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Honestly, this just goes to show me that framing is everything and I think the unnecessarily obfuscatory and slanted nature of the original wording is causing most of the controversy.
I agree with the reframe posted in the Twitter comments: "If you take the red pill, you live. If you take the blue pill and less than 50% take it, you die". If formulated in this way, there would probably be much less disagreement over the optimal solution here, and picking blue so you can also save people from their own choice to pick blue would be much less of a point of debate.
It's not my framing, it's someone else's whose I agree with (in part at least because it stresses the "personal agency" aspect behind someone selecting blue), but if framed in the way you've postulated I still think there would be less disagreement over the optimal solution. I also think "If you take the red pill, you live. If you take the blue pill and less than 50% take it, you, along with everyone else who has also taken the blue pill, die" is good wording.
I'm not allergic to altruism, but assuming no coordination and no knowledge of others' choices I seriously cannot envision a real-life scenario with actual life-and-death stakes where the majority pick blue. I've got a fairly high level of confidence that people would be rational actors in such a situation and thus consider "blue" to be suicide with no actual added benefit to anyone else.
I can't control whether others pick red or blue, and the chance of my vote making the difference between red or blue winning is extremely low. But the chance of my vote keeping me alive is fairly significant.
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But that's "everyone has to pick blue or else people die". What's the difference there from "everyone has to pick red"? You're not really giving people the choice to pick whatever colour they like, you're assuming most people will pick blue and need to be "saved from themselves" so you, Altruistic Saviour, have to pick blue also.
This isn't "everyone picks blue because they're smart", it's "majority of people pick blue because they're stupid or confused or irrational or demented so we have to Save Them From The Consequences Of Their Choice". That's... not a great look, if you have twenty people all claiming "Well, I'm too smart to pick blue, but since the other nineteen in this group are too dumb to tie their own shoelaces, I have to pick blue". So everyone thinks everybody else is stupid.
Whereas if you pick red, you're assuming everyone is "a healthy adult with no intellectual disability", since picking blue is forcing the "if fewer than 50% pick blue, people die" branch into existence, and who wants to make it so that people die as a result of their choice?
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