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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 potent
by wavemode 5mo ago
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.
- vmg12 5mo agoThe 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.
- chias 5mo agobut 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.
- imoverclocked 5mo agoThere will always be someone who chooses blue. Choosing red is choosing to kill them.
- sunrunner 5mo agoChoosing 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.
- gpm 5mo agoThe people who chose blue in no way contributed to the peril you are in, thus you aren't justified in killing them in self defense.
- sunrunner 5mo agoThey didn't cause the peril, but knowing that their choice is possibility, if I don't make a decision to protect myself now their decisions may then be the cause of my continued not-survival.
- polotics 5mo agoI fail to see how anyone could choose blue, the certain scenario is everyone chooses red, and this whole post is a nothingburger.
- imoverclocked 5mo ago> I fail to see how anyone could choose blue Depends on the scenario… or the number of people in the experiment. A sufficiently large number of people will guarantee votes in both bins. The specific scenario (reading this outside of a vacuum) will also have knock-on effects. Eg: reading this into the current political landscape in the US vs reading this into another toy problem about jumping off a cliff or not will have very different outcomes and ethics.
- margalabargala 5mo agoThe article makes a good point with their reframing. "Give everyone a magic gun. They may choose to shoot themselves in the head. If more than 50% of people choose to shoot themselves, all the guns jam. The person also has the option to put the gun down and not shoot it." The "dilemma" is asking to what lengths we should go to save people choosing to commit suicide, and does that change when they are unintentionally choosing suicide due to being "tricked" into it.
- imoverclocked 5mo agoI guess that just underlines how reframing can really muddy or clarify a problem. The original problem can be mapped onto many varied scenarios with wildly different ethics.
- paufernandez 5mo agoTo me, the whole point of the riddle is that it reveals the most internal bias towards either yourself or others, meaning that you do things for society or for yourself. Blues don't understand reds, reds don't understand blues. The bias is invisible to the self but it is clearly there given the huge contrast in the opinions of people.
- 4ndrewl 5mo agoThe blues sound like idiots. Press the red button you survive, or press the blue button you might die
- hx8 5mo agoPress red and you might kill.
- rationalist 5mo ago> Choosing red is choosing to kill them. Choosing red is choosing to most likely kill yourself.
- rationalist 5mo agoI meant: Choosing blue is choosing to most likely kill yourself.
- lukasgelbmann 5mo agoThere’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.
- bot403 5mo agoI think it would be hard to prove you, individually, were the deciding vote to blue. Everyone who voted blue in such a case could think they were the one vote. And they could be right.
- margalabargala 5mo agoThere's an argument to be made that anyone choosing blue wants to die and you should respect their choice.
- throw310822 5mo ago> but why would anybody choose blue? there is no moral benefit to doing so. Why? To contribute saving the others who chose blue. How isn't that moral?
- denkmoon 5mo agoIf everyone picks red everyone lives, nobody needs saving by picking blue. Picking blue obliges others to pick blue to prevent your death, risking their own life in turn. Red is the moral option.
- atmavatar 5mo agoThere is no topic in which you'll get 100% of people to agree with you, and this is no different. There will always be people who choose blue. Arguing that you could ever get 100% of people to pick red is a coping mechanism to deal with the knowledge that your choice to pick red will result in some deaths (i.e., unless blue wins). That isn't to say I categorically judge anyone who would choose red. If there's good reason to believe a majority and especially a supermajority would choose red over blue, then choosing red is indeed the only rational choice, and convincing overs to do the same is the only way to save lives. What I like about the question is that it can be used to measure whether a society is low trust (majority red) or high trust (majority blue). However, where I take issue with the article is the assertion that it's impossible to get a blue majority, especially in the face of polling that suggests such a majority already exists. The article's claim that choosing red is the only moral choice seems at best to be self-delusion. The utility of choosing red and the morality of convincing others to follow suit maximizes the larger the currently expected pool of red gets, sure. However, while choosing blue has less and less personal downside the greater the expected majority of blue there is, similar to red, the morality of choosing blue maximizes the closer you get to an even split, since it's the product of the potential lives saved by going blue and the likelihood your individual vote will push it over the edge. Personally, I'd choose blue. I'd rather sacrifice myself than be party to the deaths of billions of people, so if there's even some hope at convincing the majority to go blue, I'd feel obligated to stay with it even if pre-polling suggests things initially tip toward red. I'd also be a bit wary of living in a society now devoid of anyone willing to self-sacrifice. I'm not convinced most people choosing red give that any thought.
- disruptiveink 5mo agoYou're thinking of this like a game where the only point is to "win". That's not how this would actually work in practice. Blue is the only moral and logical choice. If red gets over 50% and you picked it, therefore contributing to the "red" outcome, you are now effectively a murderer. Plus you now get to live in a world where everyone else alive are sociopaths that picked red, where everyone with a conscience is now dead. You also can't count on everyone picking red, or "if you picked blue, then you voted for suicide". It's reasonable to assume that, leading to the button press event, the usual low-trust, "every man by himself" types will rally for red, with the usual excuses, where high-trust societies will make it clear that it's your moral duty to pick blue, to get the votes to the 50% threshold and ensure no one dies. Around the world there would be debates nonstop that would permeate every social circle and families. You'd have huge arguments where the typical selfish types would scream at their family members "how dare you say you're going to press blue, do you want to leave your poor mother alone without their only child?", only pushing red-leaning voters more into red and blue-leaning voters more into blue. Plus, if you look at the possible outcomes: - Red wins, you picked red: Depending on where you live, a reasonable portion to the large majority of the population is now dead. The ones alive have, by definition, a strong bias towards individualism and noncooperation. It's extremely likely civilisation will collapse. Pick your favourite fictional dystopia and you might have a reasonable chance of it actually coming somewhat real. - Red wins, you picked blue: You are now dead, but at least you don't have to live in the world above. - Blue wins, you picked blue: Things carry on as normal and your conscience is safe in knowing that you didn't vote to kill and that over 50% of your fellow humans also didn't vote to kill. - Blue wins, you picked red: Things carry on as normal, but you now have a guilty conscience, or, if your vote was made public, people around you know you would have killed them to save your skin.
- renerick 5mo agoBy picking red you didn't contribute to anything at all, this button does absolutely nothing in practice. If you remove the red button, leaving the choice between pressing blue and not participating at all, the choice to not participate seems quite obvious. The red button adds some "weight" to the decision, but it's materially the same
- 5mo ago
- wavemode 5mo agoThat'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
- jonkho 5mo agoThe dilemma is that there are some people who are not smart enough to understand this and will press blue.
- gus_massa 5mo agoThere 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?
- enoint 5mo agoCrosstabbing the results into a state-by-state table would be interesting.
- selfhoster1312 5mo agoIt is a dilemma because pressing blue or red reveals about your political orientations and your inner empathic responses (i'm assuming both are correlated). Not everyone is wired the same or agrees on politics. Though in a sense, i agree it's not really a dilemma because only sociopaths pick red in real life. See also intense and spontaneous cooperation in times of crisis (catastrophe, war, etc). See also research on mutual aid as key factor in species development: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_Aid:_A_Factor_of_Evolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_Aid:_A_Factor_of_Evolut...
- davebren 5mo agoNah pretty much everyone picks red if it was a real scenario. It's also bizarre to call everyone picking red a sociopath because they don't want to gamble their life on some naive and idealistic view of humans.
- 5mo ago
- aldanor 5mo agoExactly, 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.
- enoint 5mo agoThe 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.
- cg5280 5mo agoRed is optimal from a self preservation perspective but is also the antisocial option. Picking blue saves everyone.
- xenocratus 5mo agoLet 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.
- polotics 5mo agoBlue is what gamble? there is no gain associated with choosing blue over red, just pointless risk-taking with only at best a zero outcome.
- hypeatei 5mo ago> 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.
- Hackbraten 5mo ago> If they don't pick red Why wouldn't they?
- selfhoster1312 5mo agoBecause most people have empathy and collective consciousness. Apart from ultra-capitalist individualists, most people choose trust and cooperations, because we're hard-wired for that and that's how species develop and thrive (see also, science).
- PierceJoy 5mo agoThey’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.
- lookACamel 5mo agoYou have it backwards. In prisoner's dilemma if both stay quiet they are still punished, just less so.
- ertgbnm 5mo agoThe 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.
- owenpalmer 5mo agoIs it worse? Wouldn't the red people end up with more like-minded red people?
- ertgbnm 5mo agoI 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.
- gpm 5mo ago> I don't think I want to live in a world in which they all died out. So the blue side would also include the people who are good at game theory...
- hx8 5mo agoBlue side definitely includes the population of people that would rather die than live in a world without blues and fully understand the consequences of that choice.
- throwaway173738 5mo agoThere’s no bad outcome for choosing red. The empathetic option is to convince everyone to vote red and that choosing blue is dumb.
- rayiner 5mo agoThe “chose blue” option weaponizes empathy to get people to make a counter-productive choice. If everyone follows their own rational self interest, then everyone wins.
- hx8 5mo agoIn 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.
- croes 5mo agoThey 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
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- nostrademons 5mo agoAlso interesting how the behavior of the repeated prisoner's dilemma differs from the repeated red/blue game. The repeated prisoner's dilemma converges to an optimal strategy of "tit for tat" - you signal your conditional cooperation, but also punish defections. The repeated red/blue game converges to an optimal strategy of always choosing red. The blue-pressers will most likely be wiped out in the first round, and if they are not, they will be wiped out in some round in the future, leaving only red-pressers left in the population.