@UShouldn_tCare @DrDaniS Where is the line for your family? Your brother's wife? What about her sister? What about your great grandparents and extended family? You aren't thinking this through.
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Jacob
6K posts
@Str_Eng_Jake @DrDaniS If your family is retarded enough to press blue, it's on them. I'm fairly confident mine isn't. And I have no guilt for the suicides of blue pickers. They could just not do that. Actually the world may be better of on avarage from their deaths.
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This is quite extraordinary.
Peter doesn't understand the pay-off matrix.
Many people in the replies have tried to explain the pay-off matrix.
He doesn't understand it: "The entire red case is predicated on a red majority."
No, Peter. The entire blue case is predicated on a blue majority.
If you choose blue, and you find yourself in a blue minority, you die.
If you choose red, you live - no matter what anyone else chooses.
"But blue is winning. So it's not dumb." Yes, Peter, it's very dumb. You are gambling your life on the majority of your fellow citizens being as inept as you are at understanding a simple 2x2 pay-off matrix.
It's like having two cups of water, one of which you know contains arsenic, and an arsenic test kit. Instead of using the test kit, you decide to drink one to find out whether it has arsenic. And then you insist that since you didn't die, it wasn't a dumb thing to do!
For the love of God, can as many people as possible follow the link back to the original poll and vote "red" - Peter needs this one to play out both ways.
x.com/waitbutwhy/sta…
Peter Hague@peterrhague
@HiThere144 But blue is winning. So it’s not dumb. The entire red case is predicated on a red majority
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@Str_Eng_Jake @DrDaniS Gun to your head. If you pick one button, you're guaranteed to survive. If you pick the other, there's a high risk that you will die. Easy to call people evil and cowards when your exposure to this choice is purely hypothetical. If it were real, the choice wouldn't be so easy.
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Half your family will disagree and say that they are voting blue. Your brother may vote red, but will your brother's wife vote red? What about her family? What about her sister's husband? Your family is not a clear line that you can control.
You lack the mental capacity to understand how this would actually play out. You have a shallow understanding, or you jump to conclusions too quickly.
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@msbstories I would simply command my family to push red. Easy.
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It's just this again.
William M Briggs - Statistician to the Stars!@FamedCelebrity
Why does this question make people so angry.
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@Son_of_Mars_III Incorrect. I care more about my family than I do for myself. That is THE reason I must press blue.
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@Devon_Eriksen_ Not the same in the real world, but it is the same in some imaginary world that doesn't matter.
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You are offered a pill.
Anyone who takes the pill, dies, unless over 50% of humanity takes the pill.
Obviously, you cannot be affected by the pill if you don't take it.
Is the same moral scenario as the red and blue buttons?
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@DrunkKobold This is the game theory. Blue wins easy in the real world. Any other option requires a misunderstanding of the real world or a hatred for society in general.
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Game theory is not being used to determine which choice is popular, but which choice is winning. The red button runs 0 risk of anything bad happening to you, and 0 risk to anyone else unless they willingly inflict risk upon themselves for no gain.
Everyone who pressed red won
Peter Hague@peterrhague
Amazing how lots of self appointed game theory experts confidently asserting that blue is the stupid choice. But every time this poll is run blue wins. Not only is the “game theory” answer predicting the wrong outcome, its explanatory power is based on it being able to predict the right answer. So it’s doubly wrong.
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@Str_Eng_Jake @EigenGender I can tell you're a leftist by how many words you hard to throw into this picture to frame the answer
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the correct choice in this scenario is obviously whatever the majority is and so it’s an empirical question described as a game theory question
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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@panickssery @EigenGender Because they recognize how these votes work in the real world and my chart ia accurate.
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@Three_of_Threes @plasmarob Poll your entire family without priming them and report back.
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@Str_Eng_Jake @plasmarob Most of my family isn't dumb enough to walk into the giant blender hoping 50% of the world is stupid enough to do the same. You just don't need to walk into the blender.
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I would risk my life and die for people who are bad at expected value problems.
Diane Yap@RealDianeYap
“Would you risk your life for people who are bad at expected value problems?” The answer is straightforward. Either you care about the outcome or you care about looking like a heckin’ good person.
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@shaggysurvives This post requires a combination of altruism and strength that few posess.
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i want there to be a third button that kills the people who pressed the red button
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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@ParkDerekS 40 to 60% of people vote blue in the real world. You can't vote for your family. And it's not coordinated.
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Q: But I want to pick blue so everyone can live.
Nice answer: IF EVERYONE PICKS ACCORDING TO THEIR BEST INTEREST, EVERYONE LIVES.
Mean answer: If everyone picks according to their best interest, only the people who are too dumb to realize what their best interests are, will die.
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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This isn’t the prisoner’s dilemma. The key feature of the prisoner’s dilemma is that both parties are better off if they cooperate and palpably worse off if they both defect. The strategy here is obvious: Press the red button because you guarantee your own survival and every non-suicidal person would do the same.
The prisoner’s dilemma can’t be “solved” in this way. It requires a complex social system to enforce norms among the criminals to not defect and punish those who do. The mob already figured this out: Kill people who defect.
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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@Senbon_Z @WomanDefiner It's a private vote, no virtue signals here.
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@WomanDefiner The only people in the world pressing blue are the virtue signalers. Literally everyone else is pressing red.
This is how you get absurd amounts of foreigners on government assistance, and Indians flooding companies with their own
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This is where you're wrong, I don't like people dying. Anyone who has followed me long enough knows I lobby for the least violent effective path as a solution first. That being said, I'm not putting my life on the line for strangers who make bad decisions. I have real people who depend on me.
𝑮𝒓𝒊𝒎 𝑺𝒉𝒂𝒅𝒐𝒘 ΘΔ@R34GrimShadow
And that's what separates blue from red. Red is fine with people dying, meaning they lack moral intelligence and basic human decency whereas blue is not okay with people dying, but are willing to risk their own lives so others might live. Its a problem of selfishness vs human decency.
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@WomanDefiner Why are you assuming you play the game with only strangers? Your family is playing and you can't vote for them. They may make a mistake or error even if you coordinate. If you don't coordinate (likely rule) then at least around 40% of your family would be gone if red won.
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