4 ms·
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 worl
by ertgbnm 5mo ago
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.
- 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.
- JuniperMesos 5mo agoOn the other hand, maybe a world where everyone who is bad at game theory is dead is a better world to live in, regardless of how nice or empathetic they are.
- davebren 5mo agoLiterally suicidal empathy. Although the numbers would change drastically if it was real, it's easy to virtue signal in hypotheticals.
- juggina 5mo ago[dead]
- swed420 5mo agoYes, 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.
- owenpalmer 5mo agoPerhaps red is selfish, but blue is most certainly foolish.
- swed420 5mo agoOr blue doesn't want to live in the world where only selfish/cynical people remain.
- card_zero 5mo agoConfusingly, though, as you are of course a nice person, if you vote red you'd demonstrate that some red voters are nice, and then the choice is less severe. Then voting red is like "I embrace humanity, warts and all", while voting blue is like "I cannot tolerate sharing the planet with anyone even slightly impure".
- swed420 5mo agoIt has some conflicting circular dependencies in assumptions which is why the thought experiment is kind of dumb overall.
- selfhoster1312 5mo agoI would personally assert it's foolish to pretend a species can survive without empathy and mutual aid. That's certainly not how humanity (or most, if not all, species) developed so far: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_Aid:_A_Factor_of_Evolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_Aid:_A_Factor_of_Evolut...
- rayiner 5mo ago
- enoint 5mo agoYes and yes. Without the core of blue workers, red people will need to open Atlas Shrugged about how to assign short order cook duty.
- rayiner 5mo agoI don’t think short order cooks are know for being that especially emphatic. Along with most of the folks who “do stuff”—build roads, maintain power lines, etc.
- selfhoster1312 5mo agoThere's actually many scientific studies which tend to show that empathy is inversely correlated with wealth. That's popular knowledge as old as class war, but it seems there may be scientific evidence to support that. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/277354081_Social_class_affects_neural_empathic_responses https://www.researchgate.net/publication/277354081_Social_cl... https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1118373109 https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1118373109 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2214140520300359 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S22141...
- enoint 5mo agoSo that Galt's Gulch could source a short order cook, Ayn Rank explained that a renown philosopher gave up his career to become one.
- bennettnate5 5mo agoI'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?
- empthought 5mo agoOf 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.
- bennettnate5 5mo agoSo 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
- frotaur 5mo agoYes! There is an excellent video on the subject, though it is in french (https://youtu.be/lo7iJnq_U9M?si=FFz6iHI_W4lz9V8D https://youtu.be/lo7iJnq_U9M?si=FFz6iHI_W4lz9V8D) He did extensive polling with different framings to see how these affect the outcome.
- rayiner 5mo agoIn the Slashdot days, I suspect the weight of views would be on the side of "remove the warning labels, let Darwin sort it out." Interesting change in "hacker" culture.
- riffraff 5mo agoBut why would those pick blue? They have the same incentive to just pick red.
- jerkstate 5mo agoI wonder if red choosers really don’t understand that they are choosing to live in a world where half of all people, the more selfless half, are dead. It’s like living through a nuclear war except all of the nice people are gone, not just a random sample
- hx8 5mo agoTechnically for red to win the number of dead people will be between 0% and 49.999% of the population. The entire reason to campaign for red is to reduce the dead percentage.
- jerkstate 5mo agoIf your goal is to reduce the number of dead, is red really the one to campaign for?
- card_zero 5mo agoIf we imagine people will ignore their real-world political tribalism: Voting blue is voting to possibly die, either because you want death or in risky solidarity with others who voted to possibly die, who may have chosen by mistake. Voting red is voting for those interested in death to die, along with those who chose blue by mistake, and along with anybody who voted blue in support of those who voted blue by mistake. So we can have a blue campaign that says "we must not allow even one voter to die, we must all pull together and vote blue", and a red campaign that says "please don't be a giant crowd of idiots who risk death, just accept that maybe two voters aren't going to make it because one was depressed and the other had an involuntary hand movement, and everybody else play it safe and vote red". This is a ridiculous situation, and Jonathan Swift unfortunately died in 1745, so the best commentary I can offer is "I don't know".
- TiredOfLife 5mo ago> have to live in that worse world What makes it a worse world?