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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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
No, it's stable iff moving away from it doesn't benefit the person who moved away from it.
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.
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.
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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 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?
Must I repeat myself? Reframe the question and the answer changes, as you well know.
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.
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".
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.
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