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I somewhat agree, but, there is the argument that getting a solid blue majority is easier than getting everyone to take red, which will never happen in any real scenario. Sure, taking blue is really dumb if you were, eg, the first person to run into a blender. But I can reframe it too: 50 people on a raft drifting into shore, one guy jumps off early so he can swim to shore early, and the captain yells "If too many people jump off early the raft will collapse." The authority figure and inaction bias both push towards a shelling point of staying put, and if someone immediately jumps off I'm gonna think he's a jackass who could've killed someone.
I can't help but notice this is like a platonic respectability cascade, and is also really controversial just like respectability cascades: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/give-up-seventy-percent-of-the-way As a reminder, this is where something innocent, like shortening Japanese to "Jap", is perceived as signaling something bad the speaker, leading to a cascade whereby it does start to signal something bad because only the actual bad people are willing to keep doing it.
We could all ignore the blue pill, but as soon as a majority people do it eventually it does become selfish not to. I can see how it has the dynamics of a toxic respectability cascade: I don't think anyone thought blacklist was racist until that paper in 2018, people looking to create a moral dilemma they can be on the right side of spread it, until actual good people start believing it and suddenly I'm in the most heated argument I've ever had with my (now ex) gf.
In the original poll I picked red, then switched to blue in follow up polls when it felt safe, and my groupchat went 6 - 1 blue. Unkilled so far across all of them, and never chose red in a blue majority poll since the first one. So, I'm not dying on any hills here. But like in the Scott Alexander article, I'm at least not going to be one of the first to join some destructive cascade.
Not giving a concrete number here for the raft collapsing gave me an idea.
What if the chance of death for blue pill-ers was a variable?
That is, what if the situation was:
Everyone has to pick red or blue.
Once everyone has chosen: Blue's chance of death = percentage of people who picked red. Everyone knows this in advance. No conferring.
In this variant, the more blues you have, the better the chance of everyone surviving, but it is NEVER guaranteed. On what probability would you feel uncomfortable wagering your life to incrementally increase both the potential death toll and the likelihood of avoiding that toll?
The highest expected death toll in your scenario is when the reds and blues are even. Assuming I'm completely altruistic and just want to minimize the expected number of deaths then you would want to choose whichever side you expect to be in the majority. Expected deaths are maximized in a split vote at 25% expected dead.
If you think both are as likely then it doesn't matter what you pick.
I'd pick red, because I would expect people to be at least a little selfish and red is the stable equilibrium in the scenario where at least one person is even the tiniest bit selfish and I know I am that person. So, the blues deserve to die even in the case where I expect to be the only red, because they are so stupid as to pick the wrong equilibrium.
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