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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.

I somewhat agree, but, there is the argument that getting a solid blue majority is easier than getting everyone to take red, which will never happen in any real scenario. Sure, taking blue is really dumb if you were, eg, the first person to run into a blender. But I can reframe it too: 50 people on a raft drifting into shore, one guy jumps off early so he can swim to shore early, and the captain yells "If too many people jump off early the raft will collapse." The authority figure and inaction bias both push towards a shelling point of staying put, and if someone immediately jumps off I'm gonna think he's a jackass who could've killed someone.

I can't help but notice this is like a platonic respectability cascade, and is also really controversial just like respectability cascades: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/give-up-seventy-percent-of-the-way As a reminder, this is where something innocent, like shortening Japanese to "Jap", is perceived as signaling something bad the speaker, leading to a cascade whereby it does start to signal something bad because only the actual bad people are willing to keep doing it.

We could all ignore the blue pill, but as soon as a majority people do it eventually it does become selfish not to. I can see how it has the dynamics of a toxic respectability cascade: I don't think anyone thought blacklist was racist until that paper in 2018, people looking to create a moral dilemma they can be on the right side of spread it, until actual good people start believing it and suddenly I'm in the most heated argument I've ever had with my (now ex) gf.

In the original poll I picked red, then switched to blue in follow up polls when it felt safe, and my groupchat went 6 - 1 blue. Unkilled so far across all of them, and never chose red in a blue majority poll since the first one. So, I'm not dying on any hills here. But like in the Scott Alexander article, I'm at least not going to be one of the first to join some destructive cascade.

But I can reframe it too: 50 people on a raft drifting into shore, one guy jumps off early so he can swim to shore early, and the captain yells "If too many people jump off early the raft will collapse." The authority figure and inaction bias both push towards a shelling point of staying put, and if someone immediately jumps off I'm gonna think he's a jackass who could've killed someone.

Not giving a concrete number here for the raft collapsing gave me an idea.

What if the chance of death for blue pill-ers was a variable?

That is, what if the situation was:

Everyone has to pick red or blue.

Once everyone has chosen: Blue's chance of death = percentage of people who picked red. Everyone knows this in advance. No conferring.

In this variant, the more blues you have, the better the chance of everyone surviving, but it is NEVER guaranteed. On what probability would you feel uncomfortable wagering your life to incrementally increase both the potential death toll and the likelihood of avoiding that toll?

The highest expected death toll in your scenario is when the reds and blues are even. Assuming I'm completely altruistic and just want to minimize the expected number of deaths then you would want to choose whichever side you expect to be in the majority. Expected deaths are maximized in a split vote at 25% expected dead.

If you think both are as likely then it doesn't matter what you pick.

I'd pick red, because I would expect people to be at least a little selfish and red is the stable equilibrium in the scenario where at least one person is even the tiniest bit selfish and I know I am that person. So, the blues deserve to die even in the case where I expect to be the only red, because they are so stupid as to pick the wrong equilibrium.