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Comment by ertgbnm | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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.

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.

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

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

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".

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

> have to live in that worse world

What makes it a worse world?

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