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

shankwiler.com

81–90 of 333 posts

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

#81
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…

[deleted]

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

#82
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

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

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#85
post #76

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…

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.

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

#86
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#87
post #32
post #9

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 tha…

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.

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

#88
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is it worse? Wouldn't the red people end up with more like-minded red people?

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.

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

#89
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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

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

#90
post #4

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.

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