Goat Cheese
914 posts
All the red button pushers are mad but as you can see by the results, they lived. And they will live to cry about it.
Tim Urban@waitbutwhy
Everyone in the world has to take a private vote by pressing a red or blue button. If more than 50% of people press the blue button, everyone survives. If less than 50% of people press the blue button, only people who pressed the red button survive. Which button would you press?
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@odskkk182544 @SenseiAnother I never required saving in the first place and I'm not responsible for anyone who presses the suicide button.
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@SenseiAnother red pressers don't seem to have an mind at all, wanting to genocide 49% of humanity , be glad blue votes saved you alternative to living with red pressers
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"No theory of mind" for the most basic logical sequence is exactly why I do not believe anyone with IQ above 85 can ever be a leftist/socialist/etc.
As someone said before, the right has "theory of mind" for the left, but the left never has "theory of mind" for the right.
just matt@questionableway
red is an unbelievably phenomenally disgustingly selfish decision and i do not have theory of mind for anyone who would choose it
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@SenseiAnother I mean, yeah I get that, but I genuinely just don't understand the logic of picking the blue button, there is literally nothing to gain picking blue if 100% of people picking red would mean guaranteed survival for everyone? It's the only correct option.
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@jankulveit Blue is an unstable equilibrium. Iterate the game ten thousand times and the blue strategy will eventually be completely culled by the first loss per sample.
Red never loses and in fact can't lose. The game will regress to red in the long term.
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Funny little illustration of levels of understanding of game theory and rationality, or: why basic game theory is evil
1. Non-sociopaths going by intuition: blue sounds pro-social, blue
2. People who reason explicitly and use some naive game theory or naive rationality: red!
3. People who actually understand game theory: blue (if you want an explicit reason, because of trembling hand, Schelling points, theory of mind)
A simple explanation of "why 3." is ...imagine you are forced to play the game tens of thousand of times, at random points of your life from birth to death. What strategy you want to play?
"1." being in agreement with "3." often makes sense if you think about the origins of "1.".
Unfortunately there are few pieces of knowledge which in expectation makes you more dumb and more evil if you don't progress beyond the basic level; some of the more prominent I know about are basics of game theory, especially prisoners dilemma; basic econ; Elephant in the brain
vittorio@IterIntellectus
why would anyone even press blue?!?
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@redtachyon They want you to be willing to needlessly gamble your life for nothing more than social conformity.
They feel smug about living in a society of lemmings.
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Why do people treat this as some kind of a dunk?
If I vote red, and then blue wins, why should I be coping about anything? I don't give a shit. Buttons are pressed, everyone lives, cool. I'm not making a prescription of "everyone should press red", I'm just choosing for myself.
Danielle Fong 🔆@DanielleFong
get game theory mogged once again, game theory advocates. everybody lives, and now you're in copeaganda about how you're not mean and wrong
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@VacuityNomad @techbr0ther @IterIntellectus Red is betting on their survival actually.
In the event that they survive, I want to also be alive to care for them.
If they pick blue it's wildly improbable that my choice can save them, but if they picked red it's very possible my choice will orphan them.
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If you vote blue you are betting on your kids survival if you vote red you are betting against it. The idea that your vote "wont matter" is bullshit, think about all the cells in your body that cooperate to keep you alive. If they all decide to abandon ship and save themselves they literally kill you.
If you vote blue you did everything in your power to save your child, if your child voted red or blue you did the absolute best you could for either outcome whereas with voting red you only help your child in the context of voting red. Now if you know which side is going to win that's different but this assume you dont.
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@minordissent WWII was whites pressing the blue button and now we're going extinct.
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Blue voters are so full of shit on so many levels.
1. The question is not over whether you are selfless its whether you think most people are. Even the most holier than thou lib believes most people are selfish and thus would not press blue.
2. If everyone just presses red no one dies. blue adds unnecessary death.
3. They are moralizing the experiment to ask “what is the good person answer” rather than honestly reflecting on what theyd do if it really happened. I guarantee you that you put any person in that room and say “if you vote blue but most people dont, we will SHOOT YOU” that not one single person will take that risk, especially given #1.
Tim Urban@waitbutwhy
Everyone in the world has to take a private vote by pressing a red or blue button. If more than 50% of people press the blue button, everyone survives. If less than 50% of people press the blue button, only people who pressed the red button survive. Which button would you press?
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@StatisticUrban And go down with them. Who will care for the babies left alive after you are purged?
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The original question specified "everyone in the world."
There's a critical mass of young children/babies who would not, under any circumstances, be able to understand the question, and would pick randomly. Voting blue is the only way to save them.
just matt@questionableway
last thing i’ll say about the button is that it’s pretty strange how few red voters change their position upon learning there is a substantial contingent of blue voters
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@BlueRepublik Smaller sample size than the original poll, and limited to just Americans.
Nobody is going to post a bar graph that will convince me to increase my chance of death by infinity%
Not risking my life for a miniscule chance of saving someone who can save themselves at no cost.
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Ok this is probably the most compelling data I’ve seen, Blue is the best choice, I was way too pessimistic about society
I’m somewhat curious how the world population would do still but this calms my nerves a lot
Of course, the phrasing of the question in this specific way/
David Shor@davidshor
We asked this to a large sample of nationally representative Americans - blue wins by a 3:1 margin!
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In this bell curve, 96% of the people press blue.
Not Aldous Huxley@AldousH57500603
@waitbutwhy Red, obviously, but I think there is a bell curve meme situation where the stupid and evil people press red, the stupid and altruistic people press blue, and a small minority far under 50% of reasonable people presses red I would rather the red people die then the blue
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@ItalianChud @TierZoo That is also a hero complex just as much as those that choose the blue button trying to save the naive BBPs.
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@___Sean______ @UsingLyft I think our society is run by blue-signalers who know they are picking red
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@UsingLyft Sounds like you think there is hope for the people who pick blue.
Do you think our society today is run by people who pick blue or red? Are the people who vote for judges who release violent repeat offenders back onto our streets blue pickers or red pickers?
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I think a lot of people believe they would pick blue, but in reality once they get there they’ll realize there’s a really great chance they will die and that maybe some of their family freaked out at the last minute and didn’t want to die and picked red, and then they pick red.
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@NathanpmYoung @selectsand Thus you are responsible for your own death for pressing blue, not anyone else.
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@selectsand I think we are responsible some share of the predictable outcomes of our actions.
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The next one of these that goes viral, I commit to voting blue, because I reckon we are not close enough to doing the ‘all switch to red at once’ to not have it ‘go badly’. So if you vote red next time you’re ‘killing’ me too.
Tim Urban@waitbutwhy
Everyone in the world has to take a private vote by pressing a red or blue button. If more than 50% of people press the blue button, everyone survives. If less than 50% of people press the blue button, only people who pressed the red button survive. Which button would you press?
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@NathanpmYoung Nobody is making you press the suicide button dude. You made that choice, and I'm not responsible for your decision.
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I am not a hyper individualist. I do not disconnect myself from my fellow people.
In general I believe the 50/50 mob tends to do the correct thing. Not every time, that's why it's a 50/50 mob. I'd rather go down with the ship, so to speak, in the hope that no one will die rather than witness a mass death event.
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@nic_carter Society of people who will jump into the riptide umprompted, requiring the lifeguard to come and save them, and now there's a significant chance they both drown.
Selfish and short sighted.
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Red is unambiguously the "game theoretically correct" position, but it's actually encouraging that the majority still picks Blue, because it means that a majority of people are willing to take on meaningful personal risk to save their neighbor, which I think is beautiful
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Nobody dies. We discover we unanimously voted red. Then the real existential dread kicks in lol.
bird@oliveegger
I want a dystopian novel about the aftermath of a red victory. Characters navigating an “every man for himself” society, maybe the main character is someone who virtue signaled blue but chose red in the end
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