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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.
Now you're the one assuming your conclusion.
I don't believe those people to be more moral. I think the opposite actually.
But let's follow this thought. Okay you may be fine if you iterate once. What if you iterate forever? How long until the high trust society eventually collapses because people figure out they can avoid the risk entirely by shirking the norm? And once they do will you still be able to argue that the house of cards was moral?
How so? My only assumption is that some people will choose blue to try to save a single life. This is obviously a safe assumption.
OK, just substitute "moral" in my comment for "@Meriadoc's idea of moral" and it remains just as valid so long as you care about human life at all. My point is not to argue that such people are actually moral. I believe they are, but that's not what this thought experiment is about anyways. The point is that even if the premise says only 1 person will definitely choose blue, I know for a fact that more will.
This isn't iteration at all, this is just "when people think more about the question they'll come around to my point of view." I disagree.
As I've said before, my answer would change if I thought blue wasn't attainable.
This game only has two equilibriums: everyone takes blue or everyone takes red.
Are you really going to argue that the iterated dynamics make it tend towards blue? I just don't see how when it's just like the prisoner's dilemma except with no personal upside to cooperation .
You're essentially asking for people to do something that is in the group interest but against their personal interest. I don't give this social experiment more than 70 years.
There's no personal upside to defection either, assuming enough people cooperate. So yes, red is probably more stable, but blue is plenty stable so long as that's where things start.
You mean >50% of people take blue or everyone takes red.
I wouldn't say it's necessarily against personal interest, unless by "personal" you mean "interest in their own life." Iteration means you can figure out that your grandma or disabled cousin will pick blue. Maybe it's in your personal interest to keep them alive even if you risk your own life to do so.
No.
Remember, in the iterated version people make decisions based on what they think the result might be based on previous results and their impression of other people's strategies.
This is made clear at the margins, let's say that it's 50/50 exactly and it only takes one person to flip the next time to get the blue team killed. How many of the previous people in blue will still want to take blue? For this to be stable it will have to be the exact same amount or more. I don't think this is likely.
Everyone taking the same pill is stable because there is no reward to be gained by changing your choice, so everyone expects everyone else to keep picking that same pill.
60 blue 40 red doesn't have this property. Blue people can start minimizing personal risk without endangering the group if they think they'll be in small numbers doing that. This isn't stable.
It all depends on the framing. If you've declined steadily from 100% blue to 50%, yeah, staying blue might be risky. If you've gone from 100% red to 50%, There are now probably plenty of blue people who will feel comfortable joining in.
As far as the actual, Official Game Theory goes, blue and red are both stable, and not just at 100%.
60 red 40 blue has that same property. Blue people can start maximizing >50% blue risk with greater confidence their decision matters. Both colors are emboldened as the ratio gets closer to 100% either way, so both are stable.
I think this entirely depends on how we write the reward function, actually. Which I think we might be disagreeing about.
Well I think it depends on how each person writes the reward function. The original poll skewed blue, so I don't think I'm typical-minding too much by thinking many people are genuine altruists, but it's impossible to tell without a real-life exercise.
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What I mean is, take a simple set of rules and iterate over them a few times. For example:
Some amount of people are willing to risk death to save people who they think will choose blue
They choose blue. The number of people who choose blue according to this thought process grows.
Repeat.
One iteration would be running through that process once.
The iterated prisoner's dilemma is all part of one game. Repeating the poll again and again would not be the iterated prisoner's dilemma because the result of one poll would not affect the next at all--it would be part of a different game. If your overall survival depended on the cumulative result of all the polls, then that would be closer to actual iteration.
Besides that, I don't think they actually meant "repeat this poll again and again." What they said was:
This clearly implies that they're using it the same way I am, and I obviously didn't mean "repeat this poll" so I don't think that's how they meant it either.
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