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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   3104 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for May 1, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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What if the percentage of people that needed to press the blue button to survive was increased to 60%? 75%? 90%? Most of the provided reasons for pressing blue still holds true because none of them take consideration any calculation on what percentage of people one might believe to press blue to warrant pressing blue. For the blue button pressers, is there a number at which you would change your mind?

Here is my post about it from when it was last discussed 2 years ago:

Red requires 100% cooperation for the optimal outcome, blue requires 50% cooperation for the optimal outcome. It is near-impossible to get 100% cooperation for anything, particularly something where defecting is as simple as pressing a different button and has an actual argument for doing so. Meanwhile getting 50% cooperation is pretty easy. If blue required 90% or something it would probably make more sense to cut our losses and aim for minimizing the number of blue, but at 50% it's easy enough to make it worthwhile to aim for 0 deaths via blue majority.

If we are to compare to politics, I think the obvious comparison is to utopian projects like complete pacifism that only work if you either have 100% cooperation (in which case there is no violence to defend against or deter) or if you have so little cooperation that everyone else successfully coordinates to keep the violence-using status-quo (akin to voting for red but blue getting the majority). Except that such projects at least have the theoretical advantage of being better if they got 100% cooperation, whereas 100% cooperation on red is exactly the same as 50%-100% cooperation on blue.

In real life serious crime is almost always a self-destructive act, and yet people do it anyway. "Just create a society where there's no incentive to do crime and we can abolish the police because 0 people will be criminals" doesn't work, not just because you can't create such a society, but because some people would be criminals even if there was no possible net benefit. We can manage high cooperation, which is why we can coordinate to do things like have a justice system, but we can't manage 100% cooperation, that's why we need a justice system instead of everyone just choosing to not be criminals.

It might help to separate out the coordination problem from the self-preservation and "what blue voters deserve" aspects. Let us imagine an alternative version where, if blue gets below 50% of the vote, 1 random person dies for each blue vote. Majority blue is once again the obvious target to aim for so that nobody dies, though ironically it might be somewhat harder to coordinate around since it seems less obviously altruistic. Does your answer here differ from the original question? The thing is, even if you think this version favors blue more because the victims are less deserving of death, so long as you place above-zero value on the lives of blue voters in the first question the most achievable way to get the optimal outcome is still 50% blue.

I think 60% might be enough to make me switch, but this is influenced by having seen polling where even in randomized polls targeting the general public blue only gets 74% of the vote if you exclude those who responded "I don't know" and 63% if you don't. (I think the general public is more blue than internet voters because this is one of those cases where instincts usually give a good answer but then people can talk themselves out of it based on stuff like half-remembered game-theory puzzles.) The 60% threshold would have to induce 19% of blue voters to switch to drop from 74% to 60%, it's hard to guess if that would happen. Originally before seeing any polling I think I would stick with blue at 60% and switch at 70%. Of course this is assuming it is a surprise and there's no opportunity to do stuff like talk about it, orchestrate pro-blue government advertising campaigns, and hold public-results rehearsal polls beforehand. Very high thresholds would be viable if we could do stuff like that.

The crime example seems to imply the opposite of what you're getting at. Yes, crime is self-destructive, and it appears that the optimal way to deal with crime is to destroy criminals even further, hopefully deterring some, rather than pour the efforts of 50% of society into a vast project of reeducation and reconciliation that gets abused unless it works just right.

The key difference is the level of coordination required. Having police requires 50%+ coordination, otherwise they can just vote to legalize crime or have the police become an extension of organized crime. Similar to how the two arguments for red are the ultra-optimistic "100% can just save themselves by pressing red" and the pessimistic "we can't get to 50% coordination on blue so we should cut our losses", two parallel arguments against police would be "100% can just decide to not commit crime" and "we can't trust a 50% majority with the power of policing, we're better off with anarchy where everyone buys a gun and defends themselves even though there will be inevitable losses". Yes they aren't identical - for instance a draw for crime is people who (usually falsely) believe it will benefit themselves, while a draw for blue is people who believe it will benefit others - but they both reflect the difference between the unrealistic idealism of 100% coordination and the everyday practicality of 50% coordination.

vast project of reeducation and reconciliation that gets abused unless it works just right

Reeducating criminals to not be criminals doesn't solve criminality because even a tiny minority who don't listen to you can commit a lot of crime. We already teach the majority to not be criminals, it's just that the leftovers don't need a majority. Societies pull off that level of coordination all the time, even armies don't have 50% desertion rates. The button scenario doesn't have the opportunity to explicitly communicate and coordinate beforehand like the military does, but it's also an easier scenario where 50% provides 0 casualties, unlike knowing that coordination will still result in a large percentage getting shot.

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