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After years of lurking the Motte back on Reddit and now here, this post - and related discussion - is what finally convinced me to join. I think it's a great cautionary tale that it is not sufficient to be familiar with the terms of game theory - you actually have to understand what they mean, too.
What do you think the victory condition is here? (Everyone else should be asking themselves this as well, by the way.) There are two possibilities:
Depending on which victory condition you choose, the optimal strategy is going to be different.
If you think you "win" if you, personally, survive - go ahead, take the red pill. You will survive regardless of whatever anyone else does.
If you think that "winning" in this scenario means that nobody dies, then...
Repeat after me: if your strategy can be defeated by another player changing their strategy it is not a Nash equilibrium - much less a stable one.
If the victory condition is "everyone lives", then any strategy that requires 100% of players to cooperate is a losing one. You might think that nobody has anything to gain by picking blue, but, as soon as anyone does, you have lost the "everyone lives" game.
Given that we have the actual results of a real-world poll (and another one elsewhere in the thread), we can see first hand that the theory is demonstrated by the practice - the blue-pill strategy has resulted in a win by the "everyone lives" criterion.
Therefore, the sort of strategy you advocate for this game is, in fact, an expression of what you think the victory condition is - even if you aren't aware of it, and this is borne out by the arguments being brought forth in this discussion - and, I expect, this is one of the reasons why it has generated so much emotion.
I'm sorry red-pillers, but choosing the red pill is the selfish choice, and no amount of mental gymnastics will change this. Picking the red pill is only optimal on the basis of personal survival. Indeed, if nobody picked the red pill - nobody would die.
You can try to argue - and, indeed, do - that if nobody picked the blue pill nobody would die either, but the fact that the "everyone lives" condition only requires a sufficient - rather than perfect - level of coordination on the part of blue-pillers means that if your goal is to ensure everyone's survival, you should accept the personal risk and choose the blue pill.
Going past theoretical wonkery and into the realm of real-world problems, these exactly the sort of choices that we are often faced with, and picking the pro-social option is generally the better choice, because no man is an island, and all that (unsurprisingly, the military guys in the room seem to understand this perfectly). Humans flourish in cooperating groups. Any group whose members are willing to take risks for the sake of one another is going to have an advantage against groups whose members are only looking out for Number One.
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