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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.
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.
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