Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid.
Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
A Twitterer tweets a challenging game-theory question:
The Twitter poll came out 58% blue and right-wing folks are screeching. Here is a bad take. The orange site has a thread where people are rephrasing the prompt in order to make it sound way worse, like giving everybody a gun and then magically making the guns not discharge.
I find it remarkable that not a single dipshit has correctly analyzed the problem. Suppose you are one of Arrow’s dictators: your vote tips the scales regardless of which way you go. So, everybody else already voted and they are precisely 50% blue. Either you can vote blue and save everybody or vote red and kill 50% of voters. From that perspective, the pro-red folks are homicidally selfish.
Bonus sneer: since HN couldn’t rephrase the problem without magic, let me have a chance. Consider: everybody has some seed food and some rainwater in a barrel. If 50% of people elect to plant their seeds and pool their rainwater in a reservoir then everybody survives; otherwise, only those who selfishly eat their own seed and drink their rainwater will survive. This is a basic referendum on whether we can work together to reduce economic costs and the supposedly-economically-minded conservatives are demonstrating that they would rather be hateful than thrifty.
The incentive structure makes it not a challenging game theory question - the game-theoretically optimal solution is both very obvious and obviously morally depraved (selecting red). It’s actually a Voight-Kampff test.
but then you’re living with red-button-pushers only
I love the way people who go “yeah but IN REAL LIFE with real stakes you would totally chose the red button”
i feel like people in real life would be far less likely to press the red button, because twitter is almost wall to wall nazis and real life is not
Sounds like the winning move in that scenario is to purge the button enthusiasts before they cause any damage lol
like i said, the actual value of that little exercise is finding people who are fine with killing up to 50% of the population for no reason whatsoever.
@mawhrin Sadly, they exist. And there are too many of them! I guess this means we should kill people who are fine with killing up to 50% of the—
HEY WAIT
:-)
there’s this. (though i find it useful to know who not to rely on if/when things get worse: for example i already know our neighbour from the apartment a floor below did write many missives to our cooperative’s administration, without having a single reason.)
HN:
tfw your model of an average person on earth is someone who spends $5,000 on a hawaii vacation. good lord.
If this isn’t pure engagement bait, what’s the real world situation this is supposed to map to? Pressing red means you always live, and if everyone pushes red everyone lives so…
I mean if blue is supposed to be a proxy for altruism, that usually doesn’t come with a certain death conditional.
I rather like my examples because they iterate. If we don’t cooperate on food this year then we starve next year, so voting red only means one year of selfish life. If we don’t cooperate on water this year then we can try again in a subsequent year, but eventually a drought will wipe us out. Rationalists love to talk about iterated game theory but they’re so hesitant to recognize instances of it!
I mean it’s so cut and dried you had to invent a disadvantage for pushing the red button.
Maybe the catch is that picking red means you are basically ok with offing people who don’t think like you do en masse, even though it’s posited like a dilemma between securing the lives of your family vs giving a chance to hypothetical people who are heavily OCD in favor of blue buttons.
@Architeuthis @corbin that’s precisely the catch.
a very neat test to find people who are perfectly fine with the general idea of genocide.
(i’m entirely unsurprised by the number of genocidal ghouls in that hn thread)
I kinda wanna see LW tackle this
Here’s one post, but it’s obfuscated as usual
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KwxcunmW33TgvrAmg/red-vs-blue-the-parable-of-the-feud-within-a-feud
One weird thing about LW is that it presents itself as this timeless Hall of Truth, but half the content is literally incomprehensible if you’re not also deeply embedded in the adjacent Twittersphere .
Picking red guarantees your survival by endangering everyone else, making it morally fucked, but risk-free. Picking blue puts your life at risk, but saves everyone’s ass if it pays off, making it the more moral option overall. Picking blue also requires you to put some trust in your fellow man, so I’d have probably picked red if I didn’t know how the Twitter poll came out.
Someone else on the orange site claimed the experiment would end with only red-pushers left if it went for multiple rounds. Adding my two cents, the outcome would depend on how the first round goes - if red wins round 1, voting blue looks like suicide, shifting the calculus in red’s favour, and if blue wins round 1, you have reason to trust everyone will continue voting blue, making it a lot less risky and shifting the moral calculus in blue’s favour.
I didn’t see red as risk-free at all. You’re setting yourself up for a post-button Mad Max world where you know all of your fellow survivors are willing to kill you and up to 49% of humanity.
I mean, it seems pretty obvious that there’s no incentive to change your vote from blue to red once it’s been established that blue can win unless your goal is to murder up to 49% of everyone, which is certainly a moral calculus.
There are some amazing justifications from many amongst the red-pushing side:
It’s a bit baffling how many strongly they refuse the “blue-selection” as possibly moral/rational. Even so far as calling people pressing blue evil or subhuman, simply baffling.
I wonder if the button colours immediately made US readers pick a side e.g. republican Vs democrat. If the buttons had been Yellow and Purple would it make a difference?
The color choice was either super lazy or super inspired.
green and purple. :-)
This feels like another case where the specific context matters more than whatever supposed principal the thought experiment is supposed to illuminate. The example that came to my mind when I tried to think about how to justify “voting red” was about running into a burning building. Sure, if some large fragment of people did so then their combined numbers would presumably let them get everyone out. But on the other hand, throwing yourself in is a wholly unnecessary risk, and the only people in need of rescuing are the people who ran in trying to do the right thing without thinking. Noble, but stupid and creates that much more risk for the firefighters who now have to not only stop the fire from spreading but also figure out how to rescue the failed good samaritans.
But then what really makes the difference between the examples is purely in the details not included, which is the kind of null case. Nobody has to go into a burning building that isn’t already in there when it catches fire. The danger of harm is entirely optional and voluntary. But you can’t just choose to not eat; the danger in your framing is omnipresent threat of starvation, and the question is whether to prioritize individual or collective well-being.
Ed: also, to reference the scholarly work of Christ, Wiener, Et Al.:
RED IS MADE OF FIRE
I don’t understand the relevance of Arrow’s theorem. Why is your phrasing the correct way of analyzing the situation?
Arrow’s dictators are the relevant voters. Suppose polls predict 40% blue, or respectively 60% blue; one should still vote blue as a matter of game theory, but their vote won’t decide anything. I’m not going to invoke the Impossibility theorem, merely borrowing the definition of “dictator”; it’s quite possible that the actual vote will not have any dictators, but we can force folks to think of the problem as something trolley-problem-shaped by explaining that there are circumstances where their choice will kill people.
If polls predict 40% blue you should not vote blue “as a matter of game theory”, because that is suicide.
No, and I’m not going to further endorse a myopic framing as “game theory”. The analysis which focuses on individual survival is wrong. Kill the Austrian-school economist in your mind.
Very quotable
You’re the one who mentioned “game theory” in the first place, I was just directly quoting you. My sentence was of the form “game theory doesn’t say X”, not “game theory does say Y”. I added quotation marks to clarify.
My point here is that you can make whatever philosophical and ethical arguments about the situation you want, but none of game theory, Arrow’s theorem, nor the concept of a dictator have any bearing on it. It is an ethics question rather than a mathematical question, and it is an error to claim that your argument is a mathematical one.
as a matter of game theory you should always vote red, as a matter of morality you should always vote blue. also, a part of the “dilemma” is that you don’t know how the votes are gonna go.
As I explained elsewhere, my comment was just about the inapplicability of mathematics to this question. But also, is that really what morality always says? What if polls predict 1% will vote blue? What if they predict only one other person will vote blue? Are you always obligated to martyr yourself?