembling hand" model makes for a good reason to try to coordinate around blue. It doesn't take too high a percentage of irrational choices before you start to be tempted by the hope of saving all of them.

I think what's seen as the default really matters, as seen in the contrasting blender examples.

A lot of people who choose red see it as the default—"you're throwing away your life to try to save everyone else who does the same, when we could just not do that"

A lot of people who choose blue see it as the default. "We're all working together to save everyone, and you selfishly choose to guarantee your own life by throwing all of us under the bus."

Further, people will often prefer the default, so this also affects the chance of success.

Convincing 10000 people to vote blue is a great thing if you succeed and a tragedy if you fail. Convincing 10000 people to vote red is terrible if it tips the balance, and maybe socially predatory if blue succeeds anyway, but really good if blue would fail anyway.

The chance that blue reaches the threshhold matters. For this reason, the threshhold itself also really matters. A 1% blue to save everyone makes the case a lot stronger that you should pick blue. A 90% blue to save everyone means you probably should go with red.

Blue Ape together strong

While I can understand why people think red is the obvious choice, but I really struggle to understand why some people seem to have such a hard time imagining non-cognitively impaired people choosing blue.

You presuppositions which together I reckon are sufficient for choosing blue:

  1. A strong preference for the outcome where no one dies. For instance because you believe human life has an intrinsic value.
  2. You assume that some people will pick blue. Even if they might think red is the obvious choice when properly considered, maybe they had a brainfart, maybe they misread the poll, maybe their mouse slipped, etc. That's not even considering the fact that for whatever reason people might consciously choose blue.

There's also a weird meta element where I think both of those presuppositions are pretty normal and hence would expect a lot of people to vote blue and if I expect a lot of people to pick blue, that only makes point 2 more salient.

Again I understand why people might not agree with this reasoning, I don't understand why it seems to be so unimaginable that somebody might genuinely hold this position to some Mottizens.

There is a political quote which says that "the Right thinks the Left is stupid while the Left thinks the Right is evil".

While this quote gets repeated, I don't think it's quite true. Instead I think at the level of running a society there is no difference between stupid and evil and the right doesn't quite get why the left doesn't get that.

Granted that Mao was not a good person, he didn't set out to kill 100 million people. He made some bad decisions that inexorably led to a famine which killed 100 million people. But that wasn't his goal, his goal was to do what Deng would wind up doing. He simply happened to be incompetent at it. And from a right wing perspective, the results speak for themselves- Mao's incompetence killed more people in a war against sparrows than Hitler did in a war against a continent spanning superpower. The lesson if you're a right winger is pretty obvious- pick the cold and competent guy even if he's a little bit evil. That's probably why the right bet so big on capitalism in the later 20th century- capitalism is not very nice, but it works better than anything else anyone has ever tried and there's no getting around that.

The left, on the other hand, doesn't seem to grasp that right wingers see no practical difference between stupidity and evil in running a society. The trying to help people is what's important, that's why the political left doesn't like arguments about tradeoffs and side effects and whether or not their climate change and gun policies work. It's easy to write this off as a bit, or virtue signaling, or whatever, but I think a lot of them really do inhabit a world where as long as the people in power are willing to commit strongly enough to solving whatever problem it will inevitably be solved through the power of positive thinking. Maybe that's uncharitable, but my experience has not been that, say, gun control activists consider "whether assault weapons bans actually prevent mass shootings" to be a particularly relevant factor in whether there should be assault weapons bans to prevent mass shootings, more like it's a distraction from the broader issue of whether mass shootings are a tragedy.

While this quote gets repeated, I don't think it's quite true.

It's not quite true for a far simpler reason: both think the other is both stupid and evil.

The left thinks that the right are a bunch of parochial, bigoted morons. They hate education, they hate vaccines, they hate minorities, they're religious authoritarians, they're greedy capitalists or their useful idiots, they'd rather shoot themselves in the foot rather than pick up a free lunch if meant they had to see an immigrant, etc...

The right thinks the left are a bunch of degenerate, lazy airheads. They're soft on crime, they're soft on pedophiles, they don't want to work, they want free money for existing, they're corrupting the youth, they're race-baiters, they're cowards, they don't understand basic economics, they want to regulate everyone to death etc...

Instead I think at the level of running a society there is no difference between stupid and evil and the right doesn't quite get why the left doesn't get that.

This line of thinking is not peculiar to the right.

The old saw is that conservatives are both stupid and evil while liberals are insane. There's a difference; you can be intelligent (by some definitions) but also nuts. Consider the Unabomber; he was many things but he was most definitely not dumb.

there is no difference between stupid and evil

This has bad implications when it comes to HBD. It's one thing to say that your worth as a person isn't the same as your IQ, but that falls apart really quickly when you also say there's no difference between stupid and evil.

I know you have your caveat, "at the level of running a society," but that doesn't give me much hope considering universal suffrage. When the people are stupid, how can democracy work?

I think you’re taking stupid very literally to mean low IQ, when in reality I’m using it to mean ‘incompetent or prone to doing stupid things’. Sure, low IQ is probably the most common reason for that in genpop, but the people in position to make society-wide mistakes are doing stupid things for other reasons- they may have the wrong goals(equality before economic growth), they may be blinded by ideology(communism), they may be mentally ill. Etc, etc. The most important and influential people are disproportionately not low IQ.

You can make the argument that low IQ people vote for candidates who are stupid for non-IQ related reasons, but the best example I can come up with is South Africa, which plausibly has other reasons for corrupt incompetent single party rule(the other big example of corrupt incompetent people getting elected and re-elected until they broke the country is Argentina, which has a respectable 90 some odd average IQ). In any case I’m not exactly going to go to bat for universal suffrage but I don’t think that IQ is the sine qua non of filtering voters.

When the people are stupid, how can democracy work?

Well, it largely can't, and I think we're observing the failure of democracy right now.

The claim above was that there's no difference between stupid and evil when it comes to running a society, and yeah, I would endorse that sentiment from @hydroacetylene and buy-in on the downstream implication of HBD as it would relate to that. Someone that's quite dim might be a fine enough individual when given a simple task and happier to do it than someone with more brainpower, but trusting mentally impaired man to design bridges will get you the same result as a mustache twirling villain that just wants people to die. Likewise for putting a communist in charge of your economy - they might mean well, but the millions that starve will be just as dead whether they meant it or not.

Which is an argument against universal suffrage. And indeed, most people are against universal suffrage (10 year olds often don’t get to vote).

Of course there are no perfect solutions.

Yeah. In theory stuff like poll taxes or literacy tests for voting might be good ideas; however, it is possible to abuse the living shit out of these and rig the hell out of the system. I am somewhat partial to Heinlein's service-guarantees-citizenship idea; IIRC, physical disability was not a barrier for service and anyone that was able to understand the oath of enlistment was eligible to serve. Which is in my eyes rather admirable in a modern society: why should some dude who's born without functioning legs not be able to vote?

I unironically think land-owning was actually a pretty good Schelling Point, at least for state-level elections. The people who own land in a state have skin in the game and have demonstrated at least some level of competence and future orientation.

Since non-landowners "don't have skin in the game", are they exempt from laws?

Anyone who can be arrested, or have to pay taxes, or who needs the government's permission to do something, has skin in the game. Back when the franchise was restricted to landowners, the government was much smaller; there were fewer laws, few taxes, and certainly few regulations.

Back when the franchise was restricted to landowners, the government was much smaller; there were fewer laws, few taxes, and certainly few regulations.

Sounds good to me.

Okay then, get that first, and then go talking about people who "don't have skin in the game". In this world, everyone has skin in the game.

Smaller government is a feature not a bug

Unironically, I think returning to male only suffrage is a good idea even if it will never happen. Not because of the original reasons from the anti suffragettes, although all of those are perfectly valid, but because the average difference in neuroticism has too much influence in our politics.

I do also think property requirements are a good idea because they tend to demonstrate future orientation.

I don't know about that; I think it would have some pretty large knock-on effects and I am not sure how desirable these things would be in a modern, Western society. I would guess that you could just find a different proxy for neuroticism or something like that.

Maybe you could just use the Hock, but explicitly allow people to pay or have substitutes.

What knock-on-effects? You’d see a more politically conservative electorate, but there’s nothing wrong with that.

I think the idea of “Voting Gangs” by Moldbug largely accomplishes something similar without explicitly being gendered.

The idea is that your vote, like a share in a company, is 100% your property and completely transferable. So people would naturally transfer their voting power to interested parties they feel aligned with.

The simplest example is my wife simply allowing me to add her vote to mine in the interest of time since I follow politics more closely than her and she trusts my judgement and ability to represent her.

And if I have friends or family who trust my judgement or vice versa I could sign my vote off to them, or them to me, etc etc.

This would also allow households to vote together, one good thing from a pro-natalist perspective would be to give children the vote but in the stewardship of their legal guardian until they come of age. If a household had two adults and two children they would have four votes in total.

I suppose the effect over time is that it concentrates political power in those interested in wielding it in a transparent, traceable way. Many people want their interests protected but find politics incredibly dull or simply unfathomable. Some dude wants to sell me his vote for an ice cream? That’s fine, he clearly wasn’t interested in it, and I am.

This creates a natural, scalable democracy with basically infinite parties joined together.

It sounds like a radical pipe dream but I’m becoming less convinced it’s unrealistic over time, and I’m becoming more convinced it’s the natural evolution of a liberal democracy if it seeks to survive and overcome it’s obvious deficits.

Some dude wants to sell me his vote for an ice cream? That’s fine, he clearly wasn’t interested in it, and I am.

Laws affect third parties. Having the guy sell you his vote instead of not voting or voting randomly dilutes the vote of third parties. The third parties may be interested.

Also, poor people would end up all selling their votes and the resulting government would be bad for poor people.

Also, poor people would end up all selling their votes and the resulting government would be bad for poor people.

In less developed countries, this tends to happen anyway, so it misses the point.

I debated including that bit for this very reason, there’s a bog standard response that relies on a bunch of assumptions that don’t stand up to much scritiny.

Poor people already vote at much lower rates than members of other classes, and I don’t imagine a single vote would be worth very much at all.

When I was poor, and I my case was rather typical, the thing I lacked more than money was time and energy. Politics requires quite a bit of both. Lots of my poor brethren had the instinct that they didn’t have the time, inclination or knowledge base to make a very informed decision at the ballot box, and so would forgo the whole process. There’s certainly something to that instinct, people want to use their power responsibly.

But even very poor people generally have someone they can trust in their lives, someone who is either more informed or more inclined towards political action.

I honestly think the ability to vote by proxy would rather increase turnout among the poor, especially for local politics. From personal experience when I was poor and living somewhere where I was unfamiliar with the local political scene I would have gladly gave my vote to a trusted friend who is similar politically to me and has my interest at heart.

Now that I’m financially stable and more informed I vote more regularly. And members of my social circle are also more interested in asking about my politics.

And for those people who will likely never be interested in politics for one reason or another, they still have the ability to directly benefit from their voting privileges as a citizen.

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The arguments of the anti suffragists are actually quite complex. One interesting thing is that it turned women’s activities into political instead of apolitical.

I’d be open to a return to that as well. Landowning with kids might be my ideal

What should be the cutoff point? One acre? One square foot?

See "swamp men" of 19th century Norway.

When there was land ownership qualification for the right to vote, local labor party bought worthless swamp lands and distributed them among voters. Hail to new land owners!

Free and clear estate worth ten times the average GDP per capita in the year of the election.

I'd worry about games being played with the valuation. You could base it off of estate tax so that high valuations are expensive and reasonably consistent/objective. Still, giving the government the power to decide who votes just seems inherently risky. When only landowners were enfranchised the idea of the government interfering to the extent it does now was unthinkable.

Dunno — presumably a lot large enough for a small house.

Under the International Zoning Code, that would be 6,000 square feet (0.14 acre, 560 square meters; a 78-foot (24-meter) square).

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Granted that Mao was not a good person, he didn't set out to kill 100 million people. He made some bad decisions that inexorably led to a famine which killed 100 million people.

Absolutely nitpicking, but I don‘t think Mao killed a hundred million people in the Great Leap Forward. The commonly quoted numbers are anywhere from 18 million (CCP official estimates) to 60 million (some of the more loony estimates), with most reputable estimates going from 30 to 45 million. (The commonly quoted one I grew up with was 36 million.)

100 million sounds like something right out of the Black Book of Communism, which has very artistic ways of arriving at casuality figures.

You're right, that is an absolute nitpick. But Mao is still the bloodiest-handed figure in world history, especially when you account for non-great-leap-forward deaths(like in the cultural revolution), although a few figures like Pol Pot might have technically killed a higher percentage of population.

You get some weird questions if you try to determine "who killed a higher percentage of ruled population". Like, if I'm in charge of nation A, and I lead an army to conquer and genocide nation B of equal population, is my percentage 50% (because I clearly had power over the B-ers) or 0% (because they were my enemies and I never had any intention to rule them as subjects)?

This is relevant to the ancient custom of warfare where conquered populations were often just massacred.

Oh, yes, no question.

I'm "pick the red pill, everyone lives" and the amount of Pharisaical Showing Off about how they would simply rather die than be the kind of person who'd pick the red pill makes me go "If that choice makes me Evil, then you are Stupid".

What justification is provided for people choosing Blue over Red? Well, one of the top replies is that "red represents the values of intolerance and fascism".

That's not "working out the optimal strategy based on probability" or whatever fancy game theory, that's "I want to show off about how Nice I am, and I'll do that by insulting people and throwing accusations around of the tired old de-valued 'if you disagree with me you're a Fascist' type".

I'm happy for people like that to pick the Blue Pill because it means they all die off (in Minecraft), though I think if it were a real choice in the real world, we'd see a lot of red pills being quietly and secretively taken by the "no no I picked blue, I'm concerned for human flourishing!" boasters.

"If that choice makes me Evil, then you are Stupid".

It is generally considered more bad to be evil than stupid or incapable. There are a lot of things people do that are incredibly risky in order to save a life or in fact not be burdened with having, by their own inaction, ended one. People will take incredible amounts of risk to save young children or people who are doing something potentially dangerous, in fact a lot of times endangering their own lives. People also die in this way.

Why? Because generally people aren't sociopaths and have some sense of morals beyond "stupid ppl and people who are incapable of X thing should go die." People will and do demonstrably put themselves at risk to save themselves or to save multiple people. That is something to be applauded.

It does not make one stupid to prioritize human life.

In any case, the logical and moral option are the same one, which is blue. It's moral because saving and helping those are who are less able and capable is something that should, in my opinion, be valued. A red world is inherently an incredibly low trust world by it's very nature (all of the people who would perform self-sacrifice have been killed off!) and honestly sounds really terrible.

Regardless. It only takes 50% of the blues to go blue, while it takes 100% of reds to go reds with the same outcome. I've seen people who post here who misread the question and pick the one they weren't intending to pick, and I don't think they're inherently stupid or whatnot, and I generally don't believe in even killing people who make a simple mistake to be a good thing.

It does not make one stupid to prioritize human life.

Is that what the blue pickers are doing? Or are they rather boasting about their exquisite human sensibilities, which the coarser fabric of the reds means they just can't experience? "I'm such a good moral person I picked blue". I had no idea this was going to be a test of the state of my soul, I thought it was just a trivial silly fun game.

I mean if we're going to add a layer of "what do we think would happen for realsies" I imagine the blue % would go way up when you account for the risk. sure you might not pick red, but can you say your friends will for certain? and can you say the same that your friends won't go through this same process? what about your family?

It is generally considered more bad to be evil than stupid or incapable

In general. But if you put an incompetent in charge of a country and they incompetently unintentionally cause the deaths of 10% of the population, that's not better than if Genghis Khan conquered your country and exterminated 10% of the population on a whim.

Should run a country =/= they should literally die

I'm just pointing out that, at scale, incompetence is indistinguishable from malice in its outcome.

depends on the type of incompetence and to what scale. i think a general statement like that is hard to prove and probably doesn't have merit.

probably doesn't have merit.

This is such an immottest statement I almost want to report you. Not only are you being incurious, you are essentially calling your opponent a liar or an idiot, without any evidence to suggest they are wrong except an appeal to generality - which usually works the other way around (a statement being general implies it is so true as to be banal - which is definitely the case here, I doubt Unter expected any push back, when you zoom out far enough the only thing that matters is whether it helped you or hurt you). And all to avoid ceding a point! You are better than this bud.

If the EV of red is higher than the EV of blue what is the moral theory blue is the moral choice?

Given that some people will choose blue, and you know nothing else about how people will decide, the EV of blue is higher.

If the EV of red is higher than the EV of blue what is the moral theory blue is the moral choice?

Does it matter? Deontology maybe. Really whatever your moral theory, the EV (according to your moral theory) will be paramount.

Given that some people will choose blue, and you know nothing else about how people will decide, the EV of blue is higher.

This is wrong. See the comment chain between me and /u/roystgnr for the actual math. The EV depends upon both the expected proportion of people who will pick blue and the variance of that estimate but there are definitely situations where you expect there to be a nonzero number of people picking blue and the EV of red is higher even in the altruistic case where you value your own life no higher than that of a random person

The EV depends upon both the expected proportion of people who will pick blue

Right, if you'll read my other comments in this chain, I make it clear that what I meant was "ignoring the expected proportion of people who choose one way or the other." I absolutely agree that most of the question boils down to your expectation about the proportions.

The EV of enough people picking blue is higher than red. It is far from obvious ex ante that the EV of blue is higher.

Right, that's why I said "knowing nothing else". Of course the high-EV option will generally be the one you think more people will choose.

Knowing nothing else doesn’t add anything to your argument. Your argument seems to be that there are enough blue pill takers that your vote makes a difference. I doubt it.

Knowing nothing else doesn’t add anything to your argument.

It was a qualifier to my main point. Naively, the EV of blue is higher. Telling me "yeah but we're not naïve" is not news to me. If it was then I wouldn't have added that qualifier at all.

Your argument seems to be that there are enough blue pill takers that your vote makes a difference.

That's not my argument, which is why I added the qualifier.

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Do I follow “Women and Children first” or do I rush the life raft? Some people need to save the idiots/unfortunate before they save themselves and the have built in blinders to not take the selfish option. Explain the math to me and I can overcome this strange scenario where greed helps others. Otherwise, I’m rushing into that burning building.

Risking your life for women and children is not the same as risking your life for idiots.

That said, I’d pick the blue.

Okay, think of the women and children first in the life boat in terms of "if fewer than 50% of people pick the blue pill, everyone dies" (in the original, I'm told) or "all the blue pills die, the red pills live".

Your choice there would be "if there aren't enough women and children to fill 50% or more of the places in the life boats, then they all stay behind while all the men get to take up the places". In that case, making it contingent on hitting a particular number leaves the risk of failure. In that case, "women and children first" (the blue pill) is a death sentence while "every man for himself" (red pill) would be fairer, as there's a chance at least some women and children could grab seats first. But the red pill isn't even that, it's "line up and everyone gets a seat in safety".

But what about the dumbasses who didn’t line up, lost balance, and fell into the water, do I rescue them?

I should have been clearer, I don’t think the game-theoretical minutiae are all that important. I’m trying to explain that the hero reflex is hard to get over, and yes, I’m picking red pill over blue, but the blue has an allure that shouldn’t leave Roko scratching his head.

Edit: reading over your exploration of the titanic example again though I am wondering if “boats have a better chance of survival with a man on board” would be an interesting twist on this question.

Blue only has an allure if you have the mindset to think of the scenario in terms of "being heroic" rather than "which is the sensible choice?"

It sounds like you’re throwing on some spin there but apart from that, I agree, in fact I thought that’s what I said

Choosing the blue pill becomes an obviously rational option if your utility function includes anyone else who may also choose the blue pill.

Like, consider if the two instances of this poll you're discussing were actual. Apparently the bad outcome is the one where everyone lives and the "encouraging" outcome is the one where 10% of poll takers die. I can't speak to your values but to me, 10% of poll takers dying is much worse than nobody dying.

In a red-dominated world getting the "nobody dies" outcome requires literal perfect coordination. Everyone has to choose Red or someone dies. In a blue-dominated world getting the "nobody dies" outcome only requires majority coordination. As long as 50%+1 choose Blue everyone lives.

A vote for Blue is a vote for "everyone should live, regardless of what they chose" and a vote for Red is a vote for "I don't care if the people who chose Blue die."

Only if you assume blue wins if you choose blue. If blue loses despite you choosing blue you've thrown your life away for nothing. Blues really like to assume that blue will win if and only if they choose blue.

Blue can win iff people choose it, that is correct.

Red requires 100% cooperation for the optimal outcome, blue requires 50% cooperation for the optimal outcome. It is near-impossible to get 100% cooperation for anything, particularly something where defecting is as simple as pressing a different button and has an actual argument for doing so. Meanwhile getting 50% cooperation is pretty easy. If blue required 90% or something it would probably make more sense to cut our losses and aim for minimizing the number of blue, but at 50% it's easy enough to make it worthwhile to aim for 0 deaths via blue majority.

If we are to compare to politics, I think the obvious comparison is to utopian projects like complete pacifism that only work if you either have 100% cooperation (in which case there is no violence to defend against or deter) or if you have so little cooperation that everyone else successfully coordinates to keep the violence-using status-quo (akin to voting for red but blue getting the majority). Except that such projects at least have the theoretical advantage of being better if they got 100% cooperation, whereas 100% cooperation on red is exactly the same as 50%-100% cooperation on blue.

In real life serious crime is almost always a self-destructive act, and yet people do it anyway. "Just create a society where there's no incentive to do crime and we can abolish the police because 0 people will be criminals" doesn't work, not just because you can't create such a society, but because some people would be criminals even if there was no possible net benefit. We can manage high cooperation, which is why we can coordinate to do things like have a justice system, but we can't manage 100% cooperation, that's why we need a justice system instead of everyone just choosing to not be criminals.

It might help to separate out the coordination problem from the self-preservation and "what blue voters deserve" aspects. Let us imagine an alternative version where, if blue gets below 50% of the vote, 1 random person dies for each blue vote. Majority blue is once again the obvious target to aim for so that nobody dies, though ironically it might be somewhat harder to coordinate around since it seems less obviously altruistic. Does your answer here differ from the original question? The thing is, even if you think this version favors blue more because the victims are less deserving of death, so long as you place above-zero value on the lives of blue voters in the first question the most achievable way to get the optimal outcome is still 50% blue.

blue requires 50% cooperation for the optimal outcome.

And the way the question is posed, there is no opportunity for coordination, and everyone only has information about their own choice, and that everyone else is making the same choice.

And if the cooperation fails you and all others who picked blue die.

You can literally ONLY get the worst outcome (49.99999% death rate) if people start choosing blue.

Here's a slight adjustment to the Hypo:

What if everyone discusses the matter beforehand and everyone agrees to select red. Now, there is no way to know that people will pick red, but is there any possible reason to pick blue once that agreement has been reached?

You can literally ONLY get the worst outcome (49.99999% death rate) if people start choosing blue.

Yeah? And you can literally only get the worst outcome if people start choosing red too, framed differently.

What if everyone discusses the matter beforehand and everyone agrees to select red. Now, there is no way to know that people will pick red, but is there any possible reason to pick blue once that agreement has been reached?

Nah, there's no way blue is happening at that point. I can see people doing it anyway, to not feel guilty about the deaths of those who will misclick, but it's not rational.

Yeah? And you can literally only get the worst outcome if people start choosing red too, framed differently.

Yep.

But red doesn't introduce any additional risk. Deaths occur IF AND ONLY IF blue is picked by someone(s). Blue is a necessary AND sufficient condition for deaths. Red is neither necessary nor sufficient, under the currently stated hypo.

The first person to pick blue is the one who makes it possible for death to occur at all.

So if I push this to it's logical extreme, I could probably argue that blue-pickers end up with blood (including their own) on their hands.

I don't argue that, because I don't even think I fully understand the blue's logic.

Me saying "I'm going to pick red, and you should too" is my warning as to what will happen if we play the game. I have zero possible benefit to lying.

Picking blue is choosing to accept risk of death where red does not imply such risk.

Deaths occur IF AND ONLY IF blue is picked by someone

This statement is false. The only if part is true but not the if part since its possible for blue to be picked and there to be no deaths.

Blue is a necessary AND sufficient condition for deaths

Again false. Blue is a necessary condition but not a sufficient condition for deaths as there are situations where blue is picked but there are no deaths

Red is neither necessary nor sufficient,

False one more time. Red is a necessary condition for deaths as if there are no reds there will be no deaths.

If you're going to use precise logical terminology in your post make sure to get it right otherwise you're just embarrassing yourself.

Red is a necessary condition for deaths as if there are no reds there will be no deaths.

Yeah, I should have specified that red is neither necessary nor sufficient to cause deaths conditional on there being no persons choosing blue.

Which is to say, the persons choosing blue are satisfying the condition which makes deaths a possibility.

Blue is a necessary condition but not a sufficient condition for deaths as there are situations where blue is picked but there are no deaths

Choosing blue is sufficient to cause deaths in every scenario in which they don't meet the threshold, if you think this makes the outcome different.

I'll point out that we're still left with the point that at least one person choosing blue is necessary to cause deaths. Prior to the decisions actually being made, I can state that picking red is not satisfying the conditions for death. It's not sufficient, and it's not necessary unless someone else is choosing blue.

Red is only necessary to cause deaths in those situations where that first person chooses blue.

To choose blue is to intentionally satisfy the precondition which makes deaths a possibility.

So someone choosing blue really has to justify why they're choosing to satisfy a condition which is allowing possible deaths.

I think there will always be people who choose blue for one reason or another, and I'd rather risk my life saving everyone than accept their deaths, provided I'm not just throwing away my life.

All this debate is definitely pushing me towards red though. Blue won in the original poll, but if outside of that corner of Twitter everyone picks red, red is obviously the better option.

think there will always be people who choose blue for one reason or another,

But this is an interesting thing to state, since people choosing blue presumably HAVE reasons for doing it. And those reasons might be salient as well.

For example, someone might pick blue because they WANT to die. Am I going to know that in advance? No. So I don't see why it should change my behavior.

"I want to save everyone" is comprehensible logic, but it requires us to believe there are people in need of saving.

Well here are a few possibilities:

  1. Someone doesn't get the memo that everyone is choosing red

  2. Someone is just stupid (or young, etc.) and chooses blue because they like the color

  3. Someone gets the game theory wrong and chooses blue

I find it highly unlikely everybody perfectly coordinates around red. 50% is much easier to coordinate than 100%, so I find blue the better option, even if most of the people who originally found their way there are idiots.

Red requires 100% cooperation for the optimal outcome

I think this is the intended line of thinking, but red doesn't require any cooperation: pure self-interest can grant it too. "If you want to certainly live, choose red, but you're free to choose possible death if you want." Blue actually requires coordination to confidently pull off.

In this case, I think the actual right/left split is close to this question, but doesn't quite align: frequently (well-managed) cooperation yields better outcomes than pure self-interest economics. We as a division-of-labor society can build far greater things than as a bunch of atomized subsistence farmers. On the other hand sometimes cooperation is poorly managed and ends up worse than individualism.

Those are, broadly, the two argument points for left and right economics, respectively: "Medicare for all" fits the left, and "but how can we prove that won't make it worse" fits the right. IMHO the optimum is probably somewhere between the observable poor outcomes of pure anarchy (Somalia?) and planned economies (communism has a huge body count).

Maybe the question would be more interesting if there was an additional compensation (cash payment?) for choosing blue.

I think this is the intended line of thinking, but red doesn't require any cooperation: pure self-interest can grant it too.

The issue is the extreme difficulty of that level of coordination, not their specific motives. Imagine I said "coordination" instead of "cooperation" if you prefer. If you place an above-zero value on the lives of people who might press blue, then the optimal outcome is either >50% blue or exactly 100% red, with every other possibility being worse.

You can't rely on 100% to do pretty much anything, including act on self-interest. People in real life do things like commit suicidal school shootings, and you have to make decisions taking that into account. As I pointed out, even most mundane crime is self-destructive and yet people do it anyways. In this case, as people have pointed out, some people will pick blue by mistake, because they are momentarily suicidal enough to take a risk even though they wouldn't carry out a normal suicide, or (most of all) because they realize the above and want to save everyone.

red doesn't require any cooperation: pure self-interest can grant it too.

No, it can't. It just can't. People will misunderstand the question, misclick, or otherwise choose blue even though they are purely self-interested. Someone out there has schizophrenia and will always choose blue in self interest because the voices tell them to. 100% cooperation in large groups is 100% impossible.

This is one of the places where I find the current left/right divide to be incongruous: the left here sees a strong need to protect people from themselves, but only in certain instances. Your argument is a general one for banning the sale of potentially dangerous objects to prevent self-harm. But at the same time we're told that the addicts shooting up heroin on the streets are Living Their Best Lives and we couldn't possibly try to take away substances that demonstrably cause harm to individuals and society as a whole, because Individual Freedoms, although we can try to ban large soft drinks. This largely holds in reverse for the right.

Fundamentally, society is a coordination problem, and those are hard and seem to lack generalized solutions. Different scales have different optima: I unironically run my household as a socialist collective (from each, to each...) but wouldn't vote for such policies in even small town government.

Sure, but in reality, people can harm more than just themselves, the costs of helping them are quite high, and usually such "help" is quite ineffective. If it just required 50% cooperation to save everyone's problems, I would vote for that on every level.

I don't want to ban guns for many reasons, but I will take a gun away from a baby if I see it playing with one, even at considerable risk to myself. The frames are just different and so are the answers.

But it goes to downside; not just levels of cooperation. Sure 95% surviving is worse than 100%. But 95% is much better than 55% surviving.

Right, but the probability of success seems more than high enough to compensate. Not only is 50% blue better than 95% red, it's also easier because you only need 50% instead of 95%. It's especially high if communication is allowed, but even without communication "the most obviously pro-social option" is a natural Schelling point.

Now this is fairly fragile, it's plausible that with different question wording or a society with a more cynical default conception of other people (Russia?) or the wrong set of memes regarding game theory red would seem enough of a natural Schelling point to make aiming for blue not worth it. This would of course be a worse outcome, so if you did have access to communication it would make sense to rally people around blue rather than red if doing so seems feasible.

a society with a more cynical default conception of other people (Russia?)

I actually already seen the poll replicated in Russian social network(VK) and the results are similar to twitter one - 65% Blue.

Interesting. I thought it might correlate with being a lower-trust society and surveys like these, especially because of the stereotype of Russians being vocally cynical, but maybe not. Though I probably shouldn't conclude anything from non-randomized social media polls.

Even the real surveys are dubious (different countries probably radically differ in how they interpret the question, especially when it's being translated) and looking at the link above Russia isn't as low on them as I thought. For instance 23.3% of surveyed Russians agreed with "most people can be trusted", which is lower than the U.S. (39.7%) or Sweden (63.8%) but slightly higher than France (18.7%) or Spain (19%), let alone Brazil (6.5%) or Zimbabwe (2.1%). It's hard to tell how meaningful any of this is.

It could also be that voting on Twitter is just fundamentally different from “voting” where picking blue may actually kill you.

Perhaps wartime and the general us vs them narrative has made the Russian society pull together in a way that's unlike, say, two years ago?

But if you can communicate, wouldn’t you communicate “pick red; if we al pick red we all live!”

absolutely not. blue is the obvious one because if anyone errs, they die if everyone picks red and they pick blue, but someone erring with picking red doesn't cause a negative effect in blueworld.

the Lizardman Constant of people (+ some others who have genuine mental issues or are very young) don't die if everyone picks blue

If you run a “pick red” campaign, the equilibrium is self-reinforcing. There is no reason for anyone to “defect” to blue. It would be obviously a stupid decision.

If you run a “pick blue” campaign, how would you enforce that? How would you know it’s working? There is an obvious advantage to defecting. How much fear would you have awaiting the results? Do you have any beloved family members you secretly hope pick red just for the extra safety?

Roko is right, seeing people continue in their blue delusion is blackpilling. It’s like watching someone who is unable to understand the Monty Hall problem even after having it explained to them multiple times.

at 100% cooperation between all parties, there is no difference between blue and red. chug them both if you want and wash it down with a chaser.

I think it is a given that some people will either:

  • misread the question and choose the option they don't intend to
  • be transiently suicidal and would be helped by not encouraging someone towards suicide
  • have unironic mental retardation (in the clinical sense) or be mentally disturbed in some other way (schizophrenia, etc)
  • be incredibly young and do not understand the effects of either option
  • have someone they know and care about that fits in the above 4 groups
  • have someone they know and care about that might fit into the last option

if any of these are the case, it is almost certain for there not be 100% coordination to pick one or the other. it is not only probable, but imo extremely likely for someone to pick blue based on the last 2 or more uncommonly the first 4. therefore, untold numbers will die if red wins. you don't need to be unintelligent for the first to occur (even highly intelligent people make mistakes). therefore, we want to reduce the number who die. and the only way to do that is to get 50%+1 to pick blue.

it is much more attainable for 50%+1 to do something than for 100% to do something. and so, we should be focusing all of our effort on getting 50%+1 to do something by encouraging everyone to do something, because 50%+1 blue or 65% blue or 84.25% blue or 100% blue has the same outcome as 100% red, but the inverse is not true.

are you sure all of the people you care about will pick red? would you bet their life on it?

The original question does not assume campaigning. How many beloved family members will you be afraid for as you sit in safety having picked red?

No, if I can communicate, I will communicate that we should all pick blue and then everyone will live.

As explained above, this requires trust in strangers where the punishment for breaking trust differs on which agreement is made. If the agreement is “we all pick red” the agreement breaker suffers. If the agreement is “we all pick blue” then the agreement keeper suffers.

Thus, it seems more logical to explain this and get everyone to vote red.

But I do not want the "agreement breaker" to suffer in the red pact world, precisely because the breach obviously doesn't benefit them and doesn't harm me, realistically it could only happen by mistake or insanity.

If I can be confident that a pact works (50%+ keep it), I want the pact to be blue. If I can't, I'll pick red whatever the actual agreement was.

I voted blue in the twitter poll.

I would vote red in the same poll if it were posted here instead.

It hinges on how I think others will vote.

Wow, that is a brutal condemnation of the population of the site.

Don't be so harsh on twitter users.

This is another brutal condemnation on the population of the site.

Can someone please send this poll with colors reversed to some US progressive hangout? I'm pretty sure everybody freaking out about this now would be laughing at the stupid chuds not understanding they're committing suicide.

Let's do some math.

Let's say that we are voting on Twitter and that an evil god makes this poll binding. Let's say that that 1 million vote and that every result from 40-60% is equally likely.

So there are 200,000 possible voting outcomes. And in only 1 of these will your vote be the difference maker.

By voting blue, you have a 1/200,000 chance of saving 500,000 people, and a 1/2 chance of killing yourself. So you will save 2.5 lives on average but die 0.5 times yourself.

Is your life worth that of 5 random strangers? It's worth debating. I think most people would not kill themselves to save 5 people, but at the same time would not kill 5 people to save themselves either.

As your choice involves potentially killing yourself to save others, I'm not sure your choice to vote blue on Twitter parses from an intuitive sense. The only time in which voting blue would seem to make sense would be if you knew the vote was very near 50% and you had extreme leverage to save people.

I know some rationalists like to talk about versions of decision theory where you consider that others are going through the same decision making process that you are.

It would seem that this would be a context where whether you take that into account seems relevant?

Sort of like how in elections, any one person's vote is very unlikely to matter, but a large block of people deciding their votes don't matter really does.

Let's say that we are voting on Twitter and that an evil god makes this poll binding. Let's say that that 1 million vote and that every result from 40-60% is equally likely.

I don't accept these numbers. If I thought every result from 40%-60% were equally likely I would not vote blue.

What numbers would make you vote blue?

If I thought that 60%-80% would vote blue, I'd vote blue.

That was about the result of the two polls done on it that I've seen.

This is very interesting to me as I see picking blue as the obvious morally correct choice. Maybe that is just my military background coming through, I don’t know. So my options are pick blue where there is a chance that everything will be fine, or pick red where I will selfishly be fine but I will kill all the morally correct people. Easy choice of blue for me.

But what makes it morally correct when it's "hope that enough people will pick blue" in a situation where picking blue has the built-in risk of "people will die if not enough make this choice"?

Why is it a question of morals at all in this silly poll? If it were "unless 50% or more pick blue, they will get a custard pie in the face, but if you pick red, nobody who picks red gets a custard pie", would you talk about "of course blue is the morally correct choice"?

Because being harmlessly pranked for not understanding a question is fine.

Being killed for not understanding a question isn't.

If everyone can simply choose to live by taking the red pill, how is that morally incorrect?

Because in my values system choosing to help others is better than choosing only to help yourself. Even if everybody brings their own lunch, I will still offer people some of mine. If people eat all my lunch and I starve to death I would hope that it would be a comment on their greed, and not my stupidity.

If people eat all my lunch and I starve to death I would hope that it would be a comment on their greed, and not my stupidity.

No, it would be a comment on your stupidity.

In this scenario, everyone has lunch already. Anyone who chooses not to eat their lunch can not have been said to have been coerced or denied lunch (the ability to live). Taking the blue pill is effectively stating "I choose death."

If people eat all my lunch and I starve to death I would hope that it would be a comment on their greed, and not my stupidity.

If everyone has their own lunch, and all the lunches are adequate to sate hunger, what are you doing to help anyone? Now, if it's "can I swap a cheese sandwich for your cucumber roll?" then okay, but "no no I insist you take my food even though you have your own" is just "Notice me! Praise me!"

The hungry mother who gives the last crust to her child even if she dies is worthy of praise. You're not, even if you die of hunger, because you were deliberately seeking martyrdom and that is suicide.

Well that is certainly one way to read it. I just wanted to be nice and make sure everyone else had enough to eat. But if you do not understand that I'm not surprised you don't understand why I would take blue either. Or really any of the choices I've made. But nevertheless I would still take the blue pill on the off chance it keeps you and everyone else alive.

Friend, you have a martyr complex. You are putting emotion above logic because it feels better to imagine saving people than to imagine them dying. But it is obviously better to not have to save anyone right? The red pill is catching a plane that arrives safely at its destination without incident, as happens hundreds of times every day. The blue pill is catching a plane that might crash because then you get to save everyone.

I full understand that if everybody picked red then everything would be fine. I also fully understand not everybody will pick red, because not everybody thinks about things the same way that you do.

The situation is there are people that will die and you can vote to save them or vote to kill them. Those are the only realistic choices.

Okay, but again, you're misunderstanding the scenario. Everybody already has enough to eat. All they have to do is be basically intellectually competent enough to not press the "Quite possibly take my lunch away" button. If nobody takes the blue pill, then nobody can have their lunch taken away ever. It is only possible for anybody's lunch to be taken away if anybody takes the blue pill. All red guarantees ample food for everyone.

I will echo those saying that the only pill I've actually been fed reading this subthread is the black pill. The fact that there are some people even on here who are decision theory illiterate enough to actually consider the blue pill is haunting and maddening. (It might be one thing if blue pills explicitly said "Even if it means risking my own life, I want to try to save people even if they are too stupid to understand that we can all avoid any bad outcome with 100% probability by picking the red pill, even though we could all just avoid any bad outcome with 100% probability by picking the red pill.", though even that is quite stupid in my opinion, but a lot of them seem to be misunderstanding the scenario so much that they're interpreting it as a general altruism vs. selfishness hypothetical.)

Though it shouldn't be, this would be an amazing voting qualification test. In my view, you could immediately improve the world by 500 times by guaranteeing that no blue pills have any influence over anything ever.

I think the overall problem here is that the people here have discovered a "hack" where if everybody picks the answer that most people would view as the "Wrong" answer it actually ends up with a better solution than if people picked the "Right" answer. Now that is fine as far as it goes, but in order for it to work you have to assume that everybody in the world has also discovered the "hack" and then also assume they will decide that the "hack" is actually going to work.

On the first assumption I 100% disagree that should be taken for granted. For the second, I know about the hack and I don't think it would actually work because I suspect many of the people I know will pick blue.

If you don't risk having somebody eating your lunch you are never going to build a community capable of accomplishing anything. If you tell everybody "I'm willing to let the blue pill people die" you also are not going to be building a community, because you are constantly looking over your shoulder at all the people that would be happy to let you die if you picked the option they didn't deem as being the most efficient one.

Now if anyone should be keep from voting I know which group I'd pick.

If being able to apply basic logic is considered a "hack" then that's half the problem with modern society right there. If being able to deduce from "Nobody who does X will die." that everyone should do X is considered some grand feat of cognition in a particular "community", then I want no part of it, and yes I think I am willing to let its membership kill themselves (which I think will be very few people), or at least I'm not going to directly throw my body on the grenade of their stunning inadequacy.

because you are constantly looking over your shoulder at all the people that would be happy to let you die if you picked the option they didn't deem as being the most efficient one.

This is utter nonsense. Nobody is being asked to solve some complex payoff matrix at gunpoint. It's literally just "Do this and nobody dies." Again, if you lack the basic common sense of a 7 year old (yes, I think many 7 year olds could get this one) to figure that out, then you are damn sure not taking my fate in your hands.

Anyway I propose a compromise. Blue pills and red pills each split off to form their own country. If you genuinely think people who want to turn basic logic into a morality play can run a country...

Now if anyone should be keep [kept] from voting I know which group I'd pick.

So now there’s paternalism involved: someone who wants to choose for someone else because they think they know better. How will people be kept from choosing to save themselves, an armed guard to keep people from picking red?

“If you reach for red, we’ll tase you and kick you out of the choosing place, and if you try again we’ll kill you.”

Threatening people who refuse to be persuaded to trust is no way to build trust, nor is it building a community.

Blue wants to pick for themselves, for the incompetent, and for those who would pick red, to ensure that the outcome is majority blue to avoid them and everyone they care about dying. Then to avoid being called tyrants who are risking everyone unnecessarily and using force to do it, they say they’re building a community.

This kind of thinking and excuse-making is straight out of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged.”

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Not everyone can, or will, take the red pill.

Why not? It's very simply: You've been given a sugar pill or other harmless pill (red pill) and what is potentially a poison/suicide pill (blue pill).

Under what circumstances (other than wishing to die) does it make ANY sense to take the suicide pill? Everyone has been given the gift of life via the red pill, why reject it? And if you do reject it, why would you expect anyone to think you're moral for doing so?

Why not?

Not everyone is sane, not everyone clicks the option they mean to click, not everyone is literate, and so on. It is, for all intents and purposes, guaranteed that "everyone can simply choose to live" is wrong.

Under what circumstances (other than wishing to die) does it make ANY sense to take the suicide pill?

I've mentioned many times that changing the frame changes what the correct answer is. That said, the answer is easy--you know that taking the pill may save others who have taken it.

Everyone has been given the gift of life via the red pill, why reject it?

Not everyone has.

Not everyone is sane, not everyone clicks the option they mean to click, not everyone is literate, and so on. It is, for all intents and purposes, guaranteed that "everyone can simply choose to live" is wrong.

The premise nowhere states that people will not have what is going on explained, or only explained via text, or have the choice made via mouse click. You are introducing new premises from thin air to aid your bad arguments.

In summary, this is a bad faith argument.

The premise is "everyone who responds to this poll". Misclicks are a given. It's a real poll; is your argument that nobody has misclicked on that real poll?

Given that the question states you have to choose between a red or a blue pill, presumably were this a scenario that was happening in real life with real life-or-death stakes, you would have to decide which option you were going to take by choosing one of the pills and swallowing it. There would be no misclicks in such a scenario.

More comments

Why can't they? Here's a red pill, here's a blue pill, pick one. Everyone (no matter how many people are there) gets the same choice. Red pill for everyone if they choose to take it.

It's not a case of "if I take the red pill, that only leaves the blue pill for the next person, and taking the blue pill means they will die". If that were the choice, it would be selfish and immoral.

But this is "If I take the blue pill, unless enough other people take it, that means everyone dies but at least I get to say how good and moral and virtuous I am, how much better I am than the greedy, selfish people next door who took the red pill in the other experiment".

Why can't they?

Firstly, I said "can't or won't." But yes, I maintain that some people literally cannot choose the red pill. They will misclick or misread the question. Do you honestly disagree? I'm having a hard time understanding why everybody seems to be ignoring this possibility.

But this is "If I take the blue pill, unless enough other people take it, that means everyone dies but at least I get to say how good and moral and virtuous I am, how much better I am than the greedy, selfish people next door who took the red pill in the other experiment".

Very uncharitable. I think some people will choose blue, and therefore everyone should choose blue. It's pretty straightforward. There's no need to accuse me of virtue signaling when regular logic will suffice to explain my position.

"Not everyone can" than it is a different game.

I am talking about the game in the poll. Is your assertion that in that game, literally everybody is rational, will read the question correctly, and so on? I disagree, but even then there's the question of "will". It's a guarantee that some people will take the blue pill for one reason or another, so the "if everyone" premise is still false.

I think you're using a different definition of "can pick red" than the people you are talking to

Good thing I added "or will" then. Given that addition, does it matter what definition I'm using? My meaning was quite clear.

Whether people are rational or read the question correctly is very different from whether they can pick red. I agree that some people would pick blue, but if you are telling me that some people can't pick red, you have changed the game.

if you are telling me that some people can't pick red

Why waste my time with this hypothetical? I said "can or will". You can scroll up to my comment and read it right there.

That said, "some people can't pick red" isn't really changing the game at all. Some people will misclick. This is in line with the original rules of the poll.

The thought experiment doesn't tell us much tbh. We already knew left-wingers were a little more about protecting the weak than right-wingers, and right-wingers are a little more about self-interest than left-wingers. I'm not sure anything more is happening here than lazy application of that. Maybe there's a right answer (blue?) and some of the smarter twitter users figured it out, but so what? It feels like a psych experiment on college students you'd use to make sweeping and incorrect claims about human psychology.

Considering it anyway, for no reason: Red is not obvious - clearly some people are going to choose blue, given all of the people on twitter who choose blue, so if everyone else chooses red they die. That choice isn't even particularly correlated (based on twitter posts) with being ingroup or being your race or nationality or having high IQ, so there aren't any eugenic effects or 'people who deserve to die end up dying', it's pretty random aside from political position. So choosing blue helps all those people not die. You could analogize it to the choice to live in a city with people who aren't your kin. These people could kill you at any moment, if they choose (red!). But if everyone in the city chooses to not rape/murder, the entire city benefits (blue). But I don't think that has any meaning either, it's just a silly game theory experiment, there are a lot of those.

Hilarious how much more engagement this got than the trump indictment.

So choosing blue helps all those people not die.

I'd be more inclined to do that, if it weren't that a lot of the 'choose blue' types also argue about legalising drugs and the harmful social effects with "oh, so you want to stop people having fun, huh? you want to ban everything just because some people abuse it and hurt themselves? you gonna ban sex next, are you?". I've just had a long argument about that very topic elsewhere, where all my interlocutors were rushing to assure me that they and the people they knew were all careful recreational users and they knew nobody who ever had a bad outcome from drugs and really wasn't I just exaggerating about that?

That's not about "choosing to help those who make bad decisions not die, even if it means I have to make a sacrifice", it's "I want my fun and I am prepared to be selfish when it's not a matter of showing off my virtue online". So when those same people go "well of course I'd pick blue, it's the only correct moral thing to do, we must protect people from the risk of bad choices", forgive me if I snort in disbelief.

A lot of the blue-choosers on twitter were neoliberals, or people like roon/yashkaf, who aren't the stereotypical society-undermining leftist. I don't think it's reasonable to kill all of them just because it'd alaso kill some political enemies.

Or maybe it is correlated with high IQ and there are plenty of people who posture as smart but are actually imbeciles?

You should look at the correlation between high IQ, liberalism, and pro-socieality at some point.

IE, if you got Einstein, Bohr, Leibnitz, and the whole Nobel price galley together in a room and ran the test the only people who would pick red are the economists; ie the social scientists.

I highly doubt that. But we are arguing over a stupid point — what hypothetically dead people would pick in a highly contrived example.

The first line though, the first line!

Prosociality is highly corelated with high IQ; and thus picking blue. (Likewise, antisociality is highly corelated with low IQ. Hence the between violent offenders and low IQ.)

Pro social is not picking blue. Blue almost certainly leads to a worse society as more people die.

Only if their are enough people who pick red to create a low trust society; which is worse in every regard for every participant (except for people that are good at scams and violence and shit.)

If the majority of prosocial humans select blue as the did and habitually do in the non fake twitter quiz versions of this question; everything is fine for everyone.

Again, I don’t really see red pill as low trust or anti social. This isn’t defecting. This is “I won’t risk my life to save someone who foolishly puts themself in danger when they easily could not.”

Of course the calculus is a bit different if small children are participating who aren’t capable of understanding.

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It’s these smart blue-pickers who don’t trust people to be smart enough to pick “don’t die” over “maybe die but hopefully not”, and end up causing a situation where other people have to save them by putting themselves at risk.

This is just wishcasting. There are a lot of incredibly smart liberals, e.g. most STEM people at most universities, most tech people, ... What do you think Scott Aaronson's position on this would be? His work in quantum computation stuff shows he's quite smart.

Hilarious how much more engagement this got than the trump indictment.

This is at least a fun thought experiment, the latest Trump indictment is just either Trump super guilty and needs to be jailed or Trump obviously railroaded by political hacks, depending which movie screen you're watching, without anyone much changing their minds. I suppose I probably should care more about the subversion and destruction of the American electoral system (true whichever screen you're watching!), but I guess I'm just used to it.

It's a silly argument but fun. Trump indictment is "oh, is it a day ending in 'y' and the Dems are at it again?"

Trump's probably guilty by the standard of "did he do something illegal". He's innocent by the standard of "would Democrats be permitted to get away with it". It's the three-felonies-a-day standard of politics where everyone's a criminal, so punishing people "for being a criminal" is never that.

Can I be in both camps? I think the obstruction charge is legit. The other charges seem crazy to me (caveating I haven’t read Georgia so who knows).

At the same time, if Trump received the Hillary standard the obstruction charge wouldn’t have been brought. I wish both would share the same cell…

I was baffled, then I got to this exchange and I think I understand now:

Roko - I don't understand why anyone would vote blue in this poll. Can someone who voted blue please give their logic?

Damita - I don't want anyone to die?

Roko - It is only possible to die in this scenario if you pick blue. Red is always safe.

Clinton Coker - The logic for me was, why would anyone vote red?

Roko - Because there's no possible downside to it. Read the question carefully.

Clinton Coker - There is a possible downside. It's right there in the poll.

In this weirdo version of a prisoner's dilemma, everyone can cooperate by hitting Red and all is well, or everyone can cooperate by hitting Blue and all is well. If you have normal coordination and everyone chooses Red, they're all good, but if someone "defects" to Blue, they get killed. You or I apparently don't worry about the defector - just don't be an idiot and you're fine. Other people want to save the idiot contingent so much that they're willing to risk their own lives for it (at least in a Twitter poll). In a scenario where the only person punished by defection is the defector, the threat of that person suiciding is enough to make people change course.

What's wild is that I think this does actually have some explanatory power. When I say that I don't really care about bad outcomes for people that can't do something as basic as show up to work in a country where it's as easy as the United States, this poll makes it obvious that the Blue-pressers are willing to risk their own wellbeing for people that are too stupid to just push the correct button. This also seems like it helps explain the efficacy of hunger strikes, which I've never viscerally grasped - if someone elects to starve themselves in response to something, I am morally blameless when they starve, and their argument completely fails to persuade me. I see their actions working on others via media exposure, but I've never understood how the threat of killing yourself is supposed to move others to your position. Apparently, "give me what I want, or I'll kill myself" works even what the person wants is just the ability to smash Blue. To be fair, their impulse probably is pro-social, but it's also completely foreign to me.

Yeah, I don't know how simpler than "if you pick red, you live" it could be. If someone picks blue after that, then it really is a case of "did you not understand that if you pick red, you won't die?"

'Well if I pick blue then I'm helping to make sure everyone lives'.

There's only the risk of death if people are silly enough not to pick red. Five people picking blue on the grounds "I'm smart but those other guys are dumb so they'll probably pick blue" are doing the equivalent of grabbing a live electric wire while standing in a paddling pool full of water and sharks and piranhas being shoved off a cliff without a bungee jump cord and swigging down a cyanide cocktail at the same time. You are not showing off your intellect or your virtue.

Seriously.

I've been asking blue-choosers who they think they're saving by picking blue.

That is, who is choosing blue, OTHER than the people who think they're saving someone by picking blue?

And if the only people who are picking blue are the ones trying to save someone, they are now the only ones in need of saving. They all jumped off a bridge thinking they would save someone, when there was nobody who needed saving prior to them jumping.

Its a self-fulfilling prophecy which can easily be sidestepped by choosing red.

If you can posit a person who picks blue for some innocent reason other than a desire to look like a moral person or the desire to save someone else, then you've got the beginnings of an argument.

Otherwise, you're just creating risk where no risk needed to exist.

Literally, if I were a Supervillain playing the game, I would be trying to maximize death toll by convincing some people to choose blue. I'd lie and say I was choosing blue then mercilessly defect.

"I am choosing red and you should too" provides zero reason to lie.

It's really reminding me of the saying beloved of our mothers "And if everyone jumped off a cliff, would you do that too?"

Now I'm imagining the infant Blues rebuking her with "Mother, how selfish! In order to assure the 50%+ victory over gravity where, if a sufficiency of us jump off the cliff, we will magically float safely and slowly down to solid ground, I too must and shall jump! The lemmings, Mother, the lemmings! Can Nature in its infinite wisdom, honed over millions upon millions of years of evolution, be wrong?"

If you can posit a person who picks blue for some innocent reason other than a desire to look like a moral person or the desire to save someone else, then you've got the beginnings of an argument.

The premise is that everybody who responds to the poll chooses based on their response. Are misclicks such an insane possibility that they haven't even occurred to you?

The thought experiment literally posits colored pills, which implies this isn't just a button on a screen, as presented.

So I'm imagining a person who has two pills in front of them, and has it explained to them what each one does. And, magically, knows for certain that these explanations are 100% truthful.

So I can not imagine someone thinking "I'm picking the red pill!" and then somehow, just completely brain farting and grabbing the blue one.

And believe me, if misclicking meant living or possibly dying, I'd be pushing that mouse around with the slowest movements possible.

And believe me, if misclicking meant living or possibly dying, I'd be pushing that mouse around with the slowest movements possible.

I actually posit that the hypothetical, as presented, doesn't allow for the possibility of a misclick. Given the life-or-death stakes involved, if you made an accident in your click, then that's a consequence of your choice not to take precautions against a misclick by doing something like what you suggest. I'd personally zoom in/scroll to the page to the extent my non-preferred option is literally not on the screen before my mouse or finger is even over any of the options. And obviously there would have to be a decent time gap between press-down and pull-up of the finger on the mouse button or the touch screen, so that I can visually verify that the button I intended to click was indeed the one I clicked (usually you can cancel such clicks by dragging the mouse off the button before letting go).

Freak occurrences happen, I suppose, including a random bit of cosmic radiation flipping a bit on your PC to switch your choice to the other one. These seem like such unlikely and uncommon outliers that they can be effectively rounded down to zero. Otherwise, if someone misclicks, I would consider that just an active choice the person is making that they don't really care if they have to face the consequences of pressing the blue button or the red one.

Yeah, if we're allowed to control the circumstances under which the click occurs, I'd run a script which removes the blue option from the screen entirely. I would be preventing any possible avenue by which I might push the universe into the state where the 'blue' option was selected and transmitted.

I can absolutely accept some tiny tiny chance that a player screws up the choice. But if it's not quite small enough to fall out of my reasoning, it may as well be.

The thought experiment literally posits colored pills, which implies this isn't just a button on a screen, as presented.

Yeah I guess that's true. Still:

  1. You still have to add quite a lot to make the premise 100% work. They magically know the explanations are 100% truthful, nobody is blind/colorblind, nobody is insane or too young to truly understand the decision, and so on. Given a very generous interpretation of the premise, I think at least one person from one of the previous categories will still around.

  2. Even if literally everybody perfectly understands the question, not everybody will choose red. Some people are just dumb. Some would rather sacrifice themselves than risk even an infinitesimal chance that they're responsible for another's death, or perhaps they'd rather sacrifice themselves than even admit the possibility of such responsibility, even if the probability is 0. Even if everybody is quite rational and understands the game theory, people have different values and/or may not decide upon the same Schelling point as everyone else.

In reality, no matter how rational everyone is, I'd be utterly shocked if everyone chose red, regardless of what the "correct" answer is. Thus the correct answer (assuming it's reasonably likely to succeed) is blue.

Some people are just dumb

What % of the whole are dumb, though. Because now we're adding in irrational/random actors, which makes it even less certain that we'll meet our blue threshold because some of those will also be choosing red for dumb reasons.

I have a hard enough time modelling other rational actors in this game, now add the ones who will do things for reasons I can't even fathom!

And if we posit dumb actors, why not posit evil ones as well who are inclined to maximize death toll?

I wouldn't be utterly shocked if everyone chose red (self-interest is a hell of a drug), but I wouldn't be utterly shocked if, say 30% chose blue between those who were dumb and those who thought they were helping.

But expecting only 30% to choose blue is explicitly a reason for me to choose red.

And since the hypo doesn't present a mechanism under which you can reliably predict that the outcome for blue would be over 50%, I am pretty much going to pick the one which provides certainty.

What % of the whole are dumb, though. Because now we're adding in irrational/random actors, which makes it even less certain that we'll meet our blue threshold because some of those will also be choosing red for dumb reasons.

It's a fair question, but I still think the framing is off. I'm not adding irrational actors; they're already part of the scenario as written.

And if we posit dumb actors, why not posit evil ones as well who are inclined to maximize death toll?

Sure, I just don't think there are as many of them as there are pathological altruists, who will choose blue even when blue odds are very low.

But expecting only 30% to choose blue is explicitly a reason for me to choose red.

And since the hypo doesn't present a mechanism under which you can reliably predict that the outcome for blue would be over 50%, I am pretty much going to pick the one which provides certainty.

Agreed. I like to think I would still choose blue if it came down to it, though, because (valuing my own life equal to others) I simply think it has higher EV.

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Not just no reason to lie but no need to trust. The cost of trusting that someone will vote blue is that if they vote red you may die if you vote in accordance with the agreement. The cost of trusting that someone will vote red red is that if they vote blue they might die if you vote in accordance with the agreement.

Lying is punished when the agreement is voting red; lying isn’t punished when the agreement is to vote blue.

Yes, the trustless aspect cannot be overstated when you're playing a game with strangers, potentially millions of them, and have no enforcement mechanism.

It's virtually guaranteed that some avowed blue-pickers will have a panic attack and go with red when the choice time is actually arrives. I suppose some red-pickers have a crisis of conscious and go blue, but holy cow if you have no other information to go on, Red is the one that doesn't require faith in strangers.

Trying to play the recursive game (I know that he knows that I know that he knows I'll pick blue, therefore...) seems like an inherently losing approach.

It just seems so obvious yet some people are arguing against it. I honestly cannot model their thought process (outside of them treating the thought exercise solely as an exercise instead of thinking — how would people actually vote if voting the wrong way could lead to their death).

The closest I've gotten is that they actually believe that "Altruism is a Schelling Point."

"I want to save people, and other people will too, so they'll accept the risk and we'll all pick blue."

But they can't fully articulate WHY they believe someone actually needs saving. They reason out why someone would pick blue based on altruism, but not why someone would pick blue a priori and thus need to be rescued. So why do we need altruism?

And on the meta level, I think they may be assuming that how people behave in this thought experiment is how they'd behave in other scenarios in which case they think reds are inherently self-interested.

But no, I'm capable of being altruistic, I can just recognize that this specific situation is one where it is best to shut off the altruistic impulse.

I genuinely WANT to understand the position that allows one to pick blue believing it to be the best action.

But it seems to require that you start with premises that are completely inborn or 'faith-based.'

There's only the risk of death if people are silly enough not to pick red.

So, it's guaranteed that people will die then.

You are not showing off your intellect or your virtue.

Ever consider that might not be the point?

Everybody dies eventually. Picking blue does not mean eternal life.

OK?

Ever consider that might not be the point?

In a Twitter poll? Not even for a second.

this poll makes it obvious that the Blue-pressers are willing to risk their own wellbeing for people that are too stupid to just push the correct button

Like said below, it becomes a different thing if you imagine that everyone in some community has to make the choice, including small kids.

Would I trust my 3-year-old and 11-month-old kids to understand the subtle logic of the "everyone picks red" option, or just pick the pill that looks more like candy?

Ironically I think a kid at a certain age might cut right through the question without even blinking.

Imagine if the question were phrased thusly: "If you pick red you don't get spanked. People who picked blue get spanked, unless greater than 50% of people pick blue then NOBODY gets spanked"

Would most kids have to hear anything other than "If you pick red you don't get spanked" to immediately pick red?

Why wouldn't a red pill look like candy? Again, if you're giving a choice to an eleven month old, it's stupid.

The original poll was a simple choice in an online thought experiment that didn't say one thing about "the people in this experiment don't have the brains to come in out of the rain, so you must save them from themselves by your choice". The blue choosers then started introducing all kinds of qualifications to justify their superior virtue. Now we're down to "if an eleven month old infant in real life was given the choice of a candy or a poison pill". Come on, just tell us reds we're all devils and be done with it.

Come on, just tell us reds we're all devils and be done with it.

what's the point in this baiting?

Why wouldn't a red pill look like candy?

Did I say it wouldn't? Both might look like candy. 50/50 choice doesn't sound like good odds when talking about my child's life, though.

Come on, just tell us reds we're all devils and be done with it.

I said nothing of this sort, and find it very odd that red-pressers get pre-emptively angry over the mildest of challenges or questions around this thought experiment, considering that most of red-presser rhetoric revolves around how it's immediately and axiomatically obvious that blue-pressers are all either morons or lying virtue-signallers.

Both might look like candy. 50/50 choice doesn't sound like good odds when talking about my child's life, though.

So how does your picking blue save the kid? "Look, Junior, Mommy is picking blue so you know that one is safe". Oops, no, that's not how it works, it's "You picked the poison blue so now Mommy has to pick that one, too, and hope that enough other people pick it so we don't die".

The blue choosers then started introducing all kinds of qualifications to justify their superior virtue.

Come on, just tell us reds we're all devils and be done with it.

Nuh-uh! You're the virtue signaler! I'm rubber you're glue!

all kinds of qualifications

Is it so hard to imagine that some will misclick? There are no added qualifications. The brute reality of the poll will guarantee some choose blue by accident.

Misclicking does not send them into a blender, or the hangman's noose, or however they are theoretically supposed to go "poof!" into thin air in the thought experiment. The blue moralists, though, are acting as though "but they will DIE if they misclick, we must save them!"

No, all that happens is that they misclicked. Oops-a-daisy, but it's not like they spilled spaghetti sauce on their white shirt.

As with everything, kids are different and require a different kind of political thinking compared to adults.

Maybe I'm the complete moron, because I didn't even think about children. As someone notes below, toying with variables to make the situation more or less obvious and more or less iterative would change it in important ways.

The literal phrasing of the poll would probably exclude children, since it only talks about those voting in the poll, and presumably there wouldn't be too many 3-year-olds using Twitter (expect when someone accidentally posts awfoijgjdoindfnaofnbmadf,öd,dföl,bfbdfb,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,)

Then again, if we go by the results of the actual poll, it would have comfortably over 60% voting blue, so voting blue would be safe anyhow.

Yeah, there would probably be at least one 3-year-old though. There's only one way to guarantee everyone remains safe.

No there isn’t a way of you (the sole voter for your choice) guaranteeing everyone lives. If you vote blue you may die. If you vote red someone else may die. The only way to make sure is if enough people vote the same way but once you can allow for cooperation you tell everyone “if we all vote red no one does so just vote red.”

No there isn’t a way of you (the sole voter for your choice) guaranteeing everyone lives.

I hate this kind of turnabout. I wasn't talking about myself. I was talking about us, considering there's at least one 3 year old who makes the "wrong" choice. There's only one way to protect them.

Yes, technically speaking, without cooperation there's no way to guarantee anything. So obviously what I meant was that given a 3 year old who picks blue there's only one way to save everyone.

And I hate your kind of turnabout. You introduced the knowledge and ability to influence others into the scenario in order to “get” to your preferred outcome. If we can do that, then we can very easily influence the 3 year old to take the red candy. I have kids. It isn’t hard to convince the kid to take the red pill in this example. In fact, I think you’d be really irresponsible to get the kid to take the blue pill hoping you could get enough other people to pick blue. I know I would do everything in my power to get my kids to take red even if it meant going from sufficient blue to insufficient blue because I would not risk my kids dying.

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Yeah, there would probably be at least one 3-year-old though.

Participating in an online poll for a rationalist thought experiment? Man, three year olds these days are way more sophisticated than my time!

Bro come on. All it takes is one person to leave Twitter open, or a chance series of clicks on a computer/tablet/phone. Not that crazy.

Way to bring up all the most red pill-skewed framings of the question, and none of the opposite. Here, I'll provide what you missed.

Everyone is in a blender. If greater than 50% of people go stand on a button in one corner, those not on the button get blended. Do you stand on the button?

The plane has crashed. There are two functioning life boats. If more than 50% of people jump into the red lifeboat, though, it will swerve to the side and destroy the blue lifeboat and anyone on it. Which lifeboat do you take?

There are wolves running around eating anybody who's outside. Currently about half of our babies, small children, elderly, mentally disabled, and suicidal are getting eaten because in our initial panic to run away we left them out. If we go back outside in numbers (at least 50% of us) we can drive them back without any risk to ourselves and save all of them. Do we drive them back, or hide inside and allow our most vulnerable to be eaten?

The fact is that different framings genuinely have different correct answers. They don't always lend more "clarity" because more often than not they change the nature of the question itself to one where the answer may be different.

Like voting, your individual choice does not actually matter, but you vote with the knowledge that by doing so you are voting for everyone like you. So long as I judge the probability of >50% blue to be reasonable, I will always pick blue.

To be honest your "rational" analysis of this is lacking.

if everyone chooses Red Pill nobody dies

This is the worst part of this whole debate. I can't tell whether this is a real belief or just a justification for the real one that "I don't want to die." Obviously not everybody is choosing red. I haven't seen a single poll where less than 10% of able-minded people chose blue, not counting the countless billions who are less intelligent or possibly have not even learned to walk yet. The only scenario where everybody lives is if people choose blue.

You can even analyse it game theoretically and find that both 100% blue and 100% red are Nash equilibria, but only 100% red is stable

No, both are stable, by definition. At the margin, it's actually red which is unstable. 49.99... % red is unstable, while 50% blue is stable.

You would have to be monumentally, incorrigibly stupid to choose the blue pill (walking into the blender) here and we should expect Lizardman's constant level support for blue.

You seem to be iterating only once and declaring any further iterations on the game theory wrong and bad. Like declaring that everyone should just defect on the 99th round of the iterated prisoner's dilemma, because obviously there's no incentive to cooperate on the 100th. I understand that monumentally stupid people exist and will walk into the blender. The only way to save them is to join them, so I do so. I hope others iterate just once more, recognize that people like me exist, and decide to join me.

I'll leave you with my favorite take on this.

No, both are stable, by definition. At the margin, it's actually red which is unstable. 49.99... % red is unstable, while 50% blue is stable.

You are misusing what it means for something to be stable. A strategy is stable iff moving away from it is bad for the person who moved away from it. 100% red is stable because in such a society choosing blue is straight up suicide. 90% probability red 10% probability blue is unstable because 91% probability red and 9% probability blue is a superior strategy for yourself.

100% blue is not stable, it is only metastable since for an individual going from 100% blue to 99% blue and 1% red does not change there expectation. Indeed any blue %age above 50% is metastable, but metastability is not the same as stability (in a metastable system you get random drift, which will eventually "fall off the cliff" towards a stable equilibrium if one exists). The only stable equilibrium in this world is 100% red.

A strategy is stable iff moving away from it is bad for the person who moved away from it.

No, it's stable iff moving away from it doesn't benefit the person who moved away from it.

90% probability red 10% probability blue is unstable because 91% probability red and 9% probability blue is a superior strategy for yourself.

If you actually knew those probabilities, then 90%-10% would be stable by definition, because moving away from that (defecting to red) would not benefit you. Of course, we don't know the probabilities ahead of time, but you're the one that brought up this hypothetical.

100% blue is not stable, it is only metastable since for an individual going from 100% blue to 99% blue and 1% red does not change there expectation. Indeed any blue %age above 50% is metastable, but metastability is not the same as stability (in a metastable system you get random drift, which will eventually "fall off the cliff" towards a stable equilibrium if one exists). The only stable equilibrium in this world is 100% red.

I don't agree with your definition of stability. Even using it, though, some people value others' lives more than their own. There is no law that choosing red is positive EV for an individual. I'd argue 100% blue is more stable than 100% red, absent cooperation, because more people are prosocial and asocial than are antisocial.

The original choice was "pick red or blue". Now if it was an experiment about "if we all rush outside we have a good chance of saving the babies from the wolves because there's safety in numbers", then yeah I'd pick "rush outside". But in the original I'm picking "red pill" because there are no wolves, everyone smart enough to be able to read this poll doesn't need saving from themselves by the smarter set, and it's not a question of harming others to save yourself. If you pick red, and you pick red, and everyone in this line picks red, then all live. If you pick blue and you pick blue but the next six people pick red, you die. And that's down to your decision.

The only scenario where everybody lives is if people choose blue.

The blue versus red choice is metaphorically "do you want to be shoved out the window of a twenty storey building, or do you want to stand in the middle of the room well away from it?" What person is going to go "yes, please shove me out a window"? 'OH but if they're really stupid they will'. Well, if they're that stupid, why are they reading that particular Twitter then?

'Unless enough people pick blue, we're going to shove you out a window, but if you pick red, that won't happen' - how is this a difficult choice? By picking blue, now you're introducing the element of "uh-oh, one person picked blue, we need a lot more people to pick blue now" and nobody knows how many people are there or who picked blue. That's the problem: if there are fifty thousand people and I know that 24,999 picked blue, then clearly I must pick blue to save them. But I don't know that, so why am I immoral for picking red, if there's just as good a chance that the other 49,999 people before me picked red?

The original choice was

The blue versus red choice is metaphorically "do you want to be shoved out the window of a twenty storey building, or do you want to stand in the middle of the room well away from it?" What person is going to go "yes, please shove me out a window"?

Must I repeat myself? Reframe the question and the answer changes, as you well know.

That's the problem: if there are fifty thousand people and I know that 24,999 picked blue, then clearly I must pick blue to save them. But I don't know that, so why am I immoral for picking red, if there's just as good a chance that the other 49,999 people before me picked red?

You're not picking blue for yourself, you're picking for everyone similar to you. In other words everyone with the same reasoning process. People with different reasoning processes may come to different conclusions. So the odds that your reasoning process tips the scales is far greater than the odds that everyone with different reasoning processes picks red.

Reframe the question and the answer changes, as you well know.

Which is what the Blues are doing in order to come out ahead as the Good Guys. Toddlers in blenders and who knows what-all, when the original was simply "pick the red or pick the blue".

Reframes the question

Aha, reframing the question is a thing blues do to virtue signal!

You'd have more ground to stand on here if you hadn't just done exactly what you accuse your opponents of doing and pretended you had a point.

And I don't think things like toddlers participating is reframing the question. It's virtually guaranteed that at least one will, under the original framing of the question.

And what happens is that:

If it would be real, then I am taking option of stopping this insanity.

Also, what happens with abstain votes.

Also, what happens with abstain votes.

Lets say no abstentions allowed, you get tortured horribly until you choose if you dither. And if you still refuse a fair coin is flipped and if heads you get assigned red, otherwise blue.

Indeed this poll is equivalent to the following one

no it is not

"stay in room and keep pressing button labelled 'start blender'" would fit a bit better

Your equivalency is, "Everyone who chooses red must kill all the people who chose blue."

The original question deliberately leaves the killing to the omnipotent god of the question.

I think his is closer than yours.

Yeah, not entirely happy. But what is missing is that going red increases change of all blue voters dying.

If one lives in a high-trust society, they could comfortably pick the blue pill in expectation that blue pill, being the pro-social choice, is going to win anyhow.

Damn it, this is what is driving me mad about this stupid, stupid poll. It's the moral choice. It's the only correct answer. It's the pro-social choice.

Well, it must be lovely to be so sure of your impeccable, immaculate souls with no stains on them and no need for anyone else to ever help you because you constantly do the right thing of your own accord and so can afford to play Lady Bountiful for the idiot school inmates who need to be saved from their own bad choices. I'll be down here crying "Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me a sinner!" with the rest of the red pills.

Or they could pick the red pill knowing the red pill is also pro social.

Right, supporting freeloaders who knowingly put themselves in danger is not pro-social.

Right wing is group oriented, left wing is individually oriented. The moral foundations of the right are geared in group loyalty, authority and purity. Traditions, cultures and religions are ways of promoting group oriented behaviours. They are designed to make people take the option that benefit the group rather than themselves. left wing people are more narcissistic so it isn't surprising that they like to virtue signal about sacrificing themselves. When it comes down to making the actual choice the psychological correlates of leftism would be associated with saving oneself.

left wing people are more narcissistic

This is examining left-wing authoritarianism. The study mentions similar studies on right-wing authoritarianism finding similar results.

this seems to presuppose liberals don't make up the vast majority of this poll's respondents which... who knows? it's hard to say but if they were a representative sample of Twitter, then we'd expect red to be more common

It is a funny thing. Leftism preaches community but practices individualism. The right preaches individualism but practices community.

Argh.

Look, if I know it's a group including my demented granny and my baby nephew and the village idiot, then yeah I'll pick blue.

If I know it's a stupid online poll with no real world consequences amongst presumed rational and intelligent adults, I'll pick red.

The amount of posturing about the superior virtue of picking blue really is very revelatory about the attitudes embedded in those who like to think of themselves as smart and compassionate. You guys might want to do an examination of conscience about that.

For instance, how sure are you that you are not considered the misguided, mistaken, irrational and dementia-addled one by other people who are so sure of their superior intelligence and morality?

We already do tend to do so every single day

If they flipped the pills so that red pill was the soy, liberal, tolerant option and blue pill was the selfish one, I wonder how polling would change. “Red pill” means ‘right wing harsh truths’ (or attempts at them) pretty universally in internet culture.

It's not that hard, you can just replace the blender by dying for nationalism. Which I suspect was the idea all along.

The issue is that this setup removes any utility from the risk, which isn't how it usually works.

Still not walking in tho.

It's not that hard, you can just replace the blender by dying for nationalism.

No you can't, if 50% of people "die for nationalism" then nobody dies? At best it would be something like "willing to die for nationalism" but then you're just conflating unrelated things, especially because beliefs are much less our choice than actions are.

I did hear a similar hypothetical that was more like "you're in a shield line. So long as 50% of you don't break nobody will die." Phrased that way, not breaking seems like the right choice.

Oh come on: "If 50% of people join the motherland's army and make patriotic chants, we survive because nobody dares attack us, if less than that do, everyone in the army gets blown up. You won't get blown up if you don't join the army. Do you do your duty or desert?"

My point is there are actual benefits to cooperating and taking a risk for the collective in a lot of cases, which this setup of the prisoner's dilemma, however you phrase it, doesn't take into account because defection has no possible negative utility.

What's the name for the opposite of a Stag Hunt?

Oh come on: "If 50% of people join the motherland's army and make patriotic chants, we survive because nobody dares attack us, if less than that do, everyone in the army gets blown up. You won't get blown up if you don't join the army. Do you do your duty or desert?"

I’m telling you, this would 100% result in a different poll answer distribution when sorted by politics than the current poll in the OP’s comment.

  1. Different framings mean different things. Change the framing and the correct answer may change.

  2. Defection has the obvious negative utility of killing those who cooperate. There will always be some who cooperate, so defection not only has possible negative utility, it has guaranteed negative utility.

There is no defect here. Classically, defect means there is a lower aggregate payout whereas cooperation means there is a large payout. Here, if everyone defects you get the same payout suggesting defect isnt really defect.

Instead the question here is what option creates the highest EV. I suspect it is red.

Yeah, picking blue just straight up burns value. Those who pick it should be ashamed of themselves for putting themselves in a situation where they need to be "rescued" by lots of other people also voting blue. All this could have been avoided had they just voted red.

if everyone defects

How many times do I have to say this? It's guaranteed that not everyone will defect if the poll is large enough. So at best you should talk about "50% of people cooperating, saving everyone" vs "almost 100% of people defecting, saving almost everyone." Realistically, the best-case red scenario is much worse than the best-case blue scenario.

Instead the question here is what option creates the highest EV.

Sure.

And my guess is that something like 97%-99% of an adult population actually faced with this absurd decision would pick red and therefore it is EV negative to pick blue.

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Defection has the obvious negative utility of killing those who cooperate. There will always be some who cooperate, so defection not only has possible negative utility, it has guaranteed negative utility.

This assumes that the lives of cooperate-bots have positive utility, which I do not grant.

Different framings mean different things. Change the framing and the correct answer may change.

Yeah this is why I hate these thought experiments.

This assumes that the lives of cooperate-bots have positive utility, which I do not grant.

It assumes only that at least one such person has positive utility, or that someone with positive utility mistakenly chose blue (perhaps because they were very young, very sleep-deprived, temporarily suicidal, etc.). Seems like an extremely safe assumption to me.

Let's remove the ambiguity and say that there was a mishap at the pill factory and one of the pairs is just two blue ones.

Is it still a good idea to risk loads of people to save just one? If you change the problem that way it just becomes a bet on how high trust society is essentially.

But despite everyone seemingly wanting to jump to children and the mentally ill to justify stupid decisions, I still think the original formulation assumes someone making a conscious decision.

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I suspect most people don't fully understand problems like this and don't follow through with the thought process that everyone lives if they take red. This could be because they're not really giving a lot of thought to the question itself and are just looking at a choice between two answers, one I live, the other I might live but I'm helping other people live. If the text of the choice for red included the part that everyone also lives if they all take red the answers might end up different.

Also, there's too much baggage around red, blue and specifically around a question that involves a red and blue pill. You're just asking for people to pick an ideological side without thinking for many people not wanting to be associated with the red pill when they're not thinking too hard about it and it appears to represent only naked self-interest.

I think the moral dilemma is "Should you put yourself at risk to help people who endanger themselves foolishly?"

If you assume 20% of people will pick blue because they misunderstand the question then the moral calculus is very different.

If you assume 20% of people will pick blue because they misunderstand the question then the moral calculus is very different.

Please, please explain to me what the type of person it is that has two buttons in front of them, one which grants them a 100% chance of survival, and the other which grants some uncertain chance of survival, and then, from pure ignorance (not making any complex moral calculation) picks the second button.

Because there are a lot of other things that this person's existence would imply.

I have a genuinely hard time believing that this person exists. And if there are enough of these people who can't comprehend the question, I'm DEFINITELY picking red because they might very well be making their choice at random, in aggregate.

Please, please explain to me what the type of person it is that has two buttons in front of them, one which grants them a 100% chance of survival, and the other which grants some uncertain chance of survival, and then, from pure ignorance (not making any complex moral calculation) picks the second button.

Since we're asking what happens if this person misreads the question, we can't assume that they understand that one of the buttons grants them a 100% chance of survival.

https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/little-child-pushing-menu-button-260nw-1319473658.jpg

for one

...or anyone who accidentally presses the supposedly "bad one"

I am having a very hard time believing that there is actually anyone who is faced with two pills, one which is clearly explained to them "YOU WILL SURVIVE 100%" and intends to pick that one would accidentally screw it up at the last second.

And if we add in children who pick at random we have a new problem. IF we have a high enough number of these kids, it increases the uncertainty that enough people will end up picking blue.

Like, adding in people who can't comprehend the question posed makes it worse, not better.

For the absurd example, imagine that you play this game with 99 people who will pick at random (will literally flip a coin) and then there's you, who can make an informed choice.

You gonna bet your life on where on the probability curve they land and pick blue?

The only way to make blue more attractive to me with these added assumptions is to lower the threshhold. If blue 'wins' if 2% of people choose it, I might assume the risk.

But it just seems impossible under any fair interpretation of the hypo that you can be certain that enough people end up choosing blue to save the day, and red is inherently the certain, predictable choice because you don't HAVE to model millions of other strangers.

Hmm, when you put it like this I think using this poll would work extremely well as a political compass test for communities. Right leaning communities are going to go red while left leaning communities are going to go blue. Just increases my curiosity in how the Motte would vote as a whole.

I do wonder if they made the colors the yellow pill and the orange pill if the outcome is different. By using blue and red along with the blue pill that at a cursory level appeals to communitarian values the thought experiment is stacking the deck to get unrealistic answers.

Right leaning communities are going to go red while left leaning communities are going to go blue.

I don't think so. Rights donate more to charity and in many other ways cooperate more than lefts. This association seems to be reversed online, where at the extremes the right-wingers are very antisocial and the left-wingers are very pro social.

Right wing philosophy is “the individual is the agent and is responsible for himself which enables communities.” Left wing philosophy is that “the agent is society so it is only when the community acting together changes can there be change.”

Practically, I think that ends up with right leaning people being community focused (ie my actions damage or benefit my community) whereas left leaning people being more individually focused (ie my actions are immaterial to my communities outcome and therefore I will do what benefits me but say loudly what I think the community needs to do in order to change).

What moral position is "I want the people who walk in the blender to die"? Asking for a friend.

Small children and other innocent irrational people exist and will walk into the blender whether you like it or not. If exactly 100% of people choose red, everyone lives, while blue needs only 50% of people for everyone to live.

I don't let my 3 year old run into the street, I'm not going to let him choose the poison blue pill either.

That touches on what seems weird about the "but children" etc arguments to this. In real life, infants and small children probably try to do something that would be lethal or extremely dangerous like 20 times a day every single day. If we're now in the business of giving them quirky polls with life-or-death consequences and they're not able to be guided or advised at all, they're probably going to be dead of something or other pretty soon, if not on the first one then by the fifth or tenth.

You can't influence his decision one way or another. If you could, people could easily coordinate in other ways as well. Besides, your 3 year old is not the only one.

Why not? I reject this premise entirely.

There's no scenario where we don't make major decisions (as this would be) for our children. Whether as a parent or as a society.

Why not?

Because the premise doesn't allow it, obviously. If you reject the premise, stop arguing as if we're discussing the same premise.

The premise nowhere claims that small children make their own choices. You are modifying the premise and arguing in bad faith based on your modified premise.

The premise nowhere claims that small children make their own choices.

What it says is that "everyone responding chooses." If small children are responding, then they are the ones to choose.

I'll grant that it's not 100% perfectly clear on this point, nor does it explicitly state that coordination is not allowed, but both things are heavily implied. If you think the fact that it doesn't state "coordination is not allowed" means coordination is allowed, then that's a different premise from the commonly understood one, and we should be discussing methods of coordination rather than the game theory of the premise as stated.

I reject this premise entirely.

...

YOU'RE MODIFYING THE PREMISE REEE

Link me to one other person, here or on Twitter, who thinks the premise means people can coordinate, and I'll grant that you're not totally off-base here. Still, it's pretty obvious based on the replies that my interpretation is the commonly understood one.

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You can't influence his decision one way or another.

Then we're outside of your set-up about "will nobody think of the children?" and it's only question begging. "Oh if you don't pick this, then the small child will walk into the blender and be really horribly chopped up, but no you can't grab him or stop him or call him back as you would if you saw a real small child walking into a real blender, so are you going to walk into the blender too or are you going to light puppies on fire, you monster?"

Then we're outside of your set-up about "will nobody think of the children?"

How? Name one detail about my setup that's different from the original setup.

but no you can't grab him or stop him or call him back as you would if you saw a real small child walking into a real blender, so are you going to walk into the blender too or are you going to light puppies on fire, you monster?"

This wasn't part of the original setup. The "blender" is a metaphor. If you can coordinate at all with anyone then the whole setup is different.

People who make incorrect moral decisions that endanger their lives and require other take risks to save them are not innocent. They're guilty.

The boy who cried wolf got his just desserts when he was eaten.

People should suffer the consequences of their actions. To prevent this process is evil, for it only makes the problem worse: by arguing we should save the "innocent" by walking in the blender you've endangered more people that are going to die anyways once you run out of rubes.

When you have children you will protect them from seriously hurting themselves, no matter how much the 8 year old might deserve it for not understanding his environment properly. Sure, you'll let them get minor pains to learn how to avoid them, but you wouldn't let a wolf eat the 8 year old because he deserves it.

When you have children you will protect them from seriously hurting themselves

This is adding extra context that's not there to the problem. The people who walk in the blender are not my children. Otherwise it changes the calculus significantly and sacrifice no longer has zero positive utility for me.

What if it's not a child, what if it's some random guy you don't know?

You're assuming your own conclusion here. Blue is only the wrong choice, and only endangers people, if <50% of people choose it. Basically what you're saying is "if I'm right, then I'm right and you're wrong."

Separately, not everyone who chooses blue is making a moral decision at all. I explicitly mentioned babies, do you think they're making an "incorrect moral decision" and should "suffer the consequences of their actions"? Or have you just not thought this through?

What about the baby prisoners in the prisoner's delimma thought experiment? Introducing irrational people to this kind of game theory problem is not standard practice and amounts to inventing an entirely different question.

I responded to basically your exact comment here.

For each and every person, the only way that person can possibly be harmed is by choosing to put themselves in danger. Nobody is forcing you to put yourself in danger, and everyone gets the choice of safety.

How is choosing to put yourself in danger when you could instead choose to stay safe anything but the wrong answer? I will confidently say that playing Russian Roulette is always the wrong answer, and vehemently disagree with people like you who seem to think otherwise. I'm also happy letting people who choose to play Russian Roulette pay for their foolishness with their lives.

Me:

Small children exist

@IGI-111:

People who make incorrect moral decisions that endanger their lives and require other take risks to save them are not innocent. They're guilty.

Me:

Babies exist

@KMC:

For each and every person, the only way that person can possibly be harmed is by choosing to put themselves in danger. Nobody is forcing you to put yourself in danger, and everyone gets the choice of safety.

Babies don't have meaningful "choices". How many times do I have to say this? I don't understand how you could follow this chain of comments and not address babies at all.

Because babies are not relevant, they're just a prop you're using to tug on heartstrings.

Babies don't have meaningful "choices".

Yet they do have choices. They can choose strawberry or blueberry. They can choose blocks or stuffed animal. They can choose book 1 or book 2. They can choose to move or to stay put.

What you meant is that babies don't understand consequences. It's the consequences that make choices meaningful. And even then, I don't think you're right. Babies know the consequences of leaning over the edge, once they've fallen. They learn consequences and apply them.

Besides, if you're going to stack the deck in favor of the bleeding hearts by using children, I think the much more interesting change, instead of babies get to pick themselves essentially at random, is that they get the same results as their parents. Or, for maximum conflict, you have to pick mother or father, and the baby follows their choice. Then you're risking your child's life by picking blue, but you're also doubling your own weight.

Yet they do have choices.

What you meant is that babies don't understand consequences. It's the consequences that make choices meaningful.

Uh, right. Consequences make choices meaningful. So babies don't have meaningful choices, which is exactly what I said and exactly what I meant.

And even then, I don't think you're right.

Sure, I'll grant babies have some meaningful choices, but this isn't one of them.

Besides, if you're going to stack the deck in favor of the bleeding hearts by using children

I'm not "stacking the deck" using children. They're already part of the premise. The deck is already stacked.

I think the much more interesting change, instead of babies get to pick themselves essentially at random, is that they get the same results as their parents. Or, for maximum conflict, you have to pick mother or father, and the baby follows their choice. Then you're risking your child's life by picking blue, but you're also doubling your own weight.

I think it would be more interesting if, for everyone who chose blue, a random person died, rather than the person who chose blue.

People who don't make meaningful choices don't answer Twitter polls about ethical dilemmas.

You don't think a single person has ever misclicked in such a poll, answered without reading it, or been too young to understand it? I think that's preposterous.

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If babies pick red, they're making the immoral selfish choice. Oh no, we can't accuse babies of that, so we'll say it's okay to pick red in that case.

Come on, this is just adding epicycles to prove blue is the 'only' choice that can be made or else.

If babies pick red, they're making the immoral selfish choice.

No they're not lol. They're babies. How can a decision be immoral and selfish if you don't even understand the decision you're making?

There is no "epicycle" to the claim that some people, such as babies, will choose blue. I am adding nothing. Base reality is that some innocent people will choose blue.

What has innocence to do with it? The blue choice is lack of mental ability, it's got nothing to do with innocence or goodness. The rationale being put forward is "people too cognitively impaired or too undeveloped will make the wrong, blue, choice so in order to save them we must make the choice of blue in order to fit the parameters of this experiment".

The blue choice is lack of mental ability, it's got nothing to do with innocence or goodness.

Nobody said anything about goodness. As far as innocence, lack of mental ability is basically the definition of innocence. Look it up if you don't believe me.

The rationale being put forward is "people too cognitively impaired or too undeveloped will make the wrong, blue, choice so in order to save them we must make the choice of blue in order to fit the parameters of this experiment".

Yep.

The annoying part of debating morality is that it is indeed very presuppositional so we do need to figure out what axioms we're disagreeing on here.

I think a large part of our disagreement is that you place value on intent, while I don't. I think intent is almost completely meaningless.

Babies aren't really a good way of thinking about this problem because the whole point is to test decision making, so the actor has to understand the premise in the first place. Let's rather think about someone who's totally irrational, but can understand the premise, otherwise we're discussing some completely different thought experiment.

If that irrational person lack the instinct not to walk in blenders yeah they do deserve to die for making an incorrect decision, that's how nature works.

Now there's a separate argument to be had about whether you should try to save them through sacrifice or risk. To me, the morality of sacrifice hinges on the utility you get out of the sacrifice, which in this case is engineered to be zero.

otherwise we're discussing some completely different thought experiment

blenders

Really any deviation from the original thought experiment changes the answer. As I mentioned here an equally natural framing is that nobody dies unless >50% of people step onto the "blend everybody else" button.

I'll grant that babies should maybe be ignored, since I missed that the original sample was "everybody in this poll" rather than "everybody". Still, there is at least one person out there who chooses blue by mistake, and it's worth coordinating to save them.

If that irrational person lack the instinct not to walk in blenders yeah they do deserve to die for making an incorrect decision, that's how nature works.

What does appealing to nature have to do with people deserving things? I don't like the state of nature. I want to improve things from that state. Plenty of us would "deserve to die" for making mistakes in a state of nature, but due to the cooperation of others we live in an easier world now.

I think a large part of our disagreement is that you place value on intent, while I don't. I think intent is almost completely meaningless.

Like moral value? I'm not sure what you mean here. I definitely ascribe moral value to intent.

Now there's a separate argument to be had about whether you should try to save them through sacrifice or risk. To me, the morality of sacrifice hinges on the utility you get out of the sacrifice, which in this case is engineered to be zero.

Right, I mean, if your moral value of saving others is zero, the obvious choice is red. What else could it be? Red has a greater chance to save your own life which is all you care about. But that turns this into a moral debate rather than a game theory one. I don't share your values, so the right answer for me is different than it is for you.

What does appealing to nature have to do with people deserving things? I don't like the state of nature.

[...]

if your moral value of saving others is zero

Red has a greater chance to save your own life which is all you care about

I think I see our actual disagreement here.

I believe that one of the realities of nature that can't be escaped is the need for self preservation, and that any order we build to escape brutish nature still has to acknowledge that as a zeroth principle. Because people who don't exist do not get to make moral judgements, so existing isn't just moral, it's pre-moral.

In some sense, if you disregard self-preservation we are returned to the state of nature because pumping infinite ressources into saving people who don't care to live is not sustainable. For civilization to work, people need to not pump all the utility out of it.

Saving others can have varying levels of utility, though I understand this particular thought experiment is too vague to actually get at that, which is why people intuit different ones including on the framing.

But I think our fundamental disagreement isn't about those levels but about purely selfless sacrifice which I indeed view as immoral.

Because people who don't exist do not get to make moral judgements, so existing isn't just moral, it's pre-moral.

Taken seriously, this forbids dying for any cause, or even risking your life / shortening it by a couple of minutes for any cause. I definitely believe morality has an objective basis outside of people's minds, similar to math. Otherwise, how does morality survive at all? Even if your choices are moral when you're alive they vanish into nothingness when you die, so how are they ever moral in the first place? Realistically they are moral (or immoral) whether or not anyone is around to observe them and consider them as such.

But I think our fundamental disagreement isn't about those levels but about purely selfless sacrifice which I indeed view as immoral.

I don't think any sacrifice is purely selfless. Besides extremely evil people, even the worst that humanity has to offer shares plenty of values with me. Saving them grants me utility.

I agree we can't pump infinite resources into self-destructive people. If the threshold for blue were higher and harder to coordinate I might change my answer. But 50% is pretty attainable, and was attained in the original poll.

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To be contrarian for a minute:

100% Red and 100% Blue are indeed identical.

60% Blue is good. Everyone is alive. 60% Red is bad - it means that 40% of the population have just died horribly.

That is, the threshold for a good outcome with Blue is 50%. If Blue gets at least 51% everyone is alive and it's great. But the threshold for a non-horrible outcome with Red is much higher. Even 90% Red is still 10% of the population dying. If you gave this poll to America and the result was 90% Red, that would still be easily the worst thing to happen to America in approximately ever. By comparison: WWII killed approximately 17% of Poles, 14% of Soviets, and 8.8% of Germans. It only killed 0.3% of Americans.

How high do you need the Red percentage to be before you shrug and say, "Oh, well, acceptable casualties"? 80% 90%? 95%?

Is it lower if you think that people who pick Blue are obviously idiots and it's their own fault? Don't like it, should've picked Red? In your estimation, is picking the 'wrong' answer in a poll like this enough to condemn someone to death?

The thing is, you only need to get Blue to 50% to save everyone. That seems like a much lower hurdle than getting Red to 100%.

How high do you need the Red percentage to be before you shrug and say, "Oh, well, acceptable casualties"? 80% 90%? 95%?

If you're forcing this choice on me? 55% red. Because if 45% of people are literally too stupid to understand "pick red and live", then whatever I do doesn't matter, because even if I pick blue now and save them, the next minute they're going to wander into traffic or stick their fingers in the electric socket or think they can drink bleach and get away with it. See? I can add on conditions to retrospectively justify my choice and make me turn out to be the Superior Virtuous Gentleperson, too!

But 45% of people are not going to die, because this is an imaginary Internet poll and nobody lives, dies, or gets bunions from picking one colour over another and I refuse to be guilt-tripped. I know the difference between the real world and the imaginary, and the choices I make will be different if it's an actual real person in front of me, versus 'pretend you see a red button and a blue button in front of you'.

...I don't see the point in playing the "it's just a silly internet poll" card so early?

Yes, obviously it's just a silly poll, but if I'm going to engage with the scenario in good faith I'm going to probe my intuitions around questions like "what do I consider acceptable casualties?" or "am I more comfortable with the deaths of millions of people if they can be argued to have brought it on themselves through their own foolishness?" or "to what extent does intelligence or even just a single smart or dumb decision factor into my assessment of the value of human life?" and so on.

That's the whole point of the exercise.

I'm going to engage with the scenario in good faith I'm going to probe my intuitions around questions like "what do I consider acceptable casualties?" or "am I more comfortable with the deaths of millions of people if they can be argued to have brought it on themselves through their own foolishness?"

I'm not going to go that level of introspection over a quick'n'dirty Twitter poll. Have a sense of proportion. That's like digging out the Collected Works of Heidegger to help you decide "do you want fries with that?"

A serious question exploring moral and ethical choices? Yes, I'll do the deep thinking. An Internet Quizilla poll? Come on, now.

Why are you responding to comment at all, then?

So 65% of Twitter are cooperatebots who don't think rationally about the specifics of the choices presented? Could be worse. I for one am thankful for such people because in real life "just save yourself bro" isn't always possible.

This makes me think 65% of Twitter are very gullible and easily manipulated if you stroke their egos correctly in the direction of "I am such a Nice Person, so moral, so pro-social, so generous!". No wonder there are so many online payment scams about "buy me a Ko-fi/donate to my tip jar, I need to pay for my dying mother's operation and I'm an only child and my abusive father left us years ago and I'm currently living in a cardboard box existing on one can of cold baked beans a month".

Disagree. Picking blue is painless in the Twitter poll. There is zero harm to them. So they can posture with zero consequences.

I realise I'm being very mean and horrible, but hey, I'm a red picker so what do you expect? 😁

Yeah, posturing is what it seems to be all about. I'd be more convinced of the Ethical Upwardness if there were less "and you're a dirty mean no-good if you pick red" about it.

And I'd still rather have such choices be up to them rather than oh so rational, so actually prosocial, so non-virtue-signalling Mottizens.

I'd prefer somebody who thinks I have a brain in my head, not that I'm a dementia-patient developmentally challenged toddler who will run into a blender, so they have to tie the bib around my neck and make the White Saviour choice for me.

I have a saviour, thanks; Jesus Christ, our Lord. The salvific death on the cross is sufficient once and for always, I don't need the Twitterati to save my soul or my ass.

Good, it's not about saving you.

I don't know what people on Twitter are thinking - I suspect it's a non-representative audience. I was imagining something on the scale of a nation or the world.

My assumption is that no matter how obviously dumb the choice, any binary poll like this is going to have some significant number of people choosing each option. Is it okay to just kill Lizardman's Constant of a population? Given that picking Blue is voluntary, you might have a different calculus around that.

But my thought was that this is a question that depends very much on how everyone else is voting. My feeling is that a complete wipeout either way is fine, but realistically a complete wipeout is unlikely, and even something as one-sided as 80% Red or 90% Red is still far more casualties than I'm willing to shrug off. And if it isn't? A narrow win for Blue is fine. A narrow win for Red is the worst thing to happen to civilisation in recorded history. Even the Black Death killed, what, 30% of Europe? 40%? 60% Red is one of the worst disasters to have ever happened. Shooting for 51% Blue and asking people to cooperate seems like a safer strategy.

I feel like you're approaching this as if you have a lot more control than you actually do. If you expect 80% of people to choose red sure it's tragic that 20% of people are going to die but you can't stop that tragedy by picking blue too. You're only killing yourself

Yes, if I think the result will probably be 80% Red, then of course I pick Red myself. If this is done like a referendum with a lot of polling and a chance for campaigning, it would be very interesting and that would affect my vote.

If I had to choose completely blindly... well, that's where it would get scary.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


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