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wavemode
nostrademons
Also interesting how the behavior of the repeated prisoner's dilemma differs from the repeated red/blue game. The repeated prisoner's dilemma converges to an optimal strategy of "tit for tat" - you signal your conditional cooperation, but also punish defections. The repeated red/blue game converges to an optimal strategy of always choosing red. The blue-pressers will most likely be wiped out in the first round, and if they are not, they will be wiped out in some round in the future, leaving only red-pressers left in the population.
ertgbnm
The downside of redding is that some portion of the world probably dies and you now have to live in that worse world that if you and 50% of the rest of the world has just blued, would not have happened.
bennettnate5
I'm wondering if it's really the framing of the problem that's inflating the number of individuals responding with blue (similar to certain confusingly-worded ballot measures).
Suppose the problem were worded in a more concrete way: "I have a large container ship that I'm draining the ballasts out of tomorrow. If less than 50% of <whatever population we're working with> get on the ship, it will capsize and everyone who chose to get on it will die. You can choose either to get on the ship (blue button) or refuse to (red button)."
Would one hold a person guilty for not getting on the ship? Would a perfectly empathetic person even board that ship?
empthought
Of course the framing affects how people vote. The thought experiment demands we use the framing as given. Some people might reason themselves into your analogy, others won’t.
riffraff
But why would those pick blue? They have the same incentive to just pick red.
jerkstate
I wonder if red choosers really don’t understand that they are choosing to live in a world where half of all people, the more selfless half, are dead. It’s like living through a nuclear war except all of the nice people are gone, not just a random sample
jjj123
The end of the article mentions it. Some people are not purely rational decision makers, some people are altruists who know others are not purely rational, etc.
By choosing red you will kill some people.
soco
Or maybe the colors were chosen knowingly to mess with the minds of the US voters? Me as a non-american I would choose blue, damn those mind games I'll go with MY beliefs that the world deserves a chance - and die by them if need to. Because the whole rationalization in the post just underlines the feeling I have about US politics nowadays: let the world burn if I can get once more mayo on my burger.
PS and the whole article may be bait to trigger exactly this kind of proofs.
selfhoster1312
Same as with the original dilemma. Most people are not sociopaths and will choose to cooperate with empathy for everyone else. That's just how species survive and adapt. (1) Alternatively, some people believe that sustained cooperation is in itself a sustained equilibrium. (2)
Most of the world is not as individualistic as Silicon Valley engineers believe in their own ivory towers after decades of reading Ayn Rand.
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_Aid:_A_Factor_of_Evolut...
(2) https://www.optimallyirrational.com/p/the-true-story-of-the-...
margalabargala
[flagged]
owenpalmer
Is it worse? Wouldn't the red people end up with more like-minded red people?
ertgbnm
I think most of the people who pick blue would be empathic, loving people that are just kind of bad at game theory.
I don't think I want to live in a world in which they all died out.
swed420
Yes, the selfish-minded would end up with more selfish-minded people, and they'd be confused why their "low trust society" became even more low trust overnight.
enoint
Yes and yes. Without the core of blue workers, red people will need to open Atlas Shrugged about how to assign short order cook duty.
TiredOfLife
> have to live in that worse world
What makes it a worse world?
hx8
In The Prisoner's Dilemma, the point is that the best option (Both Cooperate) only works if people are willing to work together. It almost always ends up in the worst option (Both Defect). What this points out is that purely selfish actions can lead to non-optimal results for both the collective and the individual.
This expands on The Prisoner's Dilemma by increasing the population and increasing the stakes. We're still thinking about cooperate/defect actions, but we're also forced to acknowledge that not everyone is a rational actor and we cannot relay on the all-defect option as would be the expected outcome of The Prisoner's Dilemma.
vmg12
The dilemma is that a lot of people will press blue so if red gets above 50% a large number of selfless but not game-theory aware people will die.
chias
but why would anybody choose blue? there is no moral benefit to doing so.
If you altered the game to say that only some fraction of the population get the choice, and everyone who doesn't get the choice is assumed blue (or, is killed if less than 50% of voters choose blue) then there's some question to be explored here. But at it stands there is literally no reason to choose blue.
imoverclocked
There will always be someone who chooses blue. Choosing red is choosing to kill them.
lukasgelbmann
There’s a moral benefit to choosing blue if you think there’s a chance that the end result will be split 50-50 and you’ll be the deciding vote between a blue majority and a red majority.
throw310822
> but why would anybody choose blue? there is no moral benefit to doing so.
Why? To contribute saving the others who chose blue. How isn't that moral?
disruptiveink
You're thinking of this like a game where the only point is to "win". That's not how this would actually work in practice.
Blue is the only moral and logical choice. If red gets over 50% and you picked it, therefore contributing to the "red" outcome, you are now effectively a murderer. Plus you now get to live in a world where everyone else alive are sociopaths that picked red, where everyone with a conscience is now dead.
You also can't count on everyone picking red, or "if you picked blue, then you voted for suicide".
It's reasonable to assume that, leading to the button press event, the usual low-trust, "every man by himself" types will rally for red, with the usual excuses, where high-trust societies will make it clear that it's your moral duty to pick blue, to get the votes to the 50% threshold and ensure no one dies. Around the world there would be debates nonstop that would permeate every social circle and families. You'd have huge arguments where the typical selfish types would scream at their family members "how dare you say you're going to press blue, do you want to leave your poor mother alone without their only child?", only pushing red-leaning voters more into red and blue-leaning voters more into blue.
Plus, if you look at the possible outcomes:
- Red wins, you picked red: Depending on where you live, a reasonable portion to the large majority of the population is now dead. The ones alive have, by definition, a strong bias towards individualism and noncooperation. It's extremely likely civilisation will collapse. Pick your favourite fictional dystopia and you might have a reasonable chance of it actually coming somewhat real.
- Red wins, you picked blue: You are now dead, but at least you don't have to live in the world above.
- Blue wins, you picked blue: Things carry on as normal and your conscience is safe in knowing that you didn't vote to kill and that over 50% of your fellow humans also didn't vote to kill.
- Blue wins, you picked red: Things carry on as normal, but you now have a guilty conscience, or, if your vote was made public, people around you know you would have killed them to save your skin.
wavemode
That's still not really a dilemma. It would be a dilemma if it were up to me to save those people who choose blue. But it's not up to me - it's up to a massive gamble that over 50% of people (over 4 BILLION people) will vote with me as well. Like... huh? Are we being serious here? We want to play poker with the lives of billions?
Maybe if the required percentage was lower this would compute better in my brain lol
jonkho
The dilemma is that there are some people who are not smart enough to understand this and will press blue.
gus_massa
There is no dilemma, just a bad model. In this model, everyone press red and survive. Solved in 10 seconds.
If you want a dilemma, it must be inside the model, for example: a 10% of the buttons are miss wired, and the system register the oposite color
So if red wins, at least 10% die. If blue wins, everyone survives. Now you have a dilemma. Which button would you press?
PS: If a country has 20 cities and one of them has a big majority of red-pressers, is it moral to nuke it out of existence?
enoint
Crosstabbing the results into a state-by-state table would be interesting.
selfhoster1312
It is a dilemma because pressing blue or red reveals about your political orientations and your inner empathic responses (i'm assuming both are correlated). Not everyone is wired the same or agrees on politics.
Though in a sense, i agree it's not really a dilemma because only sociopaths pick red in real life. See also intense and spontaneous cooperation in times of crisis (catastrophe, war, etc). See also research on mutual aid as key factor in species development: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_Aid:_A_Factor_of_Evolut...
lookACamel
You have it backwards. In prisoner's dilemma if both stay quiet they are still punished, just less so.
aldanor
Exactly, if choosing blue would allow you to wear a blue badge which would raise your happiness level or otherwise affect your utility function, then it might make sense. Otherwise it just doesn't.
enoint
The variation I like is: regardless of the outcome, red choosers are forbidden from performing manual labor. You can tell a lot about someone who chooses that button.
cg5280
Red is optimal from a self preservation perspective but is also the antisocial option. Picking blue saves everyone.
xenocratus
Let me rephrase that for you: red is for people who live in this world and accept it, blue is for people with white knight syndrome.
OR. Red is for people who understand statistics, blue is for people who like to gamble.
polotics
Blue is what gamble? there is no gain associated with choosing blue over red, just pointless risk-taking with only at best a zero outcome.
hypeatei
> red is for people who live in this world and accept it
Red is for people who don't think beyond the end of their nose. Okay, you're very smart and understand statistics, but what about the following groups: friends, family, spouses? If they don't pick red, and they die, would you say life is completely fine because there's less "dumb" people or would you possibly think: "hmm, it kinda sucks that they died, maybe I should've picked blue?"
GP is correct that red is the anti-social / myopic option.
rationalist
> Picking blue saves everyone.
Everyone picking red saves everyone.
selfhoster1312
Technically correct, which is the wrong kind of correct. That's an individual framing of a collective problem which fails to capture the social and political ramifications, and all the empathy and solidarity associated with the choice.
tristanj
This question has multiple layers of thinking:
1. People who can't read pick randomly.
2. People who can read, but are too dumb to model or care about other people pick red.
3. People with enough intelligence for basic cognitive empathy pick blue.
4. People a little smarter and think through game theory overall pick red, and think they are smart for doing so.
5. People smarter than #4 and capable of seeing the big picture realize they don't want to leave people who choose #1 and #3 dead, so they pick blue.
6. People who realize the game theory optimal strategy is to announce you're pressing blue and convince everyone else to press blue, but privately press red.
There are probably more layers to this but the whole debate involves people getting upset at each other and accusing people of being in groups they are not. Red group #4 accuses blue group #5 of being #3 (not thinking beyond basic cognitive empathy). Blue group #5 accuses red group #4 of being group #2 (too dumb to model how others act). It's almost a perfect ragebait question.
As for which camp I am in, I am pressing blue and think you should too.
quuxplusone
The framing in terms of colors helps the reader to interpret the thought experiment in terms of "groups" or "teams" — as if there's a "blue team" that you can join by helping, and help by joining. Many readers will quickly [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroop_effect ] intuitively choose to join the blue team, and then rationalize their choice as a strategy to help their blue teammates.
But in fact the thought experiment doesn't say there are teams or groups at all! The reader imposes that part on their own, unconsciously at first, because of the description's emphasis on colors.
I predict that running the same Twitter poll with flipped colors — so that red means "I die, unless a majority of my fellows pick red" and blue means "I survive no matter what" — would yield a majority for blue too. What was previously justified as the "virtuous" choice (blue) would now be justified as the "only intelligent" choice (blue).
troglodytetrain
Your entire logical chain, and your self importance, well, it explains why I'm always picking red. If you win and most pick blue, I'm safe, otherwise, I'm also safe.
You get to feel intellectually superior choosing the only option that can lead you to die. The simple answer is everyone should pick red.
undefined
DetroitThrow
>The simple answer is everyone should pick red.
The simplest answer is that everyone should pick blue, actually.
This is because choosing blue results in no consequences, but choosing red does result in consequences. Why not choose the simple option? It's literally the "no consequences" button.
Seems like these reds are overcomplicating a simple question.
troglodytetrain
Please explain. Red guarantees safety. Why wouldn't everyone pick red? The only option that leads to a statistical chance of death is blue?
allajfjwbwkwja
(6) isn't correct. Left alone, everyone rational would pick red because it's the only logical option. You trying to convince them otherwise might end up getting 49% of the population killed.
You should try to get everyone to pick red, not blue.
DetroitThrow
Left alone, everyone rational would pick blue, actually.
allajfjwbwkwja
And why do you think that?
2muchinternet
You're missing the seventh group: trolls/assholes who will always press red but try to convince/muddy the waters about the blue button aiming to get a not-insignificant amount of <50% blue pushed to get people killed.
Prime candidate pool: 4chan.
If the question was restricted to local communities with 0 internet access, I would be more inclined to press blue.
But on a global scale? No fucking way.
hx8
You've structured ways to think about the problem in a hierarchy of intelligence, which is a classic economics mistake. People are not rational actors, and the primary factors determining who pushes the button will be self-preservation or group-preservation. Emotional factors.
Also, I think that's a simplistic view of intelligence.
jmull
I was thinking that if some evil god could credibly force this sadistic choice on humanity we’re all in trouble, regardless of the button you push.
I’d probably turn my mind to resistance and refuse to push any buttons if possible.
alienbaby
You have two buttons. If you press that one, you might die. If you press the other one, you won't die. Which one do you press?
gpm
You have two buttons. If you press one, you're more likely to die. If you press the other, you might murder millions of people.
Am I talking about the game, or a preemptive nuclear strike that has a good chance of knocking out the enemies ability to ever launch?
Imustaskforhelp
Not to be political but we literally vote blue and red in politics and that can sometimes kill people literally in wars and some die silent deaths because of the impacts of their policies.
I would say that its hard to underestimate the social estimates of these things. A person who will genuinely be impacted by it themselves would fall into these traps more than one might think. History has many examples of fascism that some suggest that these periods of turmoil are the norm rather than exception.
Once again an obligatory message about how the world faces some genuine issues but instead of fixing them as a civilization, We would much rather prefer to have scapegoats and this goes both ways and might be true in a certain way and at a certain path both sides are too extreme to ever collaborate for the most part that a nation of once great strength might die a slow exhausting death if nothing changes.
I have come to the realization, The world has always been like this and it might always be like this. Its messy but also one can imagine this as a side effect as the mere coexsistence of our species in such massive numbers might demand polarization.
Some people create initial changes (for greed, genuineness etc.)
people then follow it (true belief)
people then meet other people and become friends with them and create a community.
new people are born or who change because of the community aspect (Since most things are nuanced, it is easy to frame anything and sometimes everything into such communities.)
The original people who made the thing dies/are out of power and new people from the community join.
these communities gain influence and decide the decision making but the heads of such communities are prone to narcissism or any other ways to draft as much as attention as possible as it seems that all attention is (good attention??)
More corruption follows, even the people of community are impacted and they might hear criticisms but the lock-in is too much. Stockholm syndrome.
Everyone else face the consequence and someone new creates a new movement and create another set of intial changes. Competition between multiple colors follows, we also see cooperation between red and blue to prevent outside competition.
In such sense, change creates change and cycle repeats. It is up to our interpretation on if there is any idea itself which can remain logical if its implementation or implementors get corrupted in a sense similar to erosion of the main values.
more than anything, humanity wants a community. a human somehow wants acceptance and validation for himself and he is selfish in the sense that he will put a blind eye sometimes if he isn't virtuous to damage outside his house (sometimes inside as well) and he wants a community because that is the only way he functions within a society of millions and billions while monkeys cant operate on more than hundreds.
More than a political critique, my point is, we should be more aware of this human tradeoff from empirical evidences and open up this blind spot and perhaps be more aware about it.
halter73
> 6. People who realize the game theory optimal strategy is to announce you're pressing blue and convince everyone else to press blue, but privately press red.
A lot of this analysis depends on accurately guessing how people will react, so it's probably hard to say any strategy is game theory optimal without a lot of unrealistic simplifying assumptions.
In a world where you're able to convince a lot of people anything, it might better to convince everyone to press red. If it looks like 99.99% of people will press red without your influence, you're probably best off spending your time convincing the .01% who might press blue not to do so.
It also has the upside of not making you a dirty liar. I wonder, what would Kant think about this hypothetical?
hx8
Hello, Blue Presser here.
We learn something about humanity based on the results of the poll. It's naive to think that 100% of people will press the red button. Some people will die if red wins. I think pressing red is selfish and violent, in that it can result in the death of human life by their own unwillingness to cooperate.
If we are not willing to work together in order to protect each other then I have a very pessimistic long-term view of our future. If every blue-presser dies, then our average cooperation level will only decrease, and the population will be over-saturated with defectors. I'd rather just go out now then deal the those consequences.
paufernandez
The thing is, all those red button pressers can't see that, for all their exact and flawless reasoning, they have a bias towards individuality, which they see as the only possibility, and we blue button pressers perfectly understand the math and yet we have a bias towards others, and would sacrifice more readily at many situations like this one. This sacrifice is what reds see as "dumb", but natural selection has chosen this because it probably works.
Both sides have a mental bias, and just can't see each other's "reasoning" because of it.
We blues think of reds as selfish, because we can't conceive of anyone not thinking of the worst outcome for others, and being empathetic about it, making it one's own. And they see us as "virtue signalling", or getting some external value of some kind (recognition from peers) because they can't think of any other explanation to justify that behavior, when it is just pure bias towards sacrifice. Sacrifice is just that, giving something without asking nothing, which does not make sense for a red. Reds think we are dumb but society needs a little more blues than reds. Otherwise it probably collapses.
I'm such a proud blue. in fact... ;)
owenpalmer
> It's naive to think that 100% of people will press the red button.
Those who press the blue button are trying to save those who press the blue button. If they weren't trying to save each other, they wouldn't have to.
hx8
So you agree, there is a population of blue pressers.
EDIT: The mere existence of blue-pressers makes being a red presser violent and selfish in my opinion.
undefined
Lionga
no it just makes blue pressers dumb & dangerous, they create a problem just to show of their false artificial moral high ground.
Red presser did nothing, blue pressers did everything to themselfs
jmilloy
No, some of those who press the blue button are trying to save people who press the blue button for other reasons.
tromp
Does that mean that in rayiner's phrasing [1], you'd argue for "cooperating" with the other head shooters?
rayiner
That's the author's phrasing. I just think it's apt.
blululu
Good points, though I think cooperation benefits the ethical outcomes for both sides.
If we all work together to make sure that as many people press the red button as possible, then we can minimize the damage. The problem with the blue campaign is that the outcome gets progressively worse until it gets to the best outcome. 49% mortality is high and terrible unless you are very sure that the red campaign is going to lose. The ethical take on the red side is to minimize blue votes to zero.
mahkoh
You're a single parent. Through divine intervention you know that your 5 year old child has already pressed the red button. Are you going to press the blue button and risk your child becoming an orphan in a selfish and violent world? Or do you sacrifice the lives of billions to save your child from this inconvenience?
empthought
That’s not the thought experiment.
undefined
cm2187
Why pessimistic? The miracle of capitalism is that it harvests the power of people pursuing their self interest for the greater good. Collectivist systems that rely on everyone sacrifying their self interest for the collectivity failed spectacularly in the past.
llm_nerd
>Some people will die if red wins.
Why? The logical conclusion of this game is that everyone presses red. There is no reason to press blue and leave it to chance. The article talks about it, but without further rules it would be absolutely nonsensical to press blue.
Like if there was some additional rule like "oh and if more than 90% press red, everyone dies" or something, it gets more interesting. But as is everyone answering blue is virtue signalling.
>I think pressing red is selfish and violent
Most of humanity is pressing the red button every single day, again and again. From every culture, creed, religion, loads of red button presses.
paufernandez
That some people play survival all the time because "that's what life is" does not mean that humanity doesn't have pockets of more quiet, non-competitive environments where blue pressers thrive. Humans have had a lot of periods where they were not being "just animals".
But I guess everyone thinks the world is like he wants it to be in this respect.
sirwhinesalot
I love this thought experiment.
If you pick red you survive.
If you pick blue and at least 50% of people picked blue, you survive, otherwise you die.
There's 0 advantage to picking blue, none what so ever, the only reason you'd pick blue is because you assume there's some subset of people that is so unbelievably stupid that they'll pick blue. You're sacrificing yourself in the hope of saving them.
IMO, the reality is that everyone you think would pick blue would actually pick red. Very few people are that stupid, and even if they are they probably also have access to someone not as stupid who will tell them to press red.
The only people you'd be saving are other suicidal white knights that pick blue to save those imaginary "blue pressers", and the outcome of that, since that blue pressing base doesn't actually exist, is that you're all just committing collective suicide for absolutely no reason.
What "blue pressers vs red pressers" says about our society is best left to philosophers.
bastawhiz
The only reason to pick blue is to try to do the "morally correct" thing to "save" the other people who picked blue.
If you're the first person in line to vote, picking blue is neither logical nor moral. There are no other blue choosers who you need to support. "But there will be people who vote after me" well that's their decision to make. "People will vote randomly" okay well if they can't take living or dying seriously, that's kind of on them. Choosing the zero risk option when everyone else has the exact same zero risk option isn't selfish.
It's not selfish to choose red because everyone else has the choice to choose red. There's an unknowable risk with choosing blue. Choosing red only exposes blue choosers to the exact risk they decided to take.
Reframe it to eliminate the silly savior complex and it sounds ridiculous:
There's an infinitely long trolley track. You can let the trolley continue down the track, or you can divert it in your direction. You might get smooshed by the trolley by diverting it, but at least someone standing further down the track won't divert it and smoosh themselves.
undefined
rbren
Some people seem to be convinced by logical reframings, like "if you jump into a woodchipper you die, but if 50% of people jump into the woodchipper they all survive"
A logical reframing is not equivalent though! We know everyone else gets the same frame, and most of the problem is predicting what other people will do when presented with this particular two-button frame.
tigerlily
I imagine this making more sense if this were framed with the backdrop of living in an authoritarian state, with progressively worsening social conditions.
You can choose to protest (blue button) and if over some threshold of people then conditions reset. Otherwise protestors are killed off, and red buttoners survive, but with increased oppression.
Sorry for bringing the mood down with this topic. I'll go back to playing Papers Please! now.
summa_tech
I'm sorry to bring the mood down somewhat further. But a lot of the successful protests just end up re-rolling the dice instead of improving the conditions, and you actually end up possibly worse off than before. "More like, under new management", as the meme goes.
It takes a period of worldwide prosperity and, perhaps, substantial foreign entanglement to allow revolutions / coups to actually improve the situation of people living through them.
imoverclocked
The problem posted is being taken at face value by some and being interpreted outside of a vacuum for others.
The reality is that we don’t live in a vacuum and the framing of red vs blue is almost certainly not an accidental alignment with political colors. If you are in the US, voting blue is also highly correlated with broader empathy characteristics.
It’s telling that some folks think 100% voting one way is just as attainable as more than 50% voting a certain way. The strong irony here is that they themselves would likely not change their vote to help get to 100% no matter which direction that happened to be. This is also why we are roughly split in half with only a small percentage actually voting differently than their identity politics allow.
zahlman
> is almost certainly not an accidental alignment with political colors. If you are in the US,
Please keep in mind that the association of colour to political wing is radically different, even the exact opposite, in other countries.
> It’s telling that some folks think 100% voting one way is just as attainable as more than 50% voting a certain way.
I don't see anybody arguing this. The entire point of the red strategy is that it is not dependent on how many press red. There are people who predict that everyone will independently come to the same conclusion (it's wrong to assume the entire population will be rational). That is not the same thing.
The argument, as far as I can tell, is that in the world where blue pressers failed to get a majority, red pressers are not responsible for those deaths. They were free to choose red, and had no real incentive not to choose red beyond sympathy for other blue pressers.
But also, in the world where blue pressers do get a majority, red pressers don't suffer any consequences for the "betrayal", as described. It would have to literally be a fate worse than death for choosing blue to make any sense. (In the limit, if we imagine that blue pressers will, if successful, enact their revenge and kill all the reds, then the game merely becomes symmetric and the goal is just to be in the majority.)
imoverclocked
> The entire point of the red strategy is that it is not dependent on how many press red.
Yes, but depending on the specifics of the actual implementation of this problem there are extended consequences. What is missed by the red POV is, in some implementations of this, you are losing collaboration/collaborative populations. Society works because of both competition and collaboration. Some people can’t see anything but one side of that.
> Please keep in mind that the association of colour to political wing is radically different, even the exact opposite, in other countries.
Yup, that’s why I worded it the specific way I did. It doesn’t stop people from having a strong opinion on which color they would choose in this scenario. My point is that red vs blue is pre-charged.
rbren
Considerations:
* many people (at least toddlers, people with dementia) are going to press blue roughly by accident. See the lizardman constant
* other people will not want to be responsible for any deaths and will press blue out of a sense of moral imperative
* many other people are going to take this into account and vote blue out of hopes we can save everyone
You should vote blue.
blululu
The first point is interesting. You could fork the question over this and have a few variants:
1.) The pure form where the button presses and restricted to legal agents (i.e. people with credible legal standing over their choices). 2.) The mixed form with the caveat listed here inclusive of all humans whether they are even physically capable of pushing a button. 3.) you could also go for a more expansive scenario that takes 2 to the extreme and includes animals as well.
1.) gets to the game theoretic form of the question. 2 muddies things, and 3 sets up a case for blue since the non agentic voters asymptote to 50-50 and a slim edge is morally preferable to killing half.
ItsMonkk
You don't even have to go that far from the original question. If instead of the entire world being a single game, if you have hundreds of millions of sub-games where 9 random people are placed within, what should you do?
Surely some of those groups are going to be filled with selfish red pickers. Should the kind coordinating players still go blue? All the red pickers are going to lie that blue is sensible. I suspect that more coordinators will die in this way than the always blue pickers if every coordinating player went red.
So now the full-world version only has the law of large numbers on their side, but they have no way of knowing just what percentage of the population is a selfish red picker. Going for team blue is the much riskier option that can yield catastrophe.
throwaway173738
Why would a red picker ever lie about it? If I can get all 8 of my fellow players to pick red then we’re all safe. If it’s a button I’ll just break the blue button or wire it to red.
lukasgelbmann
With 3, especially if the animals outnumber humans, you’d first want to do some research into animal psychology to see whether red or blue has an edge for animals.
eikenberry
Puzzles like this are based on assumptions like all participants are rational adults with their full faculties.
empthought
This one explicitly is not.
blululu
It’s a made up toy problem. It exists for fun. The stated problem has some implicit assumptions. But you can rejigger the rules and assumptions to tweak the incentives and ethics. That’s the whole point. You could take the puzzle and apply it to a band of pirates held in a jail. That might make the outcome more obvious. Or you could imagine what would happen if the voting order were sequential. These are all just different formalisms that are fun to speculate over, but the rules can be interpreted many ways.
hollerith
That is true in isolation, but the reason we study problems like this one is to try to gain insight into our society (or our minds) and in our society, toddlers and people with dementia have guardians that make important decisions for them. Consequently, even after your comment, I'm still struggling to see how this toy problem or game sheds any light on anything I care about. Contrast that with prisoner's dilemma, Newcomb's problem or the ultimatum game, which sheds a lot of light.
But this is HN, so people are going to discuss it just because it is fun to discuss it.
edelkas
[dead]
root_cause
I would push red, and advise my family, friends, and anyone who would listen to do the same. I would not try to force anyone's choice.
I believe some would choose blue: out of a desire to help others or as a mistake (they meant to push red but accidentally pushed blue).
I do not view those who would choose to press blue as bad people, or as "stupid".
Likewise, I do not view those who press red as selfish or immoral.
I am bothered by comments in this thread which say that choosing blue, or choosing red, is the only moral choice. I believe that is wrong; as stated, I don't believe choosing red or choosing blue is immoral. I do believe it is immoral to consider someone who pushes the color other than the one you choose to be immoral or stupid.
I am similarly concerned about those who claim that choosing blue would be "stupid". I think it is mean-spirited, if not outright wrong, to say someone choosing blue is "stupid".
Likewise, I am bothered by comments in this thread which claim that choosing red is choosing to kill someone. To my mind, this is objectively and demonstrably false. When I choose red, that alone does not kill someone. Someone is only killed if I choose red and that person chooses blue. If you think I killed someone by choosing red, I am curious (genuinely) why you think a person choosing blue, out of their own free will and being sound of mind, is any less guilty than I am? After all, they are potentially choosing to kill someone: themselves.
rayiner
I like this framing:
> Every person in the world is provided a gun. If a person wants to, they can shoot themselves in the head. However, these guns are special so that if more than 50% people in the world shoot themselves in the head, the guns will all jam and everyone will survive. Or, the person can choose to set the gun down and walk away.
shiandow
What makes this framing especially interesting is that it suddenly makes perfect sense to just lay down the gun.
Until you remember the millions of children in the exact same scenario.
denkmoon
I hope most children know that they shouldn't shoot themselves in the head.
morningsam
This sounds like it only changes the framing, but in reality it would lead to completely different behavior, so the "leave the gun alone" option would likely lead to far fewer deaths than the red button option, simply by virtue of organisms including humans being generally biased in favor of "do nothing" (= leave the gun alone).
You could do both experiments with dogs instead of humans and roughly 100% of dogs wouldn't manage to shoot themselves with the gun, whereas if you forced them to press one of the two buttons (e.g. keeping them in a room until they press one by chance), roughly 50% would press the red one. So the two experiments differ strongly w/r/t to how likely it is for a "non-thinking" organism to choose each option.
adverbly
Thats not the same at all though?
A baby or toddler is way less likely to randomly shoot themselves in the head of given a gun than they are to do nothing or shoot something else.
The 2 buttons made it 50/50.
The odds of random death are what is causing people to vote blue, and you just massively changed them in your thought experiment...
edu
So a 100% presses red and everyone survives too.
bialpio
Are you also forcing children to press a button or not? Because the answer to this question changes things *a lot*.
wavemode
Yes the inclusion of children does change things, in that it makes choosing red even more obvious.
The problem is posed to the world. You have children, and they ask you what they should do. You tell them to pick red because you're their parent you can't bring yourself to have them risk their lives for some noble purpose.
According to blue buttoners, this parent is an evil person, right?
bialpio
Good luck forcing a child to actually press the red button though. Especially a small child.
blululu
What if you entertain the variant of the question where a percentage of red votes die in the event of a blue win? It makes pressing red less advantageous, but also it totally changes the moral balance depending on the percentage.
enoint
I think this is already baked in. A world of red pressers must know they’ll adapt to a shortage of things produced by blue pressers. Many red pressers won’t survive.
renticulous
Yup there are multiple ways to right answer and people are arguing why isnt the most ethical selfless version winning. Lol
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This is like a prisoner's dilemma, but with no payoff for the risky option.
In a prisoner's dilemma, you can choose a risky option (stay quiet), but the potential reward is that if the other prisoner also stays quiet then you both go completely free. But if one prisoner instead speaks up and accuses the other prisoner, the accuser gets a short sentence and the one who stayed quiet gets a max sentence.
But in this scenario, there's no payoff whatsoever for the risky option (pressing the blue button). 100% of people choosing blue and 100% of people choosing red lead to the exact same outcome. So why would it ever be rational to choose blue?
This "dilemma" would make more sense if getting over the 50% blue threshold caused some additional positive outcome, like world peace or a cure for cancer.