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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30655 thread views

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 was baffled, then I got to this exchange and I think I understand now:

Roko - I don't understand why anyone would vote blue in this poll. Can someone who voted blue please give their logic?

Damita - I don't want anyone to die?

Roko - It is only possible to die in this scenario if you pick blue. Red is always safe.

Clinton Coker - The logic for me was, why would anyone vote red?

Roko - Because there's no possible downside to it. Read the question carefully.

Clinton Coker - There is a possible downside. It's right there in the poll.

In this weirdo version of a prisoner's dilemma, everyone can cooperate by hitting Red and all is well, or everyone can cooperate by hitting Blue and all is well. If you have normal coordination and everyone chooses Red, they're all good, but if someone "defects" to Blue, they get killed. You or I apparently don't worry about the defector - just don't be an idiot and you're fine. Other people want to save the idiot contingent so much that they're willing to risk their own lives for it (at least in a Twitter poll). In a scenario where the only person punished by defection is the defector, the threat of that person suiciding is enough to make people change course.

What's wild is that I think this does actually have some explanatory power. When I say that I don't really care about bad outcomes for people that can't do something as basic as show up to work in a country where it's as easy as the United States, this poll makes it obvious that the Blue-pressers are willing to risk their own wellbeing for people that are too stupid to just push the correct button. This also seems like it helps explain the efficacy of hunger strikes, which I've never viscerally grasped - if someone elects to starve themselves in response to something, I am morally blameless when they starve, and their argument completely fails to persuade me. I see their actions working on others via media exposure, but I've never understood how the threat of killing yourself is supposed to move others to your position. Apparently, "give me what I want, or I'll kill myself" works even what the person wants is just the ability to smash Blue. To be fair, their impulse probably is pro-social, but it's also completely foreign to me.

this poll makes it obvious that the Blue-pressers are willing to risk their own wellbeing for people that are too stupid to just push the correct button

Like said below, it becomes a different thing if you imagine that everyone in some community has to make the choice, including small kids.

Would I trust my 3-year-old and 11-month-old kids to understand the subtle logic of the "everyone picks red" option, or just pick the pill that looks more like candy?

Maybe I'm the complete moron, because I didn't even think about children. As someone notes below, toying with variables to make the situation more or less obvious and more or less iterative would change it in important ways.

The literal phrasing of the poll would probably exclude children, since it only talks about those voting in the poll, and presumably there wouldn't be too many 3-year-olds using Twitter (expect when someone accidentally posts awfoijgjdoindfnaofnbmadf,öd,dföl,bfbdfb,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,)

Then again, if we go by the results of the actual poll, it would have comfortably over 60% voting blue, so voting blue would be safe anyhow.

Yeah, there would probably be at least one 3-year-old though. There's only one way to guarantee everyone remains safe.

No there isn’t a way of you (the sole voter for your choice) guaranteeing everyone lives. If you vote blue you may die. If you vote red someone else may die. The only way to make sure is if enough people vote the same way but once you can allow for cooperation you tell everyone “if we all vote red no one does so just vote red.”

No there isn’t a way of you (the sole voter for your choice) guaranteeing everyone lives.

I hate this kind of turnabout. I wasn't talking about myself. I was talking about us, considering there's at least one 3 year old who makes the "wrong" choice. There's only one way to protect them.

Yes, technically speaking, without cooperation there's no way to guarantee anything. So obviously what I meant was that given a 3 year old who picks blue there's only one way to save everyone.

And I hate your kind of turnabout. You introduced the knowledge and ability to influence others into the scenario in order to “get” to your preferred outcome. If we can do that, then we can very easily influence the 3 year old to take the red candy. I have kids. It isn’t hard to convince the kid to take the red pill in this example. In fact, I think you’d be really irresponsible to get the kid to take the blue pill hoping you could get enough other people to pick blue. I know I would do everything in my power to get my kids to take red even if it meant going from sufficient blue to insufficient blue because I would not risk my kids dying.

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Yeah, there would probably be at least one 3-year-old though.

Participating in an online poll for a rationalist thought experiment? Man, three year olds these days are way more sophisticated than my time!

Bro come on. All it takes is one person to leave Twitter open, or a chance series of clicks on a computer/tablet/phone. Not that crazy.

Why wouldn't a red pill look like candy? Again, if you're giving a choice to an eleven month old, it's stupid.

The original poll was a simple choice in an online thought experiment that didn't say one thing about "the people in this experiment don't have the brains to come in out of the rain, so you must save them from themselves by your choice". The blue choosers then started introducing all kinds of qualifications to justify their superior virtue. Now we're down to "if an eleven month old infant in real life was given the choice of a candy or a poison pill". Come on, just tell us reds we're all devils and be done with it.

Why wouldn't a red pill look like candy?

Did I say it wouldn't? Both might look like candy. 50/50 choice doesn't sound like good odds when talking about my child's life, though.

Come on, just tell us reds we're all devils and be done with it.

I said nothing of this sort, and find it very odd that red-pressers get pre-emptively angry over the mildest of challenges or questions around this thought experiment, considering that most of red-presser rhetoric revolves around how it's immediately and axiomatically obvious that blue-pressers are all either morons or lying virtue-signallers.

Both might look like candy. 50/50 choice doesn't sound like good odds when talking about my child's life, though.

So how does your picking blue save the kid? "Look, Junior, Mommy is picking blue so you know that one is safe". Oops, no, that's not how it works, it's "You picked the poison blue so now Mommy has to pick that one, too, and hope that enough other people pick it so we don't die".

The blue choosers then started introducing all kinds of qualifications to justify their superior virtue.

Come on, just tell us reds we're all devils and be done with it.

Nuh-uh! You're the virtue signaler! I'm rubber you're glue!

all kinds of qualifications

Is it so hard to imagine that some will misclick? There are no added qualifications. The brute reality of the poll will guarantee some choose blue by accident.

Misclicking does not send them into a blender, or the hangman's noose, or however they are theoretically supposed to go "poof!" into thin air in the thought experiment. The blue moralists, though, are acting as though "but they will DIE if they misclick, we must save them!"

No, all that happens is that they misclicked. Oops-a-daisy, but it's not like they spilled spaghetti sauce on their white shirt.

Come on, just tell us reds we're all devils and be done with it.

what's the point in this baiting?

As with everything, kids are different and require a different kind of political thinking compared to adults.

Ironically I think a kid at a certain age might cut right through the question without even blinking.

Imagine if the question were phrased thusly: "If you pick red you don't get spanked. People who picked blue get spanked, unless greater than 50% of people pick blue then NOBODY gets spanked"

Would most kids have to hear anything other than "If you pick red you don't get spanked" to immediately pick red?

Yeah, I don't know how simpler than "if you pick red, you live" it could be. If someone picks blue after that, then it really is a case of "did you not understand that if you pick red, you won't die?"

'Well if I pick blue then I'm helping to make sure everyone lives'.

There's only the risk of death if people are silly enough not to pick red. Five people picking blue on the grounds "I'm smart but those other guys are dumb so they'll probably pick blue" are doing the equivalent of grabbing a live electric wire while standing in a paddling pool full of water and sharks and piranhas being shoved off a cliff without a bungee jump cord and swigging down a cyanide cocktail at the same time. You are not showing off your intellect or your virtue.

Seriously.

I've been asking blue-choosers who they think they're saving by picking blue.

That is, who is choosing blue, OTHER than the people who think they're saving someone by picking blue?

And if the only people who are picking blue are the ones trying to save someone, they are now the only ones in need of saving. They all jumped off a bridge thinking they would save someone, when there was nobody who needed saving prior to them jumping.

Its a self-fulfilling prophecy which can easily be sidestepped by choosing red.

If you can posit a person who picks blue for some innocent reason other than a desire to look like a moral person or the desire to save someone else, then you've got the beginnings of an argument.

Otherwise, you're just creating risk where no risk needed to exist.

Literally, if I were a Supervillain playing the game, I would be trying to maximize death toll by convincing some people to choose blue. I'd lie and say I was choosing blue then mercilessly defect.

"I am choosing red and you should too" provides zero reason to lie.

If you can posit a person who picks blue for some innocent reason other than a desire to look like a moral person or the desire to save someone else, then you've got the beginnings of an argument.

The premise is that everybody who responds to the poll chooses based on their response. Are misclicks such an insane possibility that they haven't even occurred to you?

The thought experiment literally posits colored pills, which implies this isn't just a button on a screen, as presented.

So I'm imagining a person who has two pills in front of them, and has it explained to them what each one does. And, magically, knows for certain that these explanations are 100% truthful.

So I can not imagine someone thinking "I'm picking the red pill!" and then somehow, just completely brain farting and grabbing the blue one.

And believe me, if misclicking meant living or possibly dying, I'd be pushing that mouse around with the slowest movements possible.

The thought experiment literally posits colored pills, which implies this isn't just a button on a screen, as presented.

Yeah I guess that's true. Still:

  1. You still have to add quite a lot to make the premise 100% work. They magically know the explanations are 100% truthful, nobody is blind/colorblind, nobody is insane or too young to truly understand the decision, and so on. Given a very generous interpretation of the premise, I think at least one person from one of the previous categories will still around.

  2. Even if literally everybody perfectly understands the question, not everybody will choose red. Some people are just dumb. Some would rather sacrifice themselves than risk even an infinitesimal chance that they're responsible for another's death, or perhaps they'd rather sacrifice themselves than even admit the possibility of such responsibility, even if the probability is 0. Even if everybody is quite rational and understands the game theory, people have different values and/or may not decide upon the same Schelling point as everyone else.

In reality, no matter how rational everyone is, I'd be utterly shocked if everyone chose red, regardless of what the "correct" answer is. Thus the correct answer (assuming it's reasonably likely to succeed) is blue.

Some people are just dumb

What % of the whole are dumb, though. Because now we're adding in irrational/random actors, which makes it even less certain that we'll meet our blue threshold because some of those will also be choosing red for dumb reasons.

I have a hard enough time modelling other rational actors in this game, now add the ones who will do things for reasons I can't even fathom!

And if we posit dumb actors, why not posit evil ones as well who are inclined to maximize death toll?

I wouldn't be utterly shocked if everyone chose red (self-interest is a hell of a drug), but I wouldn't be utterly shocked if, say 30% chose blue between those who were dumb and those who thought they were helping.

But expecting only 30% to choose blue is explicitly a reason for me to choose red.

And since the hypo doesn't present a mechanism under which you can reliably predict that the outcome for blue would be over 50%, I am pretty much going to pick the one which provides certainty.

What % of the whole are dumb, though. Because now we're adding in irrational/random actors, which makes it even less certain that we'll meet our blue threshold because some of those will also be choosing red for dumb reasons.

It's a fair question, but I still think the framing is off. I'm not adding irrational actors; they're already part of the scenario as written.

And if we posit dumb actors, why not posit evil ones as well who are inclined to maximize death toll?

Sure, I just don't think there are as many of them as there are pathological altruists, who will choose blue even when blue odds are very low.

But expecting only 30% to choose blue is explicitly a reason for me to choose red.

And since the hypo doesn't present a mechanism under which you can reliably predict that the outcome for blue would be over 50%, I am pretty much going to pick the one which provides certainty.

Agreed. I like to think I would still choose blue if it came down to it, though, because (valuing my own life equal to others) I simply think it has higher EV.

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And believe me, if misclicking meant living or possibly dying, I'd be pushing that mouse around with the slowest movements possible.

I actually posit that the hypothetical, as presented, doesn't allow for the possibility of a misclick. Given the life-or-death stakes involved, if you made an accident in your click, then that's a consequence of your choice not to take precautions against a misclick by doing something like what you suggest. I'd personally zoom in/scroll to the page to the extent my non-preferred option is literally not on the screen before my mouse or finger is even over any of the options. And obviously there would have to be a decent time gap between press-down and pull-up of the finger on the mouse button or the touch screen, so that I can visually verify that the button I intended to click was indeed the one I clicked (usually you can cancel such clicks by dragging the mouse off the button before letting go).

Freak occurrences happen, I suppose, including a random bit of cosmic radiation flipping a bit on your PC to switch your choice to the other one. These seem like such unlikely and uncommon outliers that they can be effectively rounded down to zero. Otherwise, if someone misclicks, I would consider that just an active choice the person is making that they don't really care if they have to face the consequences of pressing the blue button or the red one.

Yeah, if we're allowed to control the circumstances under which the click occurs, I'd run a script which removes the blue option from the screen entirely. I would be preventing any possible avenue by which I might push the universe into the state where the 'blue' option was selected and transmitted.

I can absolutely accept some tiny tiny chance that a player screws up the choice. But if it's not quite small enough to fall out of my reasoning, it may as well be.

Not just no reason to lie but no need to trust. The cost of trusting that someone will vote blue is that if they vote red you may die if you vote in accordance with the agreement. The cost of trusting that someone will vote red red is that if they vote blue they might die if you vote in accordance with the agreement.

Lying is punished when the agreement is voting red; lying isn’t punished when the agreement is to vote blue.

Yes, the trustless aspect cannot be overstated when you're playing a game with strangers, potentially millions of them, and have no enforcement mechanism.

It's virtually guaranteed that some avowed blue-pickers will have a panic attack and go with red when the choice time is actually arrives. I suppose some red-pickers have a crisis of conscious and go blue, but holy cow if you have no other information to go on, Red is the one that doesn't require faith in strangers.

Trying to play the recursive game (I know that he knows that I know that he knows I'll pick blue, therefore...) seems like an inherently losing approach.

It just seems so obvious yet some people are arguing against it. I honestly cannot model their thought process (outside of them treating the thought exercise solely as an exercise instead of thinking — how would people actually vote if voting the wrong way could lead to their death).

The closest I've gotten is that they actually believe that "Altruism is a Schelling Point."

"I want to save people, and other people will too, so they'll accept the risk and we'll all pick blue."

But they can't fully articulate WHY they believe someone actually needs saving. They reason out why someone would pick blue based on altruism, but not why someone would pick blue a priori and thus need to be rescued. So why do we need altruism?

And on the meta level, I think they may be assuming that how people behave in this thought experiment is how they'd behave in other scenarios in which case they think reds are inherently self-interested.

But no, I'm capable of being altruistic, I can just recognize that this specific situation is one where it is best to shut off the altruistic impulse.

I genuinely WANT to understand the position that allows one to pick blue believing it to be the best action.

But it seems to require that you start with premises that are completely inborn or 'faith-based.'

It's really reminding me of the saying beloved of our mothers "And if everyone jumped off a cliff, would you do that too?"

Now I'm imagining the infant Blues rebuking her with "Mother, how selfish! In order to assure the 50%+ victory over gravity where, if a sufficiency of us jump off the cliff, we will magically float safely and slowly down to solid ground, I too must and shall jump! The lemmings, Mother, the lemmings! Can Nature in its infinite wisdom, honed over millions upon millions of years of evolution, be wrong?"

There's only the risk of death if people are silly enough not to pick red.

So, it's guaranteed that people will die then.

You are not showing off your intellect or your virtue.

Ever consider that might not be the point?

Everybody dies eventually. Picking blue does not mean eternal life.

OK?

Ever consider that might not be the point?

In a Twitter poll? Not even for a second.

What moral position is "I want the people who walk in the blender to die"? Asking for a friend.

Small children and other innocent irrational people exist and will walk into the blender whether you like it or not. If exactly 100% of people choose red, everyone lives, while blue needs only 50% of people for everyone to live.

People who make incorrect moral decisions that endanger their lives and require other take risks to save them are not innocent. They're guilty.

The boy who cried wolf got his just desserts when he was eaten.

People should suffer the consequences of their actions. To prevent this process is evil, for it only makes the problem worse: by arguing we should save the "innocent" by walking in the blender you've endangered more people that are going to die anyways once you run out of rubes.

You're assuming your own conclusion here. Blue is only the wrong choice, and only endangers people, if <50% of people choose it. Basically what you're saying is "if I'm right, then I'm right and you're wrong."

Separately, not everyone who chooses blue is making a moral decision at all. I explicitly mentioned babies, do you think they're making an "incorrect moral decision" and should "suffer the consequences of their actions"? Or have you just not thought this through?

For each and every person, the only way that person can possibly be harmed is by choosing to put themselves in danger. Nobody is forcing you to put yourself in danger, and everyone gets the choice of safety.

How is choosing to put yourself in danger when you could instead choose to stay safe anything but the wrong answer? I will confidently say that playing Russian Roulette is always the wrong answer, and vehemently disagree with people like you who seem to think otherwise. I'm also happy letting people who choose to play Russian Roulette pay for their foolishness with their lives.

Me:

Small children exist

@IGI-111:

People who make incorrect moral decisions that endanger their lives and require other take risks to save them are not innocent. They're guilty.

Me:

Babies exist

@KMC:

For each and every person, the only way that person can possibly be harmed is by choosing to put themselves in danger. Nobody is forcing you to put yourself in danger, and everyone gets the choice of safety.

Babies don't have meaningful "choices". How many times do I have to say this? I don't understand how you could follow this chain of comments and not address babies at all.

People who don't make meaningful choices don't answer Twitter polls about ethical dilemmas.

You don't think a single person has ever misclicked in such a poll, answered without reading it, or been too young to understand it? I think that's preposterous.

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Because babies are not relevant, they're just a prop you're using to tug on heartstrings.

Babies don't have meaningful "choices".

Yet they do have choices. They can choose strawberry or blueberry. They can choose blocks or stuffed animal. They can choose book 1 or book 2. They can choose to move or to stay put.

What you meant is that babies don't understand consequences. It's the consequences that make choices meaningful. And even then, I don't think you're right. Babies know the consequences of leaning over the edge, once they've fallen. They learn consequences and apply them.

Besides, if you're going to stack the deck in favor of the bleeding hearts by using children, I think the much more interesting change, instead of babies get to pick themselves essentially at random, is that they get the same results as their parents. Or, for maximum conflict, you have to pick mother or father, and the baby follows their choice. Then you're risking your child's life by picking blue, but you're also doubling your own weight.

Yet they do have choices.

What you meant is that babies don't understand consequences. It's the consequences that make choices meaningful.

Uh, right. Consequences make choices meaningful. So babies don't have meaningful choices, which is exactly what I said and exactly what I meant.

And even then, I don't think you're right.

Sure, I'll grant babies have some meaningful choices, but this isn't one of them.

Besides, if you're going to stack the deck in favor of the bleeding hearts by using children

I'm not "stacking the deck" using children. They're already part of the premise. The deck is already stacked.

I think the much more interesting change, instead of babies get to pick themselves essentially at random, is that they get the same results as their parents. Or, for maximum conflict, you have to pick mother or father, and the baby follows their choice. Then you're risking your child's life by picking blue, but you're also doubling your own weight.

I think it would be more interesting if, for everyone who chose blue, a random person died, rather than the person who chose blue.

The annoying part of debating morality is that it is indeed very presuppositional so we do need to figure out what axioms we're disagreeing on here.

I think a large part of our disagreement is that you place value on intent, while I don't. I think intent is almost completely meaningless.

Babies aren't really a good way of thinking about this problem because the whole point is to test decision making, so the actor has to understand the premise in the first place. Let's rather think about someone who's totally irrational, but can understand the premise, otherwise we're discussing some completely different thought experiment.

If that irrational person lack the instinct not to walk in blenders yeah they do deserve to die for making an incorrect decision, that's how nature works.

Now there's a separate argument to be had about whether you should try to save them through sacrifice or risk. To me, the morality of sacrifice hinges on the utility you get out of the sacrifice, which in this case is engineered to be zero.

otherwise we're discussing some completely different thought experiment

blenders

Really any deviation from the original thought experiment changes the answer. As I mentioned here an equally natural framing is that nobody dies unless >50% of people step onto the "blend everybody else" button.

I'll grant that babies should maybe be ignored, since I missed that the original sample was "everybody in this poll" rather than "everybody". Still, there is at least one person out there who chooses blue by mistake, and it's worth coordinating to save them.

If that irrational person lack the instinct not to walk in blenders yeah they do deserve to die for making an incorrect decision, that's how nature works.

What does appealing to nature have to do with people deserving things? I don't like the state of nature. I want to improve things from that state. Plenty of us would "deserve to die" for making mistakes in a state of nature, but due to the cooperation of others we live in an easier world now.

I think a large part of our disagreement is that you place value on intent, while I don't. I think intent is almost completely meaningless.

Like moral value? I'm not sure what you mean here. I definitely ascribe moral value to intent.

Now there's a separate argument to be had about whether you should try to save them through sacrifice or risk. To me, the morality of sacrifice hinges on the utility you get out of the sacrifice, which in this case is engineered to be zero.

Right, I mean, if your moral value of saving others is zero, the obvious choice is red. What else could it be? Red has a greater chance to save your own life which is all you care about. But that turns this into a moral debate rather than a game theory one. I don't share your values, so the right answer for me is different than it is for you.

What does appealing to nature have to do with people deserving things? I don't like the state of nature.

[...]

if your moral value of saving others is zero

Red has a greater chance to save your own life which is all you care about

I think I see our actual disagreement here.

I believe that one of the realities of nature that can't be escaped is the need for self preservation, and that any order we build to escape brutish nature still has to acknowledge that as a zeroth principle. Because people who don't exist do not get to make moral judgements, so existing isn't just moral, it's pre-moral.

In some sense, if you disregard self-preservation we are returned to the state of nature because pumping infinite ressources into saving people who don't care to live is not sustainable. For civilization to work, people need to not pump all the utility out of it.

Saving others can have varying levels of utility, though I understand this particular thought experiment is too vague to actually get at that, which is why people intuit different ones including on the framing.

But I think our fundamental disagreement isn't about those levels but about purely selfless sacrifice which I indeed view as immoral.

Because people who don't exist do not get to make moral judgements, so existing isn't just moral, it's pre-moral.

Taken seriously, this forbids dying for any cause, or even risking your life / shortening it by a couple of minutes for any cause. I definitely believe morality has an objective basis outside of people's minds, similar to math. Otherwise, how does morality survive at all? Even if your choices are moral when you're alive they vanish into nothingness when you die, so how are they ever moral in the first place? Realistically they are moral (or immoral) whether or not anyone is around to observe them and consider them as such.

But I think our fundamental disagreement isn't about those levels but about purely selfless sacrifice which I indeed view as immoral.

I don't think any sacrifice is purely selfless. Besides extremely evil people, even the worst that humanity has to offer shares plenty of values with me. Saving them grants me utility.

I agree we can't pump infinite resources into self-destructive people. If the threshold for blue were higher and harder to coordinate I might change my answer. But 50% is pretty attainable, and was attained in the original poll.

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If babies pick red, they're making the immoral selfish choice. Oh no, we can't accuse babies of that, so we'll say it's okay to pick red in that case.

Come on, this is just adding epicycles to prove blue is the 'only' choice that can be made or else.

If babies pick red, they're making the immoral selfish choice.

No they're not lol. They're babies. How can a decision be immoral and selfish if you don't even understand the decision you're making?

There is no "epicycle" to the claim that some people, such as babies, will choose blue. I am adding nothing. Base reality is that some innocent people will choose blue.

What has innocence to do with it? The blue choice is lack of mental ability, it's got nothing to do with innocence or goodness. The rationale being put forward is "people too cognitively impaired or too undeveloped will make the wrong, blue, choice so in order to save them we must make the choice of blue in order to fit the parameters of this experiment".

The blue choice is lack of mental ability, it's got nothing to do with innocence or goodness.

Nobody said anything about goodness. As far as innocence, lack of mental ability is basically the definition of innocence. Look it up if you don't believe me.

The rationale being put forward is "people too cognitively impaired or too undeveloped will make the wrong, blue, choice so in order to save them we must make the choice of blue in order to fit the parameters of this experiment".

Yep.

What about the baby prisoners in the prisoner's delimma thought experiment? Introducing irrational people to this kind of game theory problem is not standard practice and amounts to inventing an entirely different question.

I responded to basically your exact comment here.

When you have children you will protect them from seriously hurting themselves, no matter how much the 8 year old might deserve it for not understanding his environment properly. Sure, you'll let them get minor pains to learn how to avoid them, but you wouldn't let a wolf eat the 8 year old because he deserves it.

When you have children you will protect them from seriously hurting themselves

This is adding extra context that's not there to the problem. The people who walk in the blender are not my children. Otherwise it changes the calculus significantly and sacrifice no longer has zero positive utility for me.

What if it's not a child, what if it's some random guy you don't know?

I don't let my 3 year old run into the street, I'm not going to let him choose the poison blue pill either.

You can't influence his decision one way or another. If you could, people could easily coordinate in other ways as well. Besides, your 3 year old is not the only one.

Why not? I reject this premise entirely.

There's no scenario where we don't make major decisions (as this would be) for our children. Whether as a parent or as a society.

Why not?

Because the premise doesn't allow it, obviously. If you reject the premise, stop arguing as if we're discussing the same premise.

The premise nowhere claims that small children make their own choices. You are modifying the premise and arguing in bad faith based on your modified premise.

The premise nowhere claims that small children make their own choices.

What it says is that "everyone responding chooses." If small children are responding, then they are the ones to choose.

I'll grant that it's not 100% perfectly clear on this point, nor does it explicitly state that coordination is not allowed, but both things are heavily implied. If you think the fact that it doesn't state "coordination is not allowed" means coordination is allowed, then that's a different premise from the commonly understood one, and we should be discussing methods of coordination rather than the game theory of the premise as stated.

I reject this premise entirely.

...

YOU'RE MODIFYING THE PREMISE REEE

Link me to one other person, here or on Twitter, who thinks the premise means people can coordinate, and I'll grant that you're not totally off-base here. Still, it's pretty obvious based on the replies that my interpretation is the commonly understood one.

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You can't influence his decision one way or another.

Then we're outside of your set-up about "will nobody think of the children?" and it's only question begging. "Oh if you don't pick this, then the small child will walk into the blender and be really horribly chopped up, but no you can't grab him or stop him or call him back as you would if you saw a real small child walking into a real blender, so are you going to walk into the blender too or are you going to light puppies on fire, you monster?"

Then we're outside of your set-up about "will nobody think of the children?"

How? Name one detail about my setup that's different from the original setup.

but no you can't grab him or stop him or call him back as you would if you saw a real small child walking into a real blender, so are you going to walk into the blender too or are you going to light puppies on fire, you monster?"

This wasn't part of the original setup. The "blender" is a metaphor. If you can coordinate at all with anyone then the whole setup is different.

That touches on what seems weird about the "but children" etc arguments to this. In real life, infants and small children probably try to do something that would be lethal or extremely dangerous like 20 times a day every single day. If we're now in the business of giving them quirky polls with life-or-death consequences and they're not able to be guided or advised at all, they're probably going to be dead of something or other pretty soon, if not on the first one then by the fifth or tenth.

There is a political quote which says that "the Right thinks the Left is stupid while the Left thinks the Right is evil".

While this quote gets repeated, I don't think it's quite true. Instead I think at the level of running a society there is no difference between stupid and evil and the right doesn't quite get why the left doesn't get that.

Granted that Mao was not a good person, he didn't set out to kill 100 million people. He made some bad decisions that inexorably led to a famine which killed 100 million people. But that wasn't his goal, his goal was to do what Deng would wind up doing. He simply happened to be incompetent at it. And from a right wing perspective, the results speak for themselves- Mao's incompetence killed more people in a war against sparrows than Hitler did in a war against a continent spanning superpower. The lesson if you're a right winger is pretty obvious- pick the cold and competent guy even if he's a little bit evil. That's probably why the right bet so big on capitalism in the later 20th century- capitalism is not very nice, but it works better than anything else anyone has ever tried and there's no getting around that.

The left, on the other hand, doesn't seem to grasp that right wingers see no practical difference between stupidity and evil in running a society. The trying to help people is what's important, that's why the political left doesn't like arguments about tradeoffs and side effects and whether or not their climate change and gun policies work. It's easy to write this off as a bit, or virtue signaling, or whatever, but I think a lot of them really do inhabit a world where as long as the people in power are willing to commit strongly enough to solving whatever problem it will inevitably be solved through the power of positive thinking. Maybe that's uncharitable, but my experience has not been that, say, gun control activists consider "whether assault weapons bans actually prevent mass shootings" to be a particularly relevant factor in whether there should be assault weapons bans to prevent mass shootings, more like it's a distraction from the broader issue of whether mass shootings are a tragedy.

there is no difference between stupid and evil

This has bad implications when it comes to HBD. It's one thing to say that your worth as a person isn't the same as your IQ, but that falls apart really quickly when you also say there's no difference between stupid and evil.

I know you have your caveat, "at the level of running a society," but that doesn't give me much hope considering universal suffrage. When the people are stupid, how can democracy work?

Which is an argument against universal suffrage. And indeed, most people are against universal suffrage (10 year olds often don’t get to vote).

Of course there are no perfect solutions.

I unironically think land-owning was actually a pretty good Schelling Point, at least for state-level elections. The people who own land in a state have skin in the game and have demonstrated at least some level of competence and future orientation.

Unironically, I think returning to male only suffrage is a good idea even if it will never happen. Not because of the original reasons from the anti suffragettes, although all of those are perfectly valid, but because the average difference in neuroticism has too much influence in our politics.

I do also think property requirements are a good idea because they tend to demonstrate future orientation.

I think the idea of “Voting Gangs” by Moldbug largely accomplishes something similar without explicitly being gendered.

The idea is that your vote, like a share in a company, is 100% your property and completely transferable. So people would naturally transfer their voting power to interested parties they feel aligned with.

The simplest example is my wife simply allowing me to add her vote to mine in the interest of time since I follow politics more closely than her and she trusts my judgement and ability to represent her.

And if I have friends or family who trust my judgement or vice versa I could sign my vote off to them, or them to me, etc etc.

This would also allow households to vote together, one good thing from a pro-natalist perspective would be to give children the vote but in the stewardship of their legal guardian until they come of age. If a household had two adults and two children they would have four votes in total.

I suppose the effect over time is that it concentrates political power in those interested in wielding it in a transparent, traceable way. Many people want their interests protected but find politics incredibly dull or simply unfathomable. Some dude wants to sell me his vote for an ice cream? That’s fine, he clearly wasn’t interested in it, and I am.

This creates a natural, scalable democracy with basically infinite parties joined together.

It sounds like a radical pipe dream but I’m becoming less convinced it’s unrealistic over time, and I’m becoming more convinced it’s the natural evolution of a liberal democracy if it seeks to survive and overcome it’s obvious deficits.

Some dude wants to sell me his vote for an ice cream? That’s fine, he clearly wasn’t interested in it, and I am.

Laws affect third parties. Having the guy sell you his vote instead of not voting or voting randomly dilutes the vote of third parties. The third parties may be interested.

Also, poor people would end up all selling their votes and the resulting government would be bad for poor people.

I debated including that bit for this very reason, there’s a bog standard response that relies on a bunch of assumptions that don’t stand up to much scritiny.

Poor people already vote at much lower rates than members of other classes, and I don’t imagine a single vote would be worth very much at all.

When I was poor, and I my case was rather typical, the thing I lacked more than money was time and energy. Politics requires quite a bit of both. Lots of my poor brethren had the instinct that they didn’t have the time, inclination or knowledge base to make a very informed decision at the ballot box, and so would forgo the whole process. There’s certainly something to that instinct, people want to use their power responsibly.

But even very poor people generally have someone they can trust in their lives, someone who is either more informed or more inclined towards political action.

I honestly think the ability to vote by proxy would rather increase turnout among the poor, especially for local politics. From personal experience when I was poor and living somewhere where I was unfamiliar with the local political scene I would have gladly gave my vote to a trusted friend who is similar politically to me and has my interest at heart.

Now that I’m financially stable and more informed I vote more regularly. And members of my social circle are also more interested in asking about my politics.

And for those people who will likely never be interested in politics for one reason or another, they still have the ability to directly benefit from their voting privileges as a citizen.

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Also, poor people would end up all selling their votes and the resulting government would be bad for poor people.

In less developed countries, this tends to happen anyway, so it misses the point.

I don't know about that; I think it would have some pretty large knock-on effects and I am not sure how desirable these things would be in a modern, Western society. I would guess that you could just find a different proxy for neuroticism or something like that.

Maybe you could just use the Hock, but explicitly allow people to pay or have substitutes.

What knock-on-effects? You’d see a more politically conservative electorate, but there’s nothing wrong with that.

The arguments of the anti suffragists are actually quite complex. One interesting thing is that it turned women’s activities into political instead of apolitical.

I’d be open to a return to that as well. Landowning with kids might be my ideal

What should be the cutoff point? One acre? One square foot?

Dunno — presumably a lot large enough for a small house.

Under the International Zoning Code, that would be 6,000 square feet (0.14 acre, 560 square meters; a 78-foot (24-meter) square).

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Free and clear estate worth ten times the average GDP per capita in the year of the election.

I'd worry about games being played with the valuation. You could base it off of estate tax so that high valuations are expensive and reasonably consistent/objective. Still, giving the government the power to decide who votes just seems inherently risky. When only landowners were enfranchised the idea of the government interfering to the extent it does now was unthinkable.

See "swamp men" of 19th century Norway.

When there was land ownership qualification for the right to vote, local labor party bought worthless swamp lands and distributed them among voters. Hail to new land owners!

Since non-landowners "don't have skin in the game", are they exempt from laws?

Anyone who can be arrested, or have to pay taxes, or who needs the government's permission to do something, has skin in the game. Back when the franchise was restricted to landowners, the government was much smaller; there were fewer laws, few taxes, and certainly few regulations.

Back when the franchise was restricted to landowners, the government was much smaller; there were fewer laws, few taxes, and certainly few regulations.

Sounds good to me.

Okay then, get that first, and then go talking about people who "don't have skin in the game". In this world, everyone has skin in the game.

Smaller government is a feature not a bug

Yeah. In theory stuff like poll taxes or literacy tests for voting might be good ideas; however, it is possible to abuse the living shit out of these and rig the hell out of the system. I am somewhat partial to Heinlein's service-guarantees-citizenship idea; IIRC, physical disability was not a barrier for service and anyone that was able to understand the oath of enlistment was eligible to serve. Which is in my eyes rather admirable in a modern society: why should some dude who's born without functioning legs not be able to vote?

When the people are stupid, how can democracy work?

Well, it largely can't, and I think we're observing the failure of democracy right now.

The claim above was that there's no difference between stupid and evil when it comes to running a society, and yeah, I would endorse that sentiment from @hydroacetylene and buy-in on the downstream implication of HBD as it would relate to that. Someone that's quite dim might be a fine enough individual when given a simple task and happier to do it than someone with more brainpower, but trusting mentally impaired man to design bridges will get you the same result as a mustache twirling villain that just wants people to die. Likewise for putting a communist in charge of your economy - they might mean well, but the millions that starve will be just as dead whether they meant it or not.

I think you’re taking stupid very literally to mean low IQ, when in reality I’m using it to mean ‘incompetent or prone to doing stupid things’. Sure, low IQ is probably the most common reason for that in genpop, but the people in position to make society-wide mistakes are doing stupid things for other reasons- they may have the wrong goals(equality before economic growth), they may be blinded by ideology(communism), they may be mentally ill. Etc, etc. The most important and influential people are disproportionately not low IQ.

You can make the argument that low IQ people vote for candidates who are stupid for non-IQ related reasons, but the best example I can come up with is South Africa, which plausibly has other reasons for corrupt incompetent single party rule(the other big example of corrupt incompetent people getting elected and re-elected until they broke the country is Argentina, which has a respectable 90 some odd average IQ). In any case I’m not exactly going to go to bat for universal suffrage but I don’t think that IQ is the sine qua non of filtering voters.

Granted that Mao was not a good person, he didn't set out to kill 100 million people. He made some bad decisions that inexorably led to a famine which killed 100 million people.

Absolutely nitpicking, but I don‘t think Mao killed a hundred million people in the Great Leap Forward. The commonly quoted numbers are anywhere from 18 million (CCP official estimates) to 60 million (some of the more loony estimates), with most reputable estimates going from 30 to 45 million. (The commonly quoted one I grew up with was 36 million.)

100 million sounds like something right out of the Black Book of Communism, which has very artistic ways of arriving at casuality figures.

You're right, that is an absolute nitpick. But Mao is still the bloodiest-handed figure in world history, especially when you account for non-great-leap-forward deaths(like in the cultural revolution), although a few figures like Pol Pot might have technically killed a higher percentage of population.

Oh, yes, no question.

You get some weird questions if you try to determine "who killed a higher percentage of ruled population". Like, if I'm in charge of nation A, and I lead an army to conquer and genocide nation B of equal population, is my percentage 50% (because I clearly had power over the B-ers) or 0% (because they were my enemies and I never had any intention to rule them as subjects)?

This is relevant to the ancient custom of warfare where conquered populations were often just massacred.

While this quote gets repeated, I don't think it's quite true.

It's not quite true for a far simpler reason: both think the other is both stupid and evil.

The left thinks that the right are a bunch of parochial, bigoted morons. They hate education, they hate vaccines, they hate minorities, they're religious authoritarians, they're greedy capitalists or their useful idiots, they'd rather shoot themselves in the foot rather than pick up a free lunch if meant they had to see an immigrant, etc...

The right thinks the left are a bunch of degenerate, lazy airheads. They're soft on crime, they're soft on pedophiles, they don't want to work, they want free money for existing, they're corrupting the youth, they're race-baiters, they're cowards, they don't understand basic economics, they want to regulate everyone to death etc...

Instead I think at the level of running a society there is no difference between stupid and evil and the right doesn't quite get why the left doesn't get that.

This line of thinking is not peculiar to the right.

The old saw is that conservatives are both stupid and evil while liberals are insane. There's a difference; you can be intelligent (by some definitions) but also nuts. Consider the Unabomber; he was many things but he was most definitely not dumb.

This is very interesting to me as I see picking blue as the obvious morally correct choice. Maybe that is just my military background coming through, I don’t know. So my options are pick blue where there is a chance that everything will be fine, or pick red where I will selfishly be fine but I will kill all the morally correct people. Easy choice of blue for me.

If everyone can simply choose to live by taking the red pill, how is that morally incorrect?

Not everyone can, or will, take the red pill.

"Not everyone can" than it is a different game.

I am talking about the game in the poll. Is your assertion that in that game, literally everybody is rational, will read the question correctly, and so on? I disagree, but even then there's the question of "will". It's a guarantee that some people will take the blue pill for one reason or another, so the "if everyone" premise is still false.

Whether people are rational or read the question correctly is very different from whether they can pick red. I agree that some people would pick blue, but if you are telling me that some people can't pick red, you have changed the game.

if you are telling me that some people can't pick red

Why waste my time with this hypothetical? I said "can or will". You can scroll up to my comment and read it right there.

That said, "some people can't pick red" isn't really changing the game at all. Some people will misclick. This is in line with the original rules of the poll.

I think you're using a different definition of "can pick red" than the people you are talking to

Good thing I added "or will" then. Given that addition, does it matter what definition I'm using? My meaning was quite clear.

Why not? It's very simply: You've been given a sugar pill or other harmless pill (red pill) and what is potentially a poison/suicide pill (blue pill).

Under what circumstances (other than wishing to die) does it make ANY sense to take the suicide pill? Everyone has been given the gift of life via the red pill, why reject it? And if you do reject it, why would you expect anyone to think you're moral for doing so?

Why not?

Not everyone is sane, not everyone clicks the option they mean to click, not everyone is literate, and so on. It is, for all intents and purposes, guaranteed that "everyone can simply choose to live" is wrong.

Under what circumstances (other than wishing to die) does it make ANY sense to take the suicide pill?

I've mentioned many times that changing the frame changes what the correct answer is. That said, the answer is easy--you know that taking the pill may save others who have taken it.

Everyone has been given the gift of life via the red pill, why reject it?

Not everyone has.

Not everyone is sane, not everyone clicks the option they mean to click, not everyone is literate, and so on. It is, for all intents and purposes, guaranteed that "everyone can simply choose to live" is wrong.

The premise nowhere states that people will not have what is going on explained, or only explained via text, or have the choice made via mouse click. You are introducing new premises from thin air to aid your bad arguments.

In summary, this is a bad faith argument.

The premise is "everyone who responds to this poll". Misclicks are a given. It's a real poll; is your argument that nobody has misclicked on that real poll?

Given that the question states you have to choose between a red or a blue pill, presumably were this a scenario that was happening in real life with real life-or-death stakes, you would have to decide which option you were going to take by choosing one of the pills and swallowing it. There would be no misclicks in such a scenario.

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Why can't they? Here's a red pill, here's a blue pill, pick one. Everyone (no matter how many people are there) gets the same choice. Red pill for everyone if they choose to take it.

It's not a case of "if I take the red pill, that only leaves the blue pill for the next person, and taking the blue pill means they will die". If that were the choice, it would be selfish and immoral.

But this is "If I take the blue pill, unless enough other people take it, that means everyone dies but at least I get to say how good and moral and virtuous I am, how much better I am than the greedy, selfish people next door who took the red pill in the other experiment".

Why can't they?

Firstly, I said "can't or won't." But yes, I maintain that some people literally cannot choose the red pill. They will misclick or misread the question. Do you honestly disagree? I'm having a hard time understanding why everybody seems to be ignoring this possibility.

But this is "If I take the blue pill, unless enough other people take it, that means everyone dies but at least I get to say how good and moral and virtuous I am, how much better I am than the greedy, selfish people next door who took the red pill in the other experiment".

Very uncharitable. I think some people will choose blue, and therefore everyone should choose blue. It's pretty straightforward. There's no need to accuse me of virtue signaling when regular logic will suffice to explain my position.

Because in my values system choosing to help others is better than choosing only to help yourself. Even if everybody brings their own lunch, I will still offer people some of mine. If people eat all my lunch and I starve to death I would hope that it would be a comment on their greed, and not my stupidity.

If people eat all my lunch and I starve to death I would hope that it would be a comment on their greed, and not my stupidity.

If everyone has their own lunch, and all the lunches are adequate to sate hunger, what are you doing to help anyone? Now, if it's "can I swap a cheese sandwich for your cucumber roll?" then okay, but "no no I insist you take my food even though you have your own" is just "Notice me! Praise me!"

The hungry mother who gives the last crust to her child even if she dies is worthy of praise. You're not, even if you die of hunger, because you were deliberately seeking martyrdom and that is suicide.

Well that is certainly one way to read it. I just wanted to be nice and make sure everyone else had enough to eat. But if you do not understand that I'm not surprised you don't understand why I would take blue either. Or really any of the choices I've made. But nevertheless I would still take the blue pill on the off chance it keeps you and everyone else alive.

Okay, but again, you're misunderstanding the scenario. Everybody already has enough to eat. All they have to do is be basically intellectually competent enough to not press the "Quite possibly take my lunch away" button. If nobody takes the blue pill, then nobody can have their lunch taken away ever. It is only possible for anybody's lunch to be taken away if anybody takes the blue pill. All red guarantees ample food for everyone.

I will echo those saying that the only pill I've actually been fed reading this subthread is the black pill. The fact that there are some people even on here who are decision theory illiterate enough to actually consider the blue pill is haunting and maddening. (It might be one thing if blue pills explicitly said "Even if it means risking my own life, I want to try to save people even if they are too stupid to understand that we can all avoid any bad outcome with 100% probability by picking the red pill, even though we could all just avoid any bad outcome with 100% probability by picking the red pill.", though even that is quite stupid in my opinion, but a lot of them seem to be misunderstanding the scenario so much that they're interpreting it as a general altruism vs. selfishness hypothetical.)

Though it shouldn't be, this would be an amazing voting qualification test. In my view, you could immediately improve the world by 500 times by guaranteeing that no blue pills have any influence over anything ever.

I think the overall problem here is that the people here have discovered a "hack" where if everybody picks the answer that most people would view as the "Wrong" answer it actually ends up with a better solution than if people picked the "Right" answer. Now that is fine as far as it goes, but in order for it to work you have to assume that everybody in the world has also discovered the "hack" and then also assume they will decide that the "hack" is actually going to work.

On the first assumption I 100% disagree that should be taken for granted. For the second, I know about the hack and I don't think it would actually work because I suspect many of the people I know will pick blue.

If you don't risk having somebody eating your lunch you are never going to build a community capable of accomplishing anything. If you tell everybody "I'm willing to let the blue pill people die" you also are not going to be building a community, because you are constantly looking over your shoulder at all the people that would be happy to let you die if you picked the option they didn't deem as being the most efficient one.

Now if anyone should be keep from voting I know which group I'd pick.

Now if anyone should be keep [kept] from voting I know which group I'd pick.

So now there’s paternalism involved: someone who wants to choose for someone else because they think they know better. How will people be kept from choosing to save themselves, an armed guard to keep people from picking red?

“If you reach for red, we’ll tase you and kick you out of the choosing place, and if you try again we’ll kill you.”

Threatening people who refuse to be persuaded to trust is no way to build trust, nor is it building a community.

Blue wants to pick for themselves, for the incompetent, and for those who would pick red, to ensure that the outcome is majority blue to avoid them and everyone they care about dying. Then to avoid being called tyrants who are risking everyone unnecessarily and using force to do it, they say they’re building a community.

This kind of thinking and excuse-making is straight out of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged.”

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If being able to apply basic logic is considered a "hack" then that's half the problem with modern society right there. If being able to deduce from "Nobody who does X will die." that everyone should do X is considered some grand feat of cognition in a particular "community", then I want no part of it, and yes I think I am willing to let its membership kill themselves (which I think will be very few people), or at least I'm not going to directly throw my body on the grenade of their stunning inadequacy.

because you are constantly looking over your shoulder at all the people that would be happy to let you die if you picked the option they didn't deem as being the most efficient one.

This is utter nonsense. Nobody is being asked to solve some complex payoff matrix at gunpoint. It's literally just "Do this and nobody dies." Again, if you lack the basic common sense of a 7 year old (yes, I think many 7 year olds could get this one) to figure that out, then you are damn sure not taking my fate in your hands.

Anyway I propose a compromise. Blue pills and red pills each split off to form their own country. If you genuinely think people who want to turn basic logic into a morality play can run a country...