Without reading the article first because it probably covers similar ground, here are my thoughts after hearing of this thought experiment somewhere else recently: The relevant question is the likelihood of a blue majority. I consider group A, the people who will press red in any case to save themselves. That’s probably a large percentage but might not be 50 %. But then I have to add group B, people who might have pressed blue but believe A to be over 50 % and because of this press red. Next is group C following the same thoughts, believing A + B to be over 50 % and because of that press red, and so on. All of this makes a win for blue almost impossible, leading to almost everyone pressing red. There will probably some remain who press blue either because they’re not thinking it through or because they, falsely in my opinion, would have taken on moral responsibility for “blues” dying and want to avoid that.
While this is an interesting experiment, I don’t think it can be used as direct analogy for anything like elections in real life because those are rarely life-and-death decisions, so trying for a better but less likely outcome is viable. More importantly communication is possible.
Edit: I just noticed that here it’s not stated that people cannot communicate. With communication it’s actually less interesting. You can try to convince everyone to press blue or everyone to press red. Both would have the same outcome if perfectly successful but with red people are more likely to do it and there’s no catastrophic failure if 50 % isn’t reached.
See knowing the rules it seems to me the logical choice is everyone press red. everyone knows it will allow them to survive and if everyone presses it no one dies. Blue seems iffy but red seems like a sure thing.
Without reading the article first because it probably covers similar ground, here are my thoughts after hearing of this thought experiment somewhere else recently: The relevant question is the likelihood of a blue majority. I consider group A, the people who will press red in any case to save themselves. That’s probably a large percentage but might not be 50 %. But then I have to add group B, people who might have pressed blue but believe A to be over 50 % and because of this press red. Next is group C following the same thoughts, believing A + B to be over 50 % and because of that press red, and so on. All of this makes a win for blue almost impossible, leading to almost everyone pressing red. There will probably some remain who press blue either because they’re not thinking it through or because they, falsely in my opinion, would have taken on moral responsibility for “blues” dying and want to avoid that.
While this is an interesting experiment, I don’t think it can be used as direct analogy for anything like elections in real life because those are rarely life-and-death decisions, so trying for a better but less likely outcome is viable. More importantly communication is possible.
Edit: I just noticed that here it’s not stated that people cannot communicate. With communication it’s actually less interesting. You can try to convince everyone to press blue or everyone to press red. Both would have the same outcome if perfectly successful but with red people are more likely to do it and there’s no catastrophic failure if 50 % isn’t reached.
See knowing the rules it seems to me the logical choice is everyone press red. everyone knows it will allow them to survive and if everyone presses it no one dies. Blue seems iffy but red seems like a sure thing.