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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:
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.
Red requires 100% cooperation for the optimal outcome, blue requires 50% cooperation for the optimal outcome. It is near-impossible to get 100% cooperation for anything, particularly something where defecting is as simple as pressing a different button and has an actual argument for doing so. Meanwhile getting 50% cooperation is pretty easy. If blue required 90% or something it would probably make more sense to cut our losses and aim for minimizing the number of blue, but at 50% it's easy enough to make it worthwhile to aim for 0 deaths via blue majority.
If we are to compare to politics, I think the obvious comparison is to utopian projects like complete pacifism that only work if you either have 100% cooperation (in which case there is no violence to defend against or deter) or if you have so little cooperation that everyone else successfully coordinates to keep the violence-using status-quo (akin to voting for red but blue getting the majority). Except that such projects at least have the theoretical advantage of being better if they got 100% cooperation, whereas 100% cooperation on red is exactly the same as 50%-100% cooperation on blue.
In real life serious crime is almost always a self-destructive act, and yet people do it anyway. "Just create a society where there's no incentive to do crime and we can abolish the police because 0 people will be criminals" doesn't work, not just because you can't create such a society, but because some people would be criminals even if there was no possible net benefit. We can manage high cooperation, which is why we can coordinate to do things like have a justice system, but we can't manage 100% cooperation, that's why we need a justice system instead of everyone just choosing to not be criminals.
It might help to separate out the coordination problem from the self-preservation and "what blue voters deserve" aspects. Let us imagine an alternative version where, if blue gets below 50% of the vote, 1 random person dies for each blue vote. Majority blue is once again the obvious target to aim for so that nobody dies, though ironically it might be somewhat harder to coordinate around since it seems less obviously altruistic. Does your answer here differ from the original question? The thing is, even if you think this version favors blue more because the victims are less deserving of death, so long as you place above-zero value on the lives of blue voters in the first question the most achievable way to get the optimal outcome is still 50% blue.
And the way the question is posed, there is no opportunity for coordination, and everyone only has information about their own choice, and that everyone else is making the same choice.
And if the cooperation fails you and all others who picked blue die.
You can literally ONLY get the worst outcome (49.99999% death rate) if people start choosing blue.
Here's a slight adjustment to the Hypo:
What if everyone discusses the matter beforehand and everyone agrees to select red. Now, there is no way to know that people will pick red, but is there any possible reason to pick blue once that agreement has been reached?
Yeah? And you can literally only get the worst outcome if people start choosing red too, framed differently.
Nah, there's no way blue is happening at that point. I can see people doing it anyway, to not feel guilty about the deaths of those who will misclick, but it's not rational.
Yep.
But red doesn't introduce any additional risk. Deaths occur IF AND ONLY IF blue is picked by someone(s). Blue is a necessary AND sufficient condition for deaths. Red is neither necessary nor sufficient, under the currently stated hypo.
The first person to pick blue is the one who makes it possible for death to occur at all.
So if I push this to it's logical extreme, I could probably argue that blue-pickers end up with blood (including their own) on their hands.
I don't argue that, because I don't even think I fully understand the blue's logic.
Me saying "I'm going to pick red, and you should too" is my warning as to what will happen if we play the game. I have zero possible benefit to lying.
Picking blue is choosing to accept risk of death where red does not imply such risk.
This statement is false. The only if part is true but not the if part since its possible for blue to be picked and there to be no deaths.
Again false. Blue is a necessary condition but not a sufficient condition for deaths as there are situations where blue is picked but there are no deaths
False one more time. Red is a necessary condition for deaths as if there are no reds there will be no deaths.
If you're going to use precise logical terminology in your post make sure to get it right otherwise you're just embarrassing yourself.
Yeah, I should have specified that red is neither necessary nor sufficient to cause deaths conditional on there being no persons choosing blue.
Which is to say, the persons choosing blue are satisfying the condition which makes deaths a possibility.
Choosing blue is sufficient to cause deaths in every scenario in which they don't meet the threshold, if you think this makes the outcome different.
I'll point out that we're still left with the point that at least one person choosing blue is necessary to cause deaths. Prior to the decisions actually being made, I can state that picking red is not satisfying the conditions for death. It's not sufficient, and it's not necessary unless someone else is choosing blue.
Red is only necessary to cause deaths in those situations where that first person chooses blue.
To choose blue is to intentionally satisfy the precondition which makes deaths a possibility.
So someone choosing blue really has to justify why they're choosing to satisfy a condition which is allowing possible deaths.
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I think there will always be people who choose blue for one reason or another, and I'd rather risk my life saving everyone than accept their deaths, provided I'm not just throwing away my life.
All this debate is definitely pushing me towards red though. Blue won in the original poll, but if outside of that corner of Twitter everyone picks red, red is obviously the better option.
But this is an interesting thing to state, since people choosing blue presumably HAVE reasons for doing it. And those reasons might be salient as well.
For example, someone might pick blue because they WANT to die. Am I going to know that in advance? No. So I don't see why it should change my behavior.
"I want to save everyone" is comprehensible logic, but it requires us to believe there are people in need of saving.
Well here are a few possibilities:
Someone doesn't get the memo that everyone is choosing red
Someone is just stupid (or young, etc.) and chooses blue because they like the color
Someone gets the game theory wrong and chooses blue
I find it highly unlikely everybody perfectly coordinates around red. 50% is much easier to coordinate than 100%, so I find blue the better option, even if most of the people who originally found their way there are idiots.
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I think this is the intended line of thinking, but red doesn't require any cooperation: pure self-interest can grant it too. "If you want to certainly live, choose red, but you're free to choose possible death if you want." Blue actually requires coordination to confidently pull off.
In this case, I think the actual right/left split is close to this question, but doesn't quite align: frequently (well-managed) cooperation yields better outcomes than pure self-interest economics. We as a division-of-labor society can build far greater things than as a bunch of atomized subsistence farmers. On the other hand sometimes cooperation is poorly managed and ends up worse than individualism.
Those are, broadly, the two argument points for left and right economics, respectively: "Medicare for all" fits the left, and "but how can we prove that won't make it worse" fits the right. IMHO the optimum is probably somewhere between the observable poor outcomes of pure anarchy (Somalia?) and planned economies (communism has a huge body count).
Maybe the question would be more interesting if there was an additional compensation (cash payment?) for choosing blue.
The issue is the extreme difficulty of that level of coordination, not their specific motives. Imagine I said "coordination" instead of "cooperation" if you prefer. If you place an above-zero value on the lives of people who might press blue, then the optimal outcome is either >50% blue or exactly 100% red, with every other possibility being worse.
You can't rely on 100% to do pretty much anything, including act on self-interest. People in real life do things like commit suicidal school shootings, and you have to make decisions taking that into account. As I pointed out, even most mundane crime is self-destructive and yet people do it anyways. In this case, as people have pointed out, some people will pick blue by mistake, because they are momentarily suicidal enough to take a risk even though they wouldn't carry out a normal suicide, or (most of all) because they realize the above and want to save everyone.
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No, it can't. It just can't. People will misunderstand the question, misclick, or otherwise choose blue even though they are purely self-interested. Someone out there has schizophrenia and will always choose blue in self interest because the voices tell them to. 100% cooperation in large groups is 100% impossible.
This is one of the places where I find the current left/right divide to be incongruous: the left here sees a strong need to protect people from themselves, but only in certain instances. Your argument is a general one for banning the sale of potentially dangerous objects to prevent self-harm. But at the same time we're told that the addicts shooting up heroin on the streets are Living Their Best Lives and we couldn't possibly try to take away substances that demonstrably cause harm to individuals and society as a whole, because Individual Freedoms, although we can try to ban large soft drinks. This largely holds in reverse for the right.
Fundamentally, society is a coordination problem, and those are hard and seem to lack generalized solutions. Different scales have different optima: I unironically run my household as a socialist collective (from each, to each...) but wouldn't vote for such policies in even small town government.
Sure, but in reality, people can harm more than just themselves, the costs of helping them are quite high, and usually such "help" is quite ineffective. If it just required 50% cooperation to save everyone's problems, I would vote for that on every level.
I don't want to ban guns for many reasons, but I will take a gun away from a baby if I see it playing with one, even at considerable risk to myself. The frames are just different and so are the answers.
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But it goes to downside; not just levels of cooperation. Sure 95% surviving is worse than 100%. But 95% is much better than 55% surviving.
Right, but the probability of success seems more than high enough to compensate. Not only is 50% blue better than 95% red, it's also easier because you only need 50% instead of 95%. It's especially high if communication is allowed, but even without communication "the most obviously pro-social option" is a natural Schelling point.
Now this is fairly fragile, it's plausible that with different question wording or a society with a more cynical default conception of other people (Russia?) or the wrong set of memes regarding game theory red would seem enough of a natural Schelling point to make aiming for blue not worth it. This would of course be a worse outcome, so if you did have access to communication it would make sense to rally people around blue rather than red if doing so seems feasible.
I actually already seen the poll replicated in Russian social network(VK) and the results are similar to twitter one - 65% Blue.
Interesting. I thought it might correlate with being a lower-trust society and surveys like these, especially because of the stereotype of Russians being vocally cynical, but maybe not. Though I probably shouldn't conclude anything from non-randomized social media polls.
Even the real surveys are dubious (different countries probably radically differ in how they interpret the question, especially when it's being translated) and looking at the link above Russia isn't as low on them as I thought. For instance 23.3% of surveyed Russians agreed with "most people can be trusted", which is lower than the U.S. (39.7%) or Sweden (63.8%) but slightly higher than France (18.7%) or Spain (19%), let alone Brazil (6.5%) or Zimbabwe (2.1%). It's hard to tell how meaningful any of this is.
It could also be that voting on Twitter is just fundamentally different from “voting” where picking blue may actually kill you.
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Perhaps wartime and the general us vs them narrative has made the Russian society pull together in a way that's unlike, say, two years ago?
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But if you can communicate, wouldn’t you communicate “pick red; if we al pick red we all live!”
absolutely not. blue is the obvious one because if anyone errs, they die if everyone picks red and they pick blue, but someone erring with picking red doesn't cause a negative effect in blueworld.
the Lizardman Constant of people (+ some others who have genuine mental issues or are very young) don't die if everyone picks blue
If you run a “pick red” campaign, the equilibrium is self-reinforcing. There is no reason for anyone to “defect” to blue. It would be obviously a stupid decision.
If you run a “pick blue” campaign, how would you enforce that? How would you know it’s working? There is an obvious advantage to defecting. How much fear would you have awaiting the results? Do you have any beloved family members you secretly hope pick red just for the extra safety?
Roko is right, seeing people continue in their blue delusion is blackpilling. It’s like watching someone who is unable to understand the Monty Hall problem even after having it explained to them multiple times.
at 100% cooperation between all parties, there is no difference between blue and red. chug them both if you want and wash it down with a chaser.
I think it is a given that some people will either:
if any of these are the case, it is almost certain for there not be 100% coordination to pick one or the other. it is not only probable, but imo extremely likely for someone to pick blue based on the last 2 or more uncommonly the first 4. therefore, untold numbers will die if red wins. you don't need to be unintelligent for the first to occur (even highly intelligent people make mistakes). therefore, we want to reduce the number who die. and the only way to do that is to get 50%+1 to pick blue.
it is much more attainable for 50%+1 to do something than for 100% to do something. and so, we should be focusing all of our effort on getting 50%+1 to do something by encouraging everyone to do something, because 50%+1 blue or 65% blue or 84.25% blue or 100% blue has the same outcome as 100% red, but the inverse is not true.
are you sure all of the people you care about will pick red? would you bet their life on it?
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The original question does not assume campaigning. How many beloved family members will you be afraid for as you sit in safety having picked red?
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No, if I can communicate, I will communicate that we should all pick blue and then everyone will live.
As explained above, this requires trust in strangers where the punishment for breaking trust differs on which agreement is made. If the agreement is “we all pick red” the agreement breaker suffers. If the agreement is “we all pick blue” then the agreement keeper suffers.
Thus, it seems more logical to explain this and get everyone to vote red.
But I do not want the "agreement breaker" to suffer in the red pact world, precisely because the breach obviously doesn't benefit them and doesn't harm me, realistically it could only happen by mistake or insanity.
If I can be confident that a pact works (50%+ keep it), I want the pact to be blue. If I can't, I'll pick red whatever the actual agreement was.
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