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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 14, 2023

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The thought experiment doesn't tell us much tbh. We already knew left-wingers were a little more about protecting the weak than right-wingers, and right-wingers are a little more about self-interest than left-wingers. I'm not sure anything more is happening here than lazy application of that. Maybe there's a right answer (blue?) and some of the smarter twitter users figured it out, but so what? It feels like a psych experiment on college students you'd use to make sweeping and incorrect claims about human psychology.

Considering it anyway, for no reason: Red is not obvious - clearly some people are going to choose blue, given all of the people on twitter who choose blue, so if everyone else chooses red they die. That choice isn't even particularly correlated (based on twitter posts) with being ingroup or being your race or nationality or having high IQ, so there aren't any eugenic effects or 'people who deserve to die end up dying', it's pretty random aside from political position. So choosing blue helps all those people not die. You could analogize it to the choice to live in a city with people who aren't your kin. These people could kill you at any moment, if they choose (red!). But if everyone in the city chooses to not rape/murder, the entire city benefits (blue). But I don't think that has any meaning either, it's just a silly game theory experiment, there are a lot of those.

Hilarious how much more engagement this got than the trump indictment.

Or maybe it is correlated with high IQ and there are plenty of people who posture as smart but are actually imbeciles?

You should look at the correlation between high IQ, liberalism, and pro-socieality at some point.

IE, if you got Einstein, Bohr, Leibnitz, and the whole Nobel price galley together in a room and ran the test the only people who would pick red are the economists; ie the social scientists.

I highly doubt that. But we are arguing over a stupid point — what hypothetically dead people would pick in a highly contrived example.

The first line though, the first line!

Prosociality is highly corelated with high IQ; and thus picking blue. (Likewise, antisociality is highly corelated with low IQ. Hence the between violent offenders and low IQ.)

Pro social is not picking blue. Blue almost certainly leads to a worse society as more people die.

Only if their are enough people who pick red to create a low trust society; which is worse in every regard for every participant (except for people that are good at scams and violence and shit.)

If the majority of prosocial humans select blue as the did and habitually do in the non fake twitter quiz versions of this question; everything is fine for everyone.

Again, I don’t really see red pill as low trust or anti social. This isn’t defecting. This is “I won’t risk my life to save someone who foolishly puts themself in danger when they easily could not.”

Of course the calculus is a bit different if small children are participating who aren’t capable of understanding.

I guess it's how you think of the poll.

If I was in a prisoners dilemma situation with one other person, I take the red pill. Duh. With ten? Red pill. With 100? Red pill.

I see the actual question as: We are posing this question to everyone who speaks your language on the internet. That changes the calculus, and I start answering the question by modeling what an ideal society would do, guessing how likely it is, and if it's =+51% doing that.