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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.
This is very interesting to me as I see picking blue as the obvious morally correct choice. Maybe that is just my military background coming through, I don’t know. So my options are pick blue where there is a chance that everything will be fine, or pick red where I will selfishly be fine but I will kill all the morally correct people. Easy choice of blue for me.
But what makes it morally correct when it's "hope that enough people will pick blue" in a situation where picking blue has the built-in risk of "people will die if not enough make this choice"?
Why is it a question of morals at all in this silly poll? If it were "unless 50% or more pick blue, they will get a custard pie in the face, but if you pick red, nobody who picks red gets a custard pie", would you talk about "of course blue is the morally correct choice"?
Because being harmlessly pranked for not understanding a question is fine.
Being killed for not understanding a question isn't.
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If everyone can simply choose to live by taking the red pill, how is that morally incorrect?
Because in my values system choosing to help others is better than choosing only to help yourself. Even if everybody brings their own lunch, I will still offer people some of mine. If people eat all my lunch and I starve to death I would hope that it would be a comment on their greed, and not my stupidity.
No, it would be a comment on your stupidity.
In this scenario, everyone has lunch already. Anyone who chooses not to eat their lunch can not have been said to have been coerced or denied lunch (the ability to live). Taking the blue pill is effectively stating "I choose death."
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If everyone has their own lunch, and all the lunches are adequate to sate hunger, what are you doing to help anyone? Now, if it's "can I swap a cheese sandwich for your cucumber roll?" then okay, but "no no I insist you take my food even though you have your own" is just "Notice me! Praise me!"
The hungry mother who gives the last crust to her child even if she dies is worthy of praise. You're not, even if you die of hunger, because you were deliberately seeking martyrdom and that is suicide.
Well that is certainly one way to read it. I just wanted to be nice and make sure everyone else had enough to eat. But if you do not understand that I'm not surprised you don't understand why I would take blue either. Or really any of the choices I've made. But nevertheless I would still take the blue pill on the off chance it keeps you and everyone else alive.
Friend, you have a martyr complex. You are putting emotion above logic because it feels better to imagine saving people than to imagine them dying. But it is obviously better to not have to save anyone right? The red pill is catching a plane that arrives safely at its destination without incident, as happens hundreds of times every day. The blue pill is catching a plane that might crash because then you get to save everyone.
I full understand that if everybody picked red then everything would be fine. I also fully understand not everybody will pick red, because not everybody thinks about things the same way that you do.
The situation is there are people that will die and you can vote to save them or vote to kill them. Those are the only realistic choices.
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Okay, but again, you're misunderstanding the scenario. Everybody already has enough to eat. All they have to do is be basically intellectually competent enough to not press the "Quite possibly take my lunch away" button. If nobody takes the blue pill, then nobody can have their lunch taken away ever. It is only possible for anybody's lunch to be taken away if anybody takes the blue pill. All red guarantees ample food for everyone.
I will echo those saying that the only pill I've actually been fed reading this subthread is the black pill. The fact that there are some people even on here who are decision theory illiterate enough to actually consider the blue pill is haunting and maddening. (It might be one thing if blue pills explicitly said "Even if it means risking my own life, I want to try to save people even if they are too stupid to understand that we can all avoid any bad outcome with 100% probability by picking the red pill, even though we could all just avoid any bad outcome with 100% probability by picking the red pill.", though even that is quite stupid in my opinion, but a lot of them seem to be misunderstanding the scenario so much that they're interpreting it as a general altruism vs. selfishness hypothetical.)
Though it shouldn't be, this would be an amazing voting qualification test. In my view, you could immediately improve the world by 500 times by guaranteeing that no blue pills have any influence over anything ever.
I think the overall problem here is that the people here have discovered a "hack" where if everybody picks the answer that most people would view as the "Wrong" answer it actually ends up with a better solution than if people picked the "Right" answer. Now that is fine as far as it goes, but in order for it to work you have to assume that everybody in the world has also discovered the "hack" and then also assume they will decide that the "hack" is actually going to work.
On the first assumption I 100% disagree that should be taken for granted. For the second, I know about the hack and I don't think it would actually work because I suspect many of the people I know will pick blue.
If you don't risk having somebody eating your lunch you are never going to build a community capable of accomplishing anything. If you tell everybody "I'm willing to let the blue pill people die" you also are not going to be building a community, because you are constantly looking over your shoulder at all the people that would be happy to let you die if you picked the option they didn't deem as being the most efficient one.
Now if anyone should be keep from voting I know which group I'd pick.
If being able to apply basic logic is considered a "hack" then that's half the problem with modern society right there. If being able to deduce from "Nobody who does X will die." that everyone should do X is considered some grand feat of cognition in a particular "community", then I want no part of it, and yes I think I am willing to let its membership kill themselves (which I think will be very few people), or at least I'm not going to directly throw my body on the grenade of their stunning inadequacy.
This is utter nonsense. Nobody is being asked to solve some complex payoff matrix at gunpoint. It's literally just "Do this and nobody dies." Again, if you lack the basic common sense of a 7 year old (yes, I think many 7 year olds could get this one) to figure that out, then you are damn sure not taking my fate in your hands.
Anyway I propose a compromise. Blue pills and red pills each split off to form their own country. If you genuinely think people who want to turn basic logic into a morality play can run a country...
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So now there’s paternalism involved: someone who wants to choose for someone else because they think they know better. How will people be kept from choosing to save themselves, an armed guard to keep people from picking red?
“If you reach for red, we’ll tase you and kick you out of the choosing place, and if you try again we’ll kill you.”
Threatening people who refuse to be persuaded to trust is no way to build trust, nor is it building a community.
Blue wants to pick for themselves, for the incompetent, and for those who would pick red, to ensure that the outcome is majority blue to avoid them and everyone they care about dying. Then to avoid being called tyrants who are risking everyone unnecessarily and using force to do it, they say they’re building a community.
This kind of thinking and excuse-making is straight out of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged.”
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Not everyone can, or will, take the red pill.
Why not? It's very simply: You've been given a sugar pill or other harmless pill (red pill) and what is potentially a poison/suicide pill (blue pill).
Under what circumstances (other than wishing to die) does it make ANY sense to take the suicide pill? Everyone has been given the gift of life via the red pill, why reject it? And if you do reject it, why would you expect anyone to think you're moral for doing so?
Not everyone is sane, not everyone clicks the option they mean to click, not everyone is literate, and so on. It is, for all intents and purposes, guaranteed that "everyone can simply choose to live" is wrong.
I've mentioned many times that changing the frame changes what the correct answer is. That said, the answer is easy--you know that taking the pill may save others who have taken it.
Not everyone has.
The premise nowhere states that people will not have what is going on explained, or only explained via text, or have the choice made via mouse click. You are introducing new premises from thin air to aid your bad arguments.
In summary, this is a bad faith argument.
The premise is "everyone who responds to this poll". Misclicks are a given. It's a real poll; is your argument that nobody has misclicked on that real poll?
Given that the question states you have to choose between a red or a blue pill, presumably were this a scenario that was happening in real life with real life-or-death stakes, you would have to decide which option you were going to take by choosing one of the pills and swallowing it. There would be no misclicks in such a scenario.
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Why can't they? Here's a red pill, here's a blue pill, pick one. Everyone (no matter how many people are there) gets the same choice. Red pill for everyone if they choose to take it.
It's not a case of "if I take the red pill, that only leaves the blue pill for the next person, and taking the blue pill means they will die". If that were the choice, it would be selfish and immoral.
But this is "If I take the blue pill, unless enough other people take it, that means everyone dies but at least I get to say how good and moral and virtuous I am, how much better I am than the greedy, selfish people next door who took the red pill in the other experiment".
Firstly, I said "can't or won't." But yes, I maintain that some people literally cannot choose the red pill. They will misclick or misread the question. Do you honestly disagree? I'm having a hard time understanding why everybody seems to be ignoring this possibility.
Very uncharitable. I think some people will choose blue, and therefore everyone should choose blue. It's pretty straightforward. There's no need to accuse me of virtue signaling when regular logic will suffice to explain my position.
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"Not everyone can" than it is a different game.
I am talking about the game in the poll. Is your assertion that in that game, literally everybody is rational, will read the question correctly, and so on? I disagree, but even then there's the question of "will". It's a guarantee that some people will take the blue pill for one reason or another, so the "if everyone" premise is still false.
I think you're using a different definition of "can pick red" than the people you are talking to
Good thing I added "or will" then. Given that addition, does it matter what definition I'm using? My meaning was quite clear.
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Whether people are rational or read the question correctly is very different from whether they can pick red. I agree that some people would pick blue, but if you are telling me that some people can't pick red, you have changed the game.
Why waste my time with this hypothetical? I said "can or will". You can scroll up to my comment and read it right there.
That said, "some people can't pick red" isn't really changing the game at all. Some people will misclick. This is in line with the original rules of the poll.
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