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Notes -
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:
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):
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:
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:
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.
I was baffled, then I got to this exchange and I think I understand now:
In this weirdo version of a prisoner's dilemma, everyone can cooperate by hitting Red and all is well, or everyone can cooperate by hitting Blue and all is well. If you have normal coordination and everyone chooses Red, they're all good, but if someone "defects" to Blue, they get killed. You or I apparently don't worry about the defector - just don't be an idiot and you're fine. Other people want to save the idiot contingent so much that they're willing to risk their own lives for it (at least in a Twitter poll). In a scenario where the only person punished by defection is the defector, the threat of that person suiciding is enough to make people change course.
What's wild is that I think this does actually have some explanatory power. When I say that I don't really care about bad outcomes for people that can't do something as basic as show up to work in a country where it's as easy as the United States, this poll makes it obvious that the Blue-pressers are willing to risk their own wellbeing for people that are too stupid to just push the correct button. This also seems like it helps explain the efficacy of hunger strikes, which I've never viscerally grasped - if someone elects to starve themselves in response to something, I am morally blameless when they starve, and their argument completely fails to persuade me. I see their actions working on others via media exposure, but I've never understood how the threat of killing yourself is supposed to move others to your position. Apparently, "give me what I want, or I'll kill myself" works even what the person wants is just the ability to smash Blue. To be fair, their impulse probably is pro-social, but it's also completely foreign to me.
Like said below, it becomes a different thing if you imagine that everyone in some community has to make the choice, including small kids.
Would I trust my 3-year-old and 11-month-old kids to understand the subtle logic of the "everyone picks red" option, or just pick the pill that looks more like candy?
Ironically I think a kid at a certain age might cut right through the question without even blinking.
Imagine if the question were phrased thusly: "If you pick red you don't get spanked. People who picked blue get spanked, unless greater than 50% of people pick blue then NOBODY gets spanked"
Would most kids have to hear anything other than "If you pick red you don't get spanked" to immediately pick red?
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Why wouldn't a red pill look like candy? Again, if you're giving a choice to an eleven month old, it's stupid.
The original poll was a simple choice in an online thought experiment that didn't say one thing about "the people in this experiment don't have the brains to come in out of the rain, so you must save them from themselves by your choice". The blue choosers then started introducing all kinds of qualifications to justify their superior virtue. Now we're down to "if an eleven month old infant in real life was given the choice of a candy or a poison pill". Come on, just tell us reds we're all devils and be done with it.
what's the point in this baiting?
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Did I say it wouldn't? Both might look like candy. 50/50 choice doesn't sound like good odds when talking about my child's life, though.
I said nothing of this sort, and find it very odd that red-pressers get pre-emptively angry over the mildest of challenges or questions around this thought experiment, considering that most of red-presser rhetoric revolves around how it's immediately and axiomatically obvious that blue-pressers are all either morons or lying virtue-signallers.
So how does your picking blue save the kid? "Look, Junior, Mommy is picking blue so you know that one is safe". Oops, no, that's not how it works, it's "You picked the poison blue so now Mommy has to pick that one, too, and hope that enough other people pick it so we don't die".
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Nuh-uh! You're the virtue signaler! I'm rubber you're glue!
Is it so hard to imagine that some will misclick? There are no added qualifications. The brute reality of the poll will guarantee some choose blue by accident.
Misclicking does not send them into a blender, or the hangman's noose, or however they are theoretically supposed to go "poof!" into thin air in the thought experiment. The blue moralists, though, are acting as though "but they will DIE if they misclick, we must save them!"
No, all that happens is that they misclicked. Oops-a-daisy, but it's not like they spilled spaghetti sauce on their white shirt.
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As with everything, kids are different and require a different kind of political thinking compared to adults.
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Maybe I'm the complete moron, because I didn't even think about children. As someone notes below, toying with variables to make the situation more or less obvious and more or less iterative would change it in important ways.
The literal phrasing of the poll would probably exclude children, since it only talks about those voting in the poll, and presumably there wouldn't be too many 3-year-olds using Twitter (expect when someone accidentally posts awfoijgjdoindfnaofnbmadf,öd,dföl,bfbdfb,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,)
Then again, if we go by the results of the actual poll, it would have comfortably over 60% voting blue, so voting blue would be safe anyhow.
Yeah, there would probably be at least one 3-year-old though. There's only one way to guarantee everyone remains safe.
No there isn’t a way of you (the sole voter for your choice) guaranteeing everyone lives. If you vote blue you may die. If you vote red someone else may die. The only way to make sure is if enough people vote the same way but once you can allow for cooperation you tell everyone “if we all vote red no one does so just vote red.”
I hate this kind of turnabout. I wasn't talking about myself. I was talking about us, considering there's at least one 3 year old who makes the "wrong" choice. There's only one way to protect them.
Yes, technically speaking, without cooperation there's no way to guarantee anything. So obviously what I meant was that given a 3 year old who picks blue there's only one way to save everyone.
And I hate your kind of turnabout. You introduced the knowledge and ability to influence others into the scenario in order to “get” to your preferred outcome. If we can do that, then we can very easily influence the 3 year old to take the red candy. I have kids. It isn’t hard to convince the kid to take the red pill in this example. In fact, I think you’d be really irresponsible to get the kid to take the blue pill hoping you could get enough other people to pick blue. I know I would do everything in my power to get my kids to take red even if it meant going from sufficient blue to insufficient blue because I would not risk my kids dying.
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Participating in an online poll for a rationalist thought experiment? Man, three year olds these days are way more sophisticated than my time!
Bro come on. All it takes is one person to leave Twitter open, or a chance series of clicks on a computer/tablet/phone. Not that crazy.
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