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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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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.

You say this as if it somehow contradicts anything I've said.

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.

Is it still a good idea to risk loads of people to save just one?

Many religious people, moral extremists of many types, the very elderly, and others will all choose blue to save one, yes. So now we iterate once, is it a good idea for the somewhat less moral people to choose blue to save the more moral people? I'd say so, and I'd say those two groups account for at least half already.

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