2. People who can read, but are too dumb to model or care about other people pick red.
3. People with enough intelligence for basic cognitive empathy pick blue.
4. People a little smarter and think through game theory overall pick red, and think they are smart for doing so.
5. People smarter than #4 and capable of seeing the big picture realize they don't want to leave people who choose #1 and #3 dead, so they pick blue.
6. People who realize the game theory optimal strategy is to announce you're pressing blue and convince everyone else to press blue, but privately press red.
There are probably more layers to this but the whole debate involves people getting upset at each other and accusing people of being in groups they are not. Red group #4 accuses blue group #5 of being #3 (not thinking beyond basic cognitive empathy). Blue group #5 accuses red group #4 of being group #2 (too dumb to model how others act). It's almost a perfect ragebait question.
As for which camp I am in, I am pressing blue and think you should too.
The framing in terms of colors helps the reader to interpret the thought experiment in terms of "groups" or "teams" — as if there's a "blue team" that you can join by helping, and help by joining. Many readers will quickly [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroop_effect ] intuitively choose to join the blue team, and then rationalize their choice as a strategy to help their blue teammates.
But in fact the thought experiment doesn't say there are teams or groups at all! The reader imposes that part on their own, unconsciously at first, because of the description's emphasis on colors.
I predict that running the same Twitter poll with flipped colors — so that red means "I die, unless a majority of my fellows pick red" and blue means "I survive no matter what" — would yield a majority for blue too. What was previously justified as the "virtuous" choice (blue) would now be justified as the "only intelligent" choice (blue).
Your entire logical chain, and your self importance, well, it explains why I'm always picking red. If you win and most pick blue, I'm safe, otherwise, I'm also safe.
You get to feel intellectually superior choosing the only option that can lead you to die. 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.
And where in the original post is specified who does "the murdering"? As far as I see blue pressers are explicitly putting themselves in harms way and red pressers have fuck all to do with it.
Just because someone jumped infront of the train and died doesn't mean the conductor is a murderer.
The red pressers commit murder. If people don't press red, the blue pressers don't die.
Train conductors and companies take reasonable precautions to avoid killing people - they aren't indifferent to it. If they just built tracks and started running trains on them without taking measures to avoid mowing people down they absolutely would be guilty of murder.
For it to be murder it would need to be unlawful (lets just assume this entire hypothetical is unlawful) and planned, so unless red pressers are specifically doing it to kill blue pressers it is factually not murder. Blue pressers have put themselves into the situation of possibly dying, which was entirely their choice and isn't the responsibility of anybody else (ignoring the "forced to press a button by some mystical force/being").
There is a reason why even "duty to rescue" laws usually do not require the rescuer to endanger themselves doing it, which in this case would most certainly be the case (going from 0% of death to "who knows, this is entirely out of my control but non-negligable chance of dying" % of death).
> If they just built tracks and started running trains on them without taking measures to avoid mowing people down they absolutely would be guilty of murder.
Most stations in the world do not have any guardrails to the tracks themselves. If someone decides to walk onto them as the early end of a station they will most likely die if the train is arriving. The tracks were there, the train was scheduled just the person decided to put themselves into harms way. At most it would be considered manslaughter.
> For it to be murder it would need to be unlawful
You have this backwards. It is unlawful because it is murder and we have laws against murder, not the other way around.
You might be thinking of "felony murder", which is a way some places promote crimes that wouldn't otherwise be murder to murder if someone happened to die in their commission (e.g. you intended to rob a bank, and the bank guard shot someone else trying to stop you, so now you get a murder charge) but that's not necessary when you are the one intentionally performing the action that you know will kill people.
> so unless red pressers are specifically doing it to kill blue pressers it is factually not murder.
This isn't how "intent" works. This would be like saying "I shot the opposing soccer player so I could win the soccer game, not so that he would die, so it's not murder". Intent requires that you intentionally performed the action that could result in death, not that death was the goal. I.e. the intent requirement means tripping and falling and accidentally pressing the red button wouldn't be murder, choosing to press it would be.
Similarly if you're falling off a building, and you somehow have the option to pull some bystander off the building throwing them to their certain death but saving yourself, it would be murder to do so.
> There is a reason why even "duty to rescue" laws usually do not require the rescuer to endanger themselves doing it,
We're not in a "duty to rescue" situation, merely in a "duty not to commit murder" one. There is no duty to press the blue button, merely one not to press the red button. That the scenario apparently leaves no other choice but to press the blue button is irrelevant.
You could imagine a 3-choice game. If more people press the red button than press the blue button everyone who presses the blue button dies, but you can also not press any button and not be at any risk. Pressing the red button is still murder, but you're under no obligation to press the blue button and put yourself at risk to potentially save other blue button pushers. Doing nothing is not a crime... but the red button is just as much murder in the 2-choice game as it is in the 3-choice game.
A single button labeled "Murder" appears out of nowhere appears, and if more than the majority of people press it, then the people who didn't press will die.
I'm pretty sure most people would just ignore and keep going with their day since why would everyone in the world be so cheesed to press the murder button?
Anyways, these are all reductive scenarios once outside of game theoretics (like this one partially is) - I find this ragebait question really funny because every minor reframing shows significant biases in how you map the theory of mind for the public, and makes the reductive question entirely different.
The framing leads many people to pick blue for its altruistic framing. Enough, in fact, that 50% quorum is honestly not difficult. A lot of red-advocates seem to have a False Consensus Effect going where they're convinced way more people than in reality will interpret this "dilemma" as "do you step in the human grinder in hopes of jamming it", and act accordingly.
A 70% or 90% requirement, or just explicitly framing it as "do you step into the human grinder" would make it vastly easier to aim for 100% red, but we're dealing with the literal words of the "everyone lives button" here.
(6) isn't correct. Left alone, everyone rational would pick red because it's the only logical option. You trying to convince them otherwise might end up getting 49% of the population killed.
You should try to get everyone to pick red, not blue.
Since if a rational actor would understand that the group can avoid ever dying to this game by simply choosing blue. There is no consequence for choosing blue - but there is a consequence for choosing red.
Also, regardless of these specific consequences, people who are rational/ethical will by default choose blue because it is a good color.
People's "by default" behavior will never define what is rational. You don't do polling to choose rationality.
If there is a game in which you choose between two buttons, you know everyone will get this same choice, and one button says that you definitely live and the other button says that there's a chance that you will die, adding more rules to the "maybe death button" can not make it a more rational choice.
This is actually an experiment that I would get behind doing in real life. I will pick the red button. We could do it every morning.
There are enough collective action problems with real and obvious benefits leading to catastrophe without the need to create more unnecessarily, or to have any confidence in in a world full of strangers' collective ability to solve them. Campaigning for blue is actually murder; you've encouraged a situation that may result in the deaths of 49% of the population.
There are two globally optimal solutions to this problem: > 50% pick blue (saving everybody), and 100% of the people pick red (saving everybody).
There is only one Nash equilibrium, which is for everybody to pick red. This is also strictly dominant for each player (if they choose red, they have a 100% chance of surviving, while if they choose blue, they only survive if > 50% of other people also choose blue). Knowing this, every participant has an incentive to choose red.
You can have a system that is rational even if the individual participants are irrational. Among the mechanisms for this are statistical (if any given member of the population frequently makes errors, but the errors average out to the overall rational solution) and selection (if all the irrational people die and drop out of the population, which seems to be the case here).
Only irrational people will pick blue. Let's say that's ~3% of the population. Trying to get another 47% of the population to pick blue risks losing all of them as well. That's not ethical.
You're missing the seventh group: trolls/assholes who will always press red but try to convince/muddy the waters about the blue button aiming to get a not-insignificant amount of <50% blue pushed to get people killed.
Prime candidate pool: 4chan.
If the question was restricted to local communities with 0 internet access, I would be more inclined to press blue.
You've structured ways to think about the problem in a hierarchy of intelligence, which is a classic economics mistake. People are not rational actors, and the primary factors determining who pushes the button will be self-preservation or group-preservation. Emotional factors.
Also, I think that's a simplistic view of intelligence.
Not to be political but we literally vote blue and red in politics and that can sometimes kill people literally in wars and some die silent deaths because of the impacts of their policies.
I would say that its hard to underestimate the social estimates of these things. A person who will genuinely be impacted by it themselves would fall into these traps more than one might think. History has many examples of fascism that some suggest that these periods of turmoil are the norm rather than exception.
Once again an obligatory message about how the world faces some genuine issues but instead of fixing them as a civilization, We would much rather prefer to have scapegoats and this goes both ways and might be true in a certain way and at a certain path both sides are too extreme to ever collaborate for the most part that a nation of once great strength might die a slow exhausting death if nothing changes.
I have come to the realization, The world has always been like this and it might always be like this. Its messy but also one can imagine this as a side effect as the mere coexsistence of our species in such massive numbers might demand polarization.
Some people create initial changes (for greed, genuineness etc.)
people then follow it (true belief)
people then meet other people and become friends with them and create a community.
new people are born or who change because of the community aspect (Since most things are nuanced, it is easy to frame anything and sometimes everything into such communities.)
The original people who made the thing dies/are out of power and new people from the community join.
these communities gain influence and decide the decision making but the heads of such communities are prone to narcissism or any other ways to draft as much as attention as possible as it seems that all attention is (good attention??)
More corruption follows, even the people of community are impacted and they might hear criticisms but the lock-in is too much. Stockholm syndrome.
Everyone else face the consequence and someone new creates a new movement and create another set of intial changes. Competition between multiple colors follows, we also see cooperation between red and blue to prevent outside competition.
In such sense, change creates change and cycle repeats. It is up to our interpretation on if there is any idea itself which can remain logical if its implementation or implementors get corrupted in a sense similar to erosion of the main values.
more than anything, humanity wants a community. a human somehow wants acceptance and validation for himself and he is selfish in the sense that he will put a blind eye sometimes if he isn't virtuous to damage outside his house (sometimes inside as well) and he wants a community because that is the only way he functions within a society of millions and billions while monkeys cant operate on more than hundreds.
More than a political critique, my point is, we should be more aware of this human tradeoff from empirical evidences and open up this blind spot and perhaps be more aware about it.
> 6. People who realize the game theory optimal strategy is to announce you're pressing blue and convince everyone else to press blue, but privately press red.
A lot of this analysis depends on accurately guessing how people will react, so it's probably hard to say any strategy is game theory optimal without a lot of unrealistic simplifying assumptions.
In a world where you're able to convince a lot of people anything, it might better to convince everyone to press red. If it looks like 99.99% of people will press red without your influence, you're probably best off spending your time convincing the .01% who might press blue not to do so.
It also has the upside of not making you a dirty liar. I wonder, what would Kant think about this hypothetical?
This is one of only a few analyses that really captures the big picture. The other ones make the point that it is impossible to get a group of more than three people to make a unanimous decision, so the best decision is one that takes that into account.
Yes. Group #6 is optimal because everyone in group #4 appears selfish and uncaring for others. Group #5 has the moral high ground, but actually voting with group #5 is risky. Therefore the best option is to virtue signal you are in group #5 and get the moral benefits, but vote with group #4 and guarantee survival. Group #6 gives you the benefits of both.
This is similar to Newcomb's two-box paradox, where the optimal strategy is deception. The winning play is to preemptively convince everyone you're only going to take the second box, but then actually take both.
Missing the layer where blue is my favorite color and therefore I will always choose blue. From this perspective, all other reasonings lack basic empathy and/or intelligence.
This question is genius like the way secret hitler is a genius game.
All the different ways to frame it and think about it, and the balance between them all.
Saying "I would press blue" is different than actually pressing blue. Many people have insisted if I strike it rich, I'm going to give all my money away, and then... they don't.
Oh and the amount of ways you can ask it differently "If more than 50% vote for Trump/Kamala everyone lives, but if less than 50% all Trump/Kamala voters die" - and then seeing how the responses change. And the way the whole calculus changes depending on what other parameters could be added/presumed.
Once again just such a good rage-bait question.
Though I can't for the life of me figure out why people get so mad at people's answers, unless it's like in secret hitler where someone accuses of me being a fascist, and we get all mad, but we all laugh at the end because it's just a silly game, like this silly but fun question.
1. People who can't read pick randomly.
2. People who can read, but are too dumb to model or care about other people pick red.
3. People with enough intelligence for basic cognitive empathy pick blue.
4. People a little smarter and think through game theory overall pick red, and think they are smart for doing so.
5. People smarter than #4 and capable of seeing the big picture realize they don't want to leave people who choose #1 and #3 dead, so they pick blue.
6. People who realize the game theory optimal strategy is to announce you're pressing blue and convince everyone else to press blue, but privately press red.
There are probably more layers to this but the whole debate involves people getting upset at each other and accusing people of being in groups they are not. Red group #4 accuses blue group #5 of being #3 (not thinking beyond basic cognitive empathy). Blue group #5 accuses red group #4 of being group #2 (too dumb to model how others act). It's almost a perfect ragebait question.
As for which camp I am in, I am pressing blue and think you should too.