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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".
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.
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.
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?
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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.
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.
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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.
Does it matter? Deontology maybe. Really whatever your moral theory, the EV (according to your moral theory) will be paramount.
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
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.
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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.
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.
That's not my argument, which is why I added the qualifier.
You keep making claims that don’t seem to reflect reality. Knowing nothing else (ie not knowing what other people pick) it is far from obvious that blue is maximizing EV.
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