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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30660 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 14, 2023

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Are you stupid or am I evil?

There is a political quote which says that "the Right thinks the Left is stupid while the Left thinks the Right is evil". Today/yesterday there was a poll floating around rationalist twitter which I think is the best example I've ever seen of this dynamic.

It asks you to choose between two options:

  1. (Blue pill)
  2. (Red pill)

And what happens is that:

- if > 50% of ppl choose blue pill, everyone lives
- if not, red pills live and blue pills die

Now if you think about it for even 30 seconds, it clearly makes sense for everyone to choose Red Pill here: if everyone chooses Red Pill nobody dies, which is the best case scenario from choosing blue, and on top there is no personal risk to yourself of dying. You can even analyse it game theoretically and find that both 100% blue and 100% red are Nash equilibria, but only 100% red is stable, and anyways, choosing red keeps you alive with no personal risk (not present in case you choose blue), so everyone should just choose Red, survive and continue on with their lives. Indeed this poll is equivalent to the following one (posted by Roko):

  1. Walk into a room that is a human blender
  2. Do nothing

And what happens is that:

- if you choose the blender, you will die, unless at least 50% of people choose the blender as well, in which case the blender will overload and not work, making you live
- if you do nothing, you live

You would have to be monumentally, incorrigibly stupid to choose the blue pill (walking into the blender) here and we should expect Lizardman's constant level support for blue.

If only our world were really that simple...

The poll can be found here on Twitter: https://twitter.com/lisatomic5/status/1690904441967575040 . Currently there is a 65% majority for choosing the blue pill ::facepalm:: . At least this number is over 50% so nobody is dying. What justification is provided for people choosing Blue over Red? Well, one of the top replies is that "red represents the values of intolerance and fascism". Now this is an extreme example of a reply but even then personally I am stunned that there are a non-negligible proportion of people who actually think in this way. The best response explain what's going on here seems to be this one:

I’ll take the over on preference falsification driving these results.

If all voters were in a position where the non-zero chance of death for a blue vote vs zero chance of death for a red vote was salient and believable, red would win.

Cost-free signaling is a hell of a drug.

Perhaps expectedly enough, no matter how many Red supporters try to explain to people that choosing Blue is stupid, making the choice really really clear using examples like this:

Your plane crashes into the sea. Everyone survives, and exits the plane with their life vest.

Someone says, “If over half of us turn our life vests into a raft, it can save everyone without a life vest! Otherwise, we’ll drown!”

Everyone has a life vest.

Everyone wearing a life vest will not drown.

Do you build the boat, or just put on your vest?

And yet, large amounts of people still support blue (taking your life vests off to build a raft). The fact that such people get to vote (and make up a majority of at least this twitter poll) is a fucking scary thought. This is why we can't have nice things people!

</rant over>

In more encouraging news rdrama.net also ran this poll here: https://rdrama.net/h/polls/post/196874/are-you-effective-altruist-enough-to . Fortunately people there were sensible enough to vote for Red by a 90-10 margin, which is basically everyone once you discount the ultra-edgy maximally contrarian nodule on the site ("I want to die, so I pick blue") which will always vote to pick the maximally dramatic option (which on the site would be Blue).

I'd be interested in trying this out here on the Motte too, but unfortunately we don't have poll functionality on this site...

&&Blue Pill&&
&&Red Pill&&

EDIT:

For people who say "Blue" is the right choice for pro-social reasons:

Consider a slightly changed version of the poll where instead of choosing for yourself whether you have Red/Blue you are making this choice for a random stranger who's also taking part (and in turn some other random stranger is making the choice for you). In this case it makes sense from a selfish perspective to choose Blue for that random stranger, since there's a chance that the person choosing for you chooses Blue for you as well in which case you'd want 50%+ Blue as you want to live, while from an altruistic perspective it makes sense to choose "Red" for your stranger, since that way you're saving them from potentially dying.

In this case we'd expect everyone to end up choosing Blue if they play rationally, even though the "altruistic" pro-social option is to choose Red. If you still think that everyone should choose Blue then you agree that there are cases where the non-(pro-social) thing is the right thing to do.

If you say that in this case we should each of us now choose Red as that's the socially good option then since people generally value their own life at least as much as the life of a stranger (note: I say "at least as much", not "more" here) you must also agree that it's just as fine for people to choose "Red" in the case where they're deciding for themselves instead of a stranger.

Yes, it's a very basic game-theoretical outcome that you should choose red. However, this ignores human psychology- if you account for it, even if no information sharing is present, choosing blue is probably rational (depending on whether you know who else is involved and how important they are for your life). This is because the word "die" attaches a stronger taboo to the red pill option. We instinctually assume that a group would get together and agree on this; 50 % agreement is not that hard, but 100 % agreement is pretty hard.

Btw as a result of arguing with people in the BotCcord, I managed to convince myself that Red is actually the prosocial choice.

  1. The selfishness of the Red choice is a bit of a red herring, you can modify the scenario where you are choosing the pills for your underage children while having won a lottery that guarantees your survival in a Red world. The problem remains.

  2. The actual scary worlds are where 10-50% of people choose Blue. This is the nightmare scenario that we want to avoid at all costs, including killing 1% of suicidal people, idiots, etc--if that actually works.

  3. After I pointed that out, I got weird arguments from Blue people that they were certain that Blue would win anyway, but somehow this didn't make them choose Red just in case.

  4. A sort of Kant's Universalizability/one-boxing in Newcomb's problem came up too: you should choose Blue so that people like you choose Blue and Blue wins. But by the same logic you're also morally responsible for killing everyone who chose Blue in a 49% Blue world.

Yeah, this all makes sense. If you're certain blue is going to win anyways, choosing Red just in case is the expectation of number of lives saved maximising option (someone did the maths downthread).

I pick red because I care more about not dying than I care about idiots and idiot-saviors not dying 🗿

After reading the whole thread (The Motte: "The choice is so obvious, how could anyone disagree" Also the Motte: 40,000 words of debate in a day) it seems to me that the choice depends from what you're planning to achieve:

  • If you want to save yourself, red is the clear choice;
  • If you want to save a group of people with whom you can reliably coordinate, either by explicit communication or by sharing similar thought patterns (a group sharing your values, if you will), red is again the best;
  • if you want to save everyone, blue is the most likely to succeed.

Let's reframe it again!

I have a gun. You have a wallet. I do not have a wallet. You do not have a gun.

Would you rather we lived in blue pill world or a red pill world?

That is why people pick blue. Because after everyone selects their pills, they go back to work where other people get 100000 choices a day to pick red or blue for you.

Your solution to this prisoners dilemma is the state of nature.

Let’s try bringing the pills to this world of wallets and guns.

Would I rather live in a place where everyone is armed and can protect their own wallet, and because everyone knows armed robbery has a high likelihood of bloody death, nobody commits armed robbery?

Or would I rather live in a place where I have to rely on the police to a) keep everyone but the police from having guns, including organized people good at hiding secrets and doing crime, b) be close and aware enough to prevent all robberies (armed with a gun, armed with another weapon, or unarmed except for literal arms and hands), c) not accidentally shoot me or mine, d) not ever be corrupt robbers or tyrannical imprisoners themselves despite being the only armed people in the place.

Occam’s Razor suggests the simplest answer is the best. In the first place, I only have to rely on other people’s sense of self preservation. In the second, I have to rely on the competence, capability, capacity, and honor of people whose job is partly to prevent me from gaining the means to defend myself.

Consider the actual situation you are describing in case one: Baltimore in the 90's. Somalia. Zanzibar. Early Colonial America.

Basically, you are describing the situation up to the creation of the modern state, where (once you normalize for famine and infectious disease) the most common cause of death for men was being murdered.

As usual, nothing rational about this "rationalist" mind experiment unconnected to anything in real life, and this makes it the best reason for wild dead bird teapot storm. Pick a side and fight!

If we squint hard, it might be seen as allegory to cowardice/desertion in war, except it is the kind of war where you get nothing if you win and nothing happens to you if you lose.

Imagine: you are peasant conscripted by your feudal boss. If you desert, you certainly get to live (your boss' security is shit), if you stay and fight but more than half of your fellows desert, you lose and die. If your side wins, your boss gets some more land and peasants to rule. If your side loses (because everyone deserts) you get new boss to rule over you, no different from the old boss.

In this case, the rational choice, both from indivudual and collective POW, is obvious.

The problem with your reframing however, is that fighting typically implies killing others, even if you are not at risk of getting killed yourself. So if you are a humanitarian, even if you "win", you lose. In other words, the correct choice is obvious only if you don't care about other people's lives.

Imagine a different version where an enemy army is about to attack your village, intending to kill all who stand in its way, but leaving others unharmed. But the enemy isn't reckless. If the village fields a large enough army in its defense, the attack will be too risky, and the enemy will call it off. In that case, the status quo is maintained without any bloodshed.

In that case, just like in the original scenario, it would make sense for you to join the defense if all of the following hold:

  1. You believe some people will choose to fight regardless of the odds.
  2. You care enough about those people to risk your own life to help save theirs.
  3. You believe it's likely your army will reach the critical size necessary to avoid bloodshed.

The rest is just squabbling about probabilities: how much of a risk would you be willing to assume for a chance to save someone else's life?

(By the way, I always hate it when people declare their own point of view as obvious. Even if you are right, you aren't obviously right. And before you say “well, it might not be obvious to a dunce like you, but it's obvious to me, a very intelligent person!”: in my experience there is little correlation between people who declare themselves to be highly intelligent and who are able to demonstrate their intelligence. For example, there are plenty of people who, at least at first, insist that in the Monty Hall problem it's “obviously” pointless to switch.)

On the other hand, if you lose then your kids get sold into slavery and your wife is raped…that is actual downside to losing in real life.

This is why I set my example in feudal times, not in antiquity.

Could we not test this (it's cost free signalling) out with at least small stakes using cryptocurrency?

E.g. you have a poll where blue is everyone gets money back if 50%+ vote blue, red is you get the pot divided by red voters...

This isn't the same. In this case red voters want a sizeable minority to vote blue. Unless you're especially bloodthirsty that isn't the case in the original scenario

You’ve hit the nail on the head. There’s a perverse incentive. How about this:

  • blue gets money back if 50%+ vote blue, otherwise the blue money gets burned up and nobody gets it.
  • red is you get your money back, exactly what you put in.

It's not the right way to go about being bloodthirsty.

Decent point.

But a lot of blue-pickers seem to be ignoring the possibility that such bloodthirsty people could exist and want more people to die.

If that didn't impact their choice before, don't know why it would here.

I cannot be arsed to read it as anything other than

Red: Live

Blue: Maybe Die

and anyone who draws up a grand narrative of how it's more than this is a rascal and a villain.

I ran this by a BPD ancestor and got told only psychopaths would choose red.

This from a person who was observed laughing quietly at the scene in King's Speech where Churchill berates his newly hired stenographer to tears.

Can someone run this by their friends with the colors reversed? I'm betting 99% of the results is comes from conflating the colors with American political tribes.

Am gonna run it on a gaming discord populated by mostly blue collar slavs.

I think the effect would be the most pronounced with American progressives.

Suppose that we take an extreme example of this. If one person votes Blue, he dies. But if even one person joins him, nobody dies. I think even the most hardened Red would concede the case for picking Blue. After all, your risk is very low, since there's a very high chance someone else will join you.

Consider the opposite case. If there is even a single Red voter, all Blues die. Well, even the softest of heart might concede that it's justified to vote Red than to throw your life away for the extremely small chance of total Blue unanimity.

But then, I don't vote.

Suppose that we take an extreme example of this. If one person votes Blue, he dies. But if even one person joins him, nobody dies. I think even the most hardened Red would concede the case for picking Blue. After all, your risk is very low, since there's a very high chance someone else will join you.

On the other hand, the chances of actually saving anyone is small since enough people will vote for blue anyways. I don't think there is a single scenario, other than me being very concerned with the people I am trying to save, where I would pick blue.

I think the key poll here is you can't coordinate and it's a secret poll.

Both examples I gave were secret.

You wrote concede and implied people have some knowledge of the event and how others are choosing.

I'm talking about the people in this thread arguing for one side of another. In the hypothetical, you don't know for sure how others are choosing. But you can reasonably assume that in a group of many people, there is probably at least one other person that will pick Red or Blue.

As is pointed out by others here, it's all about framing. I frame this as:

-Blue pill: You join a death cult that will commit suicide unless half of all people join them.

-Red pill: You don't join this death cult.

Those blue-pillers are going to live or die in circumstances outside of my control, but the one thing I can control is my ability to save my own life. Perhaps another reframing is that instead of making the choice for myself, I am making it for another person. By selecting blue for this other person, I am willing to wager their life on an unknown outcome, and by selecting red I am guaranteed to save one life that would not be saved otherwise. I suspect that the calculus of this decision changes when the life of someone else is being wagered instead of one's own, but the difference is between having compassion for others and having compassion for one's self.

When you phrase it like that, blue reminds me of codependent people who demand someone do something or they’ll kill themselves.

Never put anything you value into the hands of someone that crazy, especially your life.

After years of lurking the Motte back on Reddit and now here, this post - and related discussion - is what finally convinced me to join. I think it's a great cautionary tale that it is not sufficient to be familiar with the terms of game theory - you actually have to understand what they mean, too.

What do you think the victory condition is here? (Everyone else should be asking themselves this as well, by the way.) There are two possibilities:

  1. Victory is achieved when I, personally, survive,
  2. Victory is achieved when everyone survives.

Depending on which victory condition you choose, the optimal strategy is going to be different.

If you think you "win" if you, personally, survive - go ahead, take the red pill. You will survive regardless of whatever anyone else does.

If you think that "winning" in this scenario means that nobody dies, then...

You can even analyse it game theoretically and find that both 100% blue and 100% red are Nash equilibria, but only 100% red is stable

Repeat after me: if your strategy can be defeated by another player changing their strategy it is not a Nash equilibrium - much less a stable one.

If the victory condition is "everyone lives", then any strategy that requires 100% of players to cooperate is a losing one. You might think that nobody has anything to gain by picking blue, but, as soon as anyone does, you have lost the "everyone lives" game.

Given that we have the actual results of a real-world poll (and another one elsewhere in the thread), we can see first hand that the theory is demonstrated by the practice - the blue-pill strategy has resulted in a win by the "everyone lives" criterion.

Therefore, the sort of strategy you advocate for this game is, in fact, an expression of what you think the victory condition is - even if you aren't aware of it, and this is borne out by the arguments being brought forth in this discussion - and, I expect, this is one of the reasons why it has generated so much emotion.

I'm sorry red-pillers, but choosing the red pill is the selfish choice, and no amount of mental gymnastics will change this. Picking the red pill is only optimal on the basis of personal survival. Indeed, if nobody picked the red pill - nobody would die.

You can try to argue - and, indeed, do - that if nobody picked the blue pill nobody would die either, but the fact that the "everyone lives" condition only requires a sufficient - rather than perfect - level of coordination on the part of blue-pillers means that if your goal is to ensure everyone's survival, you should accept the personal risk and choose the blue pill.

Going past theoretical wonkery and into the realm of real-world problems, these exactly the sort of choices that we are often faced with, and picking the pro-social option is generally the better choice, because no man is an island, and all that (unsurprisingly, the military guys in the room seem to understand this perfectly). Humans flourish in cooperating groups. Any group whose members are willing to take risks for the sake of one another is going to have an advantage against groups whose members are only looking out for Number One.

It's a deceptively interesting hypothetical.

(I'm assuming this is a "no communication" scenario)

My initial feel was "Pick Red, obviously".

But then I remembered, my sister thinks that her husband is colorblind. (He denies this!). So that plants a seed of doubt, so it's possible that she would pick blue, to save him, just in case he accidentally picks blue. And then, my brother-in-law knows that his wife thinks that he is colorblind. So he would know that she would likely vote blue to save him, so he would likely pick the blue pill to save her. And my mother knows that my sister thinks her husband is colorblind. That would be enough of a doubt that she would vote blue without hesitation, to save her daughter. Even without that, she's a very self-sacrificing person (as grandmothers often are) likely to pick blue because she couldn't bear to live in a world where her decision contributed to her children's deaths. And I know all of the above, and I know other family members are following the same logic chain, this seed of doubt spreading... and hey colorblindness isn't that uncommon right, and what about regular blindness, and...

(This colorblindness concern is scenario specific, but I'm sure there would be some other niggling doubt leading to an altruism cascade for other hypotheticals too.)

I'm not sure I want to live in the sort of world where blue loses the vote. For a start, I suspect the blue vote to be higher amongst women. Losing some nontrivial chunk of the population is likely to lead to supply chain disruptions, famine, recriminations, war etc... and all the most pro-social people are gone. I'd be potentially living with the crippling guilt that most of my family is dead and it's my fault.

Yeah I think I've blue-pilled myself.

But that chain isn't about personal choice, it's all about "I think/believe/know X would pick blue so I have to pick blue, but if I knew X would pick red, I might pick red". It's "he's going to pick blue because... so I have to pick blue/she's going to pick blue because she thinks I'll pick blue so I have to pick blue/they're going to pick blue so I have to pick blue" on outwards.

The problem is, unless you can be sure enough people pick blue, then you're imposing a death sentence on everyone by picking blue, because if there aren't enough of you to hit the 50%+ limit, too bad, now everyone who picked blue dies. And if you're picking blue to save X because you think X will pick blue, and X knows that, then you're forcing X to pick blue to save you and that leads to picking blue by compulsion which then leads to the possibility of 'not enough to win but enough to lose' blue choices.

I'm considering the "no communication" scenario. I don't know if my sister, brother-in-law or mother picked blue, they don't know if I picked blue. All I have to go on is whether I think they're the type of person who might pick blue, either by mistake or altruistically.

Me choosing blue doesn't impose a death sentence on anyone besides (potentially) myself. Me choosing red could impose a death sentence on others.

I guess you could argue that living a virtuous life such that others assume I would pick blue is imposing a death sentence on them, and therefore I should be a maximally selfish asshole at all times. Is that your strategy?

This is to me one of the best examples of "thought experiment that actively mis-educates people by making implausible assumptions or deliberately leaving out key details". In this case, it's the mechanism that's missing. Is the blue pill doing nothing and the red pill "unleashing" something that kills blue pillers? If yes, blue pill seems like the obviously morally correct choice, as you can just choose not to unleash a great evil. Or is the red pill doing nothing while the blue pill infecting you with something that makes you symbiotically dependent on other blue pillers? If yes, red pill seems like the obviously correct choice, since infecting yourself with something for no reason is just plain stupid.

The original framing is extremely awkward and seems deliberately designed to give of the impression that the blue piller's death is the red piller's fault without outright stating it, by mentioning specifically how "everyone lives" on the blue pill text and how "blue pillers die" on the red pill text. So I'm not surprised the majority on Twitter is choosing blue. A much shorter and more natural framing (R:"You live", B:"You live if B>50%") would have the opposite result, since it will probably be read to implicitly imply the blue pillers death is their own fault, even if it the actual mechanism isn't stated here either.

The point is that to a utilitarian rationalist who optimizes for expected utility, the mechanism shouldn't matter, only the (expected) outcome.

See, that's exactly what I consider a toxic influence from these thought experiments! Sure you can just state, as an assumption, that mechanisms don't matter for the thought experiment. But in the real world, mechanisms always have implied additional risks and as such always matter. And wasting your intellect on thought experiments with deeply implausible assumptions isn't just wasted effort, it actively screws with your intuitions in a way that imo makes your real-world decision making worse in the long term. It's a similar thing to how the often deeply ingrained liberal ideology in most of modern media gives us a long list of bad intuitions, such as a massive overestimate of the prevalence of LGBT individuals, or an overestimate of the prevalence of open, honest-to-god rabid racism, or an underestimate of the dysfunctionality present in poor & unsucessful groups, and so on.

To use this example, if the blue pill actually does nothing and the red pill unleashes a weird virus, then even if I grant that the virus initially may only kill blue pillers, the presence of this new lethal virus is just a completely unnecessary extra long term risk. Likewise, if the red pill actually does nothing and the blue pill infects you with a weird symbiotic fungus, even if I grant that this fungus doesn't kill initially as long as there are enough blue pillers, the fungus is again a completely unnecessary long term risk. This matters!

Yes, and what this shows is that a lot of people aren't utilitarians.

I wonder how much the choice of colors affected people's choices. Blue is the color of American Democrats. Red is the color of American Republicans. Most Twitter users are aligned with the American Democrats so they are biased towards "voting blue”.

The red pill is also a term that is also associated with the anti-feminist manosphere, which puts off the pro-feminist Twitter majority. Those people wouldn't want to be on record taking the red pill on any topic!

That’s why I gave this example with salt and pepper shakers at a rationalist meetup as a conversation-starter.

Did it channge the result of the conversation, or was it still controversial at a similar rate?

No to the first, because those who were there had already heard the original… and decided “red” like me.

This kind of dilemma seems to be catnip for rationalists. If I for some reason wanted to take the world's rationalist community out of commission for a few days, I could craft a series of these kinds of dilemmas and release them on the Internet once every day or so. For extra effectiveness, throw in some Aella posts and a controversial statement about AI risk.

it's xkcd 356 for rats. as @hbtz pointed out on another medium

its a pretty good question! its a idiot economist, commons problem, and altruism problem triple whammy
its also prolly a spiritual problem cuz mottecels prolly dont rate the psychological cost of living as a red pill picker as opposed to a blue pill picker

The psychological cost of living as red picker vs. the cost of dying as a blue-picker.

HMMMMM.

The psychological cost of living as red picker vs. the cost of dying as a blue-picker.

It didn't occur to me until reading this, but also there's the possibility of the psychological cost of living as a blue-picker - which is the knowledge (at least with very high confidence) that I futilely risked my life for no gain. The odds that my vote was the decisive one that brought blue from 49.99% to 50.00% or whatever is minuscule, which means that, almost certainly, regardless of what I picked, all the blue pickers were going to live anyway. My picking blue meant nothing in terms of causing good, but I was able to manipulate my brain into convincing myself that it was worth it to pay the real cost of a real fear of real risk of dying, when removing that fear was as simple as picking a different color which, again, would have caused no negative consequences.

but I was able to manipulate my brain into convincing myself that it was worth it to pay the real cost of a real fear of real risk of dying, when removing that fear was as simple as picking a different color which, again, would have caused no negative consequences.

Yes, one should expect that your natural instinct is to generate any plausible justification for a choice you made in the past, and that the justification needs to pass social muster.

I'm partially solving that by straight up precommitting to picking red in all cases and broadcasting this intent. I won't have much cognitive dissonance later.

the psychological cost of living as a red pill picker as opposed to a blue pill picker

What psychological cost?

Yeah, I would quite easily pick Red and go on with my life no different from yesterday.

Mottcels? Really?

Also I think the vast majority of blue pill pickers are liars. If faced with the actual choice, they pick red.

the psychological cost of living as a red pill picker as opposed to a blue pill picker

What cost would that be? I'd pick red, and I'm sticking with that choice, and the only 'psychological cost' I'm suffering is all the blues declaring I'm a selfish murderous monster. I'm happy with my choice otherwise, and maybe a bit sorry that the blues are too stupid to come in out of the rain ("choose red and all live"/"but what about the blind three-legged puppy who will lick the blue pill by mistake???? I must save them by throwing myself off the cliff alongside them! by the power of snuggles and friendship, magic will happen and we will gain the ability to fly if I do that!")

What cost would that be?

negative reactions to surviving where someone else didn't are common. this is not a hard concept to understand nor grasp.

by the power of snuggles and friendship, magic will happen and we will gain the ability to fly if I do that!")

in this scenario, i think you have to realize that 50%+1 picking blue does save everyone, including those who misread the question or whatever.

negative reactions to surviving where someone else didn't are common.

It turns out that the sort of people who will pick red are also resistant to survivor's guilt (Deisach, 2019)

I have to admit, I had some serious thoughts about whether or not this was some leaked GPT4.5-generated infohazard. The, "my 12 year old came up with this," framing seems a little weird, but it appears to check out.

I could see a 12 year old inventing this because they think it's so cool and smart. What I don't get is all the adults imagining this is a test of moral fibre and if you don't pick blue, well Stalin and Pol Pot's genetic lovechild surrogated by Hitler was Pollyanna by comparison with you, you monster of uncaring self-centred hatred for all that is good and fluffy!

you've been spamming this sorta content all over this very thread and it's gotten incredibly annoying. you've been pretending that no one in their right mind would talk about how it relates to morality (note: links to multiple comments here) when this is a pretty clear angle that people would talk about it from.

i cannot buy that you had no idea people would talk about the morality of decisions. reference to morality is there from the bloody title of the post and discussing the moral turpitude of a choice or another is an incredibly obvious discussion point when we're talking about a problem like this. this is also the culture war thread ffs, discussion of morality of a certain thing is a pretty obvious jumping off point even if the darn title didn't mention it.

people've responded to your points and you keep ignoring them and insisting an incredibly uncharitable form of the argument. name calling by calling people virtue signalers, sarcastically making the strawman that people who disagree with you are calling you fascist with the implicit assumption that these are The Outgroup™, and just general uncharitablity and being a complete jerk.

which while there are strong opinions that some of the people you disagree with probably hold, your refusal to engage at any level but the most in-group signaling way is incredibly boring, unproductive, way more heat than light, and annoying. if you don't care so much as you say, just don't participate, or make a comment detailing your problem with the poll rather than pretending to be shocked shocked that people would have a long form discussion on something that has multiple different angles in the culture war thread of all places.

Honestly, looking at FarNearEverywhere's comments here and on abortion, this seems like a pattern of assuming the their opponents are stupid and/or evil and spending no effort to make his comments less inflammatory.

It did give me the vibe of: “Just told my 10yo daughter about #RBG. She had tears in her eyes. And then she did the Wakanda pose and said ‘#Ruthkanda forever’”

However, as per your link, maybe there is cause for cautious optimism.

I somewhat agree, but, there is the argument that getting a solid blue majority is easier than getting everyone to take red, which will never happen in any real scenario. Sure, taking blue is really dumb if you were, eg, the first person to run into a blender. But I can reframe it too: 50 people on a raft drifting into shore, one guy jumps off early so he can swim to shore early, and the captain yells "If too many people jump off early the raft will collapse." The authority figure and inaction bias both push towards a shelling point of staying put, and if someone immediately jumps off I'm gonna think he's a jackass who could've killed someone.

I can't help but notice this is like a platonic respectability cascade, and is also really controversial just like respectability cascades: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/give-up-seventy-percent-of-the-way As a reminder, this is where something innocent, like shortening Japanese to "Jap", is perceived as signaling something bad the speaker, leading to a cascade whereby it does start to signal something bad because only the actual bad people are willing to keep doing it.

We could all ignore the blue pill, but as soon as a majority people do it eventually it does become selfish not to. I can see how it has the dynamics of a toxic respectability cascade: I don't think anyone thought blacklist was racist until that paper in 2018, people looking to create a moral dilemma they can be on the right side of spread it, until actual good people start believing it and suddenly I'm in the most heated argument I've ever had with my (now ex) gf.

In the original poll I picked red, then switched to blue in follow up polls when it felt safe, and my groupchat went 6 - 1 blue. Unkilled so far across all of them, and never chose red in a blue majority poll since the first one. So, I'm not dying on any hills here. But like in the Scott Alexander article, I'm at least not going to be one of the first to join some destructive cascade.

But I can reframe it too: 50 people on a raft drifting into shore, one guy jumps off early so he can swim to shore early, and the captain yells "If too many people jump off early the raft will collapse." The authority figure and inaction bias both push towards a shelling point of staying put, and if someone immediately jumps off I'm gonna think he's a jackass who could've killed someone.

Not giving a concrete number here for the raft collapsing gave me an idea.

What if the chance of death for blue pill-ers was a variable?

That is, what if the situation was:

Everyone has to pick red or blue.

Once everyone has chosen: Blue's chance of death = percentage of people who picked red. Everyone knows this in advance. No conferring.

In this variant, the more blues you have, the better the chance of everyone surviving, but it is NEVER guaranteed. On what probability would you feel uncomfortable wagering your life to incrementally increase both the potential death toll and the likelihood of avoiding that toll?

The highest expected death toll in your scenario is when the reds and blues are even. Assuming I'm completely altruistic and just want to minimize the expected number of deaths then you would want to choose whichever side you expect to be in the majority. Expected deaths are maximized in a split vote at 25% expected dead.

If you think both are as likely then it doesn't matter what you pick.

I'd pick red, because I would expect people to be at least a little selfish and red is the stable equilibrium in the scenario where at least one person is even the tiniest bit selfish and I know I am that person. So, the blues deserve to die even in the case where I expect to be the only red, because they are so stupid as to pick the wrong equilibrium.

Try this opposite reframing:

The final two candidates in the election in a democratic yet absolute dictatorial country make statements:

  • Red: If elected, I will have everyone who didn't vote for me executed
  • Blue: If elected, I won't have anyone executed based on this vote

Who do you vote for?

For true equivalence, we probably have to assume that the candidates are otherwise equivalent. But if we choose Red in this scenario, it's scary to imagine that Red could even "mug" us by also having worse policies that we'd sacrifice for the "guaranteed survival".

There is also the problem of iteration. not quite apt.

At first this comment annoyed me - you can't reframe it this way, it completely changes the question! But upon further thought, it helped me see why the original poll might have turned out the way it did. To a rational person, like most of you here, the pills can be treated as machines. Pull lever A, you might die. Pull lever B, you are guaranteed to not die. Obviously you pull B. However, to a socially driven person, like those on Twitter, nothing is merely an object. Everything has character, and which you choose reflects on you. You don't drive a car: you're a Toyota driver. You don't enjoy a movie: you're a Star Wars fan. You don't vote for a politician: you're a Burnie supporter. I don't think the blue pillers are literally imagining their choice as an election, but the framing was the kick I needed to see things in the society centric way. If you don't choose the blue pill, you're signaling that you're anti-social. This is the essence of culture war: when everything is viewed from the tribal perspective, all choices are made in judgement of others.

We should do this for real. Have Zorba make a poll where you can vote either blue or red. If > 50% of users choose blue, nobody gets permabanned; if not, blues get permabanned and nothing happens to reds.

It'll be like our own version of /r/thanosdidnothingwrong.

EDIT: You are required to vote; until you do, you can't vote or comment.

Permaban could be harmful to the community, but I wouldn't mind doing this with a temp ban (decreases the compellingness of altruism, though). Red's definitely going to win here with a 50% threshold, though, so I expect most people will realize and choose that.

I would have so many questions for someone who picked blue in a motte specific version of this.

Lets go.

Assuming there’s some combination of a minimum comment, upvoted, account-length floor to prevent last minute botting or brigading, let’s dew it.

Well, Scott was right again. There are such things as Scissor Statements and this idiotic poll is one of them. We have on one side those claiming theirs is the only ethical, moral, and correct choice, and those choosing otherwise are evil (including loolahs online claiming it's the fascist choice) and on the other side claiming that the first choice is stupid and virtue-signalling.

It's just a dumb online game. It's the equivalent of those quizzes about "find your inner goddess" only for people who like to think of themselves as smart. Would we really be tearing one another apart over "which phase of the moon are you?"

Yes, absolutely. Waning gibbous chads are more morally upright, taller, more handsome and just generally superior to crescentcels.

Waning gibbous fans are enamored by something in decline, Waxing gibbous enjoyers though only see their fortunes grow.

Why would anyone not be full? You're leaving luminosity on the table for no reason. It's free. You can simply pick it up.

Why do full mooners feel the need to be so conspicuous and the center of attention all the time? New moon sigmas just want to get on with their own lives and not bother anyone.

It's possible to have too much of a good thing - as a good person, I make sure to only take as much luminosity as I need, so that others who are less fortunate than me do not have to suffer.

What about the werewolf community? Or edgy, I'm-so-special eclipse fans?

Honestly, this just goes to show me that framing is everything and I think the unnecessarily obfuscatory and slanted nature of the original wording is causing most of the controversy.

I agree with the reframe posted in the Twitter comments: "If you take the red pill, you live. If you take the blue pill and less than 50% take it, you die". If formulated in this way, there would probably be much less disagreement over the optimal solution here, and picking blue so you can also save people from their own choice to pick blue would be much less of a point of debate.

It's not my framing, it's someone else's whose I agree with (in part at least because it stresses the "personal agency" aspect behind someone selecting blue), but if framed in the way you've postulated I still think there would be less disagreement over the optimal solution. I also think "If you take the red pill, you live. If you take the blue pill and less than 50% take it, you, along with everyone else who has also taken the blue pill, die" is good wording.

I'm not allergic to altruism, but assuming no coordination and no knowledge of others' choices I seriously cannot envision a real-life scenario with actual life-and-death stakes where the majority pick blue. I've got a fairly high level of confidence that people would be rational actors in such a situation and thus consider "blue" to be suicide with no actual added benefit to anyone else.

I can't control whether others pick red or blue, and the chance of my vote making the difference between red or blue winning is extremely low. But the chance of my vote keeping me alive is fairly significant.

But that's "everyone has to pick blue or else people die". What's the difference there from "everyone has to pick red"? You're not really giving people the choice to pick whatever colour they like, you're assuming most people will pick blue and need to be "saved from themselves" so you, Altruistic Saviour, have to pick blue also.

This isn't "everyone picks blue because they're smart", it's "majority of people pick blue because they're stupid or confused or irrational or demented so we have to Save Them From The Consequences Of Their Choice". That's... not a great look, if you have twenty people all claiming "Well, I'm too smart to pick blue, but since the other nineteen in this group are too dumb to tie their own shoelaces, I have to pick blue". So everyone thinks everybody else is stupid.

Whereas if you pick red, you're assuming everyone is "a healthy adult with no intellectual disability", since picking blue is forcing the "if fewer than 50% pick blue, people die" branch into existence, and who wants to make it so that people die as a result of their choice?

Some thoughts on the conversation this post has generated this far:

Much of people’s moral reasoning about this dilemma centers on the question How much agency does each participant have in his or her choice? It’s very interesting that @Meriadoc intuited immediately that there will inevitably and undeniably be some non-zero number of people who pick blue. That proposition probably wouldn’t have occurred to many of the more right-leaning users here - it probably wouldn’t have occurred to me - but in hindsight it is somewhat obviously true. So then we get into the question of why those people picked blue: Was it by accident? On purpose? Were they tricked? Did they do so in a moment of aberrant psychosis or a self-destructive impulse, which is not representative of their normal behavior? Or is their choice symptomatic of a larger pattern of behavior/shortcoming, such that given the choice to redo the selection several times, they’d still pick blue every time?

Recognizing that this poll isn’t merely a frivolous internet meme, but rather a chance to publicly hash out and enforce local political/philosophical default norms, we can extrapolate this to thinking about the types of real-world societal dilemmas the poll is supposed to invoke, and we can recognize that progressives believe that there are people who are born having already picked blue. Racial minorities, gays, trans people, the disabled, etc. They were never actually given the opportunity to pick red. By the simple fact of one or more of their identities being inherently blue, they will on some level always be reliant on the communitarian protective instincts of the larger society. Taking it as a given that such people exist, and that they will never have the option to “switch pills”, blue becomes a far more compelling moral option even for those of us who personally gain nothing by picking blue.

Someone who refuses to decouple the poll from its larger political implications will also intuit that even though the poll specifically fails to enumerate any actual benefits from selecting blue - it’s merely a choice to avoid bad outcomes, and offers no positive-sum outcome over and above that - in the real world the communitarian option actually does offer very clear benefits to everyone involved, including the selfish fucks who picked red. Subsistence farmers may not be reliant on the kindness of strangers, but they’ll also never successfully launch a rocket to the moon, nor cure cancer, nor build Notre Dame Cathedral. Thus, a poll that sought to more accurately model real life would have to include a clause that “if 50% or more people choose blue, all participants are given $5000, and anyone who chose blue gets an additional $5000.”

Also in real life, many people do have the ability to “switch pills” at any time, based on an observation of the choices made by those around them. People who made terrible choices early in life can choose to make better choices in the future. Drug addicts can get clean, people can go to trade school or get a second degree to improve their economic prospects, etc.

So then we have to actually parse out which people are genuinely stuck with blue no matter what, versus how many people were just demoralized and psyopped into picking blue, because they thought they could never hope to hack it on their own without society propping them up, whereas they were in truth fully capable of thriving independently if just given more effective coping strategies. Psychopaths, schizophrenics, and people with profound mental disabilities will never be able to Git Gud, but people with minor depression and transitory suicidal ideation mostly can just choose to snap out of it at any time if nudged in the right direction.

But then what do we do with the people who actually are stuck with blue? The people who will definitely die, or at least have very bad life outcomes, unless we all dedicate some not-insignificant level of effort and resources, and incur some level of personal risk, in order to provide a safety net for them?

One way to think about it is to deny that they are stuck with blue; to harangue them into making a better choice, to deny that they are innately blue, to blame their “culture” and to tell them to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Maybe every time they pick blue, we insult them and tell them to pick again, until they pick red. (Except of course, as we established, you could do this a thousand times and they’re still gonna pick blue.) By convincing yourself that they had agency the whole time, you not only absolve yourself of feeling any responsibility for the consequence of their decision, you also maintain the certainty that your own choice was 100% the result of agency, and therefore you morally flatter yourself.

The other way to think about it is: Yes, they’re stuck with blue, I could never have saved them, and it’s actually a good thing that they’re gonna die. Leaving aside the question of whether or not you could have saved them - in the poll, it was possible, but in real life? I’m not so sure - we do have to actually grapple with the question of whether or not the vast majority of us are better off without the people who were stuck with blue. The profoundly mentally/physically disabled, those who are born with the psychological equivalent of glass bones and paper skin, etc. Those who are essentially utility monsters - burdens with no hope of creating a positive-sum contribution, into whom we must continually sink our own resources to keep them from destroying themselves.

Several users brought up children; the thing with children, though, is that the vast majority of them will eventually grow up into people with agency. Any sacrifices we make for them now are actually an investment, made with the assumption that it will produce a positive future outcome. This is fundamentally different from the sort of sacrifices we make for adults with Down Syndrome, who will still have Down Syndrome at every point in their life, and will never “get better” and never repay the investment. How many times do I need to pick blue, putting myself at significant risk, in order to stave off the inevitable for these people? Because that’s the other thing about picking blue: you don’t actually get to just pick it once and then everything works out for everyone. You’re actually going to be given the same choice over and over throughout your life, and so will your children and their children and so on into perpetuity. But perhaps if enough of us pick red enough times to cull the people who keep forcing us to make these choices, we can buy ourselves some length of time wherein we can just thrive for a while as productive, normal people, until enough people who are blue-by-default start to accumulate again and we’re once again forced into unpleasant choices.

that there will inevitably and undeniably be some non-zero number of people who pick blue.

There is literally no possible way to know that a priori once you're faced with the choice.

There's at worst a probability distribution of people picking blue, which includes zero as an option, there might very well be zero who are compelled to pick it.

Further, if you're including people lacking agency, you're including the chance that there are people who PICK RED without it being a choice.

And suddenly this creates the risk of missing the threshold because those red-pickers made the 'wrong' choice.

So there's some real special pleading going on here to assume that we must save people who are helpess to make any decision other than pick blue, when I can just as easily point out that there are a number of people who are helpless to make any other decision than pick RED, and these folks might very well thwart our attempts to coordinate to save those other blue pickers.

There's no reason to assume that people who aren't making rational choices are only picking blue.

So the real meta-question becomes: How many NPCs are there in your population?

So then we get into the question of why those people picked blue

Honestly? Going by the comments I've seen on the original Twitter post and a lot of the arguments here, people pick blue to show off how morally superior they are. "I have to save the idiots who made the wrong choice". "I'd rather be dead than live in a world where people are so selfish as to pick red" and the rest of it.

It'd be easy to turn the good/evil framing around on them.

By signaling that you are the kind of person that would pick blue, you are pressuring everyone around you to risk their death or else they'll live with yours on their conscience. I love my family and my friends, I would prefer they NOT put themselves at such a serious unnecessary risk of death, especially not my sake.

The only truly selfless moral choice (assuming no one is reading this post or applying meta reasoning) is to signal that you're the kind of person who'd chose red and then secretly chose blue. It's also quite a stupid choice, I think.

You've caught me! I have no principles, hate everything and everyone, and have no desires but to virtue signal as I do the opposite of what I teach. How'd you do it? You must be very smart to have seen my true nature through the dozens of comments defending the logical basis of blue-pilling which I crafted to obscure it.

I and each of the other 60-70% of people who picked blue are master charlatans, nothing more, and have not a neuron in our brains not devoted to the endless task of status- and rent-seeking. I'll have to inform the others that you're onto us.

Aha, the secret of my success is that I'm a down and dirty no-good wicked horrible selfish fascist red pill picker, you see. That's how I can tell lack of morals in others by the simple results of an Internet play poll, birds of a feather flock together!

I don't think you're entirely wrong. I don't think blue pillers are status-seekers, but there's a variant of that where people choose the altruistic option in online polls and choose the selfish option when things get real. That said, in the past when things have gotten real humanity has had a remarkable ability to cooperate. I would hope this would be the same, and people would actually be more altruistic when it comes down to it.

My own personal answer is red, for the general reasons delineated below.

For the people who choose blue: does the presence of this vigorous debate change your opinions any? I know that while my first thought was red, the fact that this has become a thing, and that there is no obvious common consensus, is more than enough to permanently cement me on Team Red. How much baseline expectation of people picking red no matter what do you need before your choice comes down to "Everyone who picks blue dies, which includes me." and "Everyone who picks blue dies, which doesn't include me?"

I don't think that anyone who purports to be team blue can sufficiently convince me of their conviction to the cause for me to believe they're ALWAYS going to choose blue in an actual scenario where actual death is on the line.

Add in an enforcement mechanism and maybe.

I was in the Iraq War, so I have some experience with putting my life on the line to help protect the other people that also choose the blue pill. Now granted maybe it would have been better off if we all just took the red pill and stayed home in that particular case, but in a general sense I stand by the choice I made.

And I feel confident based on knowing the sort of people that I met in the military and talking to first responders etc that many of them will pick the blue pill instinctively because that aligns with their values. And so I will pick the blue pill consciously because I want to help save them, even at my own risk.

You may not know anybody like us, but people like that do exist.

Yes yes yes but the only reason anybody is at risk is because somebody chose blue while red exists and there's no force compelling people to pick blue.

I can understand altruism AND realize that this exact scenario is when it's time to turn off and ignore the altruistic impulse.

I don't think there's any reason to believe someone when they say "I'm picking blue" because there's no direct punishment for defecting.

I also worry about 'evil' players who say "i'm picking blue" specifically to convince others to pick blue and die, while the evil player defects.

So I'm not suggesting you're not altruistic. I have no proof other than your word, and you absolutely can be telling the truth. I'm saying I can't believe you, because I have no outside information to confirm it, nor is there some way for you to provably demonstrate it.

Yes yes yes but the only reason anybody is at risk is because somebody chose blue while red exists and there's no force compelling people to pick blue.

Except, again, people who choose by mistake for one reason or another. Even putting aside trembling hands etc., not everyone is a perfect game theorist.

Yes, but if we don't know how many of these players there are, this makes the goal of getting to the 50% threshold even less likely.

If it's 99 irrational players and you, are you going to pick blue to mildly increase the chances that everyone is saved even though in a large proportion of those scenarios you die just by random chance?

My position is that I simply don't know that there's anybody picking blue for innocent mistake reasons. That number could be zero, indeed.

I think that it doesn't require perfect game theory knowledge to see a button that says "100% chance of survival" and just pick that.

So I'm not going to put myself in need of saving to help some theoretical person in need of saving who may not exist.

That's literally the blue position as you've stated it: Imagining a guy who picks blue, then picking blue to save that guy. Without actually knowing if he exists.

My position is that I simply don't know that there's anybody picking blue for innocent mistake reasons. That number could be zero, indeed.

Well, are we going by the original premise, or by a hypothetical game based loosely on the premise? The original premise is that everyone who responds to the poll gets a choice. We've expanded that a bit and said "what if this poll grew quite a lot" and mostly left the modifications there, which I think is a good place to leave it.

So who responds to useless Twitter polls? Lots of regular people, plus I think occasionally a few kids hitting buttons randomly on their parents' devices. I believe it to be virtually guaranteed that, given a poll size of a few billion people, there are a few small children who have answered the poll by accident and gotten involved. But putting that aside, people are just really dumb.

45% of Americans believe in ghosts. 13% believe in vampires. Americans on average rate at 253 on the numeracy scale, which means nearly half of our adults are incapable of doing things like calculating the gas costs of a car ride. Scientologists, flat earthers, schizophrenics, etc. all exist and cannot neatly be dismissed.

Even if you truly think the very dumbest, most illogical person will still intentionally pick the red option (which btw isn't so neatly labelled as "100% survive"), there's still the question of whether that person with their limited capacity thinks there's an even dumber person out there who picked blue by mistake. Blue is happening, whether you like it or not. Whether it's happening for "innocent mistake reasons" is I guess up to you, but I certainly wouldn't blame 70 IQ people for not perfectly modelling a somewhat complex game.

If it's 99 irrational players and you, are you going to pick blue to mildly increase the chances that everyone is saved even though in a large proportion of those scenarios you die just by random chance?

I hope I would, but in the end all I care about is that people acknowledge that there's somebody out there who will choose the blue pill through no fault of their own. The game theory from that point on is just a useless thought exercise, but it's driving me crazy that everyone seems to be modelling the standard US population as perfect game theorists and proceeding from that assumption. In no other context do we grant people's intelligence nearly so much charity as when we're trying to deny any responsibility for the outcomes of their decisions.

but in the end all I care about is that people acknowledge that there's somebody out there who will choose the blue pill through no fault of their own

I can acknowledge that there's a chance such a person exists in the game.

If the blue side can acknowledge that there's a chance that such a person does not actually exist in the game, since we don't have that information at the time we make the decision.

But if we've acknowledged such a person exists, it suggests that we should be designing our systems specifically to keep these people VERY FAR AWAY from any buttons that might hurt them or others.

And I think the uncomfortable implication, which blue-pickers will have to deal with, is that there may be a lot of these people who THINK of themselves as rational and intelligent, and will insist on being included in future decisions too.

(Yes, this is going towards an analogy about voting, in real life)

If your theory is:

I believe it to be virtually guaranteed that, given a poll size of a few billion people, there are a few small children who have answered the poll by accident and gotten involved. But putting that aside, people are just really dumb.

Then I am going to insist that if blue meets its threshold. and these people survive, we're going to have to take steps to forbid them from being involved in such decisions in the future for the sake of everybody else.

I remind you, my theory is that the vast majority of people are both intelligent enough and self-interested enough to pick red/survival when presented with the choice in a vacuum.

Yours is that there are dummies who will do stupid things like pick blue without thinking.

If I accept your theory, we are now left with the question of what to do about those dummies.

More comments

Red is the ingroup and blue is the baddies, so blues kysing themselves is actually positive utility for me. We need to recruit enough blues to join the good guys so the truly hopeless cases are elimenated.

Hey I've seen this one before!

Even though he often do miss, this one is a hit.

Depends on the exact population involved, but blue at least sometimes.

Suppose it's a population of two: you and your spouse. An exact tie goes to red. You have no way to collaborate beforehand (e.g. both of you have been taken to separate rooms that are totally isolated from one another). Which do you choose?

Without having discussed the situation beforehand, there is a nonzero chance my wife would choose blue. So I choose blue. If I die, well, I die. The key to an optimal outcome here and in life is to develop the character to choose blue and develop a community who chooses blue. Reducing everything to a calculation of the optimal individualist outcome ends up degrading the spirit and the self. In a way, committing to choose blue is the selfish, personal utility-optimizing choice, because it means you're the type of person who chooses blue which is what enables the existence of the community, without which the individual life is empty and meaningless.

If we are talking the general population, it becomes a lot trickier. But consider two variants of the original scenario: one where the cutoff is 0.1%, and one where the cutoff is 99.9%. With 99.9% the choice is obviously red, and with 0.1% the choice is (a bit less obviously, but still obviously to me) blue. It's not clear to me where the cutoff is, but it does show that it isn't something you can decide based purely on first principles. You need data about the health and the quality of the community. For the USA, my guy reaction is a cutoff of around 10%, though that's just based on feels.

Yeah, in a situation like that, of course you'll pick blue (unless you really hate your spouse, or unless both of you realise "red lives, pick red, I know my spouse knows me well enough to know that I'll choose red so they should pick red too").

But this isn't about being at war, or being a firefighter, or a parent of a child running into a blender, or the other tortured examples conjured up out of thin air to justify just how wunnerful the blues are. It's "imagine a random group of anonymous people, everyone has the choice for red or blue; red lives, blue only lives if more than 50% of the group pick blue; you have no idea how big the group is or what choices people make". It's like "Who would win: Superman or Batman?" Everyone picks red, everyone lives, nobody is being selfish or mean or horrible because RED IS LIFE.

The key to an optimal outcome here and in life is to develop the character to choose blue and develop a community who chooses blue. Reducing everything to a calculation of the optimal individualist outcome ends up degrading the spirit and the self.

Not quite. That's usually the case with a lot of these cooperation dilemmas but this one has the feature that everyone choosing red is just as optimal as everyone choosing blue

Most people have never heard of Nash equilibrium, let alone understand what a stable Nash equilibrium is. Most people who choose red are just trying to act selfishly and most people choosing blue are just trying to act altruistically, which means it's crazy to argue that one action is correct or incorrect using game theory -- the vast majority of actors are not rational!

"Everyone just choose red" is not a tenable solution in the real world.

Why are people making this into a moral judgement? If the poll asked me "Would you kill this adorable fluffy little kitten with the big eyes to save your own life?" - well I'm not answering that one. But it's not that kind of fucking Sophie's Choice, it's "pick red or blue in a game that has no consequences for the real world".

Sincerely, the more smarmy justifications I'm reading from the blues, the less I like them as people because all the worst finger-wagging Nanny Is Watching instincts are coming out in them. It's not enough to argue that it's the optimal strategy to pick blue if you assume some people out of the group will pick blue; no, it has to be made into "reds are selfish, blues are altruistic, kiss my upright and high-minded ass and tell me how fantastic I am".

How dare those people believe that picking the option that keeps 100% of participants alive is superior! Nannies! Smarms!

Have you ever entertained a thought that not everything others do is for your approval?

For what it’s worth, my main point was that “it’s okay for me to take the red pill because everyone doing that is optimal” is completely inapplicable to the real world, and hence an obvious rationalization. Not that one side was evil or good, just that this particular defense is balderdash.

I realize that it’s kind of hard to say that without coming off as insulting to red pillers. I’d think you would be more sympathetic though, since you did the mirror image and accused all blue pillers of virtue signaling.

Just because people don’t understand game theory terms doesn’t mean game theory cannot explain actions.

No but it means "It's okay that I took the redpill because it's the game theoretic optimal solution (and so everyone else will do it too)" is totally divorced from reality.

The question is does game theory model accurately model human behavior. If yes, then regardless of whether people know what a Nash equilibrium is, it will still exist. If no, then it won’t.

"Everyone just choose red" is not a tenable solution in the real world.

Why?

Good point.

I'd still pick red though.

"Everyone just choose red" is not a tenable solution in the real world.

"Everyone just choose blue" isn't a tenable solution in the real world either. In point of fact, the real world doesn't have a lot of "tenable solutions" of any sort. Mostly people eat shit.

Which is why you don't need everyone to choose blue, just over half the people, which is a much more tenable solution.

It's more tenable than getting everyone to choose red, but maximizing the number of blues is much higher-risk than maximizing the number of reds. If people commit to writing the blues off, you get very close to everyone choosing red, as the apparent upside of blue drops like a rock. People committing to maximizing blue introduces serious tail-risk of calamity.

Likely minimal losses versus unlikely but very large ones. Which is worse?

Perhaps this is harsh, but there's also the fact that if we're talking about adults the people who would pick blue in the first place would likely be a tiny subset of people (suicidal people, mentally retarded people, etc) whose QALYs are realistically fairly limited. I'd say "Maybe we could just not try to pull off some incredible coordination feat which might turn out horrible for marginal gains" is fairly reasonable.

I think of it more as "we benefit also from cautionary examples". Whoever picks blue has volunteered to demonstrate why picking red is the correct choice.

Going with the spousal example, it's not equally optimal for both to choose red and both to choose blue. Both choosing blue is superior to both choosing red, because the very act of both choosing blue is indicative of stronger bonds and itself reenforces them.

Alternately, it's a competition in who can be the bigger martyr: "Darling, I chose blue because I want you to live, even if I know you would choose red and leave me to die, I love you that much".

Competing over who makes the bigger sacrifice and who is the more self-sacrificing and who is ahead in the list of favours done is not a strong and happy bond. I'd rather someone who said "I picked red because I trust you're not an idiot and would pick red, too".

You're really reaching to add things to the situation that aren't present in the initial scenario

Why? I expect my wife to choose red and I think she'd be very upset if I was dead. Is choosing blue supposed to be an act that indicates that I simply couldn't live without her or something? When it's only two people, it really does feel a lot like the blender version of things where I would say that we should just both skip the door leading to the blender and that it's pretty obvious.

In the purely altruistic 1v1 version of the game it's literally just about finding the Schelling point. Though, even then, if both players are rational, red is still the obvious Schelling point since the downside is less if the other person chooses differently. Red is strongly dominant if someone is agnostic about the other person's choice.