Let’s say there was a green button and an orange button, for everybody else in the world except John. If orange wins, all greens die. If green wins all oranges die, no communication. (There may be an even number and if so on an exact tie everybody is spared). John is instead given a black button and a white button. If he presses black he joins the majority and lives but the minority die. If he chooses the white button he joins the minority, if that now results in a tie everybody lives. If it was already a tie, both buttons do nothing.
Would you take the astronomic odds of achieving anything by going white? Would you blame John if he presses the black button?
I’m sorry, but that’s ridiculous. Not being willing to push the “kill yourself” button in a scenario where red is guaranteed to win is not the same as not being willing to help anyone ever or even make sacrifices for others.
If you added an orange button that you could push in order to guarantee that you die, but instead of a vote you protect 10 blue voters from death, then I could actually make a difference by pressing a button other than red and sacrificing myself.
But in the scenario described, voting blue is needless, suicidal virtue signaling.
You’re assuming that your vote is the one that decides the outcome.
The very first step you need to take in analyzing outcomes in this situation is determined what the likely outcome of the vote will be. Getting this correctly is literally a matter of life and death.
It seems obvious to me that red will win, which is why I consider blue a suicide button.
The way I see it, you don’t have the option to live in a non post apocalyptic world. You can either choose death, or life. The number of other people who will vote blue or red is not up to you; it’s a set property of the world you happen to live in, and that’s a world of mostly red button pushers.
This is a great example of a scenario where you can choose to take personal harm in order to prevent harm from happening to other people. That’s absolutely the moral path to take in that scenario.
Pushing the blue button is nothing like that. Unless you are the deciding vote, it is an empty suicide that accomplishes nothing but virtue signaling.
But that’s not the case that makes the difference in whether pressing red is “exploitive” or not. I was talking about the case where everyone presses red, that is identical to the case where most people press blue, it’s the best outcome for everyone (no one dies). That case is so unlikely as to be effectively impossible with 6 billion people, but extremely likely with three people.
Except for one very important piece of data about tendencies, that’s pretty much all you need to know. People don’t like to die, and tend to avoid it at all costs. So the chances of either of the other two people in the triple choosing the option that will likely kill them are very small.
No Trump voters are responsible for the damage he does, then, right? After all, the election was not won by a margin of one vote. Therefore no one single person’s vote swung the election in Trump’s favor, and therefore no one who voted for Trump is responsible for the damage that Trump inflicts. Trump voters are entirely blameless.
You are not usually so caustic in the way you approach debates, it makes me really hard to want to interact with you.
You believe that if you give people a scenario, and you say “pick this choice, no one dies, or pick this choice, millions die”, the only possible reason anyone could possibly choose the former is because they want to virtue signal? No one could possibly sincerely think that’s the best outcome? Yes, I know, that’s not the exact scenario as demonstrated, but lots of people would see it that way, and you’re saying that everyone who would try to get out of this with zero deaths is just virtue signalling. Absurd and insulting.
This is not the case. Pressing the blue button is deciding what world you want to live in.
It would be good to live in a world that just successfully confirmed that majority of people are community-minded, that they were willing to risk everything to have that world, with no risk to anyone else.
It would be shitty to live in a world of people who were rewarded for choosing their own self-interest at the expense of everyone who prioritized communitarian altruism. I don’t mean that I’d be sad that my preferences didn’t win out. I mean it would be pretty miserable to live in a world that’s decided it’s every man for himself, because it puts the possibility of a functioning civilization in serious doubt. It would be a world where there’s no need for a red button to be pushed, people would simply be killing others if they felt they could get away with it. Which they could, because the only thing that can stop such a thing is a state monopoly on violence, and this requires subordinating one’s interests to the common interest, which the entire world will have just proven that it has no interest in doing.
Pressing the blue button is like folks in the 1980’s who chose to live near nuclear targets, so that it would all be over instantly. Pressing the red button is like moving to a bunker in Idaho thinking you’ll be a competitive survivor in the post-apocalypse, which in reality will at best work for a year or so.
The difference is that voting for Trump is voting for a certain set of policies, and those policies are harmful (IMHO, we aren’t in a politics thread so we don’t have to get into it here, but I’m sure you agree).
This button scenario is not like that. I don’t support a button scenario where we kill some portion of society based on an arbitrary choice; I don’t think anyone does. If that scenario is imposed on us, it’s easy to see how most people will vote and then cast your own vote accordingly. I don’t think voting blue will save anyone in this scenario.
This came across harsher than I meant it, let me clarify.
When I used the term “virtue signal” I wasn’t talking about you or any other blue voter, although I see how it can come across that way.
What I was trying to say is that from my perspective the blue button push has no purpose because it is not going to save anyone and just gets you killed. In my analysis a “virtue signal” is its only purpose. I did not mean to imply that I thought it was an empty gesture coming from you or anyone else who supports pushing the blue button.
No, I am sure that you support that position because you believe that you can get to 50%+1 of the population supporting the blue button push, or that (as some in the thread expressed) you think very poorly of anyone who would push red such that you wouldn’t want to live in a society of only red pushers.
My view is different on both counts, which is why pushing the blue button is useless in my analysis; a different analysis can reach a different conclusion, as yours did.
In my view, as I said above, the vast majority of people when presented with this scenario will hear that one option (blue) means you have a chance of death, and so they will never ever ever push that button. I don’t think that being in the category that’s completely unwilling to push the button that risks death makes you a horrible person, so I don’t mind living in a society of people who pushed that button (although obviously I’d prefer to live in a society where all of us are still here). And I think the portion of such people will be so overwhelmingly large than trying to change the tide would be hopeless. Hence, voting blue is suicide in my analysis.
Getting the red-favored outcome doesn’t require everyone to push the red button. Anyone who chooses red gets that outcome. And the chances of that are equal regardless of scale.
This isn’t a probability question, it’s a social dynamics question. If there are 3 people in a room, it’s trivially easy to say “does anyone here want to die or kill anyone else? No? Then let’s all make the same choice.”
I agree the social dynamics are different in a group of 3. It’s easier to gain full cooperation. The choice of blue or red doesn’t matter, everyone has to choose one. As a common choice, red is a bit more bulletproof because it reverses the stakes - defection would mean you die alone.
And yes, at scale, it’s unlikely to get an outcome where everyone agrees to choose red and follows through. But 100% survival doesn’t require unanimity, it just requires that a majority of people choose blue.
Only in the incredibly unlikely event that your vote is the deciding one. In my analysis of the real world, it’s pretty much certain that pressing the blue button is deciding to die.
I think you are vastly overestimating how selfish someone has to be to look at the prompt as presented in the OP and say “blue button means I might die, red button means I will not die? I pick red” without giving it much more though than that.
Any kind of mass death scenario like this one would put a serious dent in society, but I don’t think the survivors would be so unbelievably selfish that they’d be incapable of cooperation just because they looked at the two options and picked the one that guarantees they don’t die. I think the vast majority of people would do that, and obviously we live in a society now, with all of those people.
I ask again, if this scenario happened yesterday and you just woke up and found out about it, would you kill yourself immediately just to avoid living in this world?
I wasn’t even talking about the merits of a particular outcome, just disagreeing with the idea that unless some sort of election or collective choice (which both this scenario and an election are) then the people who make their vote have part of the responsibility of the outcomes of that choice regardless of whether their vote was the single deciding one or not. This is also what I referenced in regards to Kant’s universalization principle – not that everyone who would take a pro-social action is required to then live the life of a monk to reduce their harm, but that it’s a cop out to say “well MY vote didn’t swing the election, so I’m not responsible for the outcome” – if you have a million or a billion people all having the same thought, obviously their vote does have an impact even though they all individually insist it does not.
No, I did not say that your choice determines the kind of world you get to live in. It’s a decision about what kind of world you want to live in. Choosing death over an entirely selfish world is very much a choice of what kind of world you want to live in.
I think you want the ease of the choice to erase the selfishness of the choice. It doesn’t.
I think you’re right about this. They would probably look around and say “wow, we fucked up, we’re going to have to form some sort of cooperative society after all. Too bad we had to kill most of society to figure that out, but never again!” That’s definitely something humans do, and have done.
It’s easy to say that you’d rather take your chances surviving a post-apocalyptic world, because most people drastically misjudge their chances of survival. It is human nature to favor a shitty survival scenario that may not pan out, because over deep evolutionary history, that’s kept the species alive. But that doesn’t make the judgment correct or rational.
And that’s what game theory is all about. It’s about how you make a decision given what you know about other actors making decisions at the same time, with the complications that they are also doing the same analysis, and their analysis of what your analysis might be effects conclusions.
It’s basically the poisoned cup scene from Princess Bride if the cups weren’t both poisoned.
I’m not making my decisions in a vacuum; I’m making them based on my analysis of what everyone else in the “game” is going to do.
My estimate is that in the scenario as written, most people will choose red, so I am acting accordingly.
Ok, so if you woke up tomorrow and found out that everyone in the world except you was offered the choice in the OP and that 60-80% chose red while the rest died, would you kill yourself rather than living in the world that remained?
I don’t think so. 5% chance of survival is more than 0%, isn’t it? 0.1% chance of survival is more than 0%, isn’t it? Sounds like I made the right choice.
Decisions that keep the species alive seem like they would be the rational and correct ones, but I guess I’m just biased towards existence in that way.
No but the best outcome does. Everyone pressing red or 50+% pressing blue are indistinguishable. Whichever way you slice it, functionally, ethically, etc. They are the same. All the other outcomes, whether one person dies or 3 billion, are worse outcomes
It’s a social dynamics AND probability. Again the probability of everyone choosing red with 6 billion players is almost zero regardless of the social dynamics, it can be safely ignored. With three people it is a significantly likely outcome. Regardless of the social dynamics the probability of the other two people both choosing red is significant (even if they are flipping coins). If you take into account the overriding motivation not to die, it becomes overwhelming likely.
So again how is choosing red in the three person case exploitative? It’s not exploitative at all. Just accepting the reality that two randomly chosen human beings will likely both prefer not to die.