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My own personal answer is red, for the general reasons delineated below.
For the people who choose blue: does the presence of this vigorous debate change your opinions any? I know that while my first thought was red, the fact that this has become a thing, and that there is no obvious common consensus, is more than enough to permanently cement me on Team Red. How much baseline expectation of people picking red no matter what do you need before your choice comes down to "Everyone who picks blue dies, which includes me." and "Everyone who picks blue dies, which doesn't include me?"
I don't think that anyone who purports to be team blue can sufficiently convince me of their conviction to the cause for me to believe they're ALWAYS going to choose blue in an actual scenario where actual death is on the line.
Add in an enforcement mechanism and maybe.
I was in the Iraq War, so I have some experience with putting my life on the line to help protect the other people that also choose the blue pill. Now granted maybe it would have been better off if we all just took the red pill and stayed home in that particular case, but in a general sense I stand by the choice I made.
And I feel confident based on knowing the sort of people that I met in the military and talking to first responders etc that many of them will pick the blue pill instinctively because that aligns with their values. And so I will pick the blue pill consciously because I want to help save them, even at my own risk.
You may not know anybody like us, but people like that do exist.
Yes yes yes but the only reason anybody is at risk is because somebody chose blue while red exists and there's no force compelling people to pick blue.
I can understand altruism AND realize that this exact scenario is when it's time to turn off and ignore the altruistic impulse.
I don't think there's any reason to believe someone when they say "I'm picking blue" because there's no direct punishment for defecting.
I also worry about 'evil' players who say "i'm picking blue" specifically to convince others to pick blue and die, while the evil player defects.
So I'm not suggesting you're not altruistic. I have no proof other than your word, and you absolutely can be telling the truth. I'm saying I can't believe you, because I have no outside information to confirm it, nor is there some way for you to provably demonstrate it.
Except, again, people who choose by mistake for one reason or another. Even putting aside trembling hands etc., not everyone is a perfect game theorist.
Yes, but if we don't know how many of these players there are, this makes the goal of getting to the 50% threshold even less likely.
If it's 99 irrational players and you, are you going to pick blue to mildly increase the chances that everyone is saved even though in a large proportion of those scenarios you die just by random chance?
My position is that I simply don't know that there's anybody picking blue for innocent mistake reasons. That number could be zero, indeed.
I think that it doesn't require perfect game theory knowledge to see a button that says "100% chance of survival" and just pick that.
So I'm not going to put myself in need of saving to help some theoretical person in need of saving who may not exist.
That's literally the blue position as you've stated it: Imagining a guy who picks blue, then picking blue to save that guy. Without actually knowing if he exists.
Well, are we going by the original premise, or by a hypothetical game based loosely on the premise? The original premise is that everyone who responds to the poll gets a choice. We've expanded that a bit and said "what if this poll grew quite a lot" and mostly left the modifications there, which I think is a good place to leave it.
So who responds to useless Twitter polls? Lots of regular people, plus I think occasionally a few kids hitting buttons randomly on their parents' devices. I believe it to be virtually guaranteed that, given a poll size of a few billion people, there are a few small children who have answered the poll by accident and gotten involved. But putting that aside, people are just really dumb.
45% of Americans believe in ghosts. 13% believe in vampires. Americans on average rate at 253 on the numeracy scale, which means nearly half of our adults are incapable of doing things like calculating the gas costs of a car ride. Scientologists, flat earthers, schizophrenics, etc. all exist and cannot neatly be dismissed.
Even if you truly think the very dumbest, most illogical person will still intentionally pick the red option (which btw isn't so neatly labelled as "100% survive"), there's still the question of whether that person with their limited capacity thinks there's an even dumber person out there who picked blue by mistake. Blue is happening, whether you like it or not. Whether it's happening for "innocent mistake reasons" is I guess up to you, but I certainly wouldn't blame 70 IQ people for not perfectly modelling a somewhat complex game.
I hope I would, but in the end all I care about is that people acknowledge that there's somebody out there who will choose the blue pill through no fault of their own. The game theory from that point on is just a useless thought exercise, but it's driving me crazy that everyone seems to be modelling the standard US population as perfect game theorists and proceeding from that assumption. In no other context do we grant people's intelligence nearly so much charity as when we're trying to deny any responsibility for the outcomes of their decisions.
I can acknowledge that there's a chance such a person exists in the game.
If the blue side can acknowledge that there's a chance that such a person does not actually exist in the game, since we don't have that information at the time we make the decision.
But if we've acknowledged such a person exists, it suggests that we should be designing our systems specifically to keep these people VERY FAR AWAY from any buttons that might hurt them or others.
And I think the uncomfortable implication, which blue-pickers will have to deal with, is that there may be a lot of these people who THINK of themselves as rational and intelligent, and will insist on being included in future decisions too.
(Yes, this is going towards an analogy about voting, in real life)
If your theory is:
Then I am going to insist that if blue meets its threshold. and these people survive, we're going to have to take steps to forbid them from being involved in such decisions in the future for the sake of everybody else.
I remind you, my theory is that the vast majority of people are both intelligent enough and self-interested enough to pick red/survival when presented with the choice in a vacuum.
Yours is that there are dummies who will do stupid things like pick blue without thinking.
If I accept your theory, we are now left with the question of what to do about those dummies.
I'll acknowledge there's a chance, but I think it's low enough to be negligible, even if we grant that red is the objectively correct option.
I think "vast majority" is highly debatable given the results of the one poll that we have on the matter. And the existence of dummies (including the very young) to me morally justifies blue. I want to save the dummies. I have enough faith in humanity to think it's worth the risk.
There's more than just that at stake though. Humanity is billions of people with different values and strategies. On the antisocial side, there are probably a good few people who actively want others to die, and then another good few who wouldn't accept any risk to their own lives in exchange for any amount of others' lives saved. The ratio of [value of own life]:[value of another's life] will be, for different people, anywhere from 1:0 to -1:1. (Anywhere from not valuing others' lives at all at 1:0, to not valuing your own life at all in comparison at 0:1, to actively wanting others to die at -1:1)
So as soon as a single dummy chooses blue, you're not just dealing with that dummy, but also the portion of people willing to sacrifice themselves for an infinitesimally small chance to save another, or just willing to sacrifice themselves to avoid moral culpability for another's death. So now we have 1 dummy plus at least a few thousand of the most stupid/altruistic (depending on your perspective, or maybe both) people around.
From there I think the blue pill can only expand. First, a dummy takes the pill. Then, a few people throw their lives away "saving" the dummy. Now some more extremely altruistic people, but not quite altruistic enough to throw their lives away for just one person, enter the pot. And so on. Depending on the distribution of values in the population, maybe it peters out quickly, or maybe it accelerates towards majority blue. As blue approaches 50%, the marginal person deciding whether to join becomes less altruistic, but the level of altruism required to find joining a good option decreases as well. The question is just which decreases faster.
If you think those altruistic people should die, then sure, red pill it is. Otherwise, I think the strategic decision depends on your estimation of humanity's altruism curve.
As far as voting, I definitely agree that in a vacuum there should be an intelligence test. However, taking it a little bit further, I'm uneasy granting the government the ability to decide who chooses the government. Every other power we've granted the government has been used against us. Imagine if we created voting intelligence tests, but unless every single different ethnic group performed equally on them, they were deemed racist and had to be rewritten. The only way I can think of to create a "fair" test would be to go the college route, include an essay portion, and then basically grade the essays solely on how many racial markers they include. We'd probably end up with some horrific amalgam counterproductive to everybody except those already in power.
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