A content creator I listen to a lot popped up in my feed yesterday confused by the repeated outcome of a particular experiment. “The situation is this: You are presented with two buttons, one red, the other blue. Everyone in the country is expected to push a button. If a majority select the blue button, everybody lives. If a majority push the red button, they live, but anyone who pushed the blue button dies.”
He thought it was a no-brainer, blue right? But apparently several polls show a bias towards red. I wonder what game theory says about this? I still feel like I would choose blue. But polls show that sometimes as much as 60% choose red.
Which color would you choose?
An alternate version he proposed was a representative from each household would choose for the family… would that affect your choice? What about if the choice was put to the world, are the red answers in anyway a product of our (American) society?
If you (any you) only consider what’s best for you, red is the correct answer. No matter what everyone else does, you don’t die.
If you want to consider what’s best for everyone, of whom you are but one person, then blue is correct answer.
It’s very obvious. It’s also obvious why the “selfish” button color is the same as the Republican color, while the “communitarian” button color corresponds to the Democrat’s color.
Sounds like a prisoner’s dilemma, just on a much bigger scale. Ultimately, it all boils down to
Do you trust other people to make the right choice?
How much do you care about other people’s survival?
The more you distrust other people to do the ethical thing, and the less you care about other people’s survival, the more it makes sense to hit the red button.
The catch is that if you press red, it all but guarantees a substantial number of deaths (those who pressed blue.) If you press blue, there’s a chance that blue will get the majority and no one will die.
Look at the payoff matrix. If you press red, you increase your chance of living, regardless of what anyone else does. If you press blue, your survival depends on other people’s actions.
I’d press blue, but this is one of those cases where the more you worry about other people being unhelpful, the more likely you are to be unhelpful
It’s also apparently a one-time thing with no opportunity for people to collaborate, which affects the results of these sorts of Prisoner’s Dilemma style hypotheticals. If for example the button-pressing was going to be a regular thing, that would bring up the issue that until most people start pressing blue, much of the population will just keep dying over and over. And the issue that if people were allowed to collaborate the result would likely be a prison term or execution for anyone pressing the red button.
These sorts of hypotheticals tend to heavily restrict how people are allowed to deal with them, because humans have been manipulating each other for as long as we’ve existed. We’re experienced. And without such restrictions we’d find a way to weasel out of the intended result of the hypothetical. Heck, there’s research showing how in many such dilemmas people will pick the less optimal choice out of sheer spite.
Yes. Any of these games change massively when the players get to do it repeatedly. Aa a broad rule of thumb single-run games encourage selfish play, and repeated games (eventually) teach the value of cooperation. Humans evidently have some capacity for cooperation, but like democracy, they’ll try it only after they’ve exhausted all the other possibilities.
See this post and the cite within if you have not. It’s interesting. Sad, but interesting.
The US electorate has already chosen Red twice in the last ten years. And I can’t see how anyone trying to explain why that’s bad has had any affect on any of those voters.
My solution is to point out to the rational people, who understand that Blue is the more ethical choice in theory, that if 100% of the people vote Red, everyone still lives. I expect enough would decide to switch on that basis that the remainder would then also switch out of fear of being left holding the Blue Bag.
And then we all get together, and hunt down and kill whoever set this up. Fuck that guy.
Naah. Just hack the game so if red gets a majority, the red people all die instead.
Then the communitarian oriented blue people can have a country worth living in. And it’ll be one hell of an object lesson in why not to raise your kids to be selfish.
But if you hacked the game, people will believe a majority voted blue. There won’t be any lesson at all there. The people who did vote red and are killed won’t be around to protest they actually voted red.
This is starting to get too close to home, as shown by the reaction I suggest just above.
I think the Nash Equilibrium of the game is to choose red.
The chances you dying are zero if you choose red, non-zero if you choose blue. So the optimal average solution for everyone (or rather not for everyone, but for each individual acting to get the most preferential outcome for them, without considering anyone else) is to choose red.
Though the quirk here (other than we are talking about death not winning a prize) is the fact if literally everyone the planet does the “rational” (as defined by game theory) thing and chooses red that’s the same as most people choosing blue
It’s possible its intended to show the limitations of the game theory approach. Given the choice between dying and not dying its outrageous to choose red, but if instead the choice was everyone gets zero dollars or 100 dollars then it becomes perfectly reasonable
Yet the Nash Equilibrium does not distinguish between the two cases
That’s a great point, and I think worth bearing in mind for all sorts of hypotheticals, not just in the prisoner dilemma space.
I’ve seen a few examples in economics, where an action is declared irrational on the basis of a hypothetical of a one-time choice in a void. But the action actually does make sense* in the real world with myriad options including repeating the situation.
Hypotheticals are necessarily quite constrained and specific, and, whether intentional or not, when they are then applied to making claims about how people make decisions in the real world, can be misleading.
\* …at least in a subset of cases…I’m obviously not claiming everyone is rational always. Just that arguments for why X is never rational tend to be flawed.
Assuming that everyone is presented with this choice simultaneously and there’s no chance to collaborate/strategize/communicate, I pick blue. Yes, for the reasons stated, it’s disadvantageous to a purely selfish individual. However, I do believe when it came down to it, most people would pick blue because they can’t bear the idea of killing a significant fraction of the population that doesn’t need to die. I’m not sure a lot of people would even think it through to the second level of “if everyone voted red we’d still survive” nor would that actually happen. I think at least 20% of people simply are not going to make the choice that kills billions of people. And so you’re basically guaranteeing that at 20% of people are going to try to do the right thing as they see it by picking blue and they’re going to die.
And so ultimately I think something like 60-70% of people would pick blue.
Maybe that’s too optimistic. But if I’m wrong, fuck it. I’m not willing to be a part of killing millions of people who were trying to do the right thing. If red wins, now you’ve cut out all of the people in society that were willing to take a risk to themselves in order to save everyone. Our world becomes even more selfish and shitty. You become even more surrounded by the bad parts of humanity. I’m struggling to exist in the current level of needless shittiness. I don’t want to find out what the next level is.
Of course flip it around and secretly kill everyone who picked red and that’s probably going to do a lot of good, for the opposite reasons. They weren’t trying to do the right thing, they were trying to be selfish. While there will indeed be people who are decent people picking red on the theory that everyone would pick red, more people who do more harm than good for the world are going to pick red than blue.
But as Dr. Strangelove asked of Ambassador de Sadeski, “But why did you keep it a secret? Why didn’t you tell the world? The whole point is lost if you keep it a secret!”
The hackers would most definitely tell the world. The surviving world. In warfare as in comedy, timing is everything.
I understand the red logic. But imagine that someone you loved pressed blue, and you pressed red along with the majority. Not only would you know that you had a hand in their death: you would know that everyone surviving also had a hand in their death.
As broken as our world is now, I believe we can find a way to patch it. I don’t think we could survive such bitterness, guilt, and recrimination.
Dr Strangelove was partially based on scientists like John Von Neumann who (at the Rand Corporation) applied these kind of game theory thought experiments to planning for nuclear war.