Moderating:
Please stick to discussing ideas and posts, and not posters. Thanks.
So this is how I see it going down, based on this thread…
button overlords:…. those are the rules. People of Earth, you have one year to make your decision. We will return in exactly one solar year to record your choices, and enact the consequences: red or blue! Muahahahah
One year later. Button overlords return.
button overlords: Just kidding! We were just having a laugh. You all get to join the utopian intergalactic society. No one has to press any buttons
Notices the smoldering lifeless ruin that Earth has become
button overlords: oh ok. Wanders off whistling
I’ve done my best to explain it. I guess you can’t understand my explanation. But it certainly isn’t because of not wanting to live!
I can’t get anything out of that but nonsense — or a desperate attempt on the part of one part of the mind to justify pressing red despite another part of the mind having that reflex of horror that I tried to describe but which you apparently don’t understand.
— it occurs to me that if any such thing were to actually happen, my first thought would be that there might really be extraterrestrials and they were testing us. And that the red button was probably the fail button.
No, that isn’t all it does. It also does its bit towards all the blue voters dying.
You’re assuming that there’s no chance at all of blue getting half plus one person of the vote — possibly because you can’t understand why anyone not suicidal would vote blue. If that were true and only people who wanted to die would vote blue, you’d be right. But it isn’t true, it’s nonsense.
No plan that begins with the words “if only everyone” will ever work; like if everyone joined in on the boycott, or if everyone worked with the Resistance, etc. Pure utopianism. The ugly part of attempted utopias comes when those promoting them start saying in effect “love and care about your neighbor— or else”. Which could be the motto of every guerrilla or terrorist organization that’s ever existed.
I would deny that it was “at the expense of others”. That’s the whole debate of this thread.
The one that begins with “if only everyone votes red” won’t work either.
And blue doesn’t need everyone.
I do think that’s the crux of the difference in how he (@Procacious) is viewing things compared to the people on the other side of the debate.
He is a logical person who is familiar with constructed hypothetical scenarios like the prisoner’s dilemma, and he knows how to optimally solve them. Since he can find the optimal solution, obviously everyone can do that, and so why would anyone choose anything but the optimal solution? And if you were playing this game with 1 or 2 or 3 other people who you also knew had the same traits and familiarity with these sorts of problems, that may be a realistic way of viewing it.
However, we’re talking about a whole lot of people. If the hypothetical is “country” and that country is the US, we’re talking about 300m+ people. If we’re talking about the world, 8b+.
There is no way 300m or 8b people are all logical, educated, individualism-oriented, familiar with hypothetical social dilemma problem solvers. They are going to come to their decision through a range of reasoning and values.
Perhaps some do not have the logical faculties to find the apparently optimal solution. Perhaps some use their own personal estimation of the reaction of the average person to this dilemma to make a different conclusion to you about the relative probabilities of people being willing to press red or blue. If someone is very confident that most people would pick blue, picking blue does not seem suicidal, it seems like cooperation to overcome this crisis. Perhaps some people would never allow themselves to choose an option that they know would end up resulting in a lot of people dying. Perhaps they disagree with what you think is the optimal solution.
Whatever the reason, we know that some significant amount of people are going to press the blue button.
So when you say “everyone COULD press the red button and we’d 100% all be fine”, that may work on the scale of 2 or 3 or 4 people. It cannot possibly work on the scale of 300m or 8b people. And so then, a zero deaths outcome from most people pressing the orange button is impossible. The threshold of getting 100% of hundreds of millions of people to all come to the same conclusion is so unlikely as to be practically impossible.
However, 50%+1 of people to come to the same decision is entirely possible. That sort of thing happens all the time in life. It’s not some far fetched fantasy.
So, I think what’s happening is that in your internal model of what’s happening, you’re basically answering the question “what’s the optimal way to minimize the damage if we took you and cloned you 8 billion times and asked all of them to solve the problem?” and you can say, well, of course, people that think exactly like me can all pick orange and we’ll be fine. But that’s not the actual situation we’re considering. In the situation we’re considering, people will absolutely come to different conclusions for various reasons.
So then we’re left with two possibilities: a realistic and attainable possibility that 50%+1 pick blue and everyone lives, or a guarantee that a significant fraction of the country/human race dies. I think you’re not accepting this fundamental reality of the situation, and so you give zero value to the lives that would be lost in the red wins scenario, because they don’t “have” to be lost if we asked 8 billion yous this question instead of 8 billion diverse human beings.
The reality of the situation is: most people picking red results in millions+ of deaths. Most people picking blue results in 0 deaths. That is the benefit you’re not acknowledging.
You are only thinking of this as a strategy puzzle, not a hypothetical situation in which 8 billion different people are faced with a horrible choice.
@Senorbeef, I think there are indeed a lot of people who will go through a logical analysis and conclude that red is the optimal choice. Call them logical game-theorists or realists.
And there are others who won’t go past the thought process of: “So if I press red, I’m guaranteed not to die? What’s the catch?” And then when told that the people who pick blue will die will respond with some version of that being their problem or they can’t worry about other people’s decisions. You could charitably say these people are acting out of self-interest, or uncharitably call them selfish.
And there will also be people who might be inclined to pick blue, but are fearful that enough people will do the same thing. Or simply distrustful of others.
And if you combine all these people together—the game theorists/realists, the selfish people, the fearful people, and the distrustful people—I don’t think there is a snowball’s chance in hell that it is going to amount to at least half the population. Put another way, I don’t think there are enough people who are that altruistic to tip the scale in the other direction.
Especially when it is so easy to rationalize the decision to press the red button—because it has a guaranteed benefit to the button pusher and doesn’t harm anyone else unless those people choose to be a martyr and put themselves in danger.
And I am so sure about the likely outcome that however much I might want to join team blue, I feel it would be foolhardy to do so. I don’t disagree that it is a noble gesture, but nonetheless a futile one, IMHO.
Ok then, in that case what would your choice be if you knew for certain—beyond a shadow of a doubt—that the majority was going to choose red? Would you still stand on principle and pick blue if it was certain to result in your death?
It seems like you are implying that your choice would change in that case—that you would then pick red. And if that is indeed the case, it’s no longer a moral choice for you to pick blue in the original scenario, but is instead a mere game theorist choice based on different assumptions.
I don’t think that’s true.
If I see someone drowning, and I can save them if I go in after them, then it’s the moral choice to try to save them.
If I’m entirely sure we’d both drown, there’s nothing immoral about staying on land. But that doesn’t mean that morals aren’t involved if the outcome’s uncertain, or if the effort’s likely to be successful.
I think part, though not all, of the argument in this thread is about the degree of likelihood.
( I live not all that far from Seneca Falls; where, about a hundred years ago, a man jumped in to save a drowning woman. He saved her — and he drowned. They honor him there, every year.
I doubt he carefully calculated his chances.)
This is the part I struggle with. Who is the first person to pick blue and why is he doing it? Pressing blue creates a hazard where the person pressing the blue button needs to be saved by 150m or 4b people only because he pressed blue. The first blue button pusher is causing half the population to have to risk their lives to save each other when no one was in danger before the first person pressed blue.
The problem I am having is that blue comes with no advantage. Red versus Blue is like the choice between taking a million dollars or being punched in the face. There is simply no reason anyone would want to take the punch in the face when it comes with no advantage over the other option. Red guarantees your survival and blue, at best, will allow you to survive as well, but you have to take on a large amount of risk that you might die, and that risk is entirely unrewarded (normally we only take on extra risk for an extra reward).
So, I guess it comes to one of my first questions, are we questioning the competency of the voters? Are we to assume that some percentage of the population are so bad at decision making that they will choose the punch to the face even though it is clearly worse than the million dollars.
I get the desire to save people, but, other than through incompetency, I don’t see who needs to be saved. There is no reason anyone would want to press the blue button when the counter on the blue button reads zero. No one is in danger as long as the blue counter is zero. Why put people in danger by pressing the blue button and making them risk their lives to save you? I get that firefighters and EMT’s like the satisfaction they get from pulling people from burning car wreckage. I get that it gives them meaningful purpose in life. But I still think they would prefer you never put your life in danger by getting into a car wreck to begin with. They would rather you just stayed safe so they didn’t have to risk their lives to save you.
I do see your point here. I struggle to understand how incompetent a person would have to be to think blue is the better choice for them, but I do get that we live in a world full of people that think those around them are quite incompetent and need to be saved. Perhaps I have too much faith in my fellow man because I don’t think there are very many people that would choose blue because they think it is the better choice (my so-called first blue button pusher). I think blue would be almost entirely made up of people that think their fellow players are not bright enough to realize that there is no reason for anyone not to pick red. That is where I am struggling. To find that 40% of the population thinks their dumb neighbor isn’t bright enough to realize that red is the better choice (better because it confers the same reward with guaranteed safety instead of potentially the same reward with much more risk) is where I have a problem.
Even people of very low IQ tend to be good at self-preservation. Your dumb neighbor doesn’t need your help saving himself because his natural instinct will be to pick the safer choice. The only people that actually need help are the people making needless self-sacrifices to protect people that never needed help to begin with. The blue button pushers need to get together and have a talk and realize they are all putting each others lives in danger by insisting on making a sacrifice where is it both unnecessary and unhelpful.
And I would say you denying it doesn’t make it so. I also don’t think it’s the whole debate of the thread. It’s part of it, sure, but not the whole debate.
I contend voting red would be selfish and would show a disregard for the whole. A whole that I feel is important.
Plus, everyone doesn’t have to vote blue, just one more than half.
What you’re using here is multiplication to get the likelihood of an exact combination of events (i.e. a specific number of people voting a certain way), and for some unknown reason assessing a 2/3rd likelihood to a binary choice.
That’s not how elections are decided though. Yes, given a 3 million person cohort, the probability of getting an exact 1,500,001 majority is infinitesimally small. But there are 1,500,000 possible vote totals that will satisfy that win condition, so the actual probability is the sum of those infinitesimals.
So as you can see, in the smaller group, you have more precision but actually less mathematical certainty than in the large group, because the larger the group, the tighter the results will cluster around the expectation, whereas a small group could be thrown by any individual’s wild impulse or schemes. Although in a small group you do have the possible advantage of face-to-face judgment of reliability, that’s not a mathematical advantage, it’s a social advantage (given a certain level of social skill).
Honestly I don’t see how probability is the controlling factor here, because the scenario gives no information about people’s tendencies to vote blue or red. It’s a binary choice but that doesn’t mean people have binary tendencies. With no data on the tendencies, you have no foundational probability information to base any calculation on, whether in a group of 3 people or 3 million. But if you do have that information, your forecasts at large scale will be more reliable, not less.
On the contrary, there was poll reporting on people’s actual tendencies to vote blue or red in the OP itself.
I’ll point out that “sometimes as much as 60%” gives a pretty clear indication that red is far, far, short of the unanimity that so many folks predict is the only sensible (possible?) answer.
This is a good point, but there are two answers to it. The wishy-washy answer is that most people who pick blue are trying to reduce their negative impact on others. They give to charity, reduce their use of carbon fuels in one way or another, are careful in their disposal of toxic waste…
The real answer is that, as the trolly problems show us, moral reasoning in humans isn’t purely about maximizing benefits. The directness of the link between your action and the outcome is a crucial component of typical human moral reasoning. This is even embedded in our laws. If you stand by in horror as the trolly kills 8 people, you have no legal culpability. (Unless you created the problem in the first place. And yes, the creators of both the trolly problem and the button are monsters.) If you pull the lever and kill the one person, you are legally liable for that person’s death.
Pushing the red button to kill a large chunk of humanity is a very direct action. You are guilty (in part) of killing them.
Granted, but red at 60% (or anything more than 50%) means that blue is in the minority, and so all of the blue voters have chosen death for themselves—for no reason other than misguided altruism.
And frankly, I think the actual results would be skewed even further in the red direction if the exercise were held for real, because I think more people would give the “expected” altruistic response in a poll than would actually put their lives at risk (and certain death, IMHO).
I totally get the impulse to pick blue—I initially had it myself—but I firmly believe it is a foolhardy choice. And what happens if I’m wrong and the majority does pick blue? Nobody dies. And if I really thought there was a chance of me being wrong, I might reconsider my choice—but I don’t think I am.
Making an analogy with getting vaccinated to help with herd immunity (like I alluded to upthread), it’s the difference between getting a vaccine that has a one-in-a-million chance of an adverse effect compared to one that has at least a 60% chance of killing you (and possibly greater).
But there is another way to look at this that is just as valid. The people who died had the opportunity to press the red button and save themselves, but took direct action to put themselves at risk by pressing the blue button (out of what I contend is a sense of misguided altruism in the scenario as presented).
No, he isn’t, because he doesn’t get to choose what option wins. 8 billion people do.
First of all, since this vote is not going to be decided by a single person, it’s pretty ridiculous to say that @Bear_Nenno or anyone else who would choose red is “condemning” anyone to die.
Let me ask you this. Tomorrow, out of nowhere, two billion people die. That number includes some of your most altruistic friends, your colorblind buddy Red-Blue Blind Rob, and almost two billion others. You then find out that you’d overslept the button pushing ceremony and the aliens running the show thought that you looked so peaceful that they left you alone. The vote happened without you, red won, all the blue pushers were destroyed by alien plasma blasters, and then the aliens left.
Do you kill yourself in solidarity?
If not, what difference would you pushing blue and becoming the two-billionth-and-first victim of the aliens make?
I see no difference between suicide in this scenario and actually pushing the blue button. Both options will needlessly kill you without helping anyone, in much the same way that there is no difference in the moral action you should take in the Trolley Problem regardless of the initial state; not switching tracks and killing one person is the same as actively killing five people to save one.
It’s pretty impressive that you’re posting this from a phone or computer whose components were all harvested with no human rights abuses whatsoever, and that you’re able to generate completely clean energy to power your computer and connect to the Internet with, so that you can engage in trivial pursuits like philosophical debates without causing any harm to anyone in a third world country.
Or would you say that your small contribution to the cadmium mines of the Congo doesn’t matter? Because if so, you may want to look into Kant’s Universalizability Principle.