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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 14, 2023

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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:

  1. (Blue pill)
  2. (Red pill)

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):

  1. Walk into a room that is a human blender
  2. Do nothing

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:

I’ll take the over on preference falsification driving these results.

If all voters were in a position where the non-zero chance of death for a blue vote vs zero chance of death for a red vote was salient and believable, red would win.

Cost-free signaling is a hell of a drug.

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:

Your plane crashes into the sea. Everyone survives, and exits the plane with their life vest.

Someone says, “If over half of us turn our life vests into a raft, it can save everyone without a life vest! Otherwise, we’ll drown!”

Everyone has a life vest.

Everyone wearing a life vest will not drown.

Do you build the boat, or just put on your vest?

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.

Depends on the exact population involved, but blue at least sometimes.

Suppose it's a population of two: you and your spouse. An exact tie goes to red. You have no way to collaborate beforehand (e.g. both of you have been taken to separate rooms that are totally isolated from one another). Which do you choose?

Without having discussed the situation beforehand, there is a nonzero chance my wife would choose blue. So I choose blue. If I die, well, I die. The key to an optimal outcome here and in life is to develop the character to choose blue and develop a community who chooses blue. Reducing everything to a calculation of the optimal individualist outcome ends up degrading the spirit and the self. In a way, committing to choose blue is the selfish, personal utility-optimizing choice, because it means you're the type of person who chooses blue which is what enables the existence of the community, without which the individual life is empty and meaningless.

If we are talking the general population, it becomes a lot trickier. But consider two variants of the original scenario: one where the cutoff is 0.1%, and one where the cutoff is 99.9%. With 99.9% the choice is obviously red, and with 0.1% the choice is (a bit less obviously, but still obviously to me) blue. It's not clear to me where the cutoff is, but it does show that it isn't something you can decide based purely on first principles. You need data about the health and the quality of the community. For the USA, my guy reaction is a cutoff of around 10%, though that's just based on feels.

Yeah, in a situation like that, of course you'll pick blue (unless you really hate your spouse, or unless both of you realise "red lives, pick red, I know my spouse knows me well enough to know that I'll choose red so they should pick red too").

But this isn't about being at war, or being a firefighter, or a parent of a child running into a blender, or the other tortured examples conjured up out of thin air to justify just how wunnerful the blues are. It's "imagine a random group of anonymous people, everyone has the choice for red or blue; red lives, blue only lives if more than 50% of the group pick blue; you have no idea how big the group is or what choices people make". It's like "Who would win: Superman or Batman?" Everyone picks red, everyone lives, nobody is being selfish or mean or horrible because RED IS LIFE.

The key to an optimal outcome here and in life is to develop the character to choose blue and develop a community who chooses blue. Reducing everything to a calculation of the optimal individualist outcome ends up degrading the spirit and the self.

Not quite. That's usually the case with a lot of these cooperation dilemmas but this one has the feature that everyone choosing red is just as optimal as everyone choosing blue

Most people have never heard of Nash equilibrium, let alone understand what a stable Nash equilibrium is. Most people who choose red are just trying to act selfishly and most people choosing blue are just trying to act altruistically, which means it's crazy to argue that one action is correct or incorrect using game theory -- the vast majority of actors are not rational!

"Everyone just choose red" is not a tenable solution in the real world.

Why are people making this into a moral judgement? If the poll asked me "Would you kill this adorable fluffy little kitten with the big eyes to save your own life?" - well I'm not answering that one. But it's not that kind of fucking Sophie's Choice, it's "pick red or blue in a game that has no consequences for the real world".

Sincerely, the more smarmy justifications I'm reading from the blues, the less I like them as people because all the worst finger-wagging Nanny Is Watching instincts are coming out in them. It's not enough to argue that it's the optimal strategy to pick blue if you assume some people out of the group will pick blue; no, it has to be made into "reds are selfish, blues are altruistic, kiss my upright and high-minded ass and tell me how fantastic I am".

How dare those people believe that picking the option that keeps 100% of participants alive is superior! Nannies! Smarms!

Have you ever entertained a thought that not everything others do is for your approval?

For what it’s worth, my main point was that “it’s okay for me to take the red pill because everyone doing that is optimal” is completely inapplicable to the real world, and hence an obvious rationalization. Not that one side was evil or good, just that this particular defense is balderdash.

I realize that it’s kind of hard to say that without coming off as insulting to red pillers. I’d think you would be more sympathetic though, since you did the mirror image and accused all blue pillers of virtue signaling.

Just because people don’t understand game theory terms doesn’t mean game theory cannot explain actions.

No but it means "It's okay that I took the redpill because it's the game theoretic optimal solution (and so everyone else will do it too)" is totally divorced from reality.

The question is does game theory model accurately model human behavior. If yes, then regardless of whether people know what a Nash equilibrium is, it will still exist. If no, then it won’t.

"Everyone just choose red" is not a tenable solution in the real world.

Why?

Good point.

I'd still pick red though.

"Everyone just choose red" is not a tenable solution in the real world.

"Everyone just choose blue" isn't a tenable solution in the real world either. In point of fact, the real world doesn't have a lot of "tenable solutions" of any sort. Mostly people eat shit.

Which is why you don't need everyone to choose blue, just over half the people, which is a much more tenable solution.

It's more tenable than getting everyone to choose red, but maximizing the number of blues is much higher-risk than maximizing the number of reds. If people commit to writing the blues off, you get very close to everyone choosing red, as the apparent upside of blue drops like a rock. People committing to maximizing blue introduces serious tail-risk of calamity.

Likely minimal losses versus unlikely but very large ones. Which is worse?

Perhaps this is harsh, but there's also the fact that if we're talking about adults the people who would pick blue in the first place would likely be a tiny subset of people (suicidal people, mentally retarded people, etc) whose QALYs are realistically fairly limited. I'd say "Maybe we could just not try to pull off some incredible coordination feat which might turn out horrible for marginal gains" is fairly reasonable.

I think of it more as "we benefit also from cautionary examples". Whoever picks blue has volunteered to demonstrate why picking red is the correct choice.

Going with the spousal example, it's not equally optimal for both to choose red and both to choose blue. Both choosing blue is superior to both choosing red, because the very act of both choosing blue is indicative of stronger bonds and itself reenforces them.

Alternately, it's a competition in who can be the bigger martyr: "Darling, I chose blue because I want you to live, even if I know you would choose red and leave me to die, I love you that much".

Competing over who makes the bigger sacrifice and who is the more self-sacrificing and who is ahead in the list of favours done is not a strong and happy bond. I'd rather someone who said "I picked red because I trust you're not an idiot and would pick red, too".

You're really reaching to add things to the situation that aren't present in the initial scenario

Why? I expect my wife to choose red and I think she'd be very upset if I was dead. Is choosing blue supposed to be an act that indicates that I simply couldn't live without her or something? When it's only two people, it really does feel a lot like the blender version of things where I would say that we should just both skip the door leading to the blender and that it's pretty obvious.

In the purely altruistic 1v1 version of the game it's literally just about finding the Schelling point. Though, even then, if both players are rational, red is still the obvious Schelling point since the downside is less if the other person chooses differently. Red is strongly dominant if someone is agnostic about the other person's choice.

You can be rational and value someone else's life higher than your own.

Is choosing blue supposed to be an act that indicates that I simply couldn't live without her or something?

Not quite. It's not that the act of choosing blue signals a belief that the value of your life is zero without her. More like, the act of choosing blue indicates that you believe she might choose blue, either inherently or because she believes you might choose blue. If there's any risk at all that one person or the other would either choose blue or believe the other person would choose blue, that forces the other person to readjust their estimation of the other person's likelihood of choosing blue upwards, which forces the other person to readjust upwards, etc. Eventually that becomes a substantial risk, and if you place a nonzero value on the relationship and believe the other person places a nonzero value on the relationship, you choose blue in a leap of faith. Recognition of that uncertainty and the risk made in the leap of faith is what builds personal character and the relationship.

ventually that becomes a substantial risk, and if you place a nonzero value on the relationship and believe the other person places a nonzero value on the relationship, you choose blue in a leap of faith.

Said leap of faith being "I thought you'd choose blue because you're too stupid to work out why that is a bad idea, and you chose blue because you thought the same about me". Yeah, nice relationship where both parties only have contempt for the choices of the other!