Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

If more than 50% press blue, everyone survives. Red pressers always survive

shankwiler.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 333 posts

Re: If more than 50% press blue, everyone survives. Red pressers always survive

#171

Post by gpm »

pessimizer wrote: post #166
gpm wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You literally can fix it, you just need at least half the word to press blue to fix it.

You literally can't fix it, you need half the world's help to do it. Things that I need billions of people's help for are on the top of the list of things that I literally can't do.

By this logic I also can't fly across the ocean in a modern airplane, but I obviously can.

We can get together and do great things. Whether that's science and industry or simply not murdering everyone who doesn't press red.

Re: If more than 50% press blue, everyone survives. Red pressers always survive

#172

Post by selfhoster1312 »

rayiner wrote: post #138
enoint wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I 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.

There'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_cl...

https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1118373109

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S22141...

Re: If more than 50% press blue, everyone survives. Red pressers always survive

#173

Post by ItsMonkk »

throwaway173738 wrote: post #147
ItsMonkk wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why would a red picker ever lie about it? If I can get all 8 of my fellow players to pick red then we’re all safe. If it’s a button I’ll just break the blue button or wire it to red.

A selfish player will claim that they will coordinate with the group, and then vote red in private. A coordinating player will pick what the group chooses, whether that be red or blue. You are talking about a coordinating player here. Yes, in this case if all players agree to red, it's obvious you should all pick red. It's completely safe.

Re: If more than 50% press blue, everyone survives. Red pressers always survive

#174

Post by pessimizer »

onurcel wrote: post #23

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 the…

That doesn't hold up in comparison to this experiment, in which the best outcome from pressing the blue button is that you're rewarded in exactly the same way as if you had pushed the red button.

If the choice is between:

a) continuing to live under bad conditions if you press the red button, but if more than half press the red button everyone who pressed the blue button dies, and

b) if more than 50% press the blue button, everyone will live under good conditions,

then the differences between living under red conditions and under blue conditions becomes a factor. If red conditions and blue conditions are identical, hide the blue button, it is evil.

Re: If more than 50% press blue, everyone survives. Red pressers always survive

#175

Post by selfhoster1312 »

Hackbraten wrote: post #126
hypeatei wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> If they don't pick red Why wouldn't they?

Because 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).

Re: If more than 50% press blue, everyone survives. Red pressers always survive

#176

Post by paufernandez »

llm_nerd wrote: post #152
hx8 wrote: post #17

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 p…

>Some people will die if red wins. Why? The logical conclusion of this game is that everyone presses red. There is no reason to press blue and leave it to chance. The article talks about it, but without further rules it would be absolutely nonsensical to press blue. Like if there was some additional rule like "oh and if more than 90% press red, everyone dies" or something, it gets more interesting. But as is everyone…

That some people play survival all the time because "that's what life is" does not mean that humanity doesn't have pockets of more quiet, non-competitive environments where blue pressers thrive. Humans have had a lot of periods where they were not being "just animals".

But I guess everyone thinks the world is like he wants it to be in this respect.

Re: If more than 50% press blue, everyone survives. Red pressers always survive

#177

Post by selfhoster1312 »

rationalist wrote: post #164
cg5280 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Red is optimal from a self preservation perspective but is also the antisocial option. Picking blue saves everyone.

> Picking blue saves everyone. Everyone picking red saves everyone.

Technically correct, which is the wrong kind of correct. That's an individual framing of a collective problem which fails to capture the social and political ramifications, and all the empathy and solidarity associated with the choice.

Re: If more than 50% press blue, everyone survives. Red pressers always survive

#178

Post by [deleted] »

pessimizer wrote: post #166
gpm wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You literally can fix it, you just need at least half the word to press blue to fix it.

You literally can't fix it, you need half the world's help to do it. Things that I need billions of people's help for are on the top of the list of things that I literally can't do.

[deleted]

Re: If more than 50% press blue, everyone survives. Red pressers always survive

#179

Post by astrocat »

gpm wrote: post #171
pessimizer wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You literally can't fix it, you need half the world's help to do it. Things that I need billions of people's help for are on the top of the list of things that I literally can't do.

By this logic I also can't fly across the ocean in a modern airplane, but I obviously can. We can get together and do great things. Whether that's science and industry or simply not murdering everyone who doesn't press red.

gpm's point is that it's a collective action issue. And even if one individual can't fix is, we can with a movement. And we SHOULD care about things like this. We're fairly familiar with these: big problem, only solved if enough people do a thing. But in general, almost all collective action problems we face are ones where either:

a. every incremental actor improves the overall picture with their individual choice (however small, even if it takes a threshold to be "solved": think, recycling, vaccines) b. every individual actor actor's choice has no _direct_ impact until some threshold is met (maybe voting?)

THIS situation, however is very different: every individual choice for blue makes things WORSE up until the threshold is met. And not just a little, but a LOT worse. That's not normal collective action territory, so we shouldn't be assuming the same kind of reasoning. The stakes of missing the threshold are not "aw shucks" or "keep trying, there's more chances later!" The stakes of missing the threshold are "everyone who cares about the threshold is dead."

I can't think of anything IRL that falls into this category?

Re: If more than 50% press blue, everyone survives. Red pressers always survive

#180

Post by selfhoster1312 »

gus_massa wrote: post #64
jonkho wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It 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_Evolut...

Post reply on HN