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Well that is certainly one way to read it. I just wanted to be nice and make sure everyone else had enough to eat. But if you do not understand that I'm not surprised you don't understand why I would take blue either. Or really any of the choices I've made. But nevertheless I would still take the blue pill on the off chance it keeps you and everyone else alive.
Friend, you have a martyr complex. You are putting emotion above logic because it feels better to imagine saving people than to imagine them dying. But it is obviously better to not have to save anyone right? The red pill is catching a plane that arrives safely at its destination without incident, as happens hundreds of times every day. The blue pill is catching a plane that might crash because then you get to save everyone.
I full understand that if everybody picked red then everything would be fine. I also fully understand not everybody will pick red, because not everybody thinks about things the same way that you do.
The situation is there are people that will die and you can vote to save them or vote to kill them. Those are the only realistic choices.
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Okay, but again, you're misunderstanding the scenario. Everybody already has enough to eat. All they have to do is be basically intellectually competent enough to not press the "Quite possibly take my lunch away" button. If nobody takes the blue pill, then nobody can have their lunch taken away ever. It is only possible for anybody's lunch to be taken away if anybody takes the blue pill. All red guarantees ample food for everyone.
I will echo those saying that the only pill I've actually been fed reading this subthread is the black pill. The fact that there are some people even on here who are decision theory illiterate enough to actually consider the blue pill is haunting and maddening. (It might be one thing if blue pills explicitly said "Even if it means risking my own life, I want to try to save people even if they are too stupid to understand that we can all avoid any bad outcome with 100% probability by picking the red pill, even though we could all just avoid any bad outcome with 100% probability by picking the red pill.", though even that is quite stupid in my opinion, but a lot of them seem to be misunderstanding the scenario so much that they're interpreting it as a general altruism vs. selfishness hypothetical.)
Though it shouldn't be, this would be an amazing voting qualification test. In my view, you could immediately improve the world by 500 times by guaranteeing that no blue pills have any influence over anything ever.
I think the overall problem here is that the people here have discovered a "hack" where if everybody picks the answer that most people would view as the "Wrong" answer it actually ends up with a better solution than if people picked the "Right" answer. Now that is fine as far as it goes, but in order for it to work you have to assume that everybody in the world has also discovered the "hack" and then also assume they will decide that the "hack" is actually going to work.
On the first assumption I 100% disagree that should be taken for granted. For the second, I know about the hack and I don't think it would actually work because I suspect many of the people I know will pick blue.
If you don't risk having somebody eating your lunch you are never going to build a community capable of accomplishing anything. If you tell everybody "I'm willing to let the blue pill people die" you also are not going to be building a community, because you are constantly looking over your shoulder at all the people that would be happy to let you die if you picked the option they didn't deem as being the most efficient one.
Now if anyone should be keep from voting I know which group I'd pick.
If being able to apply basic logic is considered a "hack" then that's half the problem with modern society right there. If being able to deduce from "Nobody who does X will die." that everyone should do X is considered some grand feat of cognition in a particular "community", then I want no part of it, and yes I think I am willing to let its membership kill themselves (which I think will be very few people), or at least I'm not going to directly throw my body on the grenade of their stunning inadequacy.
This is utter nonsense. Nobody is being asked to solve some complex payoff matrix at gunpoint. It's literally just "Do this and nobody dies." Again, if you lack the basic common sense of a 7 year old (yes, I think many 7 year olds could get this one) to figure that out, then you are damn sure not taking my fate in your hands.
Anyway I propose a compromise. Blue pills and red pills each split off to form their own country. If you genuinely think people who want to turn basic logic into a morality play can run a country...
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So now there’s paternalism involved: someone who wants to choose for someone else because they think they know better. How will people be kept from choosing to save themselves, an armed guard to keep people from picking red?
“If you reach for red, we’ll tase you and kick you out of the choosing place, and if you try again we’ll kill you.”
Threatening people who refuse to be persuaded to trust is no way to build trust, nor is it building a community.
Blue wants to pick for themselves, for the incompetent, and for those who would pick red, to ensure that the outcome is majority blue to avoid them and everyone they care about dying. Then to avoid being called tyrants who are risking everyone unnecessarily and using force to do it, they say they’re building a community.
This kind of thinking and excuse-making is straight out of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged.”
Ah, no, if I could enact government coercion to force everyone to pick blue I would be a tyrant and wouldn't be particularly trust-building but it'd be worth it. Of course, I wouldn't do it if I wasn't confident I can coerce 50%+ of all pollsters, so the "unnecessary risk" part rings hollow to me. The unnecessary risk in that case would be refraining from coercion.
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