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.

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.

Confusingly, 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".

It has some conflicting circular dependencies in assumptions which is why the thought experiment is kind of dumb overall.

I 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_Evolut...

"Empathy" isn't a binary in this context. You can exercise empathy and aid your community by making sure everyone you know votes red. That's the kind of cooperation that humans have evolved with. What you're talking about is undifferentiated, universal empathy, where someone would be willing to risk the lives of those close to them for a greater chance to help those who are outside their immediate reach to persuade.

I suspect if you played this game, lots of tight-knit, high-cooperation groups would undertake coordinated campaigns to ensure the survival of their members by ensuring everyone votes red.

Well that's exactly how empathy plays out in real life. It's not an abstract feeling. People often put their lives at stake for others, which is something game theorists can't really appreciate.

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.

> 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...

Blue 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.

There’s no bad outcome for choosing red. The empathetic option is to convince everyone to vote red and that choosing blue is dumb.

The “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.

The bad outcome for choosing red is that people that choose blue die.

On 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.

Literally suicidal empathy. Although the numbers would change drastically if it was real, it's easy to virtue signal in hypotheticals.

Why are you assuming they are more empathetic and loving than reds? Are stupidity and empathy correlated?

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...

So that Galt's Gulch could source a short order cook, Ayn Rank explained that a renown philosopher gave up his career to become one.

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

In 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.

Yes! There is an excellent video on the subject, though it is in french (https://youtu.be/lo7iJnq_U9M?si=FFz6iHI_W4lz9V8D)

He did extensive polling with different framings to see how these affect the outcome.

But why would those pick blue? They have the same incentive to just pick red.

Physician assisted suicide is legal in some places.

There are some people very upset that physician assisted suicide is legal anywhere.

People may pick blue wishing to die. People advocating others to pick blue are either would-be serial killers or would outlaw physician assisted suicide given the chance.

I 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

I guess you base that surprising "half" on the transparent analogy with politics, and so you think real-world Democrats will press blue to assert their Democrattiness. This is probably true. However, since this is the internet, and being a Democrat is associated with being online and living in a city, there are probably more than 50% blue-pressers, as shown in the poll. Just like in the real world, you won't change that ratio whichever way you vote in the poll. If swaying opinion is within a voter's control, then your "choosing" is meaningful but the "half" becomes meaningless. If swaying opinion isn't within the voter's control, it's "choosing" that becomes meaningless, and the fate of the half is already sealed by cultural forces beyond our control.

I disagree that the hypothetical maps onto politics. Voting for democrats is mostly a vote for someone else (billionaires, etc.) to shoulder additional burdens to achieve some positive end. By contrast, this game involves serious risk to one's self and family. Lots of people would vote to raise corporate taxes to increase funding for schools in Baltimore. But those people aren't going to move their kids to Sandtown to help increase the property tax base.

I think if you played the game for real, blue would get maybe 5% of the vote, tops.

I don’t see them as selfless I see them as unintelligent.

Technically 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.

If your goal is to reduce the number of dead, is red really the one to campaign for?

If 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".

The end of the article mentions it. Some people are not purely rational decision makers, some people are altruists who know others are not purely rational, etc.

By choosing red you will kill some people.

Bringing rationalism - or whatever - clouds the discussion.

Blue is purely a win-win for me, so it's rational to only choose blue. Reds have their own value judgement.

"Rationality" is a useless quality to debate here.

> Blue is purely a win-win for me

Dying is a win for you?

Either everyone lives or you don't get to experience the mess that follows when red wins cause you're dead. Sounds like a strictly better option indeed.

Or choosing blue allows them to feel self-righteous while not actually at any risk since this isn't real. Virtue signalling is the ethic of our day.

Maybe people who choose blue do so because they assume there’s some kind of monkey paw involved in the choosing the red option, like your wife and kids die or something like that

Same as with the original dilemma. Most people are not sociopaths and will choose to cooperate with empathy for everyone else. That's just how species survive and adapt. (1) Alternatively, some people believe that sustained cooperation is in itself a sustained equilibrium. (2)

Most of the world is not as individualistic as Silicon Valley engineers believe in their own ivory towers after decades of reading Ayn Rand.

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_Aid:_A_Factor_of_Evolut...

(2) https://www.optimallyirrational.com/p/the-true-story-of-the-...

but in the original dilemma you have an advantage by taking a choice at the disadvantage of the other.

But there is no advantage here to pick blue, nobody should pick blue because if we all pick red we all win.

Somewhat true, though in my view ensuring everyone lives sounds like a fair advantage. An interesting variant would be if >50% vote red, only those who voted red die.

Or maybe the colors were chosen knowingly to mess with the minds of the US voters? Me as a non-american I would choose blue, damn those mind games I'll go with MY beliefs that the world deserves a chance - and die by them if need to. Because the whole rationalization in the post just underlines the feeling I have about US politics nowadays: let the world burn if I can get once more mayo on my burger.

PS and the whole article may be bait to trigger exactly this kind of proofs.

> have to live in that worse world

What makes it a worse world?

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.

The 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.

They 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.

I fail to see how anyone could choose blue, the certain scenario is everyone chooses red, and this whole post is a nothingburger.

> 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.

The 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.

I 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.

To 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.

Practically at least one person will choose blue for lulz or curiosity or as a moral compass. Shall we punish them? How does it affect survival of whole population in a long term?

You fail to see how anyone could choose blue, even though there are plenty of people on the internet and even in the comments here who are stating they would choose blue?

The blues sound like idiots.

Press the red button you survive, or press the blue button you might die

Press red and you might kill.

Only the people who have chosen through their own free will to gamble with their lives - it's their choice.

Driving on a road while fully abiding road rules might kill people who aren't doing that (e.g. pedestrians walking across the highway).

> Choosing red is choosing to kill them.

Choosing red is choosing to most likely kill yourself.

I meant:

Choosing blue is choosing to most likely kill yourself.

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.

I 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.

There's an argument to be made that anyone choosing blue wants to die and you should respect their choice.

> 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?

If 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.

There 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.

[delayed]

You'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.

By 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

You're ignoring the dimension of universalism versus insularity. In practice, high-trust, high-cooperation communities are also insular. They cooperate within their community, but not people outside their community. Those communities can ensure the survival of their members by using their social infrastructure to ensure everyone votes red.

Assuming that the red/blue choice doesn't have a theological valance, you'd have a lot of tight-knit Mormon, Muslim, and Orthodox Jewish communities surviving in the red scenario. I suspect also all the highly authoritarian Asian countries.

> 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.

Anyone who picked blue gambled their own lives over nothing. There is nothing altruistic about pressing the blue button and especially nothing altruistic about trying to convince people to press the blue button. The altruistic thing is to convince everyone that they don't need to kill themselves by pressing the blue button.

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.

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.

> 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.

If this was a real thing I’d pick red and then stand outside the red/blue clinic with a sign urging everyone to pick red.

> 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).

Humans are conditionally cooperative

When we suspect some people are not cooperative then it gets reciprocated

> 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.

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.

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...

Nah 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.

Believe what you want, the numbers disagree with you. As for the sociopath label, assuming psychopathy and sociopathy are the same thing, egocentrism and impaired empathy are central traits.

So I guess a sociopaths...

> the numbers disagree with you

It was a pool in X where people that press blue were not going to die. They just lied to feel better.

Try again with money, everyone puts $1000 so it's real but nobody dies. Red pushers get their money back, everyone if >50% press blue. I like my version where 10% have miss wired buttons, so the % of people that will vote "incorrectly" is inside the model. Send the lost money to an Khmer Rouge advocacy group so nobody feels good about losing the money.

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’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.

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

Also 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.