Considerations:

* many people (at least toddlers, people with dementia) are going to press blue roughly by accident. See the lizardman constant

* other people will not want to be responsible for any deaths and will press blue out of a sense of moral imperative

* many other people are going to take this into account and vote blue out of hopes we can save everyone

You should vote blue.

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blululu 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The first point is interesting. You could fork the question over this and have a few variants:

1.) The pure form where the button presses and restricted to legal agents (i.e. people with credible legal standing over their choices). 2.) The mixed form with the caveat listed here inclusive of all humans whether they are even physically capable of pushing a button. 3.) you could also go for a more expansive scenario that takes 2 to the extreme and includes animals as well.

1.) gets to the game theoretic form of the question. 2 muddies things, and 3 sets up a case for blue since the non agentic voters asymptote to 50-50 and a slim edge is morally preferable to killing half.

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ItsMonkk 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You don't even have to go that far from the original question. If instead of the entire world being a single game, if you have hundreds of millions of sub-games where 9 random people are placed within, what should you do?

Surely some of those groups are going to be filled with selfish red pickers. Should the kind coordinating players still go blue? All the red pickers are going to lie that blue is sensible. I suspect that more coordinators will die in this way than the always blue pickers if every coordinating player went red.

So now the full-world version only has the law of large numbers on their side, but they have no way of knowing just what percentage of the population is a selfish red picker. Going for team blue is the much riskier option that can yield catastrophe.

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throwaway173738 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Why would a red picker ever lie about it? If I can get all 8 of my fellow players to pick red then we’re all safe. If it’s a button I’ll just break the blue button or wire it to red.

	▲	ItsMonkk 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		A selfish player will claim that they will coordinate with the group, and then vote red in private. A coordinating player will pick what the group chooses, whether that be red or blue. You are talking about a coordinating player here. Yes, in this case if all players agree to red, it's obvious you should all pick red. It's completely safe.

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lukasgelbmann 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

With 3, especially if the animals outnumber humans, you’d first want to do some research into animal psychology to see whether red or blue has an edge for animals.

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eikenberry 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Puzzles like this are based on assumptions like all participants are rational adults with their full faculties.

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empthought 9 hours ago | parent [-]

This one explicitly is not.

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blululu 9 hours ago | parent [-]

It’s a made up toy problem. It exists for fun. The stated problem has some implicit assumptions. But you can rejigger the rules and assumptions to tweak the incentives and ethics. That’s the whole point. You could take the puzzle and apply it to a band of pirates held in a jail. That might make the outcome more obvious. Or you could imagine what would happen if the voting order were sequential. These are all just different formalisms that are fun to speculate over, but the rules can be interpreted many ways.

	▲	empthought 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, but those are different thought experiments from this one.

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hollerith 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That is true in isolation, but the reason we study problems like this one is to try to gain insight into our society (or our minds) and in our society, toddlers and people with dementia have guardians that make important decisions for them. Consequently, even after your comment, I'm still struggling to see how this toy problem or game sheds any light on anything I care about. Contrast that with prisoner's dilemma, Newcomb's problem or the ultimatum game, which sheds a lot of light.

But this is HN, so people are going to discuss it just because it is fun to discuss it.

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edelkas 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[dead]