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Notes -
This has resurfaced and been trending for a while
Currently at 42.1% red and 57.9% blue.
What would you choose? (See also r/slatestarcodex discussion)
I was motivated to post because I have a convincing argument for blue:
Stupid people will choose blue. You may not care about the disabled, elderly, generally moronic, etc. but this includes children and people who are "too generous": nice, but emotional, and devote their lives to charity
Thanos snapping a decent amount of the population (including random children, and biased towards selflessness) will probably overall negatively affect society
I probably won't die because most people choose blue, as evidenced by the poll. Even if I do, it may be preferable to living with the survivors (point #2)
A true utilitarian/consequentialist should vote with whatever you expect the majority to be.
The only time your red vote matter is if there is a red majority. The only time a blue vote matters is if there everyone else in the world perfectly ties and your vote is the tiebreaker to blue. This is absurdly ridiculously unlikely, however in the event it happens it's absurdly ridiculously impactful. If you assume everyone else in the world is going to vote blue with probability p, and actually run the math, then you save the maximum number of lives by voting with whichever side of 50% that p is on. If the world population even slightly favors red then there is ~0% chance Blue will win and your vote has astronomically tiny chances of winning (billions of lives saved divided by quadrillions to one odds of it mattering). In this scenario, you aren't sacrificing your life to save anyone else, the children will die no matter what you do. In the original scenario, there is no communication or time to communicate, everyone is presented with the scenario and votes. If the world leans red, you either die for no reason or you live and try to pick up the pieces left over after however many people die, die. You cannot save them.
On the other hand, if the world leans blue, then you should vote blue. There is a tiny chance your vote matters, but also a tiny chance that through randomness you die voting blue, and it ends up being just barely worth it for non-selfish people.
If you have absolutely no idea how the world leans and p could be anything then you've got about a 50-50. There's a 1/2 chance voting blue kills you, and a 1/(world population) chance you are the tiebreaker and save half the world's population, meaning an average of 1/2 life saved. In this case, I think blue is probably better because of the second order effects of losing half the world's population and the ramifications that would have on society.
However, importantly, we DO have some idea on how the world leans. A significant fraction of people are mean and selfish. A significant fraction of people aren't willing to sacrifice themselves to save random strangers. Half of people have an IQ below 100 and are just going to press the red button because that's the simple, safe answer for themselves. If educated, western, liberal, rational people are arguing about this and half of them are red and half are blue, what do you think all of the poor people in third world countries are going to vote? What do you think people in foreign nations with foreign religions and cultures are going to vote? What do you think they're going to think we are going to vote? What do you think they think their next door neighbors who they have been warring with for thousands of years are going to vote? Are Russia/Ukraine, Israel/Palestine, Algeria/Morocco, Iran/USA going to vote blue, suspecting that their hated enemy is probably going to vote red? Or are they going to fear that billions of people living somewhere else that they don't know are going to vote red, and use that to justify what they secretly wanted in their hearts which was to vote red. Voting blue requires sacrifice, willpower, courage, and also to think that everyone else shares those virtues with you. I think there are a lot of people like that, but not half. Blue is an unstable Schelling point, because any doubt or uncertainty makes people think that other people think that.... Red is stable. And therefore red is correct in the world we actually live in. For empirical reasons.
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