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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 14, 2023

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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.