This is like a prisoner's dilemma, but with no payoff for the risky option.
In a prisoner's dilemma, you can choose a risky option (stay quiet), but the potential reward is that if the other prisoner also stays quiet then you both go completely free. But if one prisoner instead speaks up and accuses the other prisoner, the accuser gets a short sentence and the one who stayed quiet gets a max sentence.
But in this scenario, there's no payoff whatsoever for the risky option (pressing the blue button). 100% of people choosing blue and 100% of people choosing red lead to the exact same outcome. So why would it ever be rational to choose blue?
This "dilemma" would make more sense if getting over the 50% blue threshold caused some additional positive outcome, like world peace or a cure for cancer.
The downside of redding is that some portion of the world probably dies and you now have to live in that worse world that if you and 50% of the rest of the world has just blued, would not have happened.
I'm wondering if it's really the framing of the problem that's inflating the number of individuals responding with blue (similar to certain confusingly-worded ballot measures).
Suppose the problem were worded in a more concrete way: "I have a large container ship that I'm draining the ballasts out of tomorrow. If less than 50% of <whatever population we're working with> get on the ship, it will capsize and everyone who chose to get on it will die. You can choose either to get on the ship (blue button) or refuse to (red button)."
Would one hold a person guilty for not getting on the ship? Would a perfectly empathetic person even board that ship?
Of course the framing affects how people vote. The thought experiment demands we use the framing as given. Some people might reason themselves into your analogy, others won’t.
So is your general take on the problem that because the way it's worded (blue => "everyone survives", red => "only those who press red survive"), enough people would choose blue that therefore the empathetic/moral thing to do would be to also choose blue to save them? I can get on board with that line of reasoning
In the Slashdot days, I suspect the weight of views would be on the side of "remove the warning labels, let Darwin sort it out." Interesting change in "hacker" culture.
Physician assisted suicide is legal in some places.
There are some people very upset that physician assisted suicide is legal anywhere.
People may pick blue wishing to die. People advocating others to pick blue are either would-be serial killers or would outlaw physician assisted suicide given the chance.
I wonder if red choosers really don’t understand that they are choosing to live in a world where half of all people, the more selfless half, are dead. It’s like living through a nuclear war except all of the nice people are gone, not just a random sample
I guess you base that surprising "half" on the transparent analogy with politics, and so you think real-world Democrats will press blue to assert their Democrattiness. This is probably true. However, since this is the internet, and being a Democrat is associated with being online and living in a city, there are probably more than 50% blue-pressers, as shown in the poll. Just like in the real world, you won't change that ratio whichever way you vote in the poll. If swaying opinion is within a voter's control, then your "choosing" is meaningful but the "half" becomes meaningless. If swaying opinion isn't within the voter's control, it's "choosing" that becomes meaningless, and the fate of the half is already sealed by cultural forces beyond our control.
I disagree that the hypothetical maps onto politics. Voting for democrats is mostly a vote for someone else (billionaires, etc.) to shoulder additional burdens to achieve some positive end. By contrast, this game involves serious risk to one's self and family. Lots of people would vote to raise corporate taxes to increase funding for schools in Baltimore. But those people aren't going to move their kids to Sandtown to help increase the property tax base.
I think if you played the game for real, blue would get maybe 5% of the vote, tops.
If we imagine people will ignore their real-world political tribalism:
Voting blue is voting to possibly die, either because you want death or in risky solidarity with others who voted to possibly die, who may have chosen by mistake. Voting red is voting for those interested in death to die, along with those who chose blue by mistake, and along with anybody who voted blue in support of those who voted blue by mistake.
So we can have a blue campaign that says "we must not allow even one voter to die, we must all pull together and vote blue", and a red campaign that says "please don't be a giant crowd of idiots who risk death, just accept that maybe two voters aren't going to make it because one was depressed and the other had an involuntary hand movement, and everybody else play it safe and vote red".
This is a ridiculous situation, and Jonathan Swift unfortunately died in 1745, so the best commentary I can offer is "I don't know".
The end of the article mentions it. Some people are not purely rational decision makers, some people are altruists who know others are not purely rational, etc.
Maybe people who choose blue do so because they assume there’s some kind of monkey paw involved in the choosing the red option, like your wife and kids die or something like that
Same as with the original dilemma. Most people are not sociopaths and will choose to cooperate with empathy for everyone else. That's just how species survive and adapt. (1) Alternatively, some people believe that sustained cooperation is in itself a sustained equilibrium. (2)
Most of the world is not as individualistic as Silicon Valley engineers believe in their own ivory towers after decades of reading Ayn Rand.
Blue side definitely includes the population of people that would rather die than live in a world without blues and fully understand the consequences of that choice.
On the other hand, maybe a world where everyone who is bad at game theory is dead is a better world to live in, regardless of how nice or empathetic they are.
The “chose blue” option weaponizes empathy to get people to make a counter-productive choice. If everyone follows their own rational self interest, then everyone wins.
Yes, the selfish-minded would end up with more selfish-minded people, and they'd be confused why their "low trust society" became even more low trust overnight.
Confusingly, though, as you are of course a nice person, if you vote red you'd demonstrate that some red voters are nice, and then the choice is less severe. Then voting red is like "I embrace humanity, warts and all", while voting blue is like "I cannot tolerate sharing the planet with anyone even slightly impure".
"Empathy" isn't a binary in this context. You can exercise empathy and aid your community by making sure everyone you know votes red. That's the kind of cooperation that humans have evolved with. What you're talking about is undifferentiated, universal empathy, where someone would be willing to risk the lives of those close to them for a greater chance to help those who are outside their immediate reach to persuade.
I suspect if you played this game, lots of tight-knit, high-cooperation groups would undertake coordinated campaigns to ensure the survival of their members by ensuring everyone votes red.
I don’t think short order cooks are know for being that especially emphatic. Along with most of the folks who “do stuff”—build roads, maintain power lines, etc.
There's actually many scientific studies which tend to show that empathy is inversely correlated with wealth. That's popular knowledge as old as class war, but it seems there may be scientific evidence to support that.
but why would anybody choose blue? there is no moral benefit to doing so.
If you altered the game to say that only some fraction of the population get the choice, and everyone who doesn't get the choice is assumed blue (or, is killed if less than 50% of voters choose blue) then there's some question to be explored here. But at it stands there is literally no reason to choose blue.
Choosing red is choosing to survive knowing that there will always be people who choose blue, potentially an amount that would mean you don't survive if you didn't take explicit action against it.
They didn't cause the peril, but knowing that their choice is possibility, if I don't make a decision to protect myself now their decisions may then be the cause of my continued not-survival.
To me, the whole point of the riddle is that it reveals the most internal bias towards either yourself or others, meaning that you do things for society or for yourself. Blues don't understand reds, reds don't understand blues. The bias is invisible to the self but it is clearly there given the huge contrast in the opinions of people.
You fail to see how anyone could choose blue, even though there are plenty of people on the internet and even in the comments here who are stating they would choose blue?
Depends on the scenario… or the number of people in the experiment. A sufficiently large number of people will guarantee votes in both bins. The specific scenario (reading this outside of a vacuum) will also have knock-on effects.
Eg: reading this into the current political landscape in the US vs reading this into another toy problem about jumping off a cliff or not will have very different outcomes and ethics.
The article makes a good point with their reframing.
"Give everyone a magic gun. They may choose to shoot themselves in the head. If more than 50% of people choose to shoot themselves, all the guns jam. The person also has the option to put the gun down and not shoot it."
The "dilemma" is asking to what lengths we should go to save people choosing to commit suicide, and does that change when they are unintentionally choosing suicide due to being "tricked" into it.
Practically at least one person will choose blue for lulz or curiosity or as a moral compass. Shall we punish them? How does it affect survival of whole population in a long term?
There’s a moral benefit to choosing blue if you think there’s a chance that the end result will be split 50-50 and you’ll be the deciding vote between a blue majority and a red majority.
If everyone picks red everyone lives, nobody needs saving by picking blue. Picking blue obliges others to pick blue to prevent your death, risking their own life in turn. Red is the moral option.
There is no topic in which you'll get 100% of people to agree with you, and this is no different. There will always be people who choose blue. Arguing that you could ever get 100% of people to pick red is a coping mechanism to deal with the knowledge that your choice to pick red will result in some deaths (i.e., unless blue wins).
That isn't to say I categorically judge anyone who would choose red.
If there's good reason to believe a majority and especially a supermajority would choose red over blue, then choosing red is indeed the only rational choice, and convincing overs to do the same is the only way to save lives.
What I like about the question is that it can be used to measure whether a society is low trust (majority red) or high trust (majority blue).
However, where I take issue with the article is the assertion that it's impossible to get a blue majority, especially in the face of polling that suggests such a majority already exists. The article's claim that choosing red is the only moral choice seems at best to be self-delusion.
The utility of choosing red and the morality of convincing others to follow suit maximizes the larger the currently expected pool of red gets, sure. However, while choosing blue has less and less personal downside the greater the expected majority of blue there is, similar to red, the morality of choosing blue maximizes the closer you get to an even split, since it's the product of the potential lives saved by going blue and the likelihood your individual vote will push it over the edge.
Personally, I'd choose blue. I'd rather sacrifice myself than be party to the deaths of billions of people, so if there's even some hope at convincing the majority to go blue, I'd feel obligated to stay with it even if pre-polling suggests things initially tip toward red. I'd also be a bit wary of living in a society now devoid of anyone willing to self-sacrifice. I'm not convinced most people choosing red give that any thought.
> However, where I take issue with the article is the assertion that it's impossible to get a blue majority, especially in the face of polling that suggests such a majority already exists.
The people saying they'd vote blue would never actually do it. People support lots of altruistic things in the abstract, but almost nobody does it when it involves real risk and sacrifice. The cost of saving a kid in Africa by donating malaria medicine and insecticidal nets is only about $5,000. How many people do you know who will cancel their Hawaii vacation and donate that money to an African charity?
Every time you choose to take a vacation, or get a tricked out Macbook Pro, etc., you are in a real way choosing to allow some kid in Africa to die. But you do it anyway.
You're thinking of this like a game where the only point is to "win". That's not how this would actually work in practice.
Blue is the only moral and logical choice. If red gets over 50% and you picked it, therefore contributing to the "red" outcome, you are now effectively a murderer. Plus you now get to live in a world where everyone else alive are sociopaths that picked red, where everyone with a conscience is now dead.
You also can't count on everyone picking red, or "if you picked blue, then you voted for suicide".
It's reasonable to assume that, leading to the button press event, the usual low-trust, "every man by himself" types will rally for red, with the usual excuses, where high-trust societies will make it clear that it's your moral duty to pick blue, to get the votes to the 50% threshold and ensure no one dies. Around the world there would be debates nonstop that would permeate every social circle and families. You'd have huge arguments where the typical selfish types would scream at their family members "how dare you say you're going to press blue, do you want to leave your poor mother alone without their only child?", only pushing red-leaning voters more into red and blue-leaning voters more into blue.
Plus, if you look at the possible outcomes:
- Red wins, you picked red: Depending on where you live, a reasonable portion to the large majority of the population is now dead. The ones alive have, by definition, a strong bias towards individualism and noncooperation. It's extremely likely civilisation will collapse. Pick your favourite fictional dystopia and you might have a reasonable chance of it actually coming somewhat real.
- Red wins, you picked blue: You are now dead, but at least you don't have to live in the world above.
- Blue wins, you picked blue: Things carry on as normal and your conscience is safe in knowing that you didn't vote to kill and that over 50% of your fellow humans also didn't vote to kill.
- Blue wins, you picked red: Things carry on as normal, but you now have a guilty conscience, or, if your vote was made public, people around you know you would have killed them to save your skin.
By picking red you didn't contribute to anything at all, this button does absolutely nothing in practice. If you remove the red button, leaving the choice between pressing blue and not participating at all, the choice to not participate seems quite obvious. The red button adds some "weight" to the decision, but it's materially the same
You're ignoring the dimension of universalism versus insularity. In practice, high-trust, high-cooperation communities are also insular. They cooperate within their community, but not people outside their community. Those communities can ensure the survival of their members by using their social infrastructure to ensure everyone votes red.
Assuming that the red/blue choice doesn't have a theological valance, you'd have a lot of tight-knit Mormon, Muslim, and Orthodox Jewish communities surviving in the red scenario. I suspect also all the highly authoritarian Asian countries.
That's still not really a dilemma. It would be a dilemma if it were up to me to save those people who choose blue. But it's not up to me - it's up to a massive gamble that over 50% of people (over 4 BILLION people) will vote with me as well. Like... huh? Are we being serious here? We want to play poker with the lives of billions?
Maybe if the required percentage was lower this would compute better in my brain lol
Also interesting how the behavior of the repeated prisoner's dilemma differs from the repeated red/blue game. The repeated prisoner's dilemma converges to an optimal strategy of "tit for tat" - you signal your conditional cooperation, but also punish defections. The repeated red/blue game converges to an optimal strategy of always choosing red. The blue-pressers will most likely be wiped out in the first round, and if they are not, they will be wiped out in some round in the future, leaving only red-pressers left in the population.
It is a dilemma because pressing blue or red reveals about your political orientations and your inner empathic responses (i'm assuming both are correlated). Not everyone is wired the same or agrees on politics.
Though in a sense, i agree it's not really a dilemma because only sociopaths pick red in real life. See also intense and spontaneous cooperation in times of crisis (catastrophe, war, etc). See also research on mutual aid as key factor in species development: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_Aid:_A_Factor_of_Evolut...
Nah pretty much everyone picks red if it was a real scenario. It's also bizarre to call everyone picking red a sociopath because they don't want to gamble their life on some naive and idealistic view of humans.
In The Prisoner's Dilemma, the point is that the best option (Both Cooperate) only works if people are willing to work together. It almost always ends up in the worst option (Both Defect). What this points out is that purely selfish actions can lead to non-optimal results for both the collective and the individual.
This expands on The Prisoner's Dilemma by increasing the population and increasing the stakes. We're still thinking about cooperate/defect actions, but we're also forced to acknowledge that not everyone is a rational actor and we cannot relay on the all-defect option as would be the expected outcome of The Prisoner's Dilemma.
Exactly, if choosing blue would allow you to wear a blue badge which would raise your happiness level or otherwise affect your utility function, then it might make sense. Otherwise it just doesn't.
The variation I like is: regardless of the outcome, red choosers are forbidden from performing manual labor. You can tell a lot about someone who chooses that button.
> red is for people who live in this world and accept it
Red is for people who don't think beyond the end of their nose. Okay, you're very smart and understand statistics, but what about the following groups: friends, family, spouses? If they don't pick red, and they die, would you say life is completely fine because there's less "dumb" people or would you possibly think: "hmm, it kinda sucks that they died, maybe I should've picked blue?"
GP is correct that red is the anti-social / myopic option.
Because most people have empathy and collective consciousness. Apart from ultra-capitalist individualists, most people choose trust and cooperations, because we're hard-wired for that and that's how species develop and thrive (see also, science).
Technically correct, which is the wrong kind of correct. That's an individual framing of a collective problem which fails to capture the social and political ramifications, and all the empathy and solidarity associated with the choice.
They’re different scenarios. The prisoner’s dilemma is purely selfish. How do I maximize my own return? Cooperation is an option, but it’s still about maximizing your own return. This scenario leaves it open for people to choose to act selfishly by maximizing their own return, or selflessly by attempting to got maximize total return for everyone. But the choice required to maximize total return isn’t clear.
2. People who can read, but are too dumb to model or care about other people pick red.
3. People with enough intelligence for basic cognitive empathy pick blue.
4. People a little smarter and think through game theory overall pick red, and think they are smart for doing so.
5. People smarter than #4 and capable of seeing the big picture realize they don't want to leave people who choose #1 and #3 dead, so they pick blue.
6. People who realize the game theory optimal strategy is to announce you're pressing blue and convince everyone else to press blue, but privately press red.
There are probably more layers to this but the whole debate involves people getting upset at each other and accusing people of being in groups they are not. Red group #4 accuses blue group #5 of being #3 (not thinking beyond basic cognitive empathy). Blue group #5 accuses red group #4 of being group #2 (too dumb to model how others act). It's almost a perfect ragebait question.
As for which camp I am in, I am pressing blue and think you should too.
The framing in terms of colors helps the reader to interpret the thought experiment in terms of "groups" or "teams" — as if there's a "blue team" that you can join by helping, and help by joining. Many readers will quickly [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroop_effect ] intuitively choose to join the blue team, and then rationalize their choice as a strategy to help their blue teammates.
But in fact the thought experiment doesn't say there are teams or groups at all! The reader imposes that part on their own, unconsciously at first, because of the description's emphasis on colors.
I predict that running the same Twitter poll with flipped colors — so that red means "I die, unless a majority of my fellows pick red" and blue means "I survive no matter what" — would yield a majority for blue too. What was previously justified as the "virtuous" choice (blue) would now be justified as the "only intelligent" choice (blue).
Your entire logical chain, and your self importance, well, it explains why I'm always picking red. If you win and most pick blue, I'm safe, otherwise, I'm also safe.
You get to feel intellectually superior choosing the only option that can lead you to die. The simple answer is everyone should pick red.
The simplest answer is that everyone should pick blue, actually.
This is because choosing blue results in no consequences, but choosing red does result in consequences. Why not choose the simple option? It's literally the "no consequences" button.
Seems like these reds are overcomplicating a simple question.
The framing leads many people to pick blue for its altruistic framing. Enough, in fact, that 50% quorum is honestly not difficult. A lot of red-advocates seem to have a False Consensus Effect going where they're convinced way more people than in reality will interpret this "dilemma" as "do you step in the human grinder in hopes of jamming it", and act accordingly.
A 70% or 90% requirement, or just explicitly framing it as "do you step into the human grinder" would make it vastly easier to aim for 100% red, but we're dealing with the literal words of the "everyone lives button" here.
(6) isn't correct. Left alone, everyone rational would pick red because it's the only logical option. You trying to convince them otherwise might end up getting 49% of the population killed.
You should try to get everyone to pick red, not blue.
Since if a rational actor would understand that the group can avoid ever dying to this game by simply choosing blue. There is no consequence for choosing blue - but there is a consequence for choosing red.
Also, regardless of these specific consequences, people who are rational/ethical will by default choose blue because it is a good color.
There are two globally optimal solutions to this problem: > 50% pick blue (saving everybody), and 100% of the people pick red (saving everybody).
There is only one Nash equilibrium, which is for everybody to pick red. This is also strictly dominant for each player (if they choose red, they have a 100% chance of surviving, while if they choose blue, they only survive if > 50% of other people also choose blue). Knowing this, every participant has an incentive to choose red.
Only irrational people will pick blue. Let's say that's ~3% of the population. Trying to get another 47% of the population to pick blue risks losing all of them as well. That's not ethical.
People's "by default" behavior will never define what is rational. You don't do polling to choose rationality.
If there is a game in which you choose between two buttons, you know everyone will get this same choice, and one button says that you definitely live and the other button says that there's a chance that you will die, adding more rules to the "maybe death button" can not make it a more rational choice.
This is actually an experiment that I would get behind doing in real life. I will pick the red button. We could do it every morning.
There are enough collective action problems with real and obvious benefits leading to catastrophe without the need to create more unnecessarily, or to have any confidence in in a world full of strangers' collective ability to solve them. Campaigning for blue is actually murder; you've encouraged a situation that may result in the deaths of 49% of the population.
You've structured ways to think about the problem in a hierarchy of intelligence, which is a classic economics mistake. People are not rational actors, and the primary factors determining who pushes the button will be self-preservation or group-preservation. Emotional factors.
Also, I think that's a simplistic view of intelligence.
Not to be political but we literally vote blue and red in politics and that can sometimes kill people literally in wars and some die silent deaths because of the impacts of their policies.
I would say that its hard to underestimate the social estimates of these things. A person who will genuinely be impacted by it themselves would fall into these traps more than one might think. History has many examples of fascism that some suggest that these periods of turmoil are the norm rather than exception.
Once again an obligatory message about how the world faces some genuine issues but instead of fixing them as a civilization, We would much rather prefer to have scapegoats and this goes both ways and might be true in a certain way and at a certain path both sides are too extreme to ever collaborate for the most part that a nation of once great strength might die a slow exhausting death if nothing changes.
I have come to the realization, The world has always been like this and it might always be like this. Its messy but also one can imagine this as a side effect as the mere coexsistence of our species in such massive numbers might demand polarization.
Some people create initial changes (for greed, genuineness etc.)
people then follow it (true belief)
people then meet other people and become friends with them and create a community.
new people are born or who change because of the community aspect (Since most things are nuanced, it is easy to frame anything and sometimes everything into such communities.)
The original people who made the thing dies/are out of power and new people from the community join.
these communities gain influence and decide the decision making but the heads of such communities are prone to narcissism or any other ways to draft as much as attention as possible as it seems that all attention is (good attention??)
More corruption follows, even the people of community are impacted and they might hear criticisms but the lock-in is too much. Stockholm syndrome.
Everyone else face the consequence and someone new creates a new movement and create another set of intial changes. Competition between multiple colors follows, we also see cooperation between red and blue to prevent outside competition.
In such sense, change creates change and cycle repeats. It is up to our interpretation on if there is any idea itself which can remain logical if its implementation or implementors get corrupted in a sense similar to erosion of the main values.
more than anything, humanity wants a community. a human somehow wants acceptance and validation for himself and he is selfish in the sense that he will put a blind eye sometimes if he isn't virtuous to damage outside his house (sometimes inside as well) and he wants a community because that is the only way he functions within a society of millions and billions while monkeys cant operate on more than hundreds.
More than a political critique, my point is, we should be more aware of this human tradeoff from empirical evidences and open up this blind spot and perhaps be more aware about it.
You're missing the seventh group: trolls/assholes who will always press red but try to convince/muddy the waters about the blue button aiming to get a not-insignificant amount of <50% blue pushed to get people killed.
Prime candidate pool: 4chan.
If the question was restricted to local communities with 0 internet access, I would be more inclined to press blue.
> 6. People who realize the game theory optimal strategy is to announce you're pressing blue and convince everyone else to press blue, but privately press red.
A lot of this analysis depends on accurately guessing how people will react, so it's probably hard to say any strategy is game theory optimal without a lot of unrealistic simplifying assumptions.
In a world where you're able to convince a lot of people anything, it might better to convince everyone to press red. If it looks like 99.99% of people will press red without your influence, you're probably best off spending your time convincing the .01% who might press blue not to do so.
It also has the upside of not making you a dirty liar. I wonder, what would Kant think about this hypothetical?
Missing the layer where blue is my favorite color and therefore I will always choose blue. From this perspective, all other reasonings lack basic empathy and/or intelligence.
We learn something about humanity based on the results of the poll. It's naive to think that 100% of people will press the red button. Some people will die if red wins. I think pressing red is selfish and violent, in that it can result in the death of human life by their own unwillingness to cooperate.
If we are not willing to work together in order to protect each other then I have a very pessimistic long-term view of our future. If every blue-presser dies, then our average cooperation level will only decrease, and the population will be over-saturated with defectors. I'd rather just go out now then deal the those consequences.
The thing is, all those red button pressers can't see that, for all their exact and flawless reasoning, they have a bias towards individuality, which they see as the only possibility, and we blue button pressers perfectly understand the math and yet we have a bias towards others, and would sacrifice more readily at many situations like this one. This sacrifice is what reds see as "dumb", but natural selection has chosen this because it probably works.
Both sides have a mental bias, and just can't see each other's "reasoning" because of it.
We blues think of reds as selfish, because we can't conceive of anyone not thinking of the worst outcome for others, and being empathetic about it, making it one's own.
And they see us as "virtue signalling", or getting some external value of some kind (recognition from peers) because they can't think of any other explanation to justify that behavior, when it is just pure bias towards sacrifice. Sacrifice is just that, giving something without asking nothing, which does not make sense for a red. Reds think we are dumb but society needs a little more blues than reds. Otherwise it probably collapses.
Good points, though I think cooperation benefits the ethical outcomes for both sides.
If we all work together to make sure that as many people press the red button as possible, then we can minimize the damage. The problem with the blue campaign is that the outcome gets progressively worse until it gets to the best outcome. 49% mortality is high and terrible unless you are very sure that the red campaign is going to lose. The ethical take on the red side is to minimize blue votes to zero.
You're a single parent. Through divine intervention you know that your 5 year old child has already pressed the red button. Are you going to press the blue button and risk your child becoming an orphan in a selfish and violent world? Or do you sacrifice the lives of billions to save your child from this inconvenience?
Why pessimistic? The miracle of capitalism is that it harvests the power of people pursuing their self interest for the greater good. Collectivist systems that rely on everyone sacrifying their self interest for the collectivity failed spectacularly in the past.
Why? The logical conclusion of this game is that everyone presses red. There is no reason to press blue and leave it to chance. The article talks about it, but without further rules it would be absolutely nonsensical to press blue.
Like if there was some additional rule like "oh and if more than 90% press red, everyone dies" or something, it gets more interesting. But as is everyone answering blue is virtue signalling.
>I think pressing red is selfish and violent
Most of humanity is pressing the red button every single day, again and again. From every culture, creed, religion, loads of red button presses.
That some people play survival all the time because "that's what life is" does not mean that humanity doesn't have pockets of more quiet, non-competitive environments where blue pressers thrive. Humans have had a lot of periods where they were not being "just animals".
But I guess everyone thinks the world is like he wants it to be in this respect.
The first point is interesting. You could fork the question over this and have a few variants:
1.) The pure form where the button presses and restricted to legal agents (i.e. people with credible legal standing over their choices).
2.) The mixed form with the caveat listed here inclusive of all humans whether they are even physically capable of pushing a button.
3.) you could also go for a more expansive scenario that takes 2 to the extreme and includes animals as well.
1.) gets to the game theoretic form of the question. 2 muddies things, and 3 sets up a case for blue since the non agentic voters asymptote to 50-50 and a slim edge is morally preferable to killing half.
You don't even have to go that far from the original question. If instead of the entire world being a single game, if you have hundreds of millions of sub-games where 9 random people are placed within, what should you do?
Surely some of those groups are going to be filled with selfish red pickers. Should the kind coordinating players still go blue? All the red pickers are going to lie that blue is sensible. I suspect that more coordinators will die in this way than the always blue pickers if every coordinating player went red.
So now the full-world version only has the law of large numbers on their side, but they have no way of knowing just what percentage of the population is a selfish red picker. Going for team blue is the much riskier option that can yield catastrophe.
Why would a red picker ever lie about it? If I can get all 8 of my fellow players to pick red then we’re all safe. If it’s a button I’ll just break the blue button or wire it to red.
A selfish player will claim that they will coordinate with the group, and then vote red in private. A coordinating player will pick what the group chooses, whether that be red or blue. You are talking about a coordinating player here. Yes, in this case if all players agree to red, it's obvious you should all pick red. It's completely safe.
With 3, especially if the animals outnumber humans, you’d first want to do some research into animal psychology to see whether red or blue has an edge for animals.
It’s a made up toy problem. It exists for fun. The stated problem has some implicit assumptions. But you can rejigger the rules and assumptions to tweak the incentives and ethics. That’s the whole point. You could take the puzzle and apply it to a band of pirates held in a jail. That might make the outcome more obvious. Or you could imagine what would happen if the voting order were sequential. These are all just different formalisms that are fun to speculate over, but the rules can be interpreted many ways.
That is true in isolation, but the reason we study problems like this one is to try to gain insight into our society (or our minds) and in our society, toddlers and people with dementia have guardians that make important decisions for them. Consequently, even after your comment, I'm still struggling to see how this toy problem or game sheds any light on anything I care about. Contrast that with prisoner's dilemma, Newcomb's problem or the ultimatum game, which sheds a lot of light.
But this is HN, so people are going to discuss it just because it is fun to discuss it.
If you pick blue and at least 50% of people picked blue, you survive, otherwise you die.
There's 0 advantage to picking blue, none what so ever, the only reason you'd pick blue is because you assume there's some subset of people that is so unbelievably stupid that they'll pick blue. You're sacrificing yourself in the hope of saving them.
IMO, the reality is that everyone you think would pick blue would actually pick red. Very few people are that stupid, and even if they are they probably also have access to someone not as stupid who will tell them to press red.
The only people you'd be saving are other suicidal white knights that pick blue to save those imaginary "blue pressers", and the outcome of that, since that blue pressing base doesn't actually exist, is that you're all just committing collective suicide for absolutely no reason.
What "blue pressers vs red pressers" says about our society is best left to philosophers.
I imagine this making more sense if this were framed with the backdrop of living in an authoritarian state, with progressively worsening social conditions.
You can choose to protest (blue button) and if over some threshold of people then conditions reset. Otherwise protestors are killed off, and red buttoners survive, but with increased oppression.
Sorry for bringing the mood down with this topic. I'll go back to playing Papers Please! now.
I'm sorry to bring the mood down somewhat further. But a lot of the successful protests just end up re-rolling the dice instead of improving the conditions, and you actually end up possibly worse off than before. "More like, under new management", as the meme goes.
It takes a period of worldwide prosperity and, perhaps, substantial foreign entanglement to allow revolutions / coups to actually improve the situation of people living through them.
Some people seem to be convinced by logical reframings, like "if you jump into a woodchipper you die, but if 50% of people jump into the woodchipper they all survive"
A logical reframing is not equivalent though! We know everyone else gets the same frame, and most of the problem is predicting what other people will do when presented with this particular two-button frame.
> Every person in the world is provided a gun. If a person wants to, they can shoot themselves in the head. However, these guns are special so that if more than 50% people in the world shoot themselves in the head, the guns will all jam and everyone will survive. Or, the person can choose to set the gun down and walk away.
This sounds like it only changes the framing, but in reality it would lead to completely different behavior, so the "leave the gun alone" option would likely lead to far fewer deaths than the red button option, simply by virtue of organisms including humans being generally biased in favor of "do nothing" (= leave the gun alone).
You could do both experiments with dogs instead of humans and roughly 100% of dogs wouldn't manage to shoot themselves with the gun, whereas if you forced them to press one of the two buttons (e.g. keeping them in a room until they press one by chance), roughly 50% would press the red one. So the two experiments differ strongly w/r/t to how likely it is for a "non-thinking" organism to choose each option.
Yes the inclusion of children does change things, in that it makes choosing red even more obvious.
The problem is posed to the world. You have children, and they ask you what they should do. You tell them to pick red because you're their parent you can't bring yourself to have them risk their lives for some noble purpose.
According to blue buttoners, this parent is an evil person, right?
What if you entertain the variant of the question where a percentage of red votes die in the event of a blue win? It makes pressing red less advantageous, but also it totally changes the moral balance depending on the percentage.
I think this is already baked in. A world of red pressers must know they’ll adapt to a shortage of things produced by blue pressers. Many red pressers won’t survive.
I like this thought experiment, because it's not actually a dilemma, since the answer is obvious, but it creates the meta-thought-experiment conversation of trying to understand the reasoning of blue-pickers in the comments.
Whereas most thought experiments try to balance two things equally, which creates a lot of debate, this one pushes the options as far apart as possible without quite going fully black-and-white (which would sound like, "If you press the red button, you live; if you press the blue button, you die."). This creates less disagreement, but maximizes the size of the disagreement that remains.
The problem posted is being taken at face value by some and being interpreted outside of a vacuum for others.
The reality is that we don’t live in a vacuum and the framing of red vs blue is almost certainly not an accidental alignment with political colors. If you are in the US, voting blue is also highly correlated with broader empathy characteristics.
It’s telling that some folks think 100% voting one way is just as attainable as more than 50% voting a certain way. The strong irony here is that they themselves would likely not change their vote to help get to 100% no matter which direction that happened to be. This is also why we are roughly split in half with only a small percentage actually voting differently than their identity politics allow.
Besides the obvious choice of not pushing any button, so very rarely -- if at all -- are there only ever 2 options. The entire "thought experiment" leans into some fantastical unrealistic scenarios and plays on peoples "fast thinking" by saying here are 2 options I made up, tell me which of these 2 groups (us or them) shall I sort you into? Neither.
I thought about the ternary choice. Unconscious people, conscientious objectors, etc. The wording is that blue needs to exceed 50%, so the doomsday machine defaults to red.
That’s basically why dictatorships are so hard to overthrow. In real life the game is slightly different, if you choose red (don’t protest) you get a negative outcome. But if you choose blue (protest) you risk being jailed (a very negative outcome) unless enough people also choose blue, in which case the outcome can turn highly positive.
That’s why dictators try to limit protests, not just because of the protests themselves but because they don’t want people to know how many others are willing to protest.
That doesn't hold up in comparison to this experiment, in which the best outcome from pressing the blue button is that you're rewarded in exactly the same way as if you had pushed the red button.
If the choice is between:
a) continuing to live under bad conditions if you press the red button, but if more than half press the red button everyone who pressed the blue button dies, and
b) if more than 50% press the blue button, everyone will live under good conditions,
then the differences between living under red conditions and under blue conditions becomes a factor. If red conditions and blue conditions are identical, hide the blue button, it is evil.
I assume most people are aware there will be some blue voters. I also assume that greater than 50% of the population are more socially minded than not as if it was otherwise, in the long run the society would fail to stay cohesive.
It would be easy to self justify picking red as 'it's not unethical killing, it's self preservation' but I'd still bet on society being more socially minded than not, for betting otherwise would mean i think society as an idea of togetherness is a total illusion. If choosing red, after, it would be non existent.
Though also to me the experience of life is starkly temporary; dying early or not doesn't really matter to me so i'm not surprised other's emotional conflict varies here. But as a result personally, losing the existence of something unique to experience (togetherness) in preference of something otherwise fleeting, even the self, isn't very interesting to me.
It’s an amusing thought experiment to share with friends, but I’m finding the sort of conversation here a bit tiresome; kind of judgmental and dogmatic.
I honestly kind of hate these thought problems, because they attempt to distill a complex system into a single, momentary choice, and then maximize the outcome somehow.
As if it’s the decision that somehow matters, as opposed to the systemic dysfunction and incentives that mandated the decision in the first place.
I’m an increasingly reluctant blue pusher, because I am aware that societal incentives reward individual greed when traded against societal harms; that is, those who sacrifice others are rewarded proportionate to the amount of others they sacrificed. I want to cooperate, because historically that has been the source of our collective survival and growth as a species; however, at this specific moment in time, I would be greatly rewarded if I harmed as many people as possible, as thoroughly as possible, to enrich myself.
If all you’re looking at is the binary decision, red makes sense. Except taken in the context of the wider whole, red pushers should be rightly vilified and excommunicated for prioritizing their own survival over the survival of the whole.
That would genetically remove altruists from the population (assuming altuism is heritable and assuming children also have to press button).
The world would be a more selfish place in a generation after the experiment.
Presumably parents press the button for their babies.
As a family you would have to agree to all push the same colour otherwise you run the risk of only some of you dying. As a group decision I would think everyone would agree on red as the safe bet. Also making altruistic choices for children has two edges - and many parents would put their children's interests first not some strangers.
The only reason to pick blue is to try to do the "morally correct" thing to "save" the other people who picked blue.
If you're the first person in line to vote, picking blue is neither logical nor moral. There are no other blue choosers who you need to support. "But there will be people who vote after me" well that's their decision to make. "People will vote randomly" okay well if they can't take living or dying seriously, that's kind of on them. Choosing the zero risk option when everyone else has the exact same zero risk option isn't selfish.
It's not selfish to choose red because everyone else has the choice to choose red. There's an unknowable risk with choosing blue. Choosing red only exposes blue choosers to the exact risk they decided to take.
Reframe it to eliminate the silly savior complex and it sounds ridiculous:
There's an infinitely long trolley track. You can let the trolley continue down the track, or you can divert it in your direction. You might get smooshed by the trolley by diverting it, but at least someone standing further down the track won't divert it and smoosh themselves.
The arguments made about wanting to protect the children/babies and those with cognitive impairments are well meaning, but I think misguided. The bottom line is that the world has been put in a shit situation and you can't fix it. Encouraging blue is encouraging an increase in the likelihood that all the truly nice and wonderful people that would would actually follow through on a blue vote for altruistic reasons wind up dead. And that doesn't seem like an altruistic position? It seems more like self-martyring. Well meaning, but actually making the likelihood of a bad outcome worse.
You think it's easier to convince everyone to pick red than 51% of people to pick blue?
If you think it's possible to convince everyone to vote red then it's certainly possible to do the same for blue given how much lower the threshold is!
This is absolutely possible and realistic.
Imagine a scenario where public polls were taken and it showed 95% support for blue? Would you still be out here calling 95% of people martyrs? Blue is an absolutely winnable propoganda game!
gpm's point is that it's a collective action issue. And even if one individual can't fix is, we can with a movement. And we SHOULD care about things like this. We're fairly familiar with these: big problem, only solved if enough people do a thing. But in general, almost all collective action problems we face are ones where either:
a. every incremental actor improves the overall picture with their individual choice (however small, even if it takes a threshold to be "solved": think, recycling, vaccines)
b. every individual actor actor's choice has no _direct_ impact until some threshold is met (maybe voting?)
THIS situation, however is very different: every individual choice for blue makes things WORSE up until the threshold is met. And not just a little, but a LOT worse. That's not normal collective action territory, so we shouldn't be assuming the same kind of reasoning. The stakes of missing the threshold are not "aw shucks" or "keep trying, there's more chances later!" The stakes of missing the threshold are "everyone who cares about the threshold is dead."
I can't think of anything IRL that falls into this category?
> I can't think of anything IRL that falls into this category?
I suppose: People on one half of a standoff standing down when the other side will also stand down if everyone on the first half does. Not exactly a common problem to see outside of movies... but in principle it follows a common pattern. An individual lowering their guard is bad (if it ends up in a fight), but if everyone lowers their guard we get to avoid the fight.
If red pressers always survive then everyone should pick red. Its incredibly and obviously so and I'm concerned by the fact that so many commenters aren't aware of this.
Red is the obvious choice from a self-preservation perspective but not a moral one. You're seeing here in these comments that there are lots of blue pressers; they would all die. This creates a snowballing incentive to push blue: people dying is bad.
There's several reasons why someone might make the "wrong" choice, and reaching 50% + 1 on blue is way easier than reaching 100% on red. And sure enough, the polls I've seen have shown blue with a majority every time.
Its an interesting psychological test. Because, no, I don't agree, red is the moral choice and also the most rational.
Those who think the population is too stupid to behave in regards to their own self preservation might choose blue in an attempt to 'save everyone' and kill themselves.
Only one singular choice has zero risk of death, and its red. Everyone chooses red and we all survive.
If you think most farmers, construction workers, factory workers, and so on would press blue then you might want to actually get to know some of them and put them to this test. I don’t think many of them would willingly risk death on something so trivial as a button press. I’ve seen guys get rescued from falling off roofs but as written I don’t think many of the guys running to get their buddy out of his harness and on the ground are going to pick blue if you present it in a really clinical sense.
Sure, I can ask around. It's a drought here, so we're looking for things to talk about.
It's not really about the numbers, though, is it? The red button future is now a mix of game theoreticians, Objectivists, and people who like the color red. The proportion of parasites is up.
These types of analyses always treat voting red and ending up in the majority as preferable to voting blue and ending up in the minority. I don’t think that assumption is universally valid.
In the first case you contend with living in a world after a catastrophic population loss — likely including at least some of your loved ones — knowing that had some of you and your fellow survivors voted differently, nothing bad would have happened.
In the second case, you don’t care at all. Because you’re dead.
I would describe it like this. We are all standing on the edge of a cliff. You can choose the 'Red' option. That option means you don't jump off the cliff. Or you can choose the 'Blue' option. You jump off the cliff. If 50% of individuals choose also the 'Blue' option then there will be a net to catch you so you don't all die.
Yes, when you completely rephrase the problem you will have different sentiments.
The thought experiment demands that the phrasing that was used actually be used, and you don’t get a chance to show the dumb blue people how smart you are before they pick their button.
It is rephrased. Any phrasing besides the original exists only in your head and not in anyone else’s.
The only reason I’m in my tomb is because you and people like you voted to kill me instead of voting to do nothing. Luckily for me, I’m dead and don’t care.
Congratulations! Enjoy your life with people who think like you.
Well, that is one way to rationalize, as I guess there is an infinite number of ways to do so.
The point remains, only one singular choice guarantees your own safety. And another has a Chance of death. Take the stupid choice because you think everyone else is also stupid? Thats your choice.
It doesn’t guarantee my safety, though. It puts me in a world where the only people left were so afraid of dying that they opted into a completely avoidable mass murder.
It may not have been completely avoidable though. What if the maximum number of people who would ever vote for blue is 30%
If that's the case then it's truly impossible to save them.
Your assumption is there is more than 50% of people who will vote blue or could be convinced to do so.
It's a terrifying thought that there could be such a deficit of empathetic people. But without any evidence you're just hoping based on your own beliefs that over 50% believe in blue like you do.
What if I'm not afraid of dying. But I'm just not willing to throw my life away unless there's decent evidence it could succeed and we could get above 50%
I notice that this thing you and others call empathy doesn't extend to the outgroup: if anybody doesn't subscribe to it, fuck 'em, is the general sentiment.
No idea! Well, I must assume good faith and believe you. To me it looks like you're labelling everybody you dislike as "probably a psychopath, best disposed of". I suppose that's consistent with saying they're not the outgroup, it's just a practical necessity or something.
In this instance of course what you're proposing is very mild: you think they should suffer one another's company - which you imagine would be a terrible experience. Unless you further imagine that they'd like it? But my impression was that you thought they'd have a bad time, and since they're your non-compassionate outgroup, you very compassionately don't care.
You read a bunch of things into what I wrote that simply are not there. I like plenty of people who would press the red button without hesitation. Their decision is their decision and my decision is mine. Might they “have a bad time?” Maybe. Maybe not. I’m certain I would have a terrible time, if I joined them in the majority.
I feel like this is some sort of butchered metaphor because in a vacuum just picking a color that has no context or effect outside of the experiment framing is really easy. But it’s not that simple if there are some externalities. Say, red guarantees your survival but there’s 50% chance your pet will die. Or every red choice has a 10% flipping one red choice among your friends and family to blue. Now it’s not just a selfish choice but a choice with a known downside. This is a much more interesting game to play. Maybe even a more realistic one.
Seems difficult to guarantee you don't kill a bunch of kids each button press cycle...
Many people aren't old and developed enough to reason it out yet...
If this is repeated I'd certainly be on the team of trying to convince people to go blue... Otherwise the chance of someone randomly pressing red every time before they get to the age of 5 or whatever seems too low to guarantee the long term survival of the species... I guess it depends on how often it happens?
> Seems difficult to guarantee you don't kill a bunch of kids each button press cycle...
Seems extremely easy to guarantee that I don't kill a bunch of kids, just press blue. It's only the red-pressers who might end up murdering kids. By pressing blue the only person I am putting at risk is myself.
One extra consideration I haven't seen flagged: if you pick Red and the blue pressers die then everyone who's left alive definitely pressed Red. Then there will be a society-wide tacit agreement that this was a fine thing to do, blue pressers were all dumb and had it coming, and no-one needs to feel bad about it. So you won't even need to feel guilty.
First they came for the blue button pressers, and I did not speak out.
Red button pressing is killing people that didn't think/act like them. You don't need to feel guilty about it, because this type of thing happens all the time.
As a political post the formulation in the article is crass in the extreme, misrepresenting both the motivations of red and blue voters and also the and the long-term consequences of those parties' policies. There's no progress to be made in a conversation held so close to the surface.
It's very inaccurate/loaded as a political post, but the choice of colors makes the intent fairly obvious.
Politically speaking, in the US where everything is rigged by corporate media and a uniparty of capital interests with red/blue facades (where blue manufactures consent for red every step of the way), the only winning move is to not play.
Interestingly there are variants of the question where "no one pushes any button" should also be a "winning condition". The original problem states "if less than 50% of people press the blue button only people who push red survive" which rules this out, but it could be changed to "if greater than 50% of people choose red, then only red pushers survive" (allowing for people to opt to be a non-pusher). Or it could be "if greater than 50% of people choose red, then only blue pushers die" (with the non-pushers also being spared).
I think the latter is more interesting since now there's a moral consequence to voting vs abstaining.
Or you could lean into the political framing. I bet if the vote were retaken with question phrased as "if greater than 50% of people choose red, then people who pressed blue die", you might end up with some switchers who vote purely out of spite. Or maybe that framing makes it feel like voting red has a more significant moral consequence (actively condemning people to death) that the original question doesn't, so it results in more people pressing blue.
You could even add in a penalty if you press a button but are a non-majority, but then that's just the prisoners dilemma.
I don't like how the question is setup, both in wording and scenario. Saying "everyone will die unless >50% press blue" sounds more impactful. And pressing red is a free win in this scenario making it a nonchoice. Threshold not being announced or red having some condition would make it more interesting (and at the same time, boring).. unless the point of the question is not to make people discuss blue vs red, but why you should make an irrational decision.
The number of people trying to use game theory here is frankly embarrassing.
This is about predicting real people!
People are not perfect rational actors.
Good luck explaining your Nash equilibrium theory to your 6 month old niece and nephew who are good pick blue because it's their favorite color.
You aren't gonna get an all red movement to succeed. There are a small minority who will vote red or blue regardless of the community sentiment - and some of those people will be kids who would probably grow up to be smarter than your game theorizing selves if they are given to opportunity to grow old enough to fully mature.
Another way to frame the question is "how much effort should society as a whole put into saving the lives of individuals who endanger no one but themselves through unnecessary dangerous choices?"
I feel like it's fine that wingsuiting off a mountain is legal. I don't feel a need to beg some stranger not to do it. Both myself and that stranger are perfectly aware there's a decent chance their choice will result in their death.
if everyone were rational, and knew everyone else would act rationally, then obvious answer is to pick red, because everyone would pick red, and hence everyone would survive.
These sorts of problems assume that actions have no consequences beyond the immediate decision. These tests, run in places which have higher long-term expectation of social connections, give different results than in the US.
In the world where <50% press blue, you know that everyone alive (the red pushers) would save themselves rather than take a risk helping you or those who aren't clever at game theory problems.
I don't want to live in that world, so blue for me. And it's the fault of everyone who pressed red should I die.
This doesn't seem to be a game that tries to be particularly clever--one button could kill you, the other certainly won't. Trusting that nearly everyone will avoid pressing the button that could kill them seems a reasonable assumption, and it's not necessarily an indication of a lack of altruism.
Let me frame it another way and see if you still consider it homicide:
There's a cruise ship that needs to have a certain weight in order to not capsize. That weight threshold happens to be at 50% of the population (for whatever population we're considering in the original question). If the ship capsizes, everyone on it dies.
You're given the option: either get on the cruise ship or don't. Not to take an actual cruise, not for some other intrinsic prize, just file on it for a minute and then get off.
I don't see how those who refuse the risk of dying on the ship are complicit in the deaths of those who willingly choose to hop on it knowing the risks involved
You don’t get to reframe the problem with different wording or circumstances to demonstrate your intelligence to others before they choose and you choose. That’s part of the thought experiment.
That knowledge isn't a "consequence" of the game. It's a symptom of a fact that's knowable a priori. Running the game doesn't make it true; running the game merely reveals something that was already true.
Yes, that's (overly reductively stated) the point of TFA. Except for the part where it was highlighting a survey result to the contrary, and explaining why this is irrational and doesn't likely reflect what people would actually do.
The idea behind claiming you'd choose the blue button is to appear noble and altruistic, I suppose; but I struggle to even understand that instinct. Risking one's own life to possibly save the lives of others who are demonstrably completely capable of saving themselves doesn't strike me as particularly noble.
> this is irrational and doesn’t likely reflect what people would actually do
People are irrational. I guarantee it’s likely that a lot of people would actually do it.
> The idea behind claiming you’d choose the blue button is to appear noble and altruistic.
Not at all. If the majority of people can’t be bothered to press the button that says “nobody dies as long as half of the other people say nobody dies” rather than “you don’t die,” I’m happier not being around. It’s purely selfish and blue is a win-win.
>Everyone will not just. If your solution to some problem relies on "If everyone would just..." then you do not have a solution. Everyone is not going to just. At not time in the history of the universe has everyone just, and they're not going to start now.
Its frankly shocking just how many people here aren't Christian (or don't understand love thy neighbor) and are on the evil spectrum of DnD, and bragging about it.
This is like a prisoner's dilemma, but with no payoff for the risky option.
In a prisoner's dilemma, you can choose a risky option (stay quiet), but the potential reward is that if the other prisoner also stays quiet then you both go completely free. But if one prisoner instead speaks up and accuses the other prisoner, the accuser gets a short sentence and the one who stayed quiet gets a max sentence.
But in this scenario, there's no payoff whatsoever for the risky option (pressing the blue button). 100% of people choosing blue and 100% of people choosing red lead to the exact same outcome. So why would it ever be rational to choose blue?
This "dilemma" would make more sense if getting over the 50% blue threshold caused some additional positive outcome, like world peace or a cure for cancer.
The downside of redding is that some portion of the world probably dies and you now have to live in that worse world that if you and 50% of the rest of the world has just blued, would not have happened.
I'm wondering if it's really the framing of the problem that's inflating the number of individuals responding with blue (similar to certain confusingly-worded ballot measures).
Suppose the problem were worded in a more concrete way: "I have a large container ship that I'm draining the ballasts out of tomorrow. If less than 50% of <whatever population we're working with> get on the ship, it will capsize and everyone who chose to get on it will die. You can choose either to get on the ship (blue button) or refuse to (red button)."
Would one hold a person guilty for not getting on the ship? Would a perfectly empathetic person even board that ship?
Of course the framing affects how people vote. The thought experiment demands we use the framing as given. Some people might reason themselves into your analogy, others won’t.
So is your general take on the problem that because the way it's worded (blue => "everyone survives", red => "only those who press red survive"), enough people would choose blue that therefore the empathetic/moral thing to do would be to also choose blue to save them? I can get on board with that line of reasoning
In the Slashdot days, I suspect the weight of views would be on the side of "remove the warning labels, let Darwin sort it out." Interesting change in "hacker" culture.
Yes! There is an excellent video on the subject, though it is in french (https://youtu.be/lo7iJnq_U9M?si=FFz6iHI_W4lz9V8D)
He did extensive polling with different framings to see how these affect the outcome.
But why would those pick blue? They have the same incentive to just pick red.
Physician assisted suicide is legal in some places.
There are some people very upset that physician assisted suicide is legal anywhere.
People may pick blue wishing to die. People advocating others to pick blue are either would-be serial killers or would outlaw physician assisted suicide given the chance.
I wonder if red choosers really don’t understand that they are choosing to live in a world where half of all people, the more selfless half, are dead. It’s like living through a nuclear war except all of the nice people are gone, not just a random sample
I guess you base that surprising "half" on the transparent analogy with politics, and so you think real-world Democrats will press blue to assert their Democrattiness. This is probably true. However, since this is the internet, and being a Democrat is associated with being online and living in a city, there are probably more than 50% blue-pressers, as shown in the poll. Just like in the real world, you won't change that ratio whichever way you vote in the poll. If swaying opinion is within a voter's control, then your "choosing" is meaningful but the "half" becomes meaningless. If swaying opinion isn't within the voter's control, it's "choosing" that becomes meaningless, and the fate of the half is already sealed by cultural forces beyond our control.
I disagree that the hypothetical maps onto politics. Voting for democrats is mostly a vote for someone else (billionaires, etc.) to shoulder additional burdens to achieve some positive end. By contrast, this game involves serious risk to one's self and family. Lots of people would vote to raise corporate taxes to increase funding for schools in Baltimore. But those people aren't going to move their kids to Sandtown to help increase the property tax base.
I think if you played the game for real, blue would get maybe 5% of the vote, tops.
I don’t see them as selfless I see them as unintelligent.
Technically for red to win the number of dead people will be between 0% and 49.999% of the population.
The entire reason to campaign for red is to reduce the dead percentage.
If your goal is to reduce the number of dead, is red really the one to campaign for?
If we imagine people will ignore their real-world political tribalism:
Voting blue is voting to possibly die, either because you want death or in risky solidarity with others who voted to possibly die, who may have chosen by mistake. Voting red is voting for those interested in death to die, along with those who chose blue by mistake, and along with anybody who voted blue in support of those who voted blue by mistake.
So we can have a blue campaign that says "we must not allow even one voter to die, we must all pull together and vote blue", and a red campaign that says "please don't be a giant crowd of idiots who risk death, just accept that maybe two voters aren't going to make it because one was depressed and the other had an involuntary hand movement, and everybody else play it safe and vote red".
This is a ridiculous situation, and Jonathan Swift unfortunately died in 1745, so the best commentary I can offer is "I don't know".
The end of the article mentions it. Some people are not purely rational decision makers, some people are altruists who know others are not purely rational, etc.
By choosing red you will kill some people.
Or choosing blue allows them to feel self-righteous while not actually at any risk since this isn't real. Virtue signalling is the ethic of our day.
Maybe people who choose blue do so because they assume there’s some kind of monkey paw involved in the choosing the red option, like your wife and kids die or something like that
Bringing rationalism - or whatever - clouds the discussion.
Blue is purely a win-win for me, so it's rational to only choose blue. Reds have their own value judgement.
"Rationality" is a useless quality to debate here.
Same as with the original dilemma. Most people are not sociopaths and will choose to cooperate with empathy for everyone else. That's just how species survive and adapt. (1) Alternatively, some people believe that sustained cooperation is in itself a sustained equilibrium. (2)
Most of the world is not as individualistic as Silicon Valley engineers believe in their own ivory towers after decades of reading Ayn Rand.
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_Aid:_A_Factor_of_Evolut...
(2) https://www.optimallyirrational.com/p/the-true-story-of-the-...
Is it worse? Wouldn't the red people end up with more like-minded red people?
I think most of the people who pick blue would be empathic, loving people that are just kind of bad at game theory.
I don't think I want to live in a world in which they all died out.
> I don't think I want to live in a world in which they all died out.
So the blue side would also include the people who are good at game theory...
Blue side definitely includes the population of people that would rather die than live in a world without blues and fully understand the consequences of that choice.
On the other hand, maybe a world where everyone who is bad at game theory is dead is a better world to live in, regardless of how nice or empathetic they are.
Literally suicidal empathy. Although the numbers would change drastically if it was real, it's easy to virtue signal in hypotheticals.
There’s no bad outcome for choosing red. The empathetic option is to convince everyone to vote red and that choosing blue is dumb.
The “chose blue” option weaponizes empathy to get people to make a counter-productive choice. If everyone follows their own rational self interest, then everyone wins.
The bad outcome for choosing red is that people that choose blue die.
Yes, the selfish-minded would end up with more selfish-minded people, and they'd be confused why their "low trust society" became even more low trust overnight.
Perhaps red is selfish, but blue is most certainly foolish.
Or blue doesn't want to live in the world where only selfish/cynical people remain.
Confusingly, though, as you are of course a nice person, if you vote red you'd demonstrate that some red voters are nice, and then the choice is less severe. Then voting red is like "I embrace humanity, warts and all", while voting blue is like "I cannot tolerate sharing the planet with anyone even slightly impure".
I would personally assert it's foolish to pretend a species can survive without empathy and mutual aid. That's certainly not how humanity (or most, if not all, species) developed so far: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_Aid:_A_Factor_of_Evolut...
"Empathy" isn't a binary in this context. You can exercise empathy and aid your community by making sure everyone you know votes red. That's the kind of cooperation that humans have evolved with. What you're talking about is undifferentiated, universal empathy, where someone would be willing to risk the lives of those close to them for a greater chance to help those who are outside their immediate reach to persuade.
I suspect if you played this game, lots of tight-knit, high-cooperation groups would undertake coordinated campaigns to ensure the survival of their members by ensuring everyone votes red.
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Yes and yes. Without the core of blue workers, red people will need to open Atlas Shrugged about how to assign short order cook duty.
I don’t think short order cooks are know for being that especially emphatic. Along with most of the folks who “do stuff”—build roads, maintain power lines, etc.
There's actually many scientific studies which tend to show that empathy is inversely correlated with wealth. That's popular knowledge as old as class war, but it seems there may be scientific evidence to support that.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/277354081_Social_cl...
https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1118373109
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S22141...
So that Galt's Gulch could source a short order cook, Ayn Rank explained that a renown philosopher gave up his career to become one.
The dilemma is that a lot of people will press blue so if red gets above 50% a large number of selfless but not game-theory aware people will die.
but why would anybody choose blue? there is no moral benefit to doing so.
If you altered the game to say that only some fraction of the population get the choice, and everyone who doesn't get the choice is assumed blue (or, is killed if less than 50% of voters choose blue) then there's some question to be explored here. But at it stands there is literally no reason to choose blue.
There will always be someone who chooses blue. Choosing red is choosing to kill them.
The blues sound like idiots.
Press the red button you survive, or press the blue button you might die
Press red and you might kill.
Choosing red is choosing to survive knowing that there will always be people who choose blue, potentially an amount that would mean you don't survive if you didn't take explicit action against it.
The people who chose blue in no way contributed to the peril you are in, thus you aren't justified in killing them in self defense.
They didn't cause the peril, but knowing that their choice is possibility, if I don't make a decision to protect myself now their decisions may then be the cause of my continued not-survival.
> Choosing red is choosing to kill them.
Choosing red is choosing to most likely kill yourself.
I meant:
Choosing blue is choosing to most likely kill yourself.
I fail to see how anyone could choose blue, the certain scenario is everyone chooses red, and this whole post is a nothingburger.
To me, the whole point of the riddle is that it reveals the most internal bias towards either yourself or others, meaning that you do things for society or for yourself. Blues don't understand reds, reds don't understand blues. The bias is invisible to the self but it is clearly there given the huge contrast in the opinions of people.
You fail to see how anyone could choose blue, even though there are plenty of people on the internet and even in the comments here who are stating they would choose blue?
> I fail to see how anyone could choose blue
Depends on the scenario… or the number of people in the experiment. A sufficiently large number of people will guarantee votes in both bins. The specific scenario (reading this outside of a vacuum) will also have knock-on effects.
Eg: reading this into the current political landscape in the US vs reading this into another toy problem about jumping off a cliff or not will have very different outcomes and ethics.
The article makes a good point with their reframing.
"Give everyone a magic gun. They may choose to shoot themselves in the head. If more than 50% of people choose to shoot themselves, all the guns jam. The person also has the option to put the gun down and not shoot it."
The "dilemma" is asking to what lengths we should go to save people choosing to commit suicide, and does that change when they are unintentionally choosing suicide due to being "tricked" into it.
Practically at least one person will choose blue for lulz or curiosity or as a moral compass. Shall we punish them? How does it affect survival of whole population in a long term?
There’s a moral benefit to choosing blue if you think there’s a chance that the end result will be split 50-50 and you’ll be the deciding vote between a blue majority and a red majority.
I think it would be hard to prove you, individually, were the deciding vote to blue.
Everyone who voted blue in such a case could think they were the one vote. And they could be right.
There's an argument to be made that anyone choosing blue wants to die and you should respect their choice.
> but why would anybody choose blue? there is no moral benefit to doing so.
Why? To contribute saving the others who chose blue. How isn't that moral?
If everyone picks red everyone lives, nobody needs saving by picking blue. Picking blue obliges others to pick blue to prevent your death, risking their own life in turn. Red is the moral option.
There is no topic in which you'll get 100% of people to agree with you, and this is no different. There will always be people who choose blue. Arguing that you could ever get 100% of people to pick red is a coping mechanism to deal with the knowledge that your choice to pick red will result in some deaths (i.e., unless blue wins).
That isn't to say I categorically judge anyone who would choose red.
If there's good reason to believe a majority and especially a supermajority would choose red over blue, then choosing red is indeed the only rational choice, and convincing overs to do the same is the only way to save lives.
What I like about the question is that it can be used to measure whether a society is low trust (majority red) or high trust (majority blue).
However, where I take issue with the article is the assertion that it's impossible to get a blue majority, especially in the face of polling that suggests such a majority already exists. The article's claim that choosing red is the only moral choice seems at best to be self-delusion.
The utility of choosing red and the morality of convincing others to follow suit maximizes the larger the currently expected pool of red gets, sure. However, while choosing blue has less and less personal downside the greater the expected majority of blue there is, similar to red, the morality of choosing blue maximizes the closer you get to an even split, since it's the product of the potential lives saved by going blue and the likelihood your individual vote will push it over the edge.
Personally, I'd choose blue. I'd rather sacrifice myself than be party to the deaths of billions of people, so if there's even some hope at convincing the majority to go blue, I'd feel obligated to stay with it even if pre-polling suggests things initially tip toward red. I'd also be a bit wary of living in a society now devoid of anyone willing to self-sacrifice. I'm not convinced most people choosing red give that any thought.
> However, where I take issue with the article is the assertion that it's impossible to get a blue majority, especially in the face of polling that suggests such a majority already exists.
The people saying they'd vote blue would never actually do it. People support lots of altruistic things in the abstract, but almost nobody does it when it involves real risk and sacrifice. The cost of saving a kid in Africa by donating malaria medicine and insecticidal nets is only about $5,000. How many people do you know who will cancel their Hawaii vacation and donate that money to an African charity?
Every time you choose to take a vacation, or get a tricked out Macbook Pro, etc., you are in a real way choosing to allow some kid in Africa to die. But you do it anyway.
You're thinking of this like a game where the only point is to "win". That's not how this would actually work in practice.
Blue is the only moral and logical choice. If red gets over 50% and you picked it, therefore contributing to the "red" outcome, you are now effectively a murderer. Plus you now get to live in a world where everyone else alive are sociopaths that picked red, where everyone with a conscience is now dead.
You also can't count on everyone picking red, or "if you picked blue, then you voted for suicide".
It's reasonable to assume that, leading to the button press event, the usual low-trust, "every man by himself" types will rally for red, with the usual excuses, where high-trust societies will make it clear that it's your moral duty to pick blue, to get the votes to the 50% threshold and ensure no one dies. Around the world there would be debates nonstop that would permeate every social circle and families. You'd have huge arguments where the typical selfish types would scream at their family members "how dare you say you're going to press blue, do you want to leave your poor mother alone without their only child?", only pushing red-leaning voters more into red and blue-leaning voters more into blue.
Plus, if you look at the possible outcomes:
- Red wins, you picked red: Depending on where you live, a reasonable portion to the large majority of the population is now dead. The ones alive have, by definition, a strong bias towards individualism and noncooperation. It's extremely likely civilisation will collapse. Pick your favourite fictional dystopia and you might have a reasonable chance of it actually coming somewhat real.
- Red wins, you picked blue: You are now dead, but at least you don't have to live in the world above.
- Blue wins, you picked blue: Things carry on as normal and your conscience is safe in knowing that you didn't vote to kill and that over 50% of your fellow humans also didn't vote to kill.
- Blue wins, you picked red: Things carry on as normal, but you now have a guilty conscience, or, if your vote was made public, people around you know you would have killed them to save your skin.
By picking red you didn't contribute to anything at all, this button does absolutely nothing in practice. If you remove the red button, leaving the choice between pressing blue and not participating at all, the choice to not participate seems quite obvious. The red button adds some "weight" to the decision, but it's materially the same
You're ignoring the dimension of universalism versus insularity. In practice, high-trust, high-cooperation communities are also insular. They cooperate within their community, but not people outside their community. Those communities can ensure the survival of their members by using their social infrastructure to ensure everyone votes red.
Assuming that the red/blue choice doesn't have a theological valance, you'd have a lot of tight-knit Mormon, Muslim, and Orthodox Jewish communities surviving in the red scenario. I suspect also all the highly authoritarian Asian countries.
That's still not really a dilemma. It would be a dilemma if it were up to me to save those people who choose blue. But it's not up to me - it's up to a massive gamble that over 50% of people (over 4 BILLION people) will vote with me as well. Like... huh? Are we being serious here? We want to play poker with the lives of billions?
Maybe if the required percentage was lower this would compute better in my brain lol
Also interesting how the behavior of the repeated prisoner's dilemma differs from the repeated red/blue game. The repeated prisoner's dilemma converges to an optimal strategy of "tit for tat" - you signal your conditional cooperation, but also punish defections. The repeated red/blue game converges to an optimal strategy of always choosing red. The blue-pressers will most likely be wiped out in the first round, and if they are not, they will be wiped out in some round in the future, leaving only red-pressers left in the population.
The dilemma is that there are some people who are not smart enough to understand this and will press blue.
There is no dilemma, just a bad model. In this model, everyone press red and survive. Solved in 10 seconds.
If you want a dilemma, it must be inside the model, for example: a 10% of the buttons are miss wired, and the system register the oposite color
So if red wins, at least 10% die. If blue wins, everyone survives. Now you have a dilemma. Which button would you press?
PS: If a country has 20 cities and one of them has a big majority of red-pressers, is it moral to nuke it out of existence?
Crosstabbing the results into a state-by-state table would be interesting.
It is a dilemma because pressing blue or red reveals about your political orientations and your inner empathic responses (i'm assuming both are correlated). Not everyone is wired the same or agrees on politics.
Though in a sense, i agree it's not really a dilemma because only sociopaths pick red in real life. See also intense and spontaneous cooperation in times of crisis (catastrophe, war, etc). See also research on mutual aid as key factor in species development: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_Aid:_A_Factor_of_Evolut...
Nah pretty much everyone picks red if it was a real scenario. It's also bizarre to call everyone picking red a sociopath because they don't want to gamble their life on some naive and idealistic view of humans.
In The Prisoner's Dilemma, the point is that the best option (Both Cooperate) only works if people are willing to work together. It almost always ends up in the worst option (Both Defect). What this points out is that purely selfish actions can lead to non-optimal results for both the collective and the individual.
This expands on The Prisoner's Dilemma by increasing the population and increasing the stakes. We're still thinking about cooperate/defect actions, but we're also forced to acknowledge that not everyone is a rational actor and we cannot relay on the all-defect option as would be the expected outcome of The Prisoner's Dilemma.
Exactly, if choosing blue would allow you to wear a blue badge which would raise your happiness level or otherwise affect your utility function, then it might make sense. Otherwise it just doesn't.
The variation I like is: regardless of the outcome, red choosers are forbidden from performing manual labor. You can tell a lot about someone who chooses that button.
Red is optimal from a self preservation perspective but is also the antisocial option. Picking blue saves everyone.
Let me rephrase that for you: red is for people who live in this world and accept it, blue is for people with white knight syndrome.
OR. Red is for people who understand statistics, blue is for people who like to gamble.
Blue is what gamble? there is no gain associated with choosing blue over red, just pointless risk-taking with only at best a zero outcome.
> red is for people who live in this world and accept it
Red is for people who don't think beyond the end of their nose. Okay, you're very smart and understand statistics, but what about the following groups: friends, family, spouses? If they don't pick red, and they die, would you say life is completely fine because there's less "dumb" people or would you possibly think: "hmm, it kinda sucks that they died, maybe I should've picked blue?"
GP is correct that red is the anti-social / myopic option.
If this was a real thing I’d pick red and then stand outside the red/blue clinic with a sign urging everyone to pick red.
> If they don't pick red
Why wouldn't they?
Because most people have empathy and collective consciousness. Apart from ultra-capitalist individualists, most people choose trust and cooperations, because we're hard-wired for that and that's how species develop and thrive (see also, science).
Humans are conditionally cooperative
When we suspect some people are not cooperative then it gets reciprocated
> Picking blue saves everyone.
Everyone picking red saves everyone.
Technically correct, which is the wrong kind of correct. That's an individual framing of a collective problem which fails to capture the social and political ramifications, and all the empathy and solidarity associated with the choice.
You have it backwards. In prisoner's dilemma if both stay quiet they are still punished, just less so.
They payoff is, you know you are not the reason why the people who pressed the blue button died.
Blue risk their lives to safe others, red safe themselves.
Blue won’t get survivor’s guilt
They’re different scenarios. The prisoner’s dilemma is purely selfish. How do I maximize my own return? Cooperation is an option, but it’s still about maximizing your own return. This scenario leaves it open for people to choose to act selfishly by maximizing their own return, or selflessly by attempting to got maximize total return for everyone. But the choice required to maximize total return isn’t clear.
This question has multiple layers of thinking:
1. People who can't read pick randomly.
2. People who can read, but are too dumb to model or care about other people pick red.
3. People with enough intelligence for basic cognitive empathy pick blue.
4. People a little smarter and think through game theory overall pick red, and think they are smart for doing so.
5. People smarter than #4 and capable of seeing the big picture realize they don't want to leave people who choose #1 and #3 dead, so they pick blue.
6. People who realize the game theory optimal strategy is to announce you're pressing blue and convince everyone else to press blue, but privately press red.
There are probably more layers to this but the whole debate involves people getting upset at each other and accusing people of being in groups they are not. Red group #4 accuses blue group #5 of being #3 (not thinking beyond basic cognitive empathy). Blue group #5 accuses red group #4 of being group #2 (too dumb to model how others act). It's almost a perfect ragebait question.
As for which camp I am in, I am pressing blue and think you should too.
The framing in terms of colors helps the reader to interpret the thought experiment in terms of "groups" or "teams" — as if there's a "blue team" that you can join by helping, and help by joining. Many readers will quickly [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroop_effect ] intuitively choose to join the blue team, and then rationalize their choice as a strategy to help their blue teammates.
But in fact the thought experiment doesn't say there are teams or groups at all! The reader imposes that part on their own, unconsciously at first, because of the description's emphasis on colors.
I predict that running the same Twitter poll with flipped colors — so that red means "I die, unless a majority of my fellows pick red" and blue means "I survive no matter what" — would yield a majority for blue too. What was previously justified as the "virtuous" choice (blue) would now be justified as the "only intelligent" choice (blue).
Your entire logical chain, and your self importance, well, it explains why I'm always picking red. If you win and most pick blue, I'm safe, otherwise, I'm also safe.
You get to feel intellectually superior choosing the only option that can lead you to die. The simple answer is everyone should pick red.
>The simple answer is everyone should pick red.
The simplest answer is that everyone should pick blue, actually.
This is because choosing blue results in no consequences, but choosing red does result in consequences. Why not choose the simple option? It's literally the "no consequences" button.
Seems like these reds are overcomplicating a simple question.
Please explain. Red guarantees safety. Why wouldn't everyone pick red? The only option that leads to a statistical chance of death is blue?
I think this hypothetical captures a sort of hero complex. You think everyone is too stupid to choose the right choice so you will save us all...
Except we all chose red because its the obvious choice and now you are dead.
The framing leads many people to pick blue for its altruistic framing. Enough, in fact, that 50% quorum is honestly not difficult. A lot of red-advocates seem to have a False Consensus Effect going where they're convinced way more people than in reality will interpret this "dilemma" as "do you step in the human grinder in hopes of jamming it", and act accordingly.
A 70% or 90% requirement, or just explicitly framing it as "do you step into the human grinder" would make it vastly easier to aim for 100% red, but we're dealing with the literal words of the "everyone lives button" here.
The only option that leads to a statistical chance of murder though is red.
(6) isn't correct. Left alone, everyone rational would pick red because it's the only logical option. You trying to convince them otherwise might end up getting 49% of the population killed.
You should try to get everyone to pick red, not blue.
Left alone, everyone rational would pick blue, actually.
And why do you think that?
Since if a rational actor would understand that the group can avoid ever dying to this game by simply choosing blue. There is no consequence for choosing blue - but there is a consequence for choosing red.
Also, regardless of these specific consequences, people who are rational/ethical will by default choose blue because it is a good color.
See also, people by default choose blue at 5x the rate as red, really putting a dent in "red==rational" conjecture: https://www.joehallock.com/edu/COM498/media/graphs/fav-color...
I hope this makes sense!
There are two globally optimal solutions to this problem: > 50% pick blue (saving everybody), and 100% of the people pick red (saving everybody).
There is only one Nash equilibrium, which is for everybody to pick red. This is also strictly dominant for each player (if they choose red, they have a 100% chance of surviving, while if they choose blue, they only survive if > 50% of other people also choose blue). Knowing this, every participant has an incentive to choose red.
> Nash equilibrium
Bro... Game theory laws like Nash equilibrium dont apply if the population is irrational. Which it largely is!
Good luck explaining Nash equilibrium to a baby.
Only irrational people will pick blue. Let's say that's ~3% of the population. Trying to get another 47% of the population to pick blue risks losing all of them as well. That's not ethical.
People's "by default" behavior will never define what is rational. You don't do polling to choose rationality.
If there is a game in which you choose between two buttons, you know everyone will get this same choice, and one button says that you definitely live and the other button says that there's a chance that you will die, adding more rules to the "maybe death button" can not make it a more rational choice.
This is actually an experiment that I would get behind doing in real life. I will pick the red button. We could do it every morning.
There are enough collective action problems with real and obvious benefits leading to catastrophe without the need to create more unnecessarily, or to have any confidence in in a world full of strangers' collective ability to solve them. Campaigning for blue is actually murder; you've encouraged a situation that may result in the deaths of 49% of the population.
> There is no consequence for choosing blue
there are consequences in both cases.
You've structured ways to think about the problem in a hierarchy of intelligence, which is a classic economics mistake. People are not rational actors, and the primary factors determining who pushes the button will be self-preservation or group-preservation. Emotional factors.
Also, I think that's a simplistic view of intelligence.
You have two buttons. If you press that one, you might die. If you press the other one, you won't die. Which one do you press?
You have two buttons. If you press one, you're more likely to die. If you press the other, you might murder millions of people.
Am I talking about the game, or a preemptive nuclear strike that has a good chance of knocking out the enemies ability to ever launch?
Not to be political but we literally vote blue and red in politics and that can sometimes kill people literally in wars and some die silent deaths because of the impacts of their policies.
I would say that its hard to underestimate the social estimates of these things. A person who will genuinely be impacted by it themselves would fall into these traps more than one might think. History has many examples of fascism that some suggest that these periods of turmoil are the norm rather than exception.
Once again an obligatory message about how the world faces some genuine issues but instead of fixing them as a civilization, We would much rather prefer to have scapegoats and this goes both ways and might be true in a certain way and at a certain path both sides are too extreme to ever collaborate for the most part that a nation of once great strength might die a slow exhausting death if nothing changes.
I have come to the realization, The world has always been like this and it might always be like this. Its messy but also one can imagine this as a side effect as the mere coexsistence of our species in such massive numbers might demand polarization.
Some people create initial changes (for greed, genuineness etc.)
people then follow it (true belief)
people then meet other people and become friends with them and create a community.
new people are born or who change because of the community aspect (Since most things are nuanced, it is easy to frame anything and sometimes everything into such communities.)
The original people who made the thing dies/are out of power and new people from the community join.
these communities gain influence and decide the decision making but the heads of such communities are prone to narcissism or any other ways to draft as much as attention as possible as it seems that all attention is (good attention??)
More corruption follows, even the people of community are impacted and they might hear criticisms but the lock-in is too much. Stockholm syndrome.
Everyone else face the consequence and someone new creates a new movement and create another set of intial changes. Competition between multiple colors follows, we also see cooperation between red and blue to prevent outside competition.
In such sense, change creates change and cycle repeats. It is up to our interpretation on if there is any idea itself which can remain logical if its implementation or implementors get corrupted in a sense similar to erosion of the main values.
more than anything, humanity wants a community. a human somehow wants acceptance and validation for himself and he is selfish in the sense that he will put a blind eye sometimes if he isn't virtuous to damage outside his house (sometimes inside as well) and he wants a community because that is the only way he functions within a society of millions and billions while monkeys cant operate on more than hundreds.
More than a political critique, my point is, we should be more aware of this human tradeoff from empirical evidences and open up this blind spot and perhaps be more aware about it.
I was thinking that if some evil god could credibly force this sadistic choice on humanity we’re all in trouble, regardless of the button you push.
I’d probably turn my mind to resistance and refuse to push any buttons if possible.
You're missing the seventh group: trolls/assholes who will always press red but try to convince/muddy the waters about the blue button aiming to get a not-insignificant amount of <50% blue pushed to get people killed.
Prime candidate pool: 4chan.
If the question was restricted to local communities with 0 internet access, I would be more inclined to press blue.
But on a global scale? No fucking way.
> 6. People who realize the game theory optimal strategy is to announce you're pressing blue and convince everyone else to press blue, but privately press red.
A lot of this analysis depends on accurately guessing how people will react, so it's probably hard to say any strategy is game theory optimal without a lot of unrealistic simplifying assumptions.
In a world where you're able to convince a lot of people anything, it might better to convince everyone to press red. If it looks like 99.99% of people will press red without your influence, you're probably best off spending your time convincing the .01% who might press blue not to do so.
It also has the upside of not making you a dirty liar. I wonder, what would Kant think about this hypothetical?
So… you're 6?
Missing the layer where blue is my favorite color and therefore I will always choose blue. From this perspective, all other reasonings lack basic empathy and/or intelligence.
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Hello, Blue Presser here.
We learn something about humanity based on the results of the poll. It's naive to think that 100% of people will press the red button. Some people will die if red wins. I think pressing red is selfish and violent, in that it can result in the death of human life by their own unwillingness to cooperate.
If we are not willing to work together in order to protect each other then I have a very pessimistic long-term view of our future. If every blue-presser dies, then our average cooperation level will only decrease, and the population will be over-saturated with defectors. I'd rather just go out now then deal the those consequences.
The thing is, all those red button pressers can't see that, for all their exact and flawless reasoning, they have a bias towards individuality, which they see as the only possibility, and we blue button pressers perfectly understand the math and yet we have a bias towards others, and would sacrifice more readily at many situations like this one. This sacrifice is what reds see as "dumb", but natural selection has chosen this because it probably works.
Both sides have a mental bias, and just can't see each other's "reasoning" because of it.
We blues think of reds as selfish, because we can't conceive of anyone not thinking of the worst outcome for others, and being empathetic about it, making it one's own. And they see us as "virtue signalling", or getting some external value of some kind (recognition from peers) because they can't think of any other explanation to justify that behavior, when it is just pure bias towards sacrifice. Sacrifice is just that, giving something without asking nothing, which does not make sense for a red. Reds think we are dumb but society needs a little more blues than reds. Otherwise it probably collapses.
I'm such a proud blue. in fact... ;)
> It's naive to think that 100% of people will press the red button.
Those who press the blue button are trying to save those who press the blue button. If they weren't trying to save each other, they wouldn't have to.
So you agree, there is a population of blue pressers.
EDIT: The mere existence of blue-pressers makes being a red presser violent and selfish in my opinion.
No, some of those who press the blue button are trying to save people who press the blue button for other reasons.
Does that mean that in rayiner's phrasing [1], you'd argue for "cooperating" with the other head shooters?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47913066
Good points, though I think cooperation benefits the ethical outcomes for both sides.
If we all work together to make sure that as many people press the red button as possible, then we can minimize the damage. The problem with the blue campaign is that the outcome gets progressively worse until it gets to the best outcome. 49% mortality is high and terrible unless you are very sure that the red campaign is going to lose. The ethical take on the red side is to minimize blue votes to zero.
You're a single parent. Through divine intervention you know that your 5 year old child has already pressed the red button. Are you going to press the blue button and risk your child becoming an orphan in a selfish and violent world? Or do you sacrifice the lives of billions to save your child from this inconvenience?
That’s not the thought experiment.
Why pessimistic? The miracle of capitalism is that it harvests the power of people pursuing their self interest for the greater good. Collectivist systems that rely on everyone sacrifying their self interest for the collectivity failed spectacularly in the past.
>Some people will die if red wins.
Why? The logical conclusion of this game is that everyone presses red. There is no reason to press blue and leave it to chance. The article talks about it, but without further rules it would be absolutely nonsensical to press blue.
Like if there was some additional rule like "oh and if more than 90% press red, everyone dies" or something, it gets more interesting. But as is everyone answering blue is virtue signalling.
>I think pressing red is selfish and violent
Most of humanity is pressing the red button every single day, again and again. From every culture, creed, religion, loads of red button presses.
That some people play survival all the time because "that's what life is" does not mean that humanity doesn't have pockets of more quiet, non-competitive environments where blue pressers thrive. Humans have had a lot of periods where they were not being "just animals".
But I guess everyone thinks the world is like he wants it to be in this respect.
Considerations:
* many people (at least toddlers, people with dementia) are going to press blue roughly by accident. See the lizardman constant
* other people will not want to be responsible for any deaths and will press blue out of a sense of moral imperative
* many other people are going to take this into account and vote blue out of hopes we can save everyone
You should vote blue.
The first point is interesting. You could fork the question over this and have a few variants:
1.) The pure form where the button presses and restricted to legal agents (i.e. people with credible legal standing over their choices). 2.) The mixed form with the caveat listed here inclusive of all humans whether they are even physically capable of pushing a button. 3.) you could also go for a more expansive scenario that takes 2 to the extreme and includes animals as well.
1.) gets to the game theoretic form of the question. 2 muddies things, and 3 sets up a case for blue since the non agentic voters asymptote to 50-50 and a slim edge is morally preferable to killing half.
You don't even have to go that far from the original question. If instead of the entire world being a single game, if you have hundreds of millions of sub-games where 9 random people are placed within, what should you do?
Surely some of those groups are going to be filled with selfish red pickers. Should the kind coordinating players still go blue? All the red pickers are going to lie that blue is sensible. I suspect that more coordinators will die in this way than the always blue pickers if every coordinating player went red.
So now the full-world version only has the law of large numbers on their side, but they have no way of knowing just what percentage of the population is a selfish red picker. Going for team blue is the much riskier option that can yield catastrophe.
Why would a red picker ever lie about it? If I can get all 8 of my fellow players to pick red then we’re all safe. If it’s a button I’ll just break the blue button or wire it to red.
A selfish player will claim that they will coordinate with the group, and then vote red in private. A coordinating player will pick what the group chooses, whether that be red or blue. You are talking about a coordinating player here. Yes, in this case if all players agree to red, it's obvious you should all pick red. It's completely safe.
With 3, especially if the animals outnumber humans, you’d first want to do some research into animal psychology to see whether red or blue has an edge for animals.
Puzzles like this are based on assumptions like all participants are rational adults with their full faculties.
This one explicitly is not.
It’s a made up toy problem. It exists for fun. The stated problem has some implicit assumptions. But you can rejigger the rules and assumptions to tweak the incentives and ethics. That’s the whole point. You could take the puzzle and apply it to a band of pirates held in a jail. That might make the outcome more obvious. Or you could imagine what would happen if the voting order were sequential. These are all just different formalisms that are fun to speculate over, but the rules can be interpreted many ways.
Yes, but those are different thought experiments from this one.
That is true in isolation, but the reason we study problems like this one is to try to gain insight into our society (or our minds) and in our society, toddlers and people with dementia have guardians that make important decisions for them. Consequently, even after your comment, I'm still struggling to see how this toy problem or game sheds any light on anything I care about. Contrast that with prisoner's dilemma, Newcomb's problem or the ultimatum game, which sheds a lot of light.
But this is HN, so people are going to discuss it just because it is fun to discuss it.
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I love this thought experiment.
If you pick red you survive.
If you pick blue and at least 50% of people picked blue, you survive, otherwise you die.
There's 0 advantage to picking blue, none what so ever, the only reason you'd pick blue is because you assume there's some subset of people that is so unbelievably stupid that they'll pick blue. You're sacrificing yourself in the hope of saving them.
IMO, the reality is that everyone you think would pick blue would actually pick red. Very few people are that stupid, and even if they are they probably also have access to someone not as stupid who will tell them to press red.
The only people you'd be saving are other suicidal white knights that pick blue to save those imaginary "blue pressers", and the outcome of that, since that blue pressing base doesn't actually exist, is that you're all just committing collective suicide for absolutely no reason.
What "blue pressers vs red pressers" says about our society is best left to philosophers.
I imagine this making more sense if this were framed with the backdrop of living in an authoritarian state, with progressively worsening social conditions.
You can choose to protest (blue button) and if over some threshold of people then conditions reset. Otherwise protestors are killed off, and red buttoners survive, but with increased oppression.
Sorry for bringing the mood down with this topic. I'll go back to playing Papers Please! now.
I'm sorry to bring the mood down somewhat further. But a lot of the successful protests just end up re-rolling the dice instead of improving the conditions, and you actually end up possibly worse off than before. "More like, under new management", as the meme goes.
It takes a period of worldwide prosperity and, perhaps, substantial foreign entanglement to allow revolutions / coups to actually improve the situation of people living through them.
Some people seem to be convinced by logical reframings, like "if you jump into a woodchipper you die, but if 50% of people jump into the woodchipper they all survive"
A logical reframing is not equivalent though! We know everyone else gets the same frame, and most of the problem is predicting what other people will do when presented with this particular two-button frame.
I like this framing:
> Every person in the world is provided a gun. If a person wants to, they can shoot themselves in the head. However, these guns are special so that if more than 50% people in the world shoot themselves in the head, the guns will all jam and everyone will survive. Or, the person can choose to set the gun down and walk away.
Thats not the same at all though?
A baby or toddler is way less likely to randomly shoot themselves in the head of given a gun than they are to do nothing or shoot something else.
The 2 buttons made it 50/50.
The odds of random death are what is causing people to vote blue, and you just massively changed them in your thought experiment...
This sounds like it only changes the framing, but in reality it would lead to completely different behavior, so the "leave the gun alone" option would likely lead to far fewer deaths than the red button option, simply by virtue of organisms including humans being generally biased in favor of "do nothing" (= leave the gun alone).
You could do both experiments with dogs instead of humans and roughly 100% of dogs wouldn't manage to shoot themselves with the gun, whereas if you forced them to press one of the two buttons (e.g. keeping them in a room until they press one by chance), roughly 50% would press the red one. So the two experiments differ strongly w/r/t to how likely it is for a "non-thinking" organism to choose each option.
What makes this framing especially interesting is that it suddenly makes perfect sense to just lay down the gun.
Until you remember the millions of children in the exact same scenario.
So a 100% presses red and everyone survives too.
Yup there are multiple ways to right answer and people are arguing why isnt the most ethical selfless version winning. Lol
Are you also forcing children to press a button or not? Because the answer to this question changes things *a lot*.
Yes the inclusion of children does change things, in that it makes choosing red even more obvious.
The problem is posed to the world. You have children, and they ask you what they should do. You tell them to pick red because you're their parent you can't bring yourself to have them risk their lives for some noble purpose.
According to blue buttoners, this parent is an evil person, right?
What if you entertain the variant of the question where a percentage of red votes die in the event of a blue win? It makes pressing red less advantageous, but also it totally changes the moral balance depending on the percentage.
I think this is already baked in. A world of red pressers must know they’ll adapt to a shortage of things produced by blue pressers. Many red pressers won’t survive.
I like this thought experiment, because it's not actually a dilemma, since the answer is obvious, but it creates the meta-thought-experiment conversation of trying to understand the reasoning of blue-pickers in the comments.
Whereas most thought experiments try to balance two things equally, which creates a lot of debate, this one pushes the options as far apart as possible without quite going fully black-and-white (which would sound like, "If you press the red button, you live; if you press the blue button, you die."). This creates less disagreement, but maximizes the size of the disagreement that remains.
The problem posted is being taken at face value by some and being interpreted outside of a vacuum for others.
The reality is that we don’t live in a vacuum and the framing of red vs blue is almost certainly not an accidental alignment with political colors. If you are in the US, voting blue is also highly correlated with broader empathy characteristics.
It’s telling that some folks think 100% voting one way is just as attainable as more than 50% voting a certain way. The strong irony here is that they themselves would likely not change their vote to help get to 100% no matter which direction that happened to be. This is also why we are roughly split in half with only a small percentage actually voting differently than their identity politics allow.
These are so intensely annoying.
Besides the obvious choice of not pushing any button, so very rarely -- if at all -- are there only ever 2 options. The entire "thought experiment" leans into some fantastical unrealistic scenarios and plays on peoples "fast thinking" by saying here are 2 options I made up, tell me which of these 2 groups (us or them) shall I sort you into? Neither.
I thought about the ternary choice. Unconscious people, conscientious objectors, etc. The wording is that blue needs to exceed 50%, so the doomsday machine defaults to red.
The only winning move is not to play.
That’s basically why dictatorships are so hard to overthrow. In real life the game is slightly different, if you choose red (don’t protest) you get a negative outcome. But if you choose blue (protest) you risk being jailed (a very negative outcome) unless enough people also choose blue, in which case the outcome can turn highly positive.
That’s why dictators try to limit protests, not just because of the protests themselves but because they don’t want people to know how many others are willing to protest.
That doesn't hold up in comparison to this experiment, in which the best outcome from pressing the blue button is that you're rewarded in exactly the same way as if you had pushed the red button.
If the choice is between:
a) continuing to live under bad conditions if you press the red button, but if more than half press the red button everyone who pressed the blue button dies, and
b) if more than 50% press the blue button, everyone will live under good conditions,
then the differences between living under red conditions and under blue conditions becomes a factor. If red conditions and blue conditions are identical, hide the blue button, it is evil.
I assume most people are aware there will be some blue voters. I also assume that greater than 50% of the population are more socially minded than not as if it was otherwise, in the long run the society would fail to stay cohesive.
It would be easy to self justify picking red as 'it's not unethical killing, it's self preservation' but I'd still bet on society being more socially minded than not, for betting otherwise would mean i think society as an idea of togetherness is a total illusion. If choosing red, after, it would be non existent.
Though also to me the experience of life is starkly temporary; dying early or not doesn't really matter to me so i'm not surprised other's emotional conflict varies here. But as a result personally, losing the existence of something unique to experience (togetherness) in preference of something otherwise fleeting, even the self, isn't very interesting to me.
It’s an amusing thought experiment to share with friends, but I’m finding the sort of conversation here a bit tiresome; kind of judgmental and dogmatic.
I honestly kind of hate these thought problems, because they attempt to distill a complex system into a single, momentary choice, and then maximize the outcome somehow.
As if it’s the decision that somehow matters, as opposed to the systemic dysfunction and incentives that mandated the decision in the first place.
I’m an increasingly reluctant blue pusher, because I am aware that societal incentives reward individual greed when traded against societal harms; that is, those who sacrifice others are rewarded proportionate to the amount of others they sacrificed. I want to cooperate, because historically that has been the source of our collective survival and growth as a species; however, at this specific moment in time, I would be greatly rewarded if I harmed as many people as possible, as thoroughly as possible, to enrich myself.
If all you’re looking at is the binary decision, red makes sense. Except taken in the context of the wider whole, red pushers should be rightly vilified and excommunicated for prioritizing their own survival over the survival of the whole.
classic quasi paradoxical altruistic behavior and outcome.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altruism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altruism#Scientific_viewpoints
evolutionary game theory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_game_theory
That would genetically remove altruists from the population (assuming altuism is heritable and assuming children also have to press button).
The world would be a more selfish place in a generation after the experiment.
Presumably parents press the button for their babies.
As a family you would have to agree to all push the same colour otherwise you run the risk of only some of you dying. As a group decision I would think everyone would agree on red as the safe bet. Also making altruistic choices for children has two edges - and many parents would put their children's interests first not some strangers.
The only reason to pick blue is to try to do the "morally correct" thing to "save" the other people who picked blue.
If you're the first person in line to vote, picking blue is neither logical nor moral. There are no other blue choosers who you need to support. "But there will be people who vote after me" well that's their decision to make. "People will vote randomly" okay well if they can't take living or dying seriously, that's kind of on them. Choosing the zero risk option when everyone else has the exact same zero risk option isn't selfish.
It's not selfish to choose red because everyone else has the choice to choose red. There's an unknowable risk with choosing blue. Choosing red only exposes blue choosers to the exact risk they decided to take.
Reframe it to eliminate the silly savior complex and it sounds ridiculous:
There's an infinitely long trolley track. You can let the trolley continue down the track, or you can divert it in your direction. You might get smooshed by the trolley by diverting it, but at least someone standing further down the track won't divert it and smoosh themselves.
The arguments made about wanting to protect the children/babies and those with cognitive impairments are well meaning, but I think misguided. The bottom line is that the world has been put in a shit situation and you can't fix it. Encouraging blue is encouraging an increase in the likelihood that all the truly nice and wonderful people that would would actually follow through on a blue vote for altruistic reasons wind up dead. And that doesn't seem like an altruistic position? It seems more like self-martyring. Well meaning, but actually making the likelihood of a bad outcome worse.
You think it's easier to convince everyone to pick red than 51% of people to pick blue?
If you think it's possible to convince everyone to vote red then it's certainly possible to do the same for blue given how much lower the threshold is!
This is absolutely possible and realistic.
Imagine a scenario where public polls were taken and it showed 95% support for blue? Would you still be out here calling 95% of people martyrs? Blue is an absolutely winnable propoganda game!
You literally can fix it, you just need at least half the word to press blue to fix it.
You literally can't fix it, you need half the world's help to do it.
Things that I need billions of people's help for are on the top of the list of things that I literally can't do.
By this logic I also can't fly across the ocean in a modern airplane, but I obviously can.
We can get together and do great things. Whether that's science and industry or simply not murdering everyone who doesn't press red.
gpm's point is that it's a collective action issue. And even if one individual can't fix is, we can with a movement. And we SHOULD care about things like this. We're fairly familiar with these: big problem, only solved if enough people do a thing. But in general, almost all collective action problems we face are ones where either:
a. every incremental actor improves the overall picture with their individual choice (however small, even if it takes a threshold to be "solved": think, recycling, vaccines) b. every individual actor actor's choice has no _direct_ impact until some threshold is met (maybe voting?)
THIS situation, however is very different: every individual choice for blue makes things WORSE up until the threshold is met. And not just a little, but a LOT worse. That's not normal collective action territory, so we shouldn't be assuming the same kind of reasoning. The stakes of missing the threshold are not "aw shucks" or "keep trying, there's more chances later!" The stakes of missing the threshold are "everyone who cares about the threshold is dead."
I can't think of anything IRL that falls into this category?
> I can't think of anything IRL that falls into this category?
I suppose: People on one half of a standoff standing down when the other side will also stand down if everyone on the first half does. Not exactly a common problem to see outside of movies... but in principle it follows a common pattern. An individual lowering their guard is bad (if it ends up in a fight), but if everyone lowers their guard we get to avoid the fight.
If red pressers always survive then everyone should pick red. Its incredibly and obviously so and I'm concerned by the fact that so many commenters aren't aware of this.
Red is the obvious choice from a self-preservation perspective but not a moral one. You're seeing here in these comments that there are lots of blue pressers; they would all die. This creates a snowballing incentive to push blue: people dying is bad.
There's several reasons why someone might make the "wrong" choice, and reaching 50% + 1 on blue is way easier than reaching 100% on red. And sure enough, the polls I've seen have shown blue with a majority every time.
Its an interesting psychological test. Because, no, I don't agree, red is the moral choice and also the most rational.
Those who think the population is too stupid to behave in regards to their own self preservation might choose blue in an attempt to 'save everyone' and kill themselves.
Only one singular choice has zero risk of death, and its red. Everyone chooses red and we all survive.
Red does have risk: you’d be left in a world without things produced by the blue pressers. I suspect that’s red's food, water and shelter.
edit: specified who
If you think most farmers, construction workers, factory workers, and so on would press blue then you might want to actually get to know some of them and put them to this test. I don’t think many of them would willingly risk death on something so trivial as a button press. I’ve seen guys get rescued from falling off roofs but as written I don’t think many of the guys running to get their buddy out of his harness and on the ground are going to pick blue if you present it in a really clinical sense.
Sure, I can ask around. It's a drought here, so we're looking for things to talk about.
It's not really about the numbers, though, is it? The red button future is now a mix of game theoreticians, Objectivists, and people who like the color red. The proportion of parasites is up.
These types of analyses always treat voting red and ending up in the majority as preferable to voting blue and ending up in the minority. I don’t think that assumption is universally valid.
In the first case you contend with living in a world after a catastrophic population loss — likely including at least some of your loved ones — knowing that had some of you and your fellow survivors voted differently, nothing bad would have happened.
In the second case, you don’t care at all. Because you’re dead.
I would describe it like this. We are all standing on the edge of a cliff. You can choose the 'Red' option. That option means you don't jump off the cliff. Or you can choose the 'Blue' option. You jump off the cliff. If 50% of individuals choose also the 'Blue' option then there will be a net to catch you so you don't all die.
So, now we agree? Red option it is every time.
Yes, when you completely rephrase the problem you will have different sentiments.
The thought experiment demands that the phrasing that was used actually be used, and you don’t get a chance to show the dumb blue people how smart you are before they pick their button.
The problem isn't rephrased. Option Red = 0% chance of death, Option Blue = chance of death but maybe you can be the hero and save everyone.
So we all choose option Red and you, the hero, chose Blue. Congratulations, we will write some nice words on your tombstone.
It is rephrased. Any phrasing besides the original exists only in your head and not in anyone else’s.
The only reason I’m in my tomb is because you and people like you voted to kill me instead of voting to do nothing. Luckily for me, I’m dead and don’t care.
Congratulations! Enjoy your life with people who think like you.
Well, that is one way to rationalize, as I guess there is an infinite number of ways to do so.
The point remains, only one singular choice guarantees your own safety. And another has a Chance of death. Take the stupid choice because you think everyone else is also stupid? Thats your choice.
It doesn’t guarantee my safety, though. It puts me in a world where the only people left were so afraid of dying that they opted into a completely avoidable mass murder.
It may not have been completely avoidable though. What if the maximum number of people who would ever vote for blue is 30%
If that's the case then it's truly impossible to save them.
Your assumption is there is more than 50% of people who will vote blue or could be convinced to do so.
It's a terrifying thought that there could be such a deficit of empathetic people. But without any evidence you're just hoping based on your own beliefs that over 50% believe in blue like you do.
What if I'm not afraid of dying. But I'm just not willing to throw my life away unless there's decent evidence it could succeed and we could get above 50%
Then I’d say you either really deserve the world you get when red wins, or you don’t really deserve the world you get when blue wins.
I notice that this thing you and others call empathy doesn't extend to the outgroup: if anybody doesn't subscribe to it, fuck 'em, is the general sentiment.
I have no idea what you are referring to. This isn’t a question of ingroup or outgroup.
No idea! Well, I must assume good faith and believe you. To me it looks like you're labelling everybody you dislike as "probably a psychopath, best disposed of". I suppose that's consistent with saying they're not the outgroup, it's just a practical necessity or something.
In this instance of course what you're proposing is very mild: you think they should suffer one another's company - which you imagine would be a terrible experience. Unless you further imagine that they'd like it? But my impression was that you thought they'd have a bad time, and since they're your non-compassionate outgroup, you very compassionately don't care.
You read a bunch of things into what I wrote that simply are not there. I like plenty of people who would press the red button without hesitation. Their decision is their decision and my decision is mine. Might they “have a bad time?” Maybe. Maybe not. I’m certain I would have a terrible time, if I joined them in the majority.
I feel like this is some sort of butchered metaphor because in a vacuum just picking a color that has no context or effect outside of the experiment framing is really easy. But it’s not that simple if there are some externalities. Say, red guarantees your survival but there’s 50% chance your pet will die. Or every red choice has a 10% flipping one red choice among your friends and family to blue. Now it’s not just a selfish choice but a choice with a known downside. This is a much more interesting game to play. Maybe even a more realistic one.
The correct response is not to press any button, but to find whoever set up this game, and remove their capability to harm anyone.
You might die if you press blue.
Ok.. don't press blue.
Is this repeated or one time?
Can you force people on red or not?
Seems difficult to guarantee you don't kill a bunch of kids each button press cycle...
Many people aren't old and developed enough to reason it out yet...
If this is repeated I'd certainly be on the team of trying to convince people to go blue... Otherwise the chance of someone randomly pressing red every time before they get to the age of 5 or whatever seems too low to guarantee the long term survival of the species... I guess it depends on how often it happens?
> Is this repeated or one time?
I think it's meant to be one time.
> Seems difficult to guarantee you don't kill a bunch of kids each button press cycle...
Seems extremely easy to guarantee that I don't kill a bunch of kids, just press blue. It's only the red-pressers who might end up murdering kids. By pressing blue the only person I am putting at risk is myself.
If someone has parents and kids themselves should they convince them to press blue as well?
I'd say so, I think encouraging your family to act morally (not murder people) is a good thing.
One extra consideration I haven't seen flagged: if you pick Red and the blue pressers die then everyone who's left alive definitely pressed Red. Then there will be a society-wide tacit agreement that this was a fine thing to do, blue pressers were all dumb and had it coming, and no-one needs to feel bad about it. So you won't even need to feel guilty.
First they came for the blue button pressers, and I did not speak out.
Red button pressing is killing people that didn't think/act like them. You don't need to feel guilty about it, because this type of thing happens all the time.
First they came for the ones waving their hands in the air and shouting "pick me!"
Then, they stopped.
Is there actually a real-world version of this game, that the author is alluding to buy not explicitly mentioning?
Otherwise all I'm taking away from this article is that people don't think deeply about survey questions before answering them.
This is a purely theoretical concept, but ties nicely into existing game-theory which has real world implications.
Thinly veiled political post.
As a political post the formulation in the article is crass in the extreme, misrepresenting both the motivations of red and blue voters and also the and the long-term consequences of those parties' policies. There's no progress to be made in a conversation held so close to the surface.
It's very inaccurate/loaded as a political post, but the choice of colors makes the intent fairly obvious.
Politically speaking, in the US where everything is rigged by corporate media and a uniparty of capital interests with red/blue facades (where blue manufactures consent for red every step of the way), the only winning move is to not play.
>the only winning move is to not play
Interestingly there are variants of the question where "no one pushes any button" should also be a "winning condition". The original problem states "if less than 50% of people press the blue button only people who push red survive" which rules this out, but it could be changed to "if greater than 50% of people choose red, then only red pushers survive" (allowing for people to opt to be a non-pusher). Or it could be "if greater than 50% of people choose red, then only blue pushers die" (with the non-pushers also being spared).
I think the latter is more interesting since now there's a moral consequence to voting vs abstaining.
Or you could lean into the political framing. I bet if the vote were retaken with question phrased as "if greater than 50% of people choose red, then people who pressed blue die", you might end up with some switchers who vote purely out of spite. Or maybe that framing makes it feel like voting red has a more significant moral consequence (actively condemning people to death) that the original question doesn't, so it results in more people pressing blue.
You could even add in a penalty if you press a button but are a non-majority, but then that's just the prisoners dilemma.
Your assumptions of Tim Urban were false.[1]
[1] https://x.com/waitbutwhy/status/1519851044666183681
Feels like spending more money on environmentally-friendly technology.
I don't like how the question is setup, both in wording and scenario. Saying "everyone will die unless >50% press blue" sounds more impactful. And pressing red is a free win in this scenario making it a nonchoice. Threshold not being announced or red having some condition would make it more interesting (and at the same time, boring).. unless the point of the question is not to make people discuss blue vs red, but why you should make an irrational decision.
The number of people trying to use game theory here is frankly embarrassing.
This is about predicting real people!
People are not perfect rational actors.
Good luck explaining your Nash equilibrium theory to your 6 month old niece and nephew who are good pick blue because it's their favorite color.
You aren't gonna get an all red movement to succeed. There are a small minority who will vote red or blue regardless of the community sentiment - and some of those people will be kids who would probably grow up to be smarter than your game theorizing selves if they are given to opportunity to grow old enough to fully mature.
Full propaganda team blue.
Another way to frame the question is "how much effort should society as a whole put into saving the lives of individuals who endanger no one but themselves through unnecessary dangerous choices?"
I feel like it's fine that wingsuiting off a mountain is legal. I don't feel a need to beg some stranger not to do it. Both myself and that stranger are perfectly aware there's a decent chance their choice will result in their death.
I would be more interesting if the vote was public.
If you push red, you will survive. If you push blue, you might die.
Just push red.
Immediate reaction after cursory read through: A fake scenario against virtue signaling feels like virtue signaling itself.
if everyone were rational, and knew everyone else would act rationally, then obvious answer is to pick red, because everyone would pick red, and hence everyone would survive.
These sorts of problems assume that actions have no consequences beyond the immediate decision. These tests, run in places which have higher long-term expectation of social connections, give different results than in the US.
In the world where <50% press blue, you know that everyone alive (the red pushers) would save themselves rather than take a risk helping you or those who aren't clever at game theory problems.
I don't want to live in that world, so blue for me. And it's the fault of everyone who pressed red should I die.
This doesn't seem to be a game that tries to be particularly clever--one button could kill you, the other certainly won't. Trusting that nearly everyone will avoid pressing the button that could kill them seems a reasonable assumption, and it's not necessarily an indication of a lack of altruism.
One button could kill you — if and only if enough people press the other button.
The other button certainly won’t kill you, but will kill everyone who pressed the first button — if and only if enough people besides you press it.
One button means you almost certainly contributed to homicide, since the odds of everyone pressing red is essentially 0%.
The other one does not contribute to homicide.
The right answer, by the way, is to not press either button. "The only winning move is not to play."
Let me frame it another way and see if you still consider it homicide:
There's a cruise ship that needs to have a certain weight in order to not capsize. That weight threshold happens to be at 50% of the population (for whatever population we're considering in the original question). If the ship capsizes, everyone on it dies.
You're given the option: either get on the cruise ship or don't. Not to take an actual cruise, not for some other intrinsic prize, just file on it for a minute and then get off.
I don't see how those who refuse the risk of dying on the ship are complicit in the deaths of those who willingly choose to hop on it knowing the risks involved
You don’t get to reframe the problem with different wording or circumstances to demonstrate your intelligence to others before they choose and you choose. That’s part of the thought experiment.
That knowledge isn't a "consequence" of the game. It's a symptom of a fact that's knowable a priori. Running the game doesn't make it true; running the game merely reveals something that was already true.
Looking at this and the virality of Newcomb's Paradox, I have to wonder if Shari's Scissor[0] did in fact get invented.
0: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/
Silly.
Everyone will press the red button and everyone will survive.
Yes, that's (overly reductively stated) the point of TFA. Except for the part where it was highlighting a survey result to the contrary, and explaining why this is irrational and doesn't likely reflect what people would actually do.
The idea behind claiming you'd choose the blue button is to appear noble and altruistic, I suppose; but I struggle to even understand that instinct. Risking one's own life to possibly save the lives of others who are demonstrably completely capable of saving themselves doesn't strike me as particularly noble.
> this is irrational and doesn’t likely reflect what people would actually do
People are irrational. I guarantee it’s likely that a lot of people would actually do it.
> The idea behind claiming you’d choose the blue button is to appear noble and altruistic.
Not at all. If the majority of people can’t be bothered to press the button that says “nobody dies as long as half of the other people say nobody dies” rather than “you don’t die,” I’m happier not being around. It’s purely selfish and blue is a win-win.
Either I live with a restored faith in humanity, or I die and it's none of my concern.
>Everyone will not just. If your solution to some problem relies on "If everyone would just..." then you do not have a solution. Everyone is not going to just. At not time in the history of the universe has everyone just, and they're not going to start now.
You never press the button. Therefore, the game is never finished. Everyone goes on with their life as is.
By not contributing to the blue button you are commiting murder.
Its frankly shocking just how many people here aren't Christian (or don't understand love thy neighbor) and are on the evil spectrum of DnD, and bragging about it.
wrong thread?
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