Button Poll #2: Only those with normal cognitive capacity are given buttons.

[Rolfe]

OK. (I initially chose blue, by the way.)

 

[Thermal]

There will always be a few of us at the wall, middle fingers raised.

And our name is Legion.

 

[Emily's Cat]

When it votes specifically to kill others? Pretty easy to envision.

No, I reject your mischaracterization.

There is a risk which has a 50% chance of making you dead. I chose not to take that risk - a risk that literally nobody at all needs to take. My choice to not jump in the raging river with you does not make me responsible for you opting to maybe kill yourself.

Because we vote for everyone to live, not threaten to have others die. Bit more consequential on the morality scale than *checks notes* condescension.

I have threatened nobody at all. I have chosen not to join your death cult. If you die by pushing the maybe-suicide button, that’s not my fault. I didn’t force you to taunt death, I haven’t forced anyone at all to risk self-destruction.

I’m not responsible for your self-destructive choice.

 

[Emily's Cat]

-Blue button: Everyone Survives.
-Red button: Blues die

False framing.

-Blue button: risk suicide
-Red button: don’t risk suicide

Look, if you want to push blue, fine. But this demented, condescending, contemptuous need to vilify people who refrain from joining your suicide game is over the line.

 

[Emily's Cat]

I hear you, but I really can't wrap.my head around a Red victory, if the voters realized the magnitude and consequence of the Button Push. It goes against everything I think about people, broadly. I know this has a lot to do with me being a dad; parents very quickly drop themselves out of the #1 slot in deference to those we care for, almost intuitively. The compulsion for everyone to be safe and sound overrides the inner seagull squaking "me me me".

“Hey, if we all join together, we can attack the Sabre-toothed tiger and not get dead!”

“Alternatively… we could leave the Sabre-toothed tiger alone and just hunt some deer instead?”

 

[Emily's Cat]

That's choosing to do a) nothing or choosing to b) take a risk for no good reason. That's 'red is the default position.'

It’s literally a) choose not to take a completely avoidable and well-known risk or b) take a completely avoidable and well-known risk for no reason.

 

[Emily's Cat]

For a fun exercise, why not picture blue as the default?

There is one button. Everyone who presses it will live. If more than 50% of people press it, everyone who didn't press it will die.

Press the damned button then. Why would you choose not to press the button?

 

[Emily's Cat]

Alas, with the world as it is today, I am not so sanguine about this last bit, but when the reds line us up against the wall, we can all join hands and sing Kumbaya or something.

It’s… interesting… that if the reds get more than 50%, we’ll all be sad that the blues died, and dearly wish you’d chosen differently. But somehow, you think that we want you to die while you’re drinking the poisoned suicide that you mixed for yourself, and you insist that we’re forcing you to drink it.

It’s the psychology of an abuser.

 

[Emily's Cat]

If the "safe virtue signallers" are right then great. But they may not be. That's the dilemma, one which your one vote among 8.3 billion others is very unlikely to influence.

I have the impression that if the blues get more than 50%, they might hunt down and kill the reds… even though the reds are happy they all survived.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Hmm. I don't think that's actually true. I think blue pushers are prepared to reconsider if you present them with a scenario that seems quite likely to produce a red landslide, with no more than a handful of blue pushers.

If it seems like practically nobody will choose blue, then it's sensible to choose red, and yes, I'll choose red. If it seems like practically everybody will choose blue, I'll choose blue. If it seems like it's going to be close, I will choose blue (to try to help tip the balance.)

But you don’t get to see where it’s trending. You don’t get to make a decision based on how the majority is leaning. You have to make your choice with no other information.

How much of your life are you willing to gamble in the hope that others feel like gambling too?

 

[Emily's Cat]

Why should it? That's the hallmark of someone thinking through the practicalities, and not just a restricted abstract.

Most Blue pushers here, btw, seem pretty unreserved in their choice under most circumstances. If we hypothesize something outlandish, like somehow knowing red would win by an insurmountable landslide (forbidden knowledge under the premise), then the Blue push would indeed be suicidal and we would alter to how we would deal with post-vote damage control and doing what we could for the survivors. Uglier scenario, but hardly a vascillation. The objective is always minimal harm and maximal benefit. That may change the way we vote, but it's always the same goal.

What required blue percentage is your personal threshold? If it takes 60% blue to avoid death? 70%? 90%?

 

[Emily's Cat]

That was my earlier objection to trying to paint Red as a passive vote. The premise requires a choice, one that results in deaths (globally unavoidable) and one that doesn't. There is no innocent inaction option.

How strongly do you stand behind your position? If it requires 95% to choose blue in order to live, do you still insist that people not risking suicide are evil?

 

[Emily's Cat]

That's what I mean by framing. The default position, the null response, is being presented as if it's an active choice.

It’s not even that - it’s being framed as if it’s an active choice with the intent to kill other people.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Not for me, it always has to be blue, I know I simply could not live with myself if I voted red and thus killed blue pushers.

If blue requires 95%?

 

[Lithrael]

But you don’t get to see where it’s trending. You don’t get to make a decision based on how the majority is leaning. You have to make your choice with no other information.

I'd be 'gambling' based on what I know about the ways people tend to consider decisions and the ways populations trend etc etc. and knowing the exact way the question was presented. Half my contributions to the thread are different ways I'd guess people might act under different framings of the poll. And now I have the anecdote under my belt of blue being a consistent winner in the most common hypothetical version.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Okay, you're gonna have to hold my hand through this one. HOW, in what sense, is it not an active choice? I literally wrote down the actual null version and you said no it's not that.

A slide-switch with red on the left and blue on the right, set to red, and a slide-switch right in the middle, which you must push one way or the other, are not just reframings of the same dilemma; they are in fact not the same dilemma. One actually has a default setting and the other does not.

Choice: jump in front of a speeding train, or jump in front of a parked train. If more than 50% jump in front of the speeding train, they will live. If more than 50% jump in front of the parked train, they will live people who jumped in front of the speeding train will die.

Your position is that the right and moral thing to do is to jump in front of a speeding train. Why does this make sense to you?

 

[Lithrael]

(...) it’s being framed as if it’s an active choice with the intent to kill other people.

Not at all - just an active choice with the knowledge that if enough people make the same choice as you, then people will be killed for not making the same choice as you.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Not at all - just an active choice with the knowledge that if enough people make the same choice as you, then people will be killed for not making the same choice as you.

I have the knowledge that if people jump off a cliff they might die… I also have the knowledge that nobody has to jump off the cliff at all, that people are choosing to jump off a cliff of their own volition.

How am I responsible for people who choose to jump off a cliff when there is no need to do so?

 

[bruto]

It’s… interesting… that if the reds get more than 50%, we’ll all be sad that the blues died, and dearly wish you’d chosen differently. But somehow, you think that we want you to die while you’re drinking the poisoned suicide that you mixed for yourself, and you insist that we’re forcing you to drink it.

It’s the psychology of an abuser.

No, I don't think you want any specific person to die. Nor are red voters evil. I think that's a simplistic and tendentious dodge to avoid having to think too hard about what a large part of life and society is about. But unless a hundred percent of the people on the earth vote red, some will die somewhere. A certain amount of death is guaranteed by the red vote, and persuading more to do so, or lamenting that they did not, does not change that basic fact. By contrast, if 50.0001 percent of those on earth vote blue nobody at all dies.

Of course, I see you are now changing the game and tempting us with different percentages. It does complicate things for sure, but cannot be very accurately gauged without knowing what sort of education, campaigning, etc. will have occurred beforehand. The situation might well change if there's a long and concerted effort to convince everyone on earth that if they all vote red, all will be well. The more tempting and attractive the red vote is made, the less responsibility the red voters must bear for the death of the stragglers, especially if such a campaign is strong enough to guarantee a red victory. But that, along with changing percentages, is not specified in the original problem.

And, just to throw in a response to your last post, "jumping off a cliff" is, I believe, a very poor metaphor for this situation. To be more accurate, your cliff metaphor would be a choice between being a jumper and a pusher.

 

[Lithrael]

Choice: jump in front of a speeding train, or jump in front of a parked train. If more than 50% jump in front of the speeding train, they will live. If more than 50% jump in front of the parked train, they will live people who jumped in front of the speeding train will die.

Your position is that the right and moral thing to do is to jump in front of a speeding train. Why does this make sense to you?

See, this isn't holding my hand through an explanation of how red is really the default position; it's just another version of the dilemma that pretends the reds have nothing to do with what happens to the blues, which pretends the blues are in immediate danger because of themselves rather than potential danger because of their balance against reds, and which I don't think maps onto the one we're trying to discuss.

Here, I'll throw up the machine I built to represent how I see the dilemma, a couple pages back.

You say the blue button is fatal by default; I disagree. The blue button is not fatal by definition UNLESS a specific threshold is met. Only beyond that threshold does blue transform to be fatal.

Blue only becomes fatal after and if a majority of people push red. It is absolutely non-fatal up until that point.

All of your other examples use the opposite framing; they are all based on a choice between {always safe} and {fatal unless a lot of people do it}. How about instead doing the opposite? Try picturing it as forcing everyone to move to stand either on a trap door, or a platform that may operate the trap door. Then it's {if more than 50% of people move to stand on the trap door, the door is not triggered and everyone remains safe} vs {if more than 50% of people move to stand on the platform that operates the lever that opens the trap door, the trap door will open and anyone who was standing on it will be killed}.

Blue is non-fatal until the votes are counted and the tally is over 50% red; it remains non-fatal unless a lot of people push red.
Standing on the trap door is not fatal as soon as someone hops on there; it remains non-fatal unless a lot of people join in to operate the trap door's lever by sheer mass.

The risk is fully and completely disclosed to you up front. It's not a surprise - you know from the get go that pushing red means anyone and everyone who pushed blue is now at risk of dying. The default on blue is life for everyone... and you have to overcome a barrier to prevent the outcome of life for everyone.

'Push this or that' maps nicely onto the 'move onto the trapdoor or move onto the platform that sets off the trapdoor' machine, which makes red's contribution hard to ignore. The trapdoor only becomes lethal if more than half of everyone chooses to step onto the platform.

'red is default' would be the same machine but with different starting conditions: where the Dilemma Makers have put everyone on the trapdoor-operating platform, and people have the option of getting up and wandering over onto the trap door. If more than half of the people get up and leave the platform for the trap door, then and only then will the trap door be safe when the numbers are tallied.

This second scenario is the one all of EC's hypotheticals try to evoke (from the blue side). They present red as not only the safe option, but the default option. But in the original dilemma, it is not.