shouldn’t EV favour pressing blue? if you’re perfectly altruistic & your credence in being the tie breaking vote is over 1 in 4 billion, the expected lives saved is slightly above 1. if you are more selfish though, it seems EV would favour red button pressing. I wonder how the math works out
The probability you assign to being the tie-breaking vote will depend a lot on your background expectations about others' dispositions. In a global Blender case, for example, the chances of anywhere near -- let alone *exactly* -- half the population "jumping in" is surely vastly lower than that. But yes, for the original Buttons case it's very plausible to me that impartial EV strongly favors blue.
I wonder how much of the difference is just people imagining different voting scenarios. I bet blue button pickers are more likely to be imagining a game in which people can attempt to convince each other.
I admire your brevity I just went on at great length about this.
The interesting thing about the blender example, is that in real life if there were a giant blender in an urban area we would probably at least put up like a token fence or something around it. We clearly would care about people who might fall into a ravine, off a bridge, into some weird industrial machine and expend effort to prevent it. So the argument that rational red button pushers would naturally not care at all about blue button pushers seems easily shown to be empty hyperbole by reference to the actual world.
Surely if there were a dependent majority who votes the way you do that would be a reason the way you vote would make a difference. If my theory of rational choices tells me to do something and its subscribed to by the majority of people surely I would do that and expect that everyone else who so subscribes would likewise. I'd think I could not change my vote without them changing theirs and so on. You could say then it's not my choice, this implies in order for something to be my choice I have to purposefully reject external principles (I have to deliberately be irrational for example), that just seems wrong.
If our population would be more resilient by including some minority that always acts randomly, that clarifies how red is selfish. The hard part is explaining the social value of the "gadflies" that the blue option protects, but the story of Socrates' death might serve that purpose. It justifies protection of "freedom of speech" even when most people do not feel Socrates' urge to violate the (red) option of sticking to a list of allowed utterances (or avoiding disallowed).
"Just think of the children" provides a pretty strong reason to try to co-ordinate on blue in the original Buttons version. But presumably not so many people would be tempted to climb into the Blender, and there wouldn't seem much hope of coordinating a majority to try to follow the few random lunatics in that case.
Are you trying to reinvent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nudge_theory ? We don't have time to go crawling into every Blender anyone can invent on twitter, but the Buttons supposedly require a selection, so red is no easier than blue. What I find interesting about these chestnuts is that a truly individualistic selfish person has no reason to consider the children. Might that motivate invention of a surprise Blender that is advertised as you described but actually kills everyone outside?
Simple; picking blue is retarded, and if people picking blue are unable to take a minute to think, or value more virtue signaling, I don't care about them, as never do for any stranger honestly.
> there’s a sense in which the “first” people to pick blue are being deeply irrational and creating a problem that a society of logically perfect beings would avoid. But one has to deal with humanity as it is, not as we’d wish it to be, and saving others from lethal “mistakes” is a good thing to do if you can manage it.
Picking blue for this reason (if you expect the result to be close) seems perfectly intelligent and reasonable?
I don't get your point. They're still strangers to me; I'm pretty serious about that (I think everyone pretending otherwise are just projecting self-deceptions on others or are directly hypocrites). The only ones obligated for those children are their parents.
And I couldn't be managing a thing here, I would just be putting myself at stupidly unnecessary risk for stupid strangers.
This is a great example of how outcomes don’t fail at the level of logic—they fail at the level of interpretation. Same decision structure, different framing, different human behavior. That gap becomes a real risk once these kinds of decisions show up in systems people actually rely on.
Well, while making the choice less risky. But I take the point - I was implicitly imagining a large enough portion of the population that it ended up making things more certain, but if there were like 5 blue pickers, that wouldn't be the case.
Worth noting that there are also framings that make Red look worse, e.g. Red = vote for a leader who will kill all non-voters iff elected.
shouldn’t EV favour pressing blue? if you’re perfectly altruistic & your credence in being the tie breaking vote is over 1 in 4 billion, the expected lives saved is slightly above 1. if you are more selfish though, it seems EV would favour red button pressing. I wonder how the math works out
The probability you assign to being the tie-breaking vote will depend a lot on your background expectations about others' dispositions. In a global Blender case, for example, the chances of anywhere near -- let alone *exactly* -- half the population "jumping in" is surely vastly lower than that. But yes, for the original Buttons case it's very plausible to me that impartial EV strongly favors blue.
I wonder how much of the difference is just people imagining different voting scenarios. I bet blue button pickers are more likely to be imagining a game in which people can attempt to convince each other.
I admire your brevity I just went on at great length about this.
The interesting thing about the blender example, is that in real life if there were a giant blender in an urban area we would probably at least put up like a token fence or something around it. We clearly would care about people who might fall into a ravine, off a bridge, into some weird industrial machine and expend effort to prevent it. So the argument that rational red button pushers would naturally not care at all about blue button pushers seems easily shown to be empty hyperbole by reference to the actual world.
Surely if there were a dependent majority who votes the way you do that would be a reason the way you vote would make a difference. If my theory of rational choices tells me to do something and its subscribed to by the majority of people surely I would do that and expect that everyone else who so subscribes would likewise. I'd think I could not change my vote without them changing theirs and so on. You could say then it's not my choice, this implies in order for something to be my choice I have to purposefully reject external principles (I have to deliberately be irrational for example), that just seems wrong.
https://allanolley898224.substack.com/p/why-might-it-matter-how-things-are?r=27ibk6&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
If our population would be more resilient by including some minority that always acts randomly, that clarifies how red is selfish. The hard part is explaining the social value of the "gadflies" that the blue option protects, but the story of Socrates' death might serve that purpose. It justifies protection of "freedom of speech" even when most people do not feel Socrates' urge to violate the (red) option of sticking to a list of allowed utterances (or avoiding disallowed).
"Just think of the children" provides a pretty strong reason to try to co-ordinate on blue in the original Buttons version. But presumably not so many people would be tempted to climb into the Blender, and there wouldn't seem much hope of coordinating a majority to try to follow the few random lunatics in that case.
Are you trying to reinvent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nudge_theory ? We don't have time to go crawling into every Blender anyone can invent on twitter, but the Buttons supposedly require a selection, so red is no easier than blue. What I find interesting about these chestnuts is that a truly individualistic selfish person has no reason to consider the children. Might that motivate invention of a surprise Blender that is advertised as you described but actually kills everyone outside?
Simple; picking blue is retarded, and if people picking blue are unable to take a minute to think, or value more virtue signaling, I don't care about them, as never do for any stranger honestly.
Including young children?
As I write in the OP:
> there’s a sense in which the “first” people to pick blue are being deeply irrational and creating a problem that a society of logically perfect beings would avoid. But one has to deal with humanity as it is, not as we’d wish it to be, and saving others from lethal “mistakes” is a good thing to do if you can manage it.
Picking blue for this reason (if you expect the result to be close) seems perfectly intelligent and reasonable?
I don't get your point. They're still strangers to me; I'm pretty serious about that (I think everyone pretending otherwise are just projecting self-deceptions on others or are directly hypocrites). The only ones obligated for those children are their parents.
And I couldn't be managing a thing here, I would just be putting myself at stupidly unnecessary risk for stupid strangers.
My position is even stronger: maximizing the number of deaths of blue-button-pushers is a moral good. Pick red!
I wouldn't say is an absolute good, but in this imperfect scenario where we would all be trapped, yes is morally superior, no doubt.
This is a great example of how outcomes don’t fail at the level of logic—they fail at the level of interpretation. Same decision structure, different framing, different human behavior. That gap becomes a real risk once these kinds of decisions show up in systems people actually rely on.
What's the problem that myopic blue-pickers create?
Opting in to dying unnecessarily unless a majority makes the same risky choice.
Well, while making the choice less risky. But I take the point - I was implicitly imagining a large enough portion of the population that it ended up making things more certain, but if there were like 5 blue pickers, that wouldn't be the case.