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angry ♄at
313 posts
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@joe_shipman Well in reality there's no such thing as randomness, physics is deterministic...
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Newcomb’s problem is stupid because Omega can’t predict what randomizers will do, and if it punishes randomizers by treating them like two-boxers it can’t prove the person who got one empty box was really randomizing and not just impulsive, only make a lame excuse that he was.
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@RokoMijic @jbraunstein914 @tenobrus gold star to @tenobrus for finally getting roko to say the quiet part lmfao
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@jbraunstein914 @tenobrus well imagine a world without Greta Thunberg, without wokes, ... don't threaten me with a good time!
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@RokoMijic the transfer is in the risk taken on by blue voters in an attempt to save other blue voters. each red voter avoids the risk by incrementally increasing the risk to others, and again red voters in *reality* will only "win/be happy" if blue wins
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@RokoMijic @plasmarob why are you applying a nash equilibrium to a cooperative game?
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@plasmarob Red is the unique trembling hand perfect equilibrium of the game, it's the game theoretically stable equilibrium, and it minimizes long-run risk of ruin in iterated games.
It's the only rational choice
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@RokoMijic @WaseemWtesqie @allTheYud ok, my death counts as 10,000 stranger deaths. when you “crank the math” you should see an unstable equilibrium at 100% red and a stable equilibrium at >50% blue
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@WaseemWtesqie @allTheYud Well people are probably somewhat selfish so they will consider their own death as worse than that of a random person
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"What do they pick in dath ilan if everyone voting is a competent adult? Eg, no little kids."
I think it's still blue because adults go for the fault-tolerant equilibrium. But that's after encountering similar problems as 12-year-olds, where it starts more of a fight.
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@RokoMijic @DandruffDox @keyokkud voting red just increases the risk of that larger group dying though - even in the extreme examples I always see >30% dying, it’s never just a small number
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@DandruffDox @keyokkud sure, but you have to weigh the number of people who die.
A high chance of a small number dying is less bad than a slightly lower chance of a much larger group dying
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why the fuck would you press red? everyone survives if we press blue, it's guaranteed survival for everyone, by default everyone should be pressing blue, without even needing to coordinate. default state of human should be to want and guarantee best outcome, not settling.
vittorio@IterIntellectus
why would anyone even press blue?!?
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@wbic16 @RokoMijic sure, but it’s at least a real data point instead of the total vibe based claim that it’d be 10% blue irl
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@phaenone @RokoMijic in a fake hypothetical on Twitter, with higher than average IQ
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Why red teamers are losing:
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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@RokoMijic @abcampbell show me the proof, that’s only true if you value personal survival >> everything else afaict
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@abcampbell when you do the math it's almost impossible for blue to be correct
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game theory larpers see this q and tweet “how could ANYONE pick blue/red? It’s irrational!!”
a true game theorist sees it and goes “gee I wonder what the crossover threshold distribution looks like against measures of altruism & rationality?”
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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@wbic16 @RokoMijic sure, but clearly >>10% of people pick blue? I mean, blue won the poll
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@phaenone @RokoMijic yes, but going from 10% to 5% is way better than 10% to 45%
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@RokoMijic @wbic16 isn’t it much easier to avoid that species level threat by going from 49% to 51% blue instead of 49% red to 99% red?
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At the species level, red is the optimal choice. Small numbers of people die randomly every day to e.g. snake bites, lightning strikes etc. A small fraction of people accidentally pressing blue in a red majority is fine for the species.
But a result like 49% blue could actually cause a terminal decline that we never recover from
therefore the rational policy is that everyone should press red
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@RichardHanania Humans are stochastic beings in a stochastic universe! Reasonable people can disagree, which is why no poll is ever 100% anything. We should pick the choice that is tolerant to that!
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But everyone also survives if we all push red. Everyone acting in their own selfish interests actually gets you the optimal outcome.
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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I’d go further and say that everyone who says they would pick blue in an online survey would absolutely pick red if they actually found themselves in the situation and 100% believed they had a chance of dying if they picked blue.
Ari Paul ⛓️@AriDavidPaul
As a game theory question, it’s boring and easy. As a political question, it’s fascinating and reveals a great deal about why democracies struggle. Superficially, blue looks like the collectivist, selfless, moral answer. And as you’d expect, plenty of people not only assumed that to be true, but moralized aggressively at those who understand that’s not factually true. Anyone who picks red is guaranteed to live, including if everyone does it. It’s objectively the better and more moral choice for most and to recommend to others. Blue is a kind of stochastic suicide button.
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@shaggysurvives the planet would be fine, the species would be fine, but would you be fine? depends on what you do when you find out the grocery stores are empty
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wait is this true, like if half the planet died we would be fine right
shaggy@shaggysurvives
@SoundnVasion eh, i think the planet could survive a massive population drop tbh
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@theRafoel @minordissent I got the opposite answer from claude. Did you have memory turned on? claude.ai/share/10954a2c…
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@minordissent And to all saying it's a moral problem:
Even Claude, the so called "woke" AI, understands perfectly why pressing blue button is foolish:
claude.ai/share/5c2a1751…
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Just FYI blue votes think the question is “would you put your life at risk to save the lives of others?”. They genuinely lack the intellectual capacity to comprehend what it’s actually asking.
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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@voooooogel why? some percentage of people always vote blue, getting >>50% to commit to blue is much easier to do than literally 100% red
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imo this riles people up bc it feels like the prisoner's dilemma but is actually the opposite: the more coordination you get to do before the vote, the better red. in an uncoordinated scenario, press blue and start praying. if you can campaign for a year, campaign for red
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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@QiaochuYuan and this is exactly what the blues are criticizing the reds for
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@QiaochuYuan the game theory arguments don’t really hold water either. both blue and red are nash equilibria, but red is a minimum wrt personal risk where blue is a minimum wrt risk of any human dying. blue is much more failure tolerant, you only pick red if you value yourself >>> others
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i completely missed this discourse the first time so lemme try. i pressed blue without thinking about it, my gut reaction was "blue is prosocial and red is antisocial," on reflection this still seems right to me
galaxy-brain game theory arguments in favor of red are completely missing the point. as others have pointed out, empirically blue wins, and this is a test of theory of mind more than anything else. the actual outcome is determined by what everyone else who is not you actually does, not by what game theory says they should do
a certain kind of nerd thinks game theory is just the "correct" framework for reasoning about this type of situation and that is absolutely not true either and can be questioned on intellectual grounds and not just vibes. among other things game theory assumes every participant is perfectly selfish and perfectly """rational""" (and that this is common knowledge among the participants). this is just totally false as a description of the actual world! multiple parents pointed out that parents have to remember that this test includes their children. and obviously the vast majority of people have never even heard of game theory but they do know what selfishness and selflessness are
funnily enough there's LW stuff around exotic decision theories that's actually relevant here. one of them i would describe roughly as "when you make a decision you are choosing to live in a world where people like you make decisions like that" and i'd rather choose to live in a world where people like me are prosocial
"blue is prosocial and red is antisocial" is also a self-fulfilling prophecy, the more people who believe it the more true it becomes. so believing it is partly a bet on how much other people believe it, partly an act of hyperstition to make it true. few
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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@robertlasagna1 tbh I’d argue voting red is a failure to actually understand game theory, its just parroting badly what you think game theory should say
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its a pointless exercise to discuss what the results "mean", "what does this say about people who vote x", because the entire experiment is a trick, like most psychology experiments. It's actually a pretty good one of those. In psychology experiments you often trick the participants into thinking youre measuring one think, while you are secretly measuring something else. you tell them you are measuring a test on a computer where the more right answers you get, the more you get paid for participating. that you make 10 people do, but secretly one of them is an actor and you are observing their social dynamics after the actor encourages the other parties to cheat on the test so they will all make more money. something like that, classic setup. you distract the participants so they arent self concious about what you really want to observe. similar thing here: The red and blue buttons poll is not measuring moral fiber, but basic intelligence and the ability to hold multiple variables in your head at the same time, and run a quick decision tree in your head: what happens if I chose A and everyone else choses B. what happens if I chose A and everyone else choses A. what happens if I chose B and everyone else choses A. what happens if I chose B and everyone else choses B.
the results of this test, vote, discourse, has nothing to do with "selfishness" or "being a good person". It doesnt map to that or measure that in any useful way.
garfieldbot@robertlasagna1
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@phaenone This is just the same scenario but +$500 for each outcome
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To test the element of virtue signaling I would be interested in someone running this experiment with real money, like $500
As a thought experiment, Roko's blender gives a solid theory that it depends on how unreasonable people expect others to find the blue choice (cf blender)
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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