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Yes, but if we don't know how many of these players there are, this makes the goal of getting to the 50% threshold even less likely.
If it's 99 irrational players and you, are you going to pick blue to mildly increase the chances that everyone is saved even though in a large proportion of those scenarios you die just by random chance?
My position is that I simply don't know that there's anybody picking blue for innocent mistake reasons. That number could be zero, indeed.
I think that it doesn't require perfect game theory knowledge to see a button that says "100% chance of survival" and just pick that.
So I'm not going to put myself in need of saving to help some theoretical person in need of saving who may not exist.
That's literally the blue position as you've stated it: Imagining a guy who picks blue, then picking blue to save that guy. Without actually knowing if he exists.
Well, are we going by the original premise, or by a hypothetical game based loosely on the premise? The original premise is that everyone who responds to the poll gets a choice. We've expanded that a bit and said "what if this poll grew quite a lot" and mostly left the modifications there, which I think is a good place to leave it.
So who responds to useless Twitter polls? Lots of regular people, plus I think occasionally a few kids hitting buttons randomly on their parents' devices. I believe it to be virtually guaranteed that, given a poll size of a few billion people, there are a few small children who have answered the poll by accident and gotten involved. But putting that aside, people are just really dumb.
45% of Americans believe in ghosts. 13% believe in vampires. Americans on average rate at 253 on the numeracy scale, which means nearly half of our adults are incapable of doing things like calculating the gas costs of a car ride. Scientologists, flat earthers, schizophrenics, etc. all exist and cannot neatly be dismissed.
Even if you truly think the very dumbest, most illogical person will still intentionally pick the red option (which btw isn't so neatly labelled as "100% survive"), there's still the question of whether that person with their limited capacity thinks there's an even dumber person out there who picked blue by mistake. Blue is happening, whether you like it or not. Whether it's happening for "innocent mistake reasons" is I guess up to you, but I certainly wouldn't blame 70 IQ people for not perfectly modelling a somewhat complex game.
I hope I would, but in the end all I care about is that people acknowledge that there's somebody out there who will choose the blue pill through no fault of their own. The game theory from that point on is just a useless thought exercise, but it's driving me crazy that everyone seems to be modelling the standard US population as perfect game theorists and proceeding from that assumption. In no other context do we grant people's intelligence nearly so much charity as when we're trying to deny any responsibility for the outcomes of their decisions.
I can acknowledge that there's a chance such a person exists in the game.
If the blue side can acknowledge that there's a chance that such a person does not actually exist in the game, since we don't have that information at the time we make the decision.
But if we've acknowledged such a person exists, it suggests that we should be designing our systems specifically to keep these people VERY FAR AWAY from any buttons that might hurt them or others.
And I think the uncomfortable implication, which blue-pickers will have to deal with, is that there may be a lot of these people who THINK of themselves as rational and intelligent, and will insist on being included in future decisions too.
(Yes, this is going towards an analogy about voting, in real life)
If your theory is:
Then I am going to insist that if blue meets its threshold. and these people survive, we're going to have to take steps to forbid them from being involved in such decisions in the future for the sake of everybody else.
I remind you, my theory is that the vast majority of people are both intelligent enough and self-interested enough to pick red/survival when presented with the choice in a vacuum.
Yours is that there are dummies who will do stupid things like pick blue without thinking.
If I accept your theory, we are now left with the question of what to do about those dummies.
I'll acknowledge there's a chance, but I think it's low enough to be negligible, even if we grant that red is the objectively correct option.
I think "vast majority" is highly debatable given the results of the one poll that we have on the matter. And the existence of dummies (including the very young) to me morally justifies blue. I want to save the dummies. I have enough faith in humanity to think it's worth the risk.
There's more than just that at stake though. Humanity is billions of people with different values and strategies. On the antisocial side, there are probably a good few people who actively want others to die, and then another good few who wouldn't accept any risk to their own lives in exchange for any amount of others' lives saved. The ratio of [value of own life]:[value of another's life] will be, for different people, anywhere from 1:0 to -1:1. (Anywhere from not valuing others' lives at all at 1:0, to not valuing your own life at all in comparison at 0:1, to actively wanting others to die at -1:1)
So as soon as a single dummy chooses blue, you're not just dealing with that dummy, but also the portion of people willing to sacrifice themselves for an infinitesimally small chance to save another, or just willing to sacrifice themselves to avoid moral culpability for another's death. So now we have 1 dummy plus at least a few thousand of the most stupid/altruistic (depending on your perspective, or maybe both) people around.
From there I think the blue pill can only expand. First, a dummy takes the pill. Then, a few people throw their lives away "saving" the dummy. Now some more extremely altruistic people, but not quite altruistic enough to throw their lives away for just one person, enter the pot. And so on. Depending on the distribution of values in the population, maybe it peters out quickly, or maybe it accelerates towards majority blue. As blue approaches 50%, the marginal person deciding whether to join becomes less altruistic, but the level of altruism required to find joining a good option decreases as well. The question is just which decreases faster.
If you think those altruistic people should die, then sure, red pill it is. Otherwise, I think the strategic decision depends on your estimation of humanity's altruism curve.
As far as voting, I definitely agree that in a vacuum there should be an intelligence test. However, taking it a little bit further, I'm uneasy granting the government the ability to decide who chooses the government. Every other power we've granted the government has been used against us. Imagine if we created voting intelligence tests, but unless every single different ethnic group performed equally on them, they were deemed racist and had to be rewritten. The only way I can think of to create a "fair" test would be to go the college route, include an essay portion, and then basically grade the essays solely on how many racial markers they include. We'd probably end up with some horrific amalgam counterproductive to everybody except those already in power.
I don't say that red is objectively correct, just for the record.
I in fact just think that red is correct from the subjective perspective of a person facing this decision.
There are in fact scenarios where choosing blue is 'objectively' correct. I just don't think anyone has the information necessary to make an objective decision.
I want to save dummies.
I think the fact that there are dummies participating in the game makes the game too risky to take chances on.
Here's my ongoing problem. There's absolutely no way to convince others that you will ACTUALLY pick blue just because you say you will.
So you can't really be sure, at decision time, whether you're going to make the threshold. And this should induce some doubt, fear, and discomfort. Which you can resolve by picking red.
So we've got the following factions:
A) Avowed red-pickers who will pick red in almost all cases.
B) Dummies who pick blue without thinking about/understanding the consequences.
C) Dummies who pick red without thinking about/understanding the consequences.
D) Avowed Altruists who stick with their convictions and pick blue despite the personal risk.
E) "Coward" altruists who think they will pick blue, but have ultimately panic/doubt and pick red.
I suspect that the Combined forces of D) and B) will not end up, in most cases, being sufficient to pass the threshold, and instead we get a mass tragedy where 10-30% of the players die, while trying to save the <5% dummies.
And I'd be very concerned if we consider an additional faction:
F) Evil anti-altruists who are actively trying to maximize death toll and will convince others to pick blue while planning to pick red themselves.
There's one possible faction that might help the blue side:
G) Bleeding-heart red-pickers who have a crisis of conscience and pick blue despite the personal risk.
But I admit I cannot fathom the mindset that would allow one to do this.
For your bet to be sensible, you have to believe that there are enough avowed altruists to take the total of blue over the threshold, likely with only the help of an indeterminate number of dummies who also picked blue.
I can't see how this bet is worth making, when the penalty for miscalculation is making the death toll 3-6 times worse!
In fact, I expect MOST altruists will end up being coward altruists when actual death is on the line.
ALL of humanity? So every single Sub-saharan African? Every Han Chinese? Every person on the Indian subcontinent, every Ethnic Russian? Every single literal sociopath walking the planet?
Man, I don't know how you get the idea that 50% or more of the global population is going to put their lives on the line for people they don't know.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/self-reported-trust-attitudes
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-agreeing-most-people-can-be-trusted-vs-most-people-would-try-to-take-advantage-of-you
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-agreeing-most-people-can-be-trusted-vs-gdp-per-capita
It's a beautiful dream, but the hard-headed reality as I see it is that you should take the pill that avoids having to rely on the altruistic tendencies of strangers.
Yes, this is a question that has faced political scientists for centuries now. How to create a government that doesn't overstep the authority it has been assigned, and how to stop it from either being captured by sociopaths and/or destroyed by dummies.
Yeah, those links are pretty compelling. I totally understand why people would choose the red pill. Personally I still hope I'd choose blue, but in the end it's just a thought experiment not really worth devoting more time to.
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