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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:
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.
Way to bring up all the most red pill-skewed framings of the question, and none of the opposite. Here, I'll provide what you missed.
The fact is that different framings genuinely have different correct answers. They don't always lend more "clarity" because more often than not they change the nature of the question itself to one where the answer may be different.
Like voting, your individual choice does not actually matter, but you vote with the knowledge that by doing so you are voting for everyone like you. So long as I judge the probability of >50% blue to be reasonable, I will always pick blue.
To be honest your "rational" analysis of this is lacking.
This is the worst part of this whole debate. I can't tell whether this is a real belief or just a justification for the real one that "I don't want to die." Obviously not everybody is choosing red. I haven't seen a single poll where less than 10% of able-minded people chose blue, not counting the countless billions who are less intelligent or possibly have not even learned to walk yet. The only scenario where everybody lives is if people choose blue.
No, both are stable, by definition. At the margin, it's actually red which is unstable. 49.99... % red is unstable, while 50% blue is stable.
You seem to be iterating only once and declaring any further iterations on the game theory wrong and bad. Like declaring that everyone should just defect on the 99th round of the iterated prisoner's dilemma, because obviously there's no incentive to cooperate on the 100th. I understand that monumentally stupid people exist and will walk into the blender. The only way to save them is to join them, so I do so. I hope others iterate just once more, recognize that people like me exist, and decide to join me.
I'll leave you with my favorite take on this.
The original choice was "pick red or blue". Now if it was an experiment about "if we all rush outside we have a good chance of saving the babies from the wolves because there's safety in numbers", then yeah I'd pick "rush outside". But in the original I'm picking "red pill" because there are no wolves, everyone smart enough to be able to read this poll doesn't need saving from themselves by the smarter set, and it's not a question of harming others to save yourself. If you pick red, and you pick red, and everyone in this line picks red, then all live. If you pick blue and you pick blue but the next six people pick red, you die. And that's down to your decision.
The blue versus red choice is metaphorically "do you want to be shoved out the window of a twenty storey building, or do you want to stand in the middle of the room well away from it?" What person is going to go "yes, please shove me out a window"? 'OH but if they're really stupid they will'. Well, if they're that stupid, why are they reading that particular Twitter then?
'Unless enough people pick blue, we're going to shove you out a window, but if you pick red, that won't happen' - how is this a difficult choice? By picking blue, now you're introducing the element of "uh-oh, one person picked blue, we need a lot more people to pick blue now" and nobody knows how many people are there or who picked blue. That's the problem: if there are fifty thousand people and I know that 24,999 picked blue, then clearly I must pick blue to save them. But I don't know that, so why am I immoral for picking red, if there's just as good a chance that the other 49,999 people before me picked red?
Must I repeat myself? Reframe the question and the answer changes, as you well know.
You're not picking blue for yourself, you're picking for everyone similar to you. In other words everyone with the same reasoning process. People with different reasoning processes may come to different conclusions. So the odds that your reasoning process tips the scales is far greater than the odds that everyone with different reasoning processes picks red.
Which is what the Blues are doing in order to come out ahead as the Good Guys. Toddlers in blenders and who knows what-all, when the original was simply "pick the red or pick the blue".
You'd have more ground to stand on here if you hadn't just done exactly what you accuse your opponents of doing and pretended you had a point.
And I don't think things like toddlers participating is reframing the question. It's virtually guaranteed that at least one will, under the original framing of the question.
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