exactly this. I think the most insidious part of this discussion is the people such as Senor Beef who are insinuating or outright claiming that anyone who would push the red button is somehow evil or callous, but it’s the red button pushers who are the ones making the rational decision! These posters are readily acknowledging they are making an irrational decision to push the blue button in a futile and misguided attempt to protect others making irrational decisions and are shaming those who would make the correct decision. Amazing cognitive dissonance.
Though I’d argue assuming everyone playing is an incompetent baby is a much better approximation of reality than the traditional game theory assumption that everyone playing is a rational actor with perfect knowledge of the repercussions of their choices.
And not just if the population you’re considering is the current presidential administration 
I sincerely don’t believe you that you understand what cognitive dissonance is. You are not using the term correctly. I have no dissonance. I don’t even see any sort of contradiction.
If anything I believe that you are experiencing an inability to integrate and face your point of view because you are unable to estimate and acknowledge that your strategy will likely result in the death of somewhere between a fifth and half of the human race. You’ve somehow convinced yourself that this is a better outcome than no one dying.
I’m not sure you can see the irony that the only possible reason anyone would choose red is to guard against people who think like you do. And you’re willing to kill billions rather than take the obvious opportunity to cooperate. It’s twisted. It is antisocial. The continuous rationalizations make me think you understand that on some level.
If ≤165 million Americans died because of the collective actions of the other ≥165 million Americans, whom I was one of, than statistically I was maybe responsible for one or fewer deaths. Even if the blues were condemned by a single red vote, you couldn’t claim that it was MY single vote, because that accusation could be leveled at all the other 165,000,000 red voters. One cannot mix and match the personal and the statistical/ collective.
sorry, but your understanding of logic, rational decision making, and game theory is as misguided as your understanding of investing
So here’s a question for the blue pushers (genuine question, not a gotcha). At what point, if any, does it become ethical to press red? At 6 billion players it’s effectively impossible for everyone to choose red. What if we dial it back to something like the original prisoners dilemma, we only have 3 players (not 2 as we need an odd number to avoid ties). Is it still unethical to choose red ? It seems pretty inevitable then that everyone will choose red, definitely 2 out of 3 will.
So where’s the cut off? 9? 99? 999? …
That’s a pathetic attempt to hurt me and not advance the debate at all. I won’t be interacting with you in the future.
Something can be callous and evil and rational all at the same time.
Moderating:
This post is attacking other posters outside the pit. It also brings up stuff that has nothing to do with this thread (investing) and like like an attempt at a thread shit.
Drop both of these immediately.
Everyone: please don’t reply to the threadshit about investing.
It seems like this really comes down to a value judgment.
Taking myself out of the calculus…
if Team Red wins, then <50% of society dies, and the most selfish >50% will be trying to pick up the pieces. We can assume that will be a shitty outcome, because not only will everyone be stuck in a cohort that conserved the most selfish assholes, but the assholes will have had their selfish worldview validated, which kind of scuttles the chance of rebuilding any society more advanced than feudal warlords (if even that). It will be a shitty existence, but the Blues won’t be around to see it.
On the other hand, if Team Blue wins, then on net, nothing changes except Team Red’s shitty worldview has been invalidated, which is at best a minor win. They’re not going to change, and they’ll probably be chafed at the confirmation that they’re in a minority of shitty people that everyone hates. So, not a huge improvement, but at least nobody dies.
So, putting myself back in the picture and evaluating my choices…
If I prioritize survival over quality of life, or if I’m delusional enough to think I’ll rule the ashes, or that a bunch of selfish assholes can somehow rebuild a society worth living in, then I choose Team Red.
If I don’t feel that way, then I have to pick Team Blue, meaning I accept the outcomes of either nonexistence or a mildly improved status quo.
It’s not a great choice, but if faced with the prospect of navigating the post-apocalypse with a bunch of selfish assholes, I think I’d just rather not exist at all. On the other hand, if the blues win, then the world will be the same, except maybe slightly improved by the validation of kindness and selflessness. So it’s got to be Team Blue for me.
Have you even read this thread? That’s nonsense.
This.
I suspect that some in this thread are assuming that society will go on just the same the morning after. It won’t. Many of the survivors will be half crazy with grief and/or guilt. The remainder will contain a higher than normal percentage of psychopaths — still probably a small percentage, but it doesn’t take many to make a large amount of trouble. A lot of the rest will be, not full scale psychopaths, but people who don’t consider much of anything outside their immediate circle and who assume everyone thinks the same way that they do (though some of those will now be among those crazed with grief, as the evidence against the latter idea hits home in that immediate circle.) And all the work that had been being done by the huge number of people now dead won’t be being done by anybody. Some of it will have been work essential to the wellbeing of the survivors. And presumably there’ll be dead bodies starting to rot all over the place.
Things are going to fall apart, badly, and fast. And the people most likely to have pulled them back together again are most likely to have been among the dead.
Anybody who wants to live in a functioning society needs to push the blue button. That’s logic. Even aside from issues of morality.
I suspect that the hypothetical intends for us to disregard all of the post-choice externalities. But if so, it’s not a very useful hypothetical, because any sound judgement about a preferred society must consider how our preferences play out in the future.
Maybe that’s the real tendency being discriminated here… people who grasp that they’re part of a society vs. those who think they’re somehow going it alone.
I think you’re confusing ethics with utility here. In the prisoner’s dilemma, there are 3 outcomes - no cost, half cost, and full cost. Your utility is maximized by choosing to defect, because you’ll never pay more than half cost. Since you can’t knowingly cooperate with your counterparty, you can’t knowingly betray them. This, plus the fact that you’re accepting the risk of paying a cost, makes it a fair game no matter what you choose. Not a nice game, but a fair one.
The lesson of prisoner’s dilemma is that we’re stupid to defect against each other when we have the opportunity to cooperate, unlike prisoners who are so strongly incentivized to mutual betrayal that the element of choice no longer figures into it.
In the red-blue scenario, pressing red is always exploitive, because you’re either free-riding on the generosity of the cooperators who are working to save you, or you’re killing them to save your own skin. It’s not a fair game, it incentivizes exploitation of known cooperators, so it can never be ethical (unless you count pessimistic lifeboat ethics).
There’s no lesson in this particular game, it’s just a description of where we are today. The incentives to cooperate are small, and the incentive to defect is great. Moreover, defectors are incentivized to justify their behaviors by saying that not only are there not enough cooperators to make a difference, but that the stakes are too existentially high to risk any cost to oneself whatsoever.
This is how we got to the extreme situation where a guy like Elon Musk insists that if he doesn’t get to do whatever he wants, without limits or accountability, then it will literally mean the end of all intelligent life in the universe. It’s the logical ending of a game that rewards not only non-cooperation, but also exaggerating the risk of an unfavorable outcome, and annihilating the very concept of cooperation.
That’s literally the exact opposite of the lesson of the prisoners dilemma. Nash mathematically proved that in the prisoners dilemma, as it’s defined, it’s always best to betray not cooperate. The fact that actually that is not the case in similar IRL dilemma, is not because that conclusion is wrong. it’s because the assumptions of the prisoners dilemma (namely rational agents with perfect knowledge, and each game being isolated with no history) hardly ever happen in real life.
Though it’s just a variation of the prisoners dilemma. The only difference is the outcome is based on the whether the majority cooperate (blue) or betray(red). You could make the exact same table of outcomes, albeit with 6 billion players it would run quite long (though you don’t need the full table to work out the Nash Equilibrium it’s clearly choosing red)
Conversely you could play the prisoners dilemma with 6 billion people it just wouldn’t be very interesting as the “all betray” and “all cooperate” would be as vanishingly unlikely as “all red” in the red/blue dilemma
Even in the three person case? Where you know full well there is a very high possiblity that all three people will press red? How is that exploitive?
@Senorbeef, you have stated at least a half-dozen times in this thread that the red button pushers are “killing billions of people.” This is an absurd statement, IMHO.
First off, the scenario in the OP was only for the country, not the world. While this reduces the numbers (which is admittedly splitting hairs), it more importantly takes out the cultural component. I can see there being other parts of the world that might vote differently.
Secondly, the statement is absurd because the red button pushers are not killing anyone. They are being killed by whatever entity set up the situation.
I could just as easily frame the whole thing as, “why are you advocating for people to commit suicide?” If I came home and told my family that I was committing suicide because it might help others, and that they should do the same, they would think I was insane.
Also, I posted a couple of comments upthread that I don’t see that any of the blue button advocates have addressed:
To expand on this, how do you blue-button pushers reconcile your position with how you live your lives right now? Do you not realize that by driving to work in an internal combustion engine vehicle, or by heating your home with fossil fuels, or using electricity that comes from fossil fuel plants, that you are contributing to climate change that is killing other people?
And while you are advocating risking your life (by pressing the blue button) on the off-chance that you avert other people’s deaths, what about your assets? Are you willing to donate most of your income and your assets to help those who are facing hunger or homelessness? Yes, individually it would be a sacrifice for you, and unlikely to make a real difference overall, but if at least half the county did this, we could alleviate poverty and hunger. Why are you willing to risk your life (and likely sacrificing yourself in the process), but not your assets?
Yes, collectively. But an individual red button pusher is no more responsible for other people’s deaths than I am personally responsible for the death of people in Madagascar (which is experiencing famine due to climate change—and collectively, of course, we are all responsible for climate change.)
I wouldn’t even classify blue as cooperate and red as betray because, in this experiment, no one is betrayed by picking red. Literally everyone can pick red and absolutely no one will die if they do. Normally the betray option requires hurting others to help yourself, but in this case, each person can help themselves and it will hurt no one unless someone decides not to help themselves. No one needs blue voters to save them because everyone has the ability to save themselves. The only reason anyone would need to vote blue is because someone put themselves as risk by needlessly passing on pressing the red “don’t kill me” button. The need to vote blue is caused by people foolish voting blue in the first place when there is absolutely no reason to do so (because everyone can simply vote red).
I’m all for cooperation and doing the right thing for the group, but this particular experiment, unlike most I have seen, comes with a best case scenario when everyone picks the selfish option. Normally the selfish option has a downside even if everyone picks it, but not in this case. All people voting red is tied with 50%+ voting blue. There is not even a tiny advantage to the group by voting blue over everyone simple voting red.
To put it another way, if we could discuss this before choosing, we would have two options, “Risk your life and trust that I will save it” or “Don’t risk your life and we can each save ourselves.” Why would I ask you to trust me to save you when it is totally unnecessary? There is no advantage to voting blue over everyone simply voting red. It would be a crazy head game for me to even ask you to risk your life by voting blue. Why would I ask that of you? If my actual goal was to save all our lives, why ask you to risk it by voting blue instead of just telling you to vote red?
I understand that we cannot converse before the vote, but this goes back to my prior post, unless I believe that some of the players are incompetent and don’t understand the rules, why would I think I need to vote blue to save anyone when it is incredibly clear that we can all live simply by picking red, and we can do so with the least amount of stress (because we are not needlessly risking our lives voting blue and hoping people save us when we could just push the guaranteed survival button)?
All the talk about family and loved ones made me take a step back. What if my wife chooses blue?! She’s traveling for work right now, so I sent her a message:
Okay, there is a Red and a Blue button. Everyone in the world has to press one right now. Nobody can collaborate or talk about it. If the majority pick Blue, the whole world lives. But if the majority doesn’t pick blue, all the Blues die. If you pick red, you and all the Reds live no matter what. What do you press?
I didn’t tell her what I would pick. Her response:
Red. For sure survival
We’ll see each other after the Blip. Good luck, everyone else. Choose wisely, please!
That’s true but it’s not necessarily a reason to press blue.
5% of the world population pressing blue and instantly dying is an unprecedented catastropy but one that society will probably survive.
49% of the the world population pressing blue and instantly dying would put society as a whole in jeopardy, maybe the survival of the human race itself (assuming this is not a “thanos snap” situation and the dead bodies will be lying around decomposing)
Assuming you think there no (or very little chance) of a majority pressing blue then it’s in society’s best interest to ensure the number of the survivors in as large as possible.
Point taken. Of course the entity that forced this situation and actually executes all the people is most to blame. But I think it’s reductive to say that they’re the only ones to blame.
Imagine a scenario - someone takes a hundred hostages including you. They give you a choice: either I give you a non-fatal beating, or I kill the other 99 people. If you choose to kill the other 99 people, the kidnapper is absolutely person most to blame but are you completely immune to blame as the person who made the choice? Certainly your role is less culpable than the kidnapper, but the actions you chose that you could control are open to scrutiny.
This I disagree with entirely. The people who vote for blue are not trying to commit suicide, they’re trying to get the outcome where no one gets hurt. It’s accurate to say that the people who pick red are prioritizing their own safety over the lives of others, but it’s not accurate to say that the people pushing blue are trying to commit suicide.
The rest of your post I may address later, and I understand your point, but it seems out of the scope of the current discussion. I think you highlight a legitimate moral issue, but I disagree that it’s as analogous as you think it is.
I’m going to repeat something I said earlier in the thread:
“Just because you’ve found a logical argument doesn’t mean you’ve found the logical argument. People can logically come to different conclusions, and thinking that you’ve come to the only logical conclusion on a complex issue is a sign of flawed thinking.”
I think a lot of people in this thread have decided they’ve come up with THE solution and therefore anyone else’s logic that gets them to a different conclusion is invalid and makes no sense. Do you think every single person in the country/world/whatever is going to come to the exact same cold, selfish, what you perceive to be as a game theory optimal solution than you are? It’s counterintuitive for most people to pick the option where people will die over the one where they wouldn’t. And you’re discounting just how much they can make a decision and have it be both human and logical.
Imagine, for example, you’re a parent with 3 or 4 kids of various age ranges. You believe you’ve raised prosocial children who want what’s best for everyone. You think that perhaps some of your kids may work out that if we all pick red we’ll all be okay, but you also think that they may simply conclude that red is almost certainly going to result in deaths, whereas blue doesn’t have to. They may pick blue because they’re trying to do the right thing. Are you, as their parent, going to pick red and be one of the people who survives while some of your children died trying to do what they believed was the morally right thing, the result that guaranteed that no one has to be hurt? Are you going to live with that when it turns out your kids picked blue and you just became part of the collective decision that condemned them to death?
For a lot of people, this isn’t just going to be a purely dispassionate logic puzzle, it’s going to be the hardest dilemma they’ve ever faced. They may not be emotionally or mentally or tempermentally equipped to make to make the decision you find so easy to make.
And when I phrase it that way, I’m assuming for the sake of argument that you’re correct. I do not believe you’re correct. It seems so simple to you – if we all pick red, we all live – but that seems actually quite convoluted to me. The situation is even easier to describe the other way – if even HALF of us pick blue, we all live. A much easier bar to meet. In practice, there’s zero chance the entire population picks red, and almost certainly 20-49% of people will pick blue, and those people all die in your scenario. In fact, there are a lot of people who are going to correctly find your reasoning to be bizarre – we have an option to take where no one gets hurt, and you think it’s obvious that the only solution is to choose one where 20-50% of the people die?
Blue is the obvious solution. It’s pro-social. It results in a scenario where no one has to die. It’s cooperation. It’s basically the social agreement. The only reason people would pick red is because they value their own lives far above everyone else, and then, defensively, you’re essentially picking red because you’re worried other people will think like you. You’re essentially picking red because you’re worried that other people think like you, and it’s almost the way thieves are worried about everyone stealing from them.
You’ve created this convoluted situation where you’re hiding behind the meaning of what you’re doing by reducing it to a pure game theory logic puzzle. Not everyone is going to do that. A lot of people with more humanity aren’t going to do that. Saying “but everyone has the OPTION to pick red” is a cop-out when you know that for all sorts of reasons people are going to make a logical, humanistic, and practical choice to press blue.
It seems like some of you are convinced that because you have a logically defensible case you have the ONLY logically defensible case, and that’s just not true. In a complex interaction of values and perspectives, logic is a tool to make sure your decision makes sense. That your argument follows some sort of consistent idea. It’s not a tool that reduces you to the single right answer. Those advocating the red button seem to me not to understand that. They think they have the one and only solution as sure as 1+1=2 and they’re flabbergasted why other people cannot see that, but the situation is more complex than that.
I don’t think that’s what is happening. I, for example, am not at all against your decision. In fact, I support your goal, and I hope you achieve it. 50%+1 BLUE would be great, and it does not effect me one single bit.
I think you’re the one attacking other peoples’ choices and the process by which they reached their conclusions. You’re the one who is actively against other peoples’ choices. You’re the one who believes there is only “One True Choice” for a reasonable, caring, human in society.
I think your goal is fine and your decision is yours. And, since it doesn’t effect me in any way, I am not against you. I am just not actively helping you reach it. It’s your goal, not mine.
But you’re saying that our decision is actively killing you and billions more. You believe we are principles in the annihilation of billions of lives. You’ve forced us to defend our position, because we do not agree with your assessment. It’s not that we are against your decision. Go ahead and choose BLUE. We’re against your assessment of our decision and the culpability you’ve placed on us for your own action. You choose BLUE, that is not our fault. Don’t blame us when you die. I will not blame you when I live. Even if you reached a majority BLUE vote. You still don’t get credit for me living. Your vote simply does not effect me, and I don’t care.