This is like a prisoner's dilemma, but with no payoff for the risky option.
In a prisoner's dilemma, you can choose a risky option (stay quiet), but the potential reward is that if the other prisoner also stays quiet then you both go completely free. But if one prisoner instead speaks up and accuses the other prisoner, the accuser gets a short sentence and the one who stayed quiet gets a max sentence.
But in this scenario, there's no payoff whatsoever for the risky option (pressing the blue button). 100% of people choosing blue and 100% of people choosing red lead to the exact same outcome. So why would it ever be rational to choose blue?
This "dilemma" would make more sense if getting over the 50% blue threshold caused some additional positive outcome, like world peace or a cure for cancer.
The downside of redding is that some portion of the world probably dies and you now have to live in that worse world that if you and 50% of the rest of the world has just blued, would not have happened.
I'm wondering if it's really the framing of the problem that's inflating the number of individuals responding with blue (similar to certain confusingly-worded ballot measures).
Suppose the problem were worded in a more concrete way: "I have a large container ship that I'm draining the ballasts out of tomorrow. If less than 50% of <whatever population we're working with> get on the ship, it will capsize and everyone who chose to get on it will die. You can choose either to get on the ship (blue button) or refuse to (red button)."
Would one hold a person guilty for not getting on the ship? Would a perfectly empathetic person even board that ship?
Of course the framing affects how people vote. The thought experiment demands we use the framing as given. Some people might reason themselves into your analogy, others won’t.
So is your general take on the problem that because the way it's worded (blue => "everyone survives", red => "only those who press red survive"), enough people would choose blue that therefore the empathetic/moral thing to do would be to also choose blue to save them? I can get on board with that line of reasoning
Yes, the selfish-minded would end up with more selfish-minded people, and they'd be confused why their "low trust society" became even more low trust overnight.
but why would anybody choose blue? there is no moral benefit to doing so.
If you altered the game to say that only some fraction of the population get the choice, and everyone who doesn't get the choice is assumed blue (or, is killed if less than 50% of voters choose blue) then there's some question to be explored here. But at it stands there is literally no reason to choose blue.
Choosing red is choosing to survive knowing that there will always be people who choose blue, potentially an amount that would mean you don't survive if you didn't take explicit action against it.
There’s a moral benefit to choosing blue if you think there’s a chance that the end result will be split 50-50 and you’ll be the deciding vote between a blue majority and a red majority.
That's still not really a dilemma. It would be a dilemma if it were up to me to save those people who choose blue. But it's not up to me - it's up to a massive gamble that over 50% of people (over 4 BILLION people) will vote with me as well. Like... huh? Are we being serious here? We want to play poker with the lives of billions?
Maybe if the required percentage was lower this would compute better in my brain lol
> red is for people who live in this world and accept it
Red is for people who don't think beyond the end of their nose. Okay, you're very smart and understand statistics, but what about the following groups: friends, family, spouses? If they don't pick red, and they die, would you say life is completely fine because there's less "dumb" people or would you possibly think: "hmm, it kinda sucks that they died, maybe I should've picked blue?"
GP is correct that red is the anti-social / myopic option.
In The Prisoner's Dilemma, the point is that the best option (Both Cooperate) only works if people are willing to work together. It almost always ends up in the worst option (Both Defect). What this points out is that purely selfish actions can lead to non-optimal results for both the collective and the individual.
This expands on The Prisoner's Dilemma by increasing the population and increasing the stakes. We're still thinking about cooperate/defect actions, but we're also forced to acknowledge that not everyone is a rational actor and we cannot relay on the all-defect option as would be the expected outcome of The Prisoner's Dilemma.
Exactly, if choosing blue would allow you to wear a blue badge which would raise your happiness level or otherwise affect your utility function, then it might make sense. Otherwise it just doesn't.
The variation I like is: regardless of the outcome, red choosers are forbidden from performing manual labor. You can tell a lot about someone who chooses that button.
They’re different scenarios. The prisoner’s dilemma is purely selfish. How do I maximize my own return? Cooperation is an option, but it’s still about maximizing your own return. This scenario leaves it open for people to choose to act selfishly by maximizing their own return, or selflessly by attempting to got maximize total return for everyone. But the choice required to maximize total return isn’t clear.
2. People who can read, but are too dumb to model or care about other people pick red.
3. People with enough intelligence for basic cognitive empathy pick blue.
4. People a little smarter and think through game theory overall pick red, and think they are smart for doing so.
5. People smarter than #4 and capable of seeing the big picture realize they don't want to leave people who choose #1 and #3 dead, so they pick blue.
6. People who realize the game theory optimal strategy is to announce you're pressing blue and convince everyone else to press blue, but privately press red.
There are probably more layers to this but the whole debate involves people getting upset at each other and accusing people of being in groups they are not. Red group #4 accuses blue group #5 of being #3 (not thinking beyond basic cognitive empathy). Blue group #5 accuses red group #4 of being group #2 (too dumb to model how others act). It's almost a perfect ragebait question.
As for which camp I am in, I am pressing blue and think you should too.
You've structured ways to think about the problem in a hierarchy of intelligence, which is a classic economics mistake. People are not rational actors, and the primary factors determining who pushes the button will be self-preservation or group-preservation. Emotional factors.
Also, I think that's a simplistic view of intelligence.
(6) isn't correct. Left alone, everyone rational would pick red because it's the only logical option. You trying to convince them otherwise might end up getting 49% of the population killed.
You should try to get everyone to pick red, not blue.
Since if a rational actor would understand that the group can avoid ever dying to this game by simply choosing blue. There is no consequence for choosing blue - but there is a consequence for choosing red.
Also, regardless of these specific consequences, people who are rational/ethical will by default choose blue because it is a good color.
Only irrational people will pick blue. Let's say that's ~3% of the population. Trying to get another 47% of the population to pick blue risks losing all of them as well. That's not ethical.
Your entire logical chain, and your self importance, well, it explains why I'm always picking red. If you win and most pick blue, I'm safe, otherwise, I'm also safe.
You get to feel intellectually superior choosing the only option that can lead you to die. The simple answer is everyone should pick red.
The simplest answer is that everyone should pick blue, actually.
This is because choosing blue results in no consequences, but choosing red does result in consequences. Why not choose the simple option? It's literally the "no consequences" button.
Seems like these reds are overcomplicating a simple question.
> 6. People who realize the game theory optimal strategy is to announce you're pressing blue and convince everyone else to press blue, but privately press red.
A lot of this analysis depends on accurately guessing how people will react, so it's probably hard to say any strategy is game theory optimal without a lot of unrealistic simplifying assumptions.
In a world where you're able to convince a lot of people anything, it might better to convince everyone to press red. If it looks like 99.99% of people will press red without your influence, you're probably best off spending your time convincing the .01% who might press blue not to do so.
It also has the upside of not making you a dirty liar. I wonder, what would Kant think about this hypothetical?
Missing the layer where blue is my favorite color and therefore I will always choose blue. From this perspective, all other reasonings lack basic empathy and/or intelligence.
We learn something about humanity based on the results of the poll. It's naive to think that 100% of people will press the red button. Some people will die if red wins. I think pressing red is selfish and violent, in that it can result in the death of human life by their own unwillingness to cooperate.
If we are not willing to work together in order to protect each other then I have a very pessimistic long-term view of our future. If every blue-presser dies, then our average cooperation level will only decrease, and the population will be over-saturated with defectors. I'd rather just go out now then deal the those consequences.
Is it easier to convince a red-presser to be a blue-presser, or a blue-presser to be a red-presser?
Say there's a "mock vote" and you get to see how everyone voted, then there's another real vote held later. In the interim you can socialize and persuade others. If the mock vote showed that 99% vote red and 1% vote blue, it's clearly easier to persuade the blue people into voting red than trying to get the majority of red to pick blue. On the flipside if it's 51% red and 49% blue, maybe it's easier to convince the red people to vote blue. The lower the starting fraction of blue votes, the better it is for everyone to vote red.
I think the blog post is missing the social dynamics aspect to it, since it's not a "blind press" but you can influence others within your social network. I also don't think that you can trust the results of the poll because there's a thinly veiled political framing to this so revealed preference might be different from stated preference.
You're a single parent. Through divine intervention you know that your 5 year old child has already pressed the red button. Are you going to press the blue button and risk your child becoming an orphan in a selfish and violent world? Or do you sacrifice the lives of billions to save your child from this inconvenience?
Good points, though I think cooperation benefits the ethical outcomes for both sides.
If we all work together to make sure that as many people press the red button as possible, then we can minimize the damage. The problem with the blue campaign is that the outcome gets progressively worse until it gets to the best outcome. 49% mortality is high and terrible unless you are very sure that the red campaign is going to lose. The ethical take on the red side is to minimize blue votes to zero.
Why pessimistic? The miracle of capitalism is that it harvests the power of people pursuing their self interest for the greater good. Collectivist systems that rely on everyone sacrifying their self interest for the collectivity failed spectacularly in the past.
I assume most people are aware there will be some blue voters as well as that greater than 50% of the population are more socially minded than not. I feel if otherwise, in the long run the society would fail to stay cohesive.
It would be easy to self justify picking red as 'it's not killing, it's self preservation' but personally I'd bet on society being more socially minded than not, for betting otherwise would mean i think society as an idea of togetherness is an illusion. After, it being not existent.
Though also to me the experience of life is starkly temporary, dying early or not doesn't really matter to me. So i'm not surprised other's emotional conflict varies here. Personally, losing the existence of something unique to experience (togetherness) in preference of something otherwise fleeting, even the self, isn't very interesting to me.
> Every person in the world is provided a gun. If a person wants to, they can shoot themselves in the head. However, these guns are special so that if more than 50% people in the world shoot themselves in the head, the guns will all jam and everyone will survive. Or, the person can choose to set the gun down and walk away.
This sounds like it only changes the framing, but in reality it would lead to completely different behavior, so the "leave the gun alone" option would likely lead to far fewer deaths than the red button option, simply by virtue of organisms including humans being generally biased in favor of "do nothing" (= leave the gun alone).
You could do both experiments with dogs instead of humans and roughly 100% of dogs wouldn't manage to shoot themselves with the gun, whereas if you forced them to press one of the two buttons (e.g. keeping them in a room until they press one by chance), roughly 50% would press the red one. So the two experiments differ strongly w/r/t to how likely it is for a "non-thinking" organism to choose each option.
The first point is interesting. You could fork the question over this and have a few variants:
1.) The pure form where the button presses and restricted to legal agents (i.e. people with credible legal standing over their choices).
2.) The mixed form with the caveat listed here inclusive of all humans whether they are even physically capable of pushing a button.
3.) you could also go for a more expansive scenario that takes 2 to the extreme and includes animals as well.
1.) gets to the game theoretic form of the question. 2 muddies things, and 3 sets up a case for blue since the non agentic voters asymptote to 50-50 and a slim edge is morally preferable to killing half.
You don't even have to go that far from the original question. If instead of the entire world being a single game, if you have hundreds of millions of sub-games where 9 random people are placed within, what should you do?
Surely some of those groups are going to be filled with selfish red pickers. Should the kind coordinating players still go blue? All the red pickers are going to lie that blue is sensible. I suspect that more coordinators will die in this way than the always blue pickers if every coordinating player went red.
So now the full-world version only has the law of large numbers on their side, but they have no way of knowing just what percentage of the population is a selfish red picker. Going for team blue is the much riskier option that can yield catastrophe.
With 3, especially if the animals outnumber humans, you’d first want to do some research into animal psychology to see whether red or blue has an edge for animals.
It’s a made up toy problem. It exists for fun. The stated problem has some implicit assumptions. But you can rejigger the rules and assumptions to tweak the incentives and ethics. That’s the whole point. You could take the puzzle and apply it to a band of pirates held in a jail. That might make the outcome more obvious. Or you could imagine what would happen if the voting order were sequential. These are all just different formalisms that are fun to speculate over, but the rules can be interpreted many ways.
What if you entertain the variant of the question where a percentage of red votes die in the event of a blue win? It makes pressing red less advantageous, but also it totally changes the moral balance depending on the percentage.
I think this is already baked in. A world of red pressers must know they’ll adapt to a shortage of things produced by blue pressers. Many red pressers won’t survive.
I imagine this making more sense if this were framed with the backdrop of living in an authoritarian state, with progressively worsening social conditions.
You can choose to protest (blue button) and if over some threshold of people then conditions reset. Otherwise protestors are killed off, and red buttoners survive, but with increased oppression.
Sorry for bringing the mood down with this topic. I'll go back to playing Papers Please! now.
Some people seem to be convinced by logical reframings, like "if you jump into a woodchipper you die, but if 50% of people jump into the woodchipper they all survive"
A logical reframing is not equivalent though! We know everyone else gets the same frame, and most of the problem is predicting what other people will do when presented with this particular two-button frame.
The arguments made about wanting to protect the children/babies and those with cognitive impairments are well meaning, but I think misguided. The bottom line is that the world has been put in a shit situation and you can't fix it. Encouraging blue is encouraging an increase in the likelihood that all the truly nice and wonderful people that would would actually follow through on a blue vote for altruistic reasons wind up dead. And that doesn't seem like an altruistic position? It seems more like self-martyring. Well meaning, but actually making the likelihood of a bad outcome worse.
The problem posted is being taken at face value by some and being interpreted outside of a vacuum for others.
The reality is that we don’t live in a vacuum and the framing of red vs blue is almost certainly not an accidental alignment with political colors. If you are in the US, voting blue is also highly correlated with broader empathy characteristics.
It’s telling that some folks think 100% voting one way is just as attainable as more than 50% voting a certain way. The strong irony here is that they themselves would likely not change their vote to help get to 100% no matter which direction that happened to be. This is also why we are roughly split in half with only a small percentage actually voting differently than their identity politics allow.
I would describe it like this. We are all standing on the edge of a cliff. You can choose the 'Red' option. That option means you don't jump off the cliff. Or you can choose the 'Blue' option. You jump off the cliff. If 50% of individuals choose also the 'Blue' option then there will be a net to catch you so you don't all die.
Yes, when you completely rephrase the problem you will have different sentiments.
The thought experiment demands that the phrasing that was used actually be used, and you don’t get a chance to show the dumb blue people how smart you are before they pick their button.
It is rephrased. Any phrasing besides the original exists only in your head and not in anyone else’s.
The only reason I’m in my tomb is because you and people like you voted to kill me instead of voting to do nothing. Luckily for me, I’m dead and don’t care.
Congratulations! Enjoy your life with people who think like you.
Well, that is one way to rationalize, as I guess there is an infinite number of ways to do so.
The point remains, only one singular choice guarantees your own safety. And another has a Chance of death. Take the stupid choice because you think everyone else is also stupid? Thats your choice.
It doesn’t guarantee my safety, though. It puts me in a world where the only people left were so afraid of dying that they opted into a completely avoidable mass murder.
Besides the obvious choice of not pushing any button, so very rarely -- if at all -- are there only ever 2 options. The entire "thought experiment" leans into some fantastical unrealistic scenarios and plays on peoples "fast thinking" by saying here are 2 options I made up, tell me which of these 2 groups (us or them) shall I sort you into? Neither.
I thought about the ternary choice. Unconscious people, conscientious objectors, etc. The wording is that blue needs to exceed 50%, so the doomsday machine defaults to red.
That’s basically why dictatorships are so hard to overthrow. In real life the game is slightly different, if you choose red (don’t protest) you get a negative outcome. But if you choose blue (protest) you risk being jailed (a very negative outcome) unless enough people also choose blue, in which case the outcome can turn highly positive.
That’s why dictators try to limit protests, not just because of the protests themselves but because they don’t want people to know how many others are willing to protest.
These types of analyses always treat voting red and ending up in the majority as preferable to voting blue and ending up in the minority. I don’t think that assumption is universally valid.
In the first case you contend with living in a world after a catastrophic population loss — likely including at least some of your loved ones — knowing that had some of you and your fellow survivors voted differently, nothing bad would have happened.
In the second case, you don’t care at all. Because you’re dead.
As a political post the formulation in the article is crass in the extreme, misrepresenting both the motivations of red and blue voters and also the and the long-term consequences of those parties' policies. There's no progress to be made in a conversation held so close to the surface.
It's very inaccurate/loaded as a political post, but the choice of colors makes the intent fairly obvious.
Politically speaking, in the US where everything is rigged by corporate media and a uniparty of capital interests with red/blue facades (where blue manufactures consent for red every step of the way), the only winning move is to not play.
If red pressers always survive then everyone should pick red. Its incredibly and obviously so and I'm concerned by the fact that so many commenters aren't aware of this.
Red is the obvious choice from a self-preservation perspective but not a moral one. You're seeing here in these comments that there are lots of blue pressers; they would all die. This creates a snowballing incentive to push blue: people dying is bad.
There's several reasons why someone might make the "wrong" choice, and reaching 50% + 1 on blue is way easier than reaching 100% on red. And sure enough, the polls I've seen have shown blue with a majority every time.
Its an interesting psychological test. Because, no, I don't agree, red is the moral choice and also the most rational.
Those who think the population is too stupid to behave in regards to their own self preservation might choose blue in an attempt to 'save everyone' and kill themselves.
Only one singular choice has zero risk of death, and its red. Everyone chooses red and we all survive.
I don't like how the question is setup, both in wording and scenario. Saying "everyone will die unless >50% press blue" sounds more impactful. And pressing red is a free win in this scenario making it a nonchoice. Threshold not being announced or red having some condition would make it more interesting (and at the same time, boring).. unless the point of the question is not to make people discuss blue vs red, but why you should make an irrational decision.
I honestly kind of hate these thought problems, because they attempt to distill a complex system into a single, momentary choice, and then maximize the outcome somehow.
As if it’s the decision that somehow matters, as opposed to the systemic dysfunction and incentives that mandated the decision in the first place.
I’m an increasingly reluctant blue pusher, because I am aware that societal incentives reward individual greed when traded against societal harms; that is, those who sacrifice others are rewarded proportionate to the amount of others they sacrificed. I want to cooperate, because historically that has been the source of our collective survival and growth as a species; however, at this specific moment in time, I would be greatly rewarded if I harmed as many people as possible, as thoroughly as possible, to enrich myself.
If all you’re looking at is the binary decision, red makes sense. Except taken in the context of the wider whole, red pushers should be rightly vilified and excommunicated for prioritizing their own survival over the survival of the whole.
Another way to frame the question is "how much effort should society as a whole put into saving the lives of individuals who endanger no one but themselves through unnecessary dangerous choices?"
I feel like it's fine that wingsuiting off a mountain is legal. I don't feel a need to beg some stranger not to do it. Both myself and that stranger are perfectly aware there's a decent chance their choice will result in their death.
These sorts of problems assume that actions have no consequences beyond the immediate decision. These tests, run in places which have higher long-term expectation of social connections, give different results than in the US.
In the world where <50% press blue, you know that everyone alive (the red pushers) would save themselves rather than take a risk helping you or those who aren't clever at game theory problems.
I don't want to live in that world, so blue for me. And it's the fault of everyone who pressed red should I die.
This doesn't seem to be a game that tries to be particularly clever--one button could kill you, the other certainly won't. Trusting that nearly everyone will avoid pressing the button that could kill them seems a reasonable assumption, and it's not necessarily an indication of a lack of altruism.
Let me frame it another way and see if you still consider it homicide:
There's a cruise ship that needs to have a certain weight in order to not capsize. That weight threshold happens to be at 50% of the population (for whatever population we're considering in the original question). If the ship capsizes, everyone on it dies.
You're given the option: either get on the cruise ship or don't. Not to take an actual cruise, not for some other intrinsic prize, just file on it for a minute and then get off.
I don't see how those who refuse the risk of dying on the ship are complicit in the deaths of those who willingly choose to hop on it knowing the risks involved
You don’t get to reframe the problem with different wording or circumstances to demonstrate your intelligence to others before they choose and you choose. That’s part of the thought experiment.
That knowledge isn't a "consequence" of the game. It's a symptom of a fact that's knowable a priori. Running the game doesn't make it true; running the game merely reveals something that was already true.
Yes, that's (overly reductively stated) the point of TFA. Except for the part where it was highlighting a survey result to the contrary, and explaining why this is irrational and doesn't likely reflect what people would actually do.
The idea behind claiming you'd choose the blue button is to appear noble and altruistic, I suppose; but I struggle to even understand that instinct. Risking one's own life to possibly save the lives of others who are demonstrably completely capable of saving themselves doesn't strike me as particularly noble.
> this is irrational and doesn’t likely reflect what people would actually do
People are irrational. I guarantee it’s likely that a lot of people would actually do it.
> The idea behind claiming you’d choose the blue button is to appear noble and altruistic.
Not at all. If the majority of people can’t be bothered to press the button that says “nobody dies as long as half of the other people say nobody dies” rather than “you don’t die,” I’m happier not being around. It’s purely selfish and blue is a win-win.
This is like a prisoner's dilemma, but with no payoff for the risky option.
In a prisoner's dilemma, you can choose a risky option (stay quiet), but the potential reward is that if the other prisoner also stays quiet then you both go completely free. But if one prisoner instead speaks up and accuses the other prisoner, the accuser gets a short sentence and the one who stayed quiet gets a max sentence.
But in this scenario, there's no payoff whatsoever for the risky option (pressing the blue button). 100% of people choosing blue and 100% of people choosing red lead to the exact same outcome. So why would it ever be rational to choose blue?
This "dilemma" would make more sense if getting over the 50% blue threshold caused some additional positive outcome, like world peace or a cure for cancer.
The downside of redding is that some portion of the world probably dies and you now have to live in that worse world that if you and 50% of the rest of the world has just blued, would not have happened.
I'm wondering if it's really the framing of the problem that's inflating the number of individuals responding with blue (similar to certain confusingly-worded ballot measures).
Suppose the problem were worded in a more concrete way: "I have a large container ship that I'm draining the ballasts out of tomorrow. If less than 50% of <whatever population we're working with> get on the ship, it will capsize and everyone who chose to get on it will die. You can choose either to get on the ship (blue button) or refuse to (red button)."
Would one hold a person guilty for not getting on the ship? Would a perfectly empathetic person even board that ship?
Of course the framing affects how people vote. The thought experiment demands we use the framing as given. Some people might reason themselves into your analogy, others won’t.
So is your general take on the problem that because the way it's worded (blue => "everyone survives", red => "only those who press red survive"), enough people would choose blue that therefore the empathetic/moral thing to do would be to also choose blue to save them? I can get on board with that line of reasoning
Is it worse? Wouldn't the red people end up with more like-minded red people?
I think most of the people who pick blue would be empathic, loving people that are just kind of bad at game theory.
I don't think I want to live in a world in which they all died out.
Yes, the selfish-minded would end up with more selfish-minded people, and they'd be confused why their "low trust society" became even more low trust overnight.
Perhaps red is selfish, but blue is most certainly foolish.
Or blue doesn't want to live in the world where only selfish/cynical people remain.
Yes and yes. Without the core of blue workers, red people will need to open Atlas Shrugged about how to assign short order cook duty.
The dilemma is that a lot of people will press blue so if red gets above 50% a large number of selfless but not game-theory aware people will die.
but why would anybody choose blue? there is no moral benefit to doing so.
If you altered the game to say that only some fraction of the population get the choice, and everyone who doesn't get the choice is assumed blue (or, is killed if less than 50% of voters choose blue) then there's some question to be explored here. But at it stands there is literally no reason to choose blue.
There will always be someone who chooses blue. Choosing red is choosing to kill them.
Choosing red is choosing to survive knowing that there will always be people who choose blue, potentially an amount that would mean you don't survive if you didn't take explicit action against it.
I fail to see how anyone could choose blue, the certain scenario is everyone chooses red, and this whole post is a nothingburger.
There’s a moral benefit to choosing blue if you think there’s a chance that the end result will be split 50-50 and you’ll be the deciding vote between a blue majority and a red majority.
That's still not really a dilemma. It would be a dilemma if it were up to me to save those people who choose blue. But it's not up to me - it's up to a massive gamble that over 50% of people (over 4 BILLION people) will vote with me as well. Like... huh? Are we being serious here? We want to play poker with the lives of billions?
Maybe if the required percentage was lower this would compute better in my brain lol
Red is optimal from a self preservation perspective but is also the antisocial option. Picking blue saves everyone.
Let me rephrase that for you: red is for people who live in this world and accept it, blue is for people with white knight syndrome.
OR. Red is for people who understand statistics, blue is for people who like to gamble.
> red is for people who live in this world and accept it
Red is for people who don't think beyond the end of their nose. Okay, you're very smart and understand statistics, but what about the following groups: friends, family, spouses? If they don't pick red, and they die, would you say life is completely fine because there's less "dumb" people or would you possibly think: "hmm, it kinda sucks that they died, maybe I should've picked blue?"
GP is correct that red is the anti-social / myopic option.
Blue is what gamble? there is no gain associated with choosing blue over red, just pointless risk-taking with only at best a zero outcome.
In The Prisoner's Dilemma, the point is that the best option (Both Cooperate) only works if people are willing to work together. It almost always ends up in the worst option (Both Defect). What this points out is that purely selfish actions can lead to non-optimal results for both the collective and the individual.
This expands on The Prisoner's Dilemma by increasing the population and increasing the stakes. We're still thinking about cooperate/defect actions, but we're also forced to acknowledge that not everyone is a rational actor and we cannot relay on the all-defect option as would be the expected outcome of The Prisoner's Dilemma.
The dilemma is that there are some people who are not smart enough to understand this and will press blue.
There is no dilemma, just a bad model. In this model, everyone press red and survive. Solved in 10 seconds.
If you want a dilemma, it must be inside the model, for example: a 10% of the buttons are miss wired, and the system register the oposite color
So if red wins, at least 10% die. If blue wins, everyone survives. Now you have a dilemma. Which button would you press?
PS: If a country has 20 cities and one of them has a big majority of red-pressers, is it moral to nuke it out of existence?
Crosstabbing the results into a state-by-state table would be interesting.
Exactly, if choosing blue would allow you to wear a blue badge which would raise your happiness level or otherwise affect your utility function, then it might make sense. Otherwise it just doesn't.
The variation I like is: regardless of the outcome, red choosers are forbidden from performing manual labor. You can tell a lot about someone who chooses that button.
You have it backwards. In prisoner's dilemma if both stay quiet they are still punished, just less so.
They payoff is, you know you are not the reason why the people who pressed the blue button died.
Blue risk their lives to safe others, red safe themselves.
Blue won’t get survivor’s guilt
They’re different scenarios. The prisoner’s dilemma is purely selfish. How do I maximize my own return? Cooperation is an option, but it’s still about maximizing your own return. This scenario leaves it open for people to choose to act selfishly by maximizing their own return, or selflessly by attempting to got maximize total return for everyone. But the choice required to maximize total return isn’t clear.
This question has multiple layers of thinking:
1. People who can't read pick randomly.
2. People who can read, but are too dumb to model or care about other people pick red.
3. People with enough intelligence for basic cognitive empathy pick blue.
4. People a little smarter and think through game theory overall pick red, and think they are smart for doing so.
5. People smarter than #4 and capable of seeing the big picture realize they don't want to leave people who choose #1 and #3 dead, so they pick blue.
6. People who realize the game theory optimal strategy is to announce you're pressing blue and convince everyone else to press blue, but privately press red.
There are probably more layers to this but the whole debate involves people getting upset at each other and accusing people of being in groups they are not. Red group #4 accuses blue group #5 of being #3 (not thinking beyond basic cognitive empathy). Blue group #5 accuses red group #4 of being group #2 (too dumb to model how others act). It's almost a perfect ragebait question.
As for which camp I am in, I am pressing blue and think you should too.
You've structured ways to think about the problem in a hierarchy of intelligence, which is a classic economics mistake. People are not rational actors, and the primary factors determining who pushes the button will be self-preservation or group-preservation. Emotional factors.
Also, I think that's a simplistic view of intelligence.
(6) isn't correct. Left alone, everyone rational would pick red because it's the only logical option. You trying to convince them otherwise might end up getting 49% of the population killed.
You should try to get everyone to pick red, not blue.
Left alone, everyone rational would pick blue, actually.
And why do you think that?
Since if a rational actor would understand that the group can avoid ever dying to this game by simply choosing blue. There is no consequence for choosing blue - but there is a consequence for choosing red.
Also, regardless of these specific consequences, people who are rational/ethical will by default choose blue because it is a good color.
See also, people by default choose blue at 5x the rate as red, really putting a dent in "red==rational" conjecture: https://www.joehallock.com/edu/COM498/media/graphs/fav-color...
I hope this makes sense!
Only irrational people will pick blue. Let's say that's ~3% of the population. Trying to get another 47% of the population to pick blue risks losing all of them as well. That's not ethical.
Your entire logical chain, and your self importance, well, it explains why I'm always picking red. If you win and most pick blue, I'm safe, otherwise, I'm also safe.
You get to feel intellectually superior choosing the only option that can lead you to die. The simple answer is everyone should pick red.
>The simple answer is everyone should pick red.
The simplest answer is that everyone should pick blue, actually.
This is because choosing blue results in no consequences, but choosing red does result in consequences. Why not choose the simple option? It's literally the "no consequences" button.
Seems like these reds are overcomplicating a simple question.
Please explain. Red guarantees safety. Why wouldn't everyone pick red? The only option that leads to a statistical chance of death is blue?
I think this hypothetical captures a sort of hero complex. You think everyone is too stupid to choose the right choice so you will save us all...
Except we all chose red because its the obvious choice and now you are dead.
> 6. People who realize the game theory optimal strategy is to announce you're pressing blue and convince everyone else to press blue, but privately press red.
A lot of this analysis depends on accurately guessing how people will react, so it's probably hard to say any strategy is game theory optimal without a lot of unrealistic simplifying assumptions.
In a world where you're able to convince a lot of people anything, it might better to convince everyone to press red. If it looks like 99.99% of people will press red without your influence, you're probably best off spending your time convincing the .01% who might press blue not to do so.
It also has the upside of not making you a dirty liar. I wonder, what would Kant think about this hypothetical?
Missing the layer where blue is my favorite color and therefore I will always choose blue. From this perspective, all other reasonings lack basic empathy and/or intelligence.
Hello, Blue Presser here.
We learn something about humanity based on the results of the poll. It's naive to think that 100% of people will press the red button. Some people will die if red wins. I think pressing red is selfish and violent, in that it can result in the death of human life by their own unwillingness to cooperate.
If we are not willing to work together in order to protect each other then I have a very pessimistic long-term view of our future. If every blue-presser dies, then our average cooperation level will only decrease, and the population will be over-saturated with defectors. I'd rather just go out now then deal the those consequences.
> It's naive to think that 100% of people will press the red button.
Those who press the blue button are trying to save those who press the blue button. If they weren't trying to save each other, they wouldn't have to.
So you agree, there is a population of blue pressers.
EDIT: The mere existence of blue-pressers makes being a red presser violent and selfish in my opinion.
Is it easier to convince a red-presser to be a blue-presser, or a blue-presser to be a red-presser?
Say there's a "mock vote" and you get to see how everyone voted, then there's another real vote held later. In the interim you can socialize and persuade others. If the mock vote showed that 99% vote red and 1% vote blue, it's clearly easier to persuade the blue people into voting red than trying to get the majority of red to pick blue. On the flipside if it's 51% red and 49% blue, maybe it's easier to convince the red people to vote blue. The lower the starting fraction of blue votes, the better it is for everyone to vote red.
I think the blog post is missing the social dynamics aspect to it, since it's not a "blind press" but you can influence others within your social network. I also don't think that you can trust the results of the poll because there's a thinly veiled political framing to this so revealed preference might be different from stated preference.
You're a single parent. Through divine intervention you know that your 5 year old child has already pressed the red button. Are you going to press the blue button and risk your child becoming an orphan in a selfish and violent world? Or do you sacrifice the lives of billions to save your child from this inconvenience?
That’s not the thought experiment.
Good points, though I think cooperation benefits the ethical outcomes for both sides.
If we all work together to make sure that as many people press the red button as possible, then we can minimize the damage. The problem with the blue campaign is that the outcome gets progressively worse until it gets to the best outcome. 49% mortality is high and terrible unless you are very sure that the red campaign is going to lose. The ethical take on the red side is to minimize blue votes to zero.
Does that mean that in rayiner's phrasing [1], you'd argue for "cooperating" with the other head shooters?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47913066
Why pessimistic? The miracle of capitalism is that it harvests the power of people pursuing their self interest for the greater good. Collectivist systems that rely on everyone sacrifying their self interest for the collectivity failed spectacularly in the past.
I assume most people are aware there will be some blue voters as well as that greater than 50% of the population are more socially minded than not. I feel if otherwise, in the long run the society would fail to stay cohesive.
It would be easy to self justify picking red as 'it's not killing, it's self preservation' but personally I'd bet on society being more socially minded than not, for betting otherwise would mean i think society as an idea of togetherness is an illusion. After, it being not existent.
Though also to me the experience of life is starkly temporary, dying early or not doesn't really matter to me. So i'm not surprised other's emotional conflict varies here. Personally, losing the existence of something unique to experience (togetherness) in preference of something otherwise fleeting, even the self, isn't very interesting to me.
I like this framing:
> Every person in the world is provided a gun. If a person wants to, they can shoot themselves in the head. However, these guns are special so that if more than 50% people in the world shoot themselves in the head, the guns will all jam and everyone will survive. Or, the person can choose to set the gun down and walk away.
This sounds like it only changes the framing, but in reality it would lead to completely different behavior, so the "leave the gun alone" option would likely lead to far fewer deaths than the red button option, simply by virtue of organisms including humans being generally biased in favor of "do nothing" (= leave the gun alone).
You could do both experiments with dogs instead of humans and roughly 100% of dogs wouldn't manage to shoot themselves with the gun, whereas if you forced them to press one of the two buttons (e.g. keeping them in a room until they press one by chance), roughly 50% would press the red one. So the two experiments differ strongly w/r/t to how likely it is for a "non-thinking" organism to choose each option.
What makes this framing especially interesting is that it suddenly makes perfect sense to just lay down the gun.
Until you remember the millions of children in the exact same scenario.
Considerations:
* many people (at least toddlers, people with dementia) are going to press blue roughly by accident. See the lizardman constant
* other people will not want to be responsible for any deaths and will press blue out of a sense of moral imperative
* many other people are going to take this into account and vote blue out of hopes we can save everyone
You should vote blue.
The first point is interesting. You could fork the question over this and have a few variants:
1.) The pure form where the button presses and restricted to legal agents (i.e. people with credible legal standing over their choices). 2.) The mixed form with the caveat listed here inclusive of all humans whether they are even physically capable of pushing a button. 3.) you could also go for a more expansive scenario that takes 2 to the extreme and includes animals as well.
1.) gets to the game theoretic form of the question. 2 muddies things, and 3 sets up a case for blue since the non agentic voters asymptote to 50-50 and a slim edge is morally preferable to killing half.
You don't even have to go that far from the original question. If instead of the entire world being a single game, if you have hundreds of millions of sub-games where 9 random people are placed within, what should you do?
Surely some of those groups are going to be filled with selfish red pickers. Should the kind coordinating players still go blue? All the red pickers are going to lie that blue is sensible. I suspect that more coordinators will die in this way than the always blue pickers if every coordinating player went red.
So now the full-world version only has the law of large numbers on their side, but they have no way of knowing just what percentage of the population is a selfish red picker. Going for team blue is the much riskier option that can yield catastrophe.
With 3, especially if the animals outnumber humans, you’d first want to do some research into animal psychology to see whether red or blue has an edge for animals.
Puzzles like this are based on assumptions like all participants are rational adults with their full faculties.
This one explicitly is not.
It’s a made up toy problem. It exists for fun. The stated problem has some implicit assumptions. But you can rejigger the rules and assumptions to tweak the incentives and ethics. That’s the whole point. You could take the puzzle and apply it to a band of pirates held in a jail. That might make the outcome more obvious. Or you could imagine what would happen if the voting order were sequential. These are all just different formalisms that are fun to speculate over, but the rules can be interpreted many ways.
Yes, but those are different thought experiments from this one.
So a 100% presses red and everyone survives too.
Yup there are multiple ways to right answer and people are arguing why isnt the most ethical selfless version winning. Lol
Are you also forcing children to press a button or not? Because the answer to this question changes things *a lot*.
What if you entertain the variant of the question where a percentage of red votes die in the event of a blue win? It makes pressing red less advantageous, but also it totally changes the moral balance depending on the percentage.
I think this is already baked in. A world of red pressers must know they’ll adapt to a shortage of things produced by blue pressers. Many red pressers won’t survive.
I imagine this making more sense if this were framed with the backdrop of living in an authoritarian state, with progressively worsening social conditions.
You can choose to protest (blue button) and if over some threshold of people then conditions reset. Otherwise protestors are killed off, and red buttoners survive, but with increased oppression.
Sorry for bringing the mood down with this topic. I'll go back to playing Papers Please! now.
Some people seem to be convinced by logical reframings, like "if you jump into a woodchipper you die, but if 50% of people jump into the woodchipper they all survive"
A logical reframing is not equivalent though! We know everyone else gets the same frame, and most of the problem is predicting what other people will do when presented with this particular two-button frame.
The arguments made about wanting to protect the children/babies and those with cognitive impairments are well meaning, but I think misguided. The bottom line is that the world has been put in a shit situation and you can't fix it. Encouraging blue is encouraging an increase in the likelihood that all the truly nice and wonderful people that would would actually follow through on a blue vote for altruistic reasons wind up dead. And that doesn't seem like an altruistic position? It seems more like self-martyring. Well meaning, but actually making the likelihood of a bad outcome worse.
The problem posted is being taken at face value by some and being interpreted outside of a vacuum for others.
The reality is that we don’t live in a vacuum and the framing of red vs blue is almost certainly not an accidental alignment with political colors. If you are in the US, voting blue is also highly correlated with broader empathy characteristics.
It’s telling that some folks think 100% voting one way is just as attainable as more than 50% voting a certain way. The strong irony here is that they themselves would likely not change their vote to help get to 100% no matter which direction that happened to be. This is also why we are roughly split in half with only a small percentage actually voting differently than their identity politics allow.
I would describe it like this. We are all standing on the edge of a cliff. You can choose the 'Red' option. That option means you don't jump off the cliff. Or you can choose the 'Blue' option. You jump off the cliff. If 50% of individuals choose also the 'Blue' option then there will be a net to catch you so you don't all die.
So, now we agree? Red option it is every time.
Yes, when you completely rephrase the problem you will have different sentiments.
The thought experiment demands that the phrasing that was used actually be used, and you don’t get a chance to show the dumb blue people how smart you are before they pick their button.
The problem isn't rephrased. Option Red = 0% chance of death, Option Blue = chance of death but maybe you can be the hero and save everyone.
So we all choose option Red and you, the hero, chose Blue. Congratulations, we will write some nice words on your tombstone.
It is rephrased. Any phrasing besides the original exists only in your head and not in anyone else’s.
The only reason I’m in my tomb is because you and people like you voted to kill me instead of voting to do nothing. Luckily for me, I’m dead and don’t care.
Congratulations! Enjoy your life with people who think like you.
Well, that is one way to rationalize, as I guess there is an infinite number of ways to do so.
The point remains, only one singular choice guarantees your own safety. And another has a Chance of death. Take the stupid choice because you think everyone else is also stupid? Thats your choice.
It doesn’t guarantee my safety, though. It puts me in a world where the only people left were so afraid of dying that they opted into a completely avoidable mass murder.
These are so intensely annoying.
Besides the obvious choice of not pushing any button, so very rarely -- if at all -- are there only ever 2 options. The entire "thought experiment" leans into some fantastical unrealistic scenarios and plays on peoples "fast thinking" by saying here are 2 options I made up, tell me which of these 2 groups (us or them) shall I sort you into? Neither.
I thought about the ternary choice. Unconscious people, conscientious objectors, etc. The wording is that blue needs to exceed 50%, so the doomsday machine defaults to red.
That’s basically why dictatorships are so hard to overthrow. In real life the game is slightly different, if you choose red (don’t protest) you get a negative outcome. But if you choose blue (protest) you risk being jailed (a very negative outcome) unless enough people also choose blue, in which case the outcome can turn highly positive.
That’s why dictators try to limit protests, not just because of the protests themselves but because they don’t want people to know how many others are willing to protest.
These types of analyses always treat voting red and ending up in the majority as preferable to voting blue and ending up in the minority. I don’t think that assumption is universally valid.
In the first case you contend with living in a world after a catastrophic population loss — likely including at least some of your loved ones — knowing that had some of you and your fellow survivors voted differently, nothing bad would have happened.
In the second case, you don’t care at all. Because you’re dead.
Is there actually a real-world version of this game, that the author is alluding to buy not explicitly mentioning?
Otherwise all I'm taking away from this article is that people don't think deeply about survey questions before answering them.
This is a purely theoretical concept, but ties nicely into existing game-theory which has real world implications.
Thinly veiled political post.
As a political post the formulation in the article is crass in the extreme, misrepresenting both the motivations of red and blue voters and also the and the long-term consequences of those parties' policies. There's no progress to be made in a conversation held so close to the surface.
It's very inaccurate/loaded as a political post, but the choice of colors makes the intent fairly obvious.
Politically speaking, in the US where everything is rigged by corporate media and a uniparty of capital interests with red/blue facades (where blue manufactures consent for red every step of the way), the only winning move is to not play.
Feels like spending more money on environmentally-friendly technology.
If red pressers always survive then everyone should pick red. Its incredibly and obviously so and I'm concerned by the fact that so many commenters aren't aware of this.
Red is the obvious choice from a self-preservation perspective but not a moral one. You're seeing here in these comments that there are lots of blue pressers; they would all die. This creates a snowballing incentive to push blue: people dying is bad.
There's several reasons why someone might make the "wrong" choice, and reaching 50% + 1 on blue is way easier than reaching 100% on red. And sure enough, the polls I've seen have shown blue with a majority every time.
Its an interesting psychological test. Because, no, I don't agree, red is the moral choice and also the most rational.
Those who think the population is too stupid to behave in regards to their own self preservation might choose blue in an attempt to 'save everyone' and kill themselves.
Only one singular choice has zero risk of death, and its red. Everyone chooses red and we all survive.
Red does have risk: you’d be left in a world without things produced by the blue pressers. I suspect that’s your food, water and shelter.
I don't like how the question is setup, both in wording and scenario. Saying "everyone will die unless >50% press blue" sounds more impactful. And pressing red is a free win in this scenario making it a nonchoice. Threshold not being announced or red having some condition would make it more interesting (and at the same time, boring).. unless the point of the question is not to make people discuss blue vs red, but why you should make an irrational decision.
I honestly kind of hate these thought problems, because they attempt to distill a complex system into a single, momentary choice, and then maximize the outcome somehow.
As if it’s the decision that somehow matters, as opposed to the systemic dysfunction and incentives that mandated the decision in the first place.
I’m an increasingly reluctant blue pusher, because I am aware that societal incentives reward individual greed when traded against societal harms; that is, those who sacrifice others are rewarded proportionate to the amount of others they sacrificed. I want to cooperate, because historically that has been the source of our collective survival and growth as a species; however, at this specific moment in time, I would be greatly rewarded if I harmed as many people as possible, as thoroughly as possible, to enrich myself.
If all you’re looking at is the binary decision, red makes sense. Except taken in the context of the wider whole, red pushers should be rightly vilified and excommunicated for prioritizing their own survival over the survival of the whole.
Immediate reaction after cursory read through: A fake scenario against virtue signaling feels like virtue signaling itself.
Another way to frame the question is "how much effort should society as a whole put into saving the lives of individuals who endanger no one but themselves through unnecessary dangerous choices?"
I feel like it's fine that wingsuiting off a mountain is legal. I don't feel a need to beg some stranger not to do it. Both myself and that stranger are perfectly aware there's a decent chance their choice will result in their death.
If you push red, you will survive. If you push blue, you might die.
Just push red.
These sorts of problems assume that actions have no consequences beyond the immediate decision. These tests, run in places which have higher long-term expectation of social connections, give different results than in the US.
In the world where <50% press blue, you know that everyone alive (the red pushers) would save themselves rather than take a risk helping you or those who aren't clever at game theory problems.
I don't want to live in that world, so blue for me. And it's the fault of everyone who pressed red should I die.
This doesn't seem to be a game that tries to be particularly clever--one button could kill you, the other certainly won't. Trusting that nearly everyone will avoid pressing the button that could kill them seems a reasonable assumption, and it's not necessarily an indication of a lack of altruism.
One button could kill you — if and only if enough people press the other button.
The other button certainly won’t kill you, but will kill everyone who pressed the first button — if and only if enough people besides you press it.
One button means you almost certainly contributed to homicide, since the odds of everyone pressing red is essentially 0%.
The other one does not contribute to homicide.
The right answer, by the way, is to not press either button. "The only winning move is not to play."
Let me frame it another way and see if you still consider it homicide:
There's a cruise ship that needs to have a certain weight in order to not capsize. That weight threshold happens to be at 50% of the population (for whatever population we're considering in the original question). If the ship capsizes, everyone on it dies.
You're given the option: either get on the cruise ship or don't. Not to take an actual cruise, not for some other intrinsic prize, just file on it for a minute and then get off.
I don't see how those who refuse the risk of dying on the ship are complicit in the deaths of those who willingly choose to hop on it knowing the risks involved
You don’t get to reframe the problem with different wording or circumstances to demonstrate your intelligence to others before they choose and you choose. That’s part of the thought experiment.
That knowledge isn't a "consequence" of the game. It's a symptom of a fact that's knowable a priori. Running the game doesn't make it true; running the game merely reveals something that was already true.
Silly.
Everyone will press the red button and everyone will survive.
Yes, that's (overly reductively stated) the point of TFA. Except for the part where it was highlighting a survey result to the contrary, and explaining why this is irrational and doesn't likely reflect what people would actually do.
The idea behind claiming you'd choose the blue button is to appear noble and altruistic, I suppose; but I struggle to even understand that instinct. Risking one's own life to possibly save the lives of others who are demonstrably completely capable of saving themselves doesn't strike me as particularly noble.
> this is irrational and doesn’t likely reflect what people would actually do
People are irrational. I guarantee it’s likely that a lot of people would actually do it.
> The idea behind claiming you’d choose the blue button is to appear noble and altruistic.
Not at all. If the majority of people can’t be bothered to press the button that says “nobody dies as long as half of the other people say nobody dies” rather than “you don’t die,” I’m happier not being around. It’s purely selfish and blue is a win-win.