I have another question on the OP’s premise: even toddlers etc. have to choose. Is there some magic that lets them rationalize the right button? Or is it a case of “oooooooh pwetty wed button” and BANG BANG BANG on the button?
I know I for sure directly answered your question (15-20% if i recall, although I now think that’s too high. I’d say about 3-5% now), and I think several others too.
Sorry for the delayed response. I spent a lot of effort in the previous version of the debate on this topic and so I’ve been loathe to get so invested in this rehash of it, but you deserve a response.
I think you’re being technically correct but sort of missing my point.
The red people hold the position of: it’s too dangerous to pick blue. not enough people will pick blue. we cannot count on 50% of people being willing to pick blue. So the rational response is to pick red.
Which is defensible.
And they often, at the same time, hold the separate position that goes something like “hey, it’s not my fault. no one has to die. If everyone picks red, everyone lives”
The purpose of this is to give them moral absolution.
Both statements are technically true independently, but conflict in spirit when held in concert. Because if you believe that achieving 50%+1 for blue is impossible because we simply cannot get so many people to agree on anything, then it’s orders of magnitude more difficult to think that you could get every single person on Earth to pick red when you couldn’t count on 50%+1 picking blue. So you know that not everyone would pick red. But you’re holding up that scenario as plausible or practical as a way of absolving you of the role you play of picking red and killing a lot of people who picked blue.
I’ve come to respect the logic of red pickers, but I despise the self deception and moral absolution that many of them hold. If they can own up to it honestly and I’ll respect that position. But if you’ll notice in the other thread, I repeatedly asked vehement red-arguers to simply admit that some significant fraction of the population was going to pick blue, and they wouldn’t die except for all the people selecting red and to give an estimate to what percentage of the world’s population that might be.
A person who holds an uncomfortable but rational position can answer that honestly. They can say “Okay, yes, by picking red, I am one small cog in the machine that ultimately resulted in 20% of all human beings dying. This is a difficult decision, but I have my reasons for picking red” – I can respect that.
“I have nothing to do with anyone dying! 100% of people could pick red! They committed suicide for no reason! And I’m not going to admit that anyone has to die anyway, I’m going to pretend that 100% of people picking red is a viable scenario so I don’t have to face any moral implications” – that is a position I cannot respect. And many people in this argument are a lot closer to the latter than the former. If you look at the previous thread and see the non-response to my “so how many people do you think are going to pick blue and die?” challenges this will become clear.
If you did, I’m sorry that I didn’t account for you. I believe you, I just haven’t gone back to the old thread to look. I should revise my statement to say that most of the people I issued this challenge to declined to answer it.
I don’t normally like to argue about someone’s personal assessment that’s speculative, but for what it’s worth I don’t think 3-5% is a reasonable estimation. I don’t even think that’s in the ballpark for the US, the most individualistic society. And throw in the rest of the world? There’s no way 3-5% of people in Japan are saying “I’m what’s important, the rest of society can die”
I think 20% is the absolute floor and I think it’s probably closer to 60% realistically. And I’m usually pretty cynical about human nature.
But if 3-5% is your sincere estimate, like, not a self serving one but one you truly believe to be true, then I accept it as valid but disagree strongly.
There’s no possible way I can prove it short of conducting a homicidal experiment of my own but I think there is a huge discrepancy between what people answer in a poll in the comfort of their home with no danger and in a situation where their life really is on the line, (and some quick logic which would really kick in at that point, everybody is in charge of their own destiny).
Are you drawing your estimate based on people in the US or the world? Do you think most countries would have an under 10% rate? Those are different questions, but the OP of this thread sets the hypothetical as “every single person on Earth”
Keep in mind, too, that not everyone has participated in threads with dozens of posts discussing the idea. Most people would not have encountered this idea when the choice was forced on it and done optimal game theory strategizing. They’d probably go with their gut reaction, which is often blue.
I disagree. Societal values don’t have much to do with it. This is much more fundamental than that. People don’t like to die, that’s universal. You are giving people one choice where they will definitely survive one where they will likely die. 3-5% of people who are capable of understanding the dilemma and pressing the button pressing blue seems about right to me.
I’d say it will almost never be blue for the same reason. When it’s “should I definitely survive or very likely die”? Everyone’s gut is telling them “survive” our gut has millions of years of evolution saying that.
“Very likely die” is where your logic jumps the rails. That is not one of the binary choices that every person perceives.
The logic is same even if its “a significant chance you’ll die” which even the most serious blue advocates would agree with.
Choosing definitely survive vs may die, defintely survive will win overwhelmingly.
The blue brigade will be populated by those who believe that blue will win the day. I’m not trying to convince you that’s the proper choice, just pointing out that the binary choice you offer is a non sequitur when applied to the blue tribe.
I wasn’t trying to convince them. The question was asked what percentage of the world will press blue and i think 3-5% is a good estimate (if anything an overestimate).. The idea that more than 1 in 20 human beings will press the “might die” button given the choice between “definitely survive” and “might die” is fantasy IMO
Well, we’ve moved from “very likely die” to “significant chance you’ll die” to “might die.” I think the red tribe is likely to assess the blue choice as the former.
“Might die” is weak enough that I think virtually every person would agree blue has this risk, even those inclined to pick blue. And I’d say a much higher percentage exists in the “pick blue” cohort for the reasons I noted: By definition (I think) blue choosers do not think it’s very likely they’ll die. But you and I are certainly entitled to different opinions.
Most of this discussion has devolved into repetition of the same beliefs but this claim earns pushback:
There are millions of years of evolution telling us (and most social creatures, insects to primates) to take individual risks for the good of the group overall.
Agreed. The appropriate response is, “where do we find the jerk who set this up? Let’s push HIS button!” That goes for the “philosophers” and their “thought experiments,” too.
Yup. And the blue tribe the latter. But even most optimistic blue advocate is never going reasonably claim there is not a significant chance that red will win. Maybe it’s 10%, just maybe (giving the blue lobby a huge benefit of the doubt) it’s 1%. But there is a still a significant chance of death associated pressing blue. Saying that more than a tiny minority of people will opt for a significant chance of death over guaranteed survival is a fundamental misunderstanding of how humans work.
Which of course is somewhat paradoxical, you can’t say the chance of Blue winning is large yet at the same time say any given human not choosing guaranteed survival is low. That’s what makes this an interesting thought experiment. It’s actually a variant of the beauty pageant paradox.
So you are seriously saying your gut instinct.(and mine and people in remote Andaman Islands) When given two buttons where one may kill you and one will definitely not, is to press the one that may kill you? That’s just willfully refusing to recognize how human nature works IMO
This is not the prisoners dilemma, you aren’t considering whether to betray a specific person, and whether they have betrayed or cooperated with you in the past. This a simple red-blue: definitely survive, maybe die
Correct.
And this is where the tiresome back and forth goes: to a huge degree the different camps have fundamentally different understandings of how human nature works. Your perspective, honestly held, is that human nature, our wiring, is to value our individual best outcome. Prisoners dilemma. Game theory. I, and some group of other blues, believe that social creatures are hardwired to take individual risks and incur costs, in service of a potentially much greater good to the whole, from the automatic responses of social insects, to bands of primates, to human society with our fictive kinships writ large.
Reality of course is that human nature is manifold. We contain both among us and within each of us. And convincing each other that one or the other predominates is not something that debate will accomplish.
This just runs completely contradictory of well established sociology and social psychology. The culture you grow up deeply shapes who you are, how you make decisions, how you weigh things that benefit the self versus benefit the group. Individualistic and collectivist cultures make massively and clearly different decisions on issues like this, even when their lives are on the line. Look at what Japanese people did on Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and what they would’ve done defending the homeland and WW2 - they basically were going to commit national suicide to avoid dishonor. Women flung themselves off cliffs with their babies in their arms rather than be captured. You’d almost certainly never see this sort of extreme dedication to facing face or preserving group cultural values in an individualistic country. And this isn’t some hypothetical, or some proxy we’re using for risk of death – they literally killed themselves. They were as much humans as you and I, and their response seems bizarre and even unbelievable to us, but they were shaped by these cultural values that ruled their lives and it clearly overrode their survival instincts even when their lives were on the line. You could say the same things by people who achieve religious martyrdom by blowing themselves up or otherwise sacrificing their lives. Common throughout human history, cost them their lives, entirely cultural/belief based.
We have plenty of less destructive, less fatalistic examples, and ones that come from more individualistic cultures too. Adults will risk and often sacrifice their lives to protect vulnerable people like children – even when it’s not their own children – when, say, a child is in danger from a wild animal attack. There are cultures where old people will voluntarily face exile and die when they are no longer productive so that they are no longer a non-contribution resource drag on their groups. (And there are other cultures where people will demand that every possible resource be spent keeping them alive as long as possible even if it causes harm to their group). Soldiers will jump on a grenade without hesitation to save their squad. This isn’t a once in a billion rare situation that became legend. This is commonplace in war. I could come up with thousands of examples where people frequently and willingly sacrifice for the benefit of the group.
So if those people are willing to sacrifice their lives to simply avoid dishonor or to achieve religious martyrdom, others are willing to exchange their lives in exchange to people they want to protect, others are willing to sacrifice because they worry that they’re net drains on the group instead of a net benefit, is it really so hard that some non-trivial amount of them would choose the pro-social position of trying to keep everyone alive (blue) when the likely alternative (red) is going to kill billions of people?
You could almost certainly ask everyone “would you die to save 10 strangers?” and some significant amount of them would say yes. That’s guaranteed death, for the lives of a small amount of people. What if you changed the scenario from strangers to a such a large group that it would almost certainly include some of their loved ones?
Picking blue, in contrast, is a possibility of death – you hope that other people pick blue too and it all works out and everyone is fine – where the amount of people you’re saving is potentially billions. To suggest that there are very few people who would rise to this challenge (as they would see it) is hard to believe.
Do you think people will lay their lives on the line to save a child from a wild animal, but they wouldn’t for billions of people?
I know we’ve just been giving our opinions on human nature, and it’s hard to quantify, but your position is so far from what we know about the world that it falls apart under any scrutiny. Your position that very few people (1-5%) are willing to risk their own lives for the benefit of the group is contradicted over and over again by countless examples across many domains in human history.
You can totally believe all that and still realize that your average human presented with two buttons where one stands a good chance of killing them and one will definitely not, will choose the “definitely survive” option
I’m loathe to draw political conclusions from a silly thought experiment with no basis in reality (thats my main take away from the prisoners dilemma, it’s very interesting and a great mathematical model, but the stand alone prisoners dilemma has almost no applicability to real life). But if I did have to draw one from this red-blue hypothetical it’s that you should never let the right portray issues like immigration as a red-blue problem. The moment you do you have already lost, everyone will press “guaranteed survival”. No amount of “being tough but fair” will work once you have accepted this formulation of the problem.
Isn’t this plot central/related to a Batman - Joker movie? And as an aside, 100% of the Red pushers will die too. Heart attacks from dragging the blue bodies to mass graves; deadly diseases from all the rotting corpses; air and water pollution from all the dead; mental illness from causing the deaths of loved ones and admired others. And just old age.