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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.
Yeah, I don't know how simpler than "if you pick red, you live" it could be. If someone picks blue after that, then it really is a case of "did you not understand that if you pick red, you won't die?"
'Well if I pick blue then I'm helping to make sure everyone lives'.
There's only the risk of death if people are silly enough not to pick red. Five people picking blue on the grounds "I'm smart but those other guys are dumb so they'll probably pick blue" are doing the equivalent of grabbing a live electric wire while standing in a paddling pool full of water and sharks and piranhas being shoved off a cliff without a bungee jump cord and swigging down a cyanide cocktail at the same time. You are not showing off your intellect or your virtue.
Seriously.
I've been asking blue-choosers who they think they're saving by picking blue.
That is, who is choosing blue, OTHER than the people who think they're saving someone by picking blue?
And if the only people who are picking blue are the ones trying to save someone, they are now the only ones in need of saving. They all jumped off a bridge thinking they would save someone, when there was nobody who needed saving prior to them jumping.
Its a self-fulfilling prophecy which can easily be sidestepped by choosing red.
If you can posit a person who picks blue for some innocent reason other than a desire to look like a moral person or the desire to save someone else, then you've got the beginnings of an argument.
Otherwise, you're just creating risk where no risk needed to exist.
Literally, if I were a Supervillain playing the game, I would be trying to maximize death toll by convincing some people to choose blue. I'd lie and say I was choosing blue then mercilessly defect.
"I am choosing red and you should too" provides zero reason to lie.
Not just no reason to lie but no need to trust. The cost of trusting that someone will vote blue is that if they vote red you may die if you vote in accordance with the agreement. The cost of trusting that someone will vote red red is that if they vote blue they might die if you vote in accordance with the agreement.
Lying is punished when the agreement is voting red; lying isn’t punished when the agreement is to vote blue.
Yes, the trustless aspect cannot be overstated when you're playing a game with strangers, potentially millions of them, and have no enforcement mechanism.
It's virtually guaranteed that some avowed blue-pickers will have a panic attack and go with red when the choice time is actually arrives. I suppose some red-pickers have a crisis of conscious and go blue, but holy cow if you have no other information to go on, Red is the one that doesn't require faith in strangers.
Trying to play the recursive game (I know that he knows that I know that he knows I'll pick blue, therefore...) seems like an inherently losing approach.
It just seems so obvious yet some people are arguing against it. I honestly cannot model their thought process (outside of them treating the thought exercise solely as an exercise instead of thinking — how would people actually vote if voting the wrong way could lead to their death).
The closest I've gotten is that they actually believe that "Altruism is a Schelling Point."
"I want to save people, and other people will too, so they'll accept the risk and we'll all pick blue."
But they can't fully articulate WHY they believe someone actually needs saving. They reason out why someone would pick blue based on altruism, but not why someone would pick blue a priori and thus need to be rescued. So why do we need altruism?
And on the meta level, I think they may be assuming that how people behave in this thought experiment is how they'd behave in other scenarios in which case they think reds are inherently self-interested.
But no, I'm capable of being altruistic, I can just recognize that this specific situation is one where it is best to shut off the altruistic impulse.
I genuinely WANT to understand the position that allows one to pick blue believing it to be the best action.
But it seems to require that you start with premises that are completely inborn or 'faith-based.'
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