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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.
What moral position is "I want the people who walk in the blender to die"? Asking for a friend.
Small children and other innocent irrational people exist and will walk into the blender whether you like it or not. If exactly 100% of people choose red, everyone lives, while blue needs only 50% of people for everyone to live.
People who make incorrect moral decisions that endanger their lives and require other take risks to save them are not innocent. They're guilty.
The boy who cried wolf got his just desserts when he was eaten.
People should suffer the consequences of their actions. To prevent this process is evil, for it only makes the problem worse: by arguing we should save the "innocent" by walking in the blender you've endangered more people that are going to die anyways once you run out of rubes.
You're assuming your own conclusion here. Blue is only the wrong choice, and only endangers people, if <50% of people choose it. Basically what you're saying is "if I'm right, then I'm right and you're wrong."
Separately, not everyone who chooses blue is making a moral decision at all. I explicitly mentioned babies, do you think they're making an "incorrect moral decision" and should "suffer the consequences of their actions"? Or have you just not thought this through?
The annoying part of debating morality is that it is indeed very presuppositional so we do need to figure out what axioms we're disagreeing on here.
I think a large part of our disagreement is that you place value on intent, while I don't. I think intent is almost completely meaningless.
Babies aren't really a good way of thinking about this problem because the whole point is to test decision making, so the actor has to understand the premise in the first place. Let's rather think about someone who's totally irrational, but can understand the premise, otherwise we're discussing some completely different thought experiment.
If that irrational person lack the instinct not to walk in blenders yeah they do deserve to die for making an incorrect decision, that's how nature works.
Now there's a separate argument to be had about whether you should try to save them through sacrifice or risk. To me, the morality of sacrifice hinges on the utility you get out of the sacrifice, which in this case is engineered to be zero.
Really any deviation from the original thought experiment changes the answer. As I mentioned here an equally natural framing is that nobody dies unless >50% of people step onto the "blend everybody else" button.
I'll grant that babies should maybe be ignored, since I missed that the original sample was "everybody in this poll" rather than "everybody". Still, there is at least one person out there who chooses blue by mistake, and it's worth coordinating to save them.
What does appealing to nature have to do with people deserving things? I don't like the state of nature. I want to improve things from that state. Plenty of us would "deserve to die" for making mistakes in a state of nature, but due to the cooperation of others we live in an easier world now.
Like moral value? I'm not sure what you mean here. I definitely ascribe moral value to intent.
Right, I mean, if your moral value of saving others is zero, the obvious choice is red. What else could it be? Red has a greater chance to save your own life which is all you care about. But that turns this into a moral debate rather than a game theory one. I don't share your values, so the right answer for me is different than it is for you.
I think I see our actual disagreement here.
I believe that one of the realities of nature that can't be escaped is the need for self preservation, and that any order we build to escape brutish nature still has to acknowledge that as a zeroth principle. Because people who don't exist do not get to make moral judgements, so existing isn't just moral, it's pre-moral.
In some sense, if you disregard self-preservation we are returned to the state of nature because pumping infinite ressources into saving people who don't care to live is not sustainable. For civilization to work, people need to not pump all the utility out of it.
Saving others can have varying levels of utility, though I understand this particular thought experiment is too vague to actually get at that, which is why people intuit different ones including on the framing.
But I think our fundamental disagreement isn't about those levels but about purely selfless sacrifice which I indeed view as immoral.
Taken seriously, this forbids dying for any cause, or even risking your life / shortening it by a couple of minutes for any cause. I definitely believe morality has an objective basis outside of people's minds, similar to math. Otherwise, how does morality survive at all? Even if your choices are moral when you're alive they vanish into nothingness when you die, so how are they ever moral in the first place? Realistically they are moral (or immoral) whether or not anyone is around to observe them and consider them as such.
I don't think any sacrifice is purely selfless. Besides extremely evil people, even the worst that humanity has to offer shares plenty of values with me. Saving them grants me utility.
I agree we can't pump infinite resources into self-destructive people. If the threshold for blue were higher and harder to coordinate I might change my answer. But 50% is pretty attainable, and was attained in the original poll.
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