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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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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.

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