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Comment by owenpalmer | Hacker News Reader

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.

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

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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