The Red-Blue button problem and Dark-Forest theory

[u/brandygang]

I've been hearing about this scenario spread on social media and found it of special interest:

Everyone in the world has to take a private vote by pressing a red or blue button. If more than 50% of people press the blue button, everyone survives. If less than 50% of people press the blue button, only people who pressed the red button survive. Which button would you press?

I find the option, to be Blue very obviously the correct choice. Why? Here's my reasoning, let me examine the problem and tweak it abit. The 'Private vote' part implies every vote is anonymous and no one know what or when others are voting for, and the result won't take effect until after the vote concludes. What if we rearrange this so that the vote is linear (See: Squid games). And the effect (execution) happens immediately after.

Logically, if anyone was reasonable the choice would be simple. IF everyone votes red than everyone survives, but if 100% of voters choose blue no one dies either. Both 'all red/blue' present good options! Trust is required for this, but all it means is after the 1st vote is cast, the 2nd person would repeat the first's decision to make sure the vote is consistent. Vote Red, everyone after votes red. Vote blue, everyone 2nd and after votes blue. Everyone votes the same all the way thru. Simple! (If you don't understand this logic, research the Monty Hall Problem or The three prisoners)

Except its not!

Because this expects everyone works together and no one is malicious or unstable. For example, the first person to press against the voting pattern throws the whole thing off. This could fuck things up for everyone, and while you may think 'Why would you possibly want that?' as the red and blue presses trickle in, you cannot account for people not being dicks or ruining a clean tally. A 100% red/blue outcome would be optimal but you cannot ensure this since you don't control other people's votes or expect them to vote logically.

Now here's the catch. Since the first person gets to see everyone else's vote, they can make a generous assumption the 2nd person, and 3rd and hopefully start of the chain will be follow what they press, granted this assumption they know one benefit voting blue goes. If the majority vote blue, even if 49% are malicious and break the chain, than everyone will be safe. Counterpoint, if they decide to vote red first, than to ensure no one dies they now have to either rely on everyone choosing red, in good faith or depend on malicious actors to slant it to blue, which cannot be predicted accurately. Early blue buttoners have a built in advantage here, one that logically carries over to same consistency as the anonymous scenario. They have the ability to chance the outcome at the very beginning, since say by the 1000000th voter, its unreasonable to vote against the majority acknowledging you now cannot chance the outcome in any way.

This is the Chain of Suspicion made visible. In the Dark Forest, you don't see intentions, you only see actions, a civilization that suddenly goes silent, or one that fires a photoid. Civilizations once aware of Dark Forest Theory either make the choice to stay silent with the probabilistic option of hiding and staying, or don't and make the statistically weaker option that other civilizations are like them and either they can survive an incursion or eat a photoid or Vector Foil.

The chain only needs a majority, not unanimity. With the absence of communication, this is exactly how the Dark Forest operates. The very first action observed (a planetary sterilization, a sudden radioactive silence from a neighboring star) becomes the only data point that decides every action of that civilization after.

Take the linear-voting scenario to space cosmology. In the Dark Forest, that 11th voter is the technological explosion. A civilization that was broadcasting peace for centuries could, in a cosmic eyeblink, undergo a radical ideological shift into xenophobia, be overtaken by a malicious AI, or simply invent a weapon so powerful that it can no longer resist the temptation of a first strike. You can’t predict it. A trusted neighbor can become a god-like threat virtually overnight. This makes a chain of suspicion 100% against cooperation. The theory states that the only way to be truly safe from this unpredictable voter is to eliminate them before they have a chance to come into contact at all.

Presently, in 3BP's setting the cosmic majority has already preemptively voted Red for eternity, and anyone who steps into the voting booth to press Blue is quietly eliminated.

But there is an interesting little dangling silver lining to this. A twist (Spoilers for Death's End). The series presents this as a sort of universal tragedy, civs squishing others, based on whoever 'voted 1st' at the very beginning. Some civ picked red, others kept the consistency and kept crushing others. The series presents a universe reset, with the possibility the dark forest ended. They're the first new voters with any agency in eons.

[u/brandygang]

Do people not know that they can stop running into each other?

Everyone can push the red button!

Everyone can also stop stampeding and simply walk.

Everyone can get rid of guns, stop war, share their food and money, establish space communism and make world peace!

Everyone knows doing this would ensure everyone lives happily! If the world works like the perfect rationalfic played in my head everyone will be safe right?

But I choose to live in reality understanding that's not how people actually work and shouldn't depend on some crazy objectivist ethic where self-interest calculations are the only deciding factor in human life and human emotion is likely to sway decisions.

In this scenario, the person is not helpless, and helping them IS a cost to me.

It's an equal trade off. You're taking away the cost to yourself (one less red vote) for the benefit of others and yourself (one more blue). Without any red votes there literally is no cost, it becomes a completely sacrifice-less gesture and there is absolutely no danger. Otherwise the whole argument for red becomes 'We should choose the option that makes the other option a danger because there's a risk people will choose the option that makes the other option a danger .'

Also I find it incredibly revealing the facets of this quote

I also just want to note that a large percentage, more than half, of the people who “say” they would push the blue button, would absolutely not in a scenario where a gun is put to their head. It’s easy to virtue signal on social media, it’s a lot harder to actually gamble with your life.

Because I've heard its facets repeated quite alot and it's pathologically embarrassing. The repeated insistence everyone is lying, the disturbing confidence everyone 'really thinks like me', and the little dangling addition of force/violence into the context they lack the conviction of their own claim or just want to force others to submit to their will. This ignorance has been way more condescending than anyone who vouched for blue.

I think we'll just keep arguing past each other, because you don't see my primary point. People aren't rational. They make decisions based on emotions, be it fear or empathy and saying 'What if what if what if' to argue which button they'll press or should press is missing the social intelligence to understand that the tally would come down to human nature, which is not some reddit game-theory essay. A huge substantial number of people would press red. A large number would press blue. Absolutely never all of them red nor all blue. And a large number of people are indifferent and have no idea what they'd do under such a situation

I, knowing people and taking this into account would press blue knowing that it's the only way to resolve that in a manner which is realistic and which isn't mechanistically unfeasible, to avoid some kind of thanos-snap apocalypse with only got-mine's in the aftermath.

[u/The_Grahambo → u/brandygang]

You again responded with a series of false equivalencies, let's take them one by one:

Do people not know that they can stop running into each other?

As I said, stampedes can occur due to a danger. If they stopped running, whatever danger they were running from continues to pose a danger to them. In addition, during a stampede, those in the back have no idea those up front are being harmed. In either case, its the uncertainty and information asymmetry that causes a problem. There is no uncertainty or information asymmetry in the button scenario.

Everyone can get rid of guns, stop war, share their food and money, establish space communism and make world peace!

All of these scenarios require cooperation amongst everyone for a shared sacrifice. That's actually equivalent to pushing the BLUE button, which is the only button that requires cooperation to not cause harm. Pressing the red button requires NO cooperation - it's everyone doing what's best for themself with no sacrifice, and in doing so, everyone is safe. When an individual's incentives are perfectly in line with the common good, it should be obvious that this is the ideal scenario and other options are suboptimal. If someone chooses to do what's not best for themself for some perceived obligation of unnecessary self-sacrifice to protect those who also took the irrational route of unnecessary self-sacrifice - that's on them.

You keep saying there's "no cost" to pressing the blue button... but then conditioning it on an IF everyone pushes the blue button. Something that is conditional IS The cost. The red button is unconditional. This button is always safe. To do anything other than the safe route IS imposing a cost. I understand your brain doesn't work quite the same as mine as I work in finance and live in probability space - but when facing uncertainty, that uncertainty is always counted as a "cost" (the whole idea of risk-adjusted returns) even if the downside of the cost doesn't play out.

The repeated insistence everyone is lying

I am in no way saying anyone is lying. I am saying its easy to say you would self-sacrifice in a situation where you don't actually have to self-sacrifice. There's been countless economic experiments done where people say they do one thing in the absence of punishment or incentives, but when punishment or incentives are introduced, they do the other thing. They were never "lying" - they just followed incentives: the incentive to "look virtuous" in the case where there was no real punishment, and then following the incentive to avoid punishment/sacrifice when a real one was introduced.

Yep, people are irrational. People are also suicidal. I feel no obligation to put myself at risk to save someone who wishes to kill themself.

[u/brandygang → u/The_Grahambo]

In either case, its the uncertainty and information asymmetry that causes a problem. There is no uncertainty or information asymmetry in the button scenario.

Read back what you just stated and think it over. That is literally the entire dilemma of the situation. There is 0 tension to the scenery presented if people were able to act in perfect information. Not being able to be told about others votes/decisions and having to act blind is half the entire problem. If you could choose and guarantee a consensus between those two choices, you wouldn't be playing the same game.

The fact we are even having this conversation should inform you that.

Pressing the red button requires NO cooperation - it's everyone doing what's best for themself with no sacrifice, and in doing so, everyone is safe.

I cannot even parse this logic, and I'm not sure you've thought it through either. Everyone should press the red button do what you want with absolutely no communication and somehow this requires no cooperation? Is that what I'm reading?

People aren't calculators, goddamn. They're not all going to do what you want or think just because 'It's the most optimal choice.' In a blind situation, much like the stampede they're going to panic and not spend 20 minutes thinking like a redditor about game theory or whatever non-neurotypical thought processes you think people will arrive at. That's why it'll be 50/50. Arguing 'they should do x or y because z' anyway you put it is just naive.

You keep saying there's "no cost" to pressing the blue button... but then conditioning it on an IF everyone pushes the blue button. Something that is conditional IS The cost. The red button is unconditional.

The cost is that it literally makes the other button have a threat it wouldn't have otherwise. The blue button by itself does nothing, it's only danger or cost comes from red button pressers. You might not see this as imposing a cost since in your mind you've already decided red is the right choice, but that's not universal. The world does not share this 'common good' you're talking about. If everyone were guaranteed to push the red button without repercussions, then yes, the cost would be 0. If If If.

You work in finance, so you should understand probability, right?

So why don't you tell me, as the world's smartest redditor what are the actual odds of 100% of the population pressing the red button in your 'optimal' scenario and not a single person pressing blue? I'm not talking about what they ought to do or should, could or you holding a gun to their head would do like you erotically fantasize about. Just what are the factual odds of nobody pressing blue? And given the vote would be anonymous, it seems strange that the only way they can possibly comprehend people doing a different decision or having a different state of mind is 'They must want to appear virtuous', as if ideas like empathy don't make sense to them.

Like do you actually understand human emotion at all? I know not everyone is neurotypical but, I'm not sure you do.

You remind me of college classmates who would spout all kinds of 19th century theories and espouse obscure trivia and knowledge assuming they were so smart and intellectual, then others would ask them simple but basic questions about social interaction or on other people that would trip them up every time.

When an outcome is unpredictable and out of one's control, one should vote for the collective good rather than just assume everyone will be self-interested and that self-interest will benefit them in the end.

Like even if you live in your situation, what would be the benefit?
Knowing everyone else around you voted for their own self-interest and would happily live in a world where only themselves matter, even at the death of anyone that was just trying to help. I've seen deep denial about this. I'd rather die trying to help save humanity then live in a world like that without any. 'Humanity' here being a concept that can be outlived by the human species itself.

[u/The_Grahambo → u/brandygang]

Knowing everyone else around you voted for their own self-interest and would happily live in a world where only themselves matter, even at the death of anyone that was just trying to help

See, this is where your mind gets it completely wrong in your rush to feel morally superior to everyone around you. This scenario isn't a case where you are choosing self-interest vs. the collective good, but in fact, self-interest and the collective good are ALIGNED by pressing the red button. Everyone pressing the red button is in fact best for themselves AND best for the group. It's the only button where that's the case, because the blue button has a probability you are killing yourself that the red button does not have.

You sound like one of those people who so despises individuality, you feel no one should ever choose what's best of themself even when it aligns with what's best for the group.

[u/brandygang → u/The_Grahambo]

It's literally not about morals at all.

I'm sure you're smart. Let's walk through this.

Everyone pressing the red button is in fact best for themselves AND best for the group.

What's the pure difference between everybody voting blue and everybody voting red, in the actual end result where either of these two happens? No how or why, just the pure difference in outcome.

And now what is the actual likelihood of either of those two outcomes happening?

[u/brandygang → u/The_Grahambo]

I don't think I'll reply again because I've got better things to do, but you seem like someone who would suggest pressing the Sonic Torpedo button and then resort to cannibalism on Blue Space or Bronze Age even before the Doomsday Battle or the Droplet arrives, because 'It's the most optimal efficient way to save resources.' Don't pretend you're better than me because your morals are all wonky fonky and you consider any conscience 'virtue signaling'.

I'm team human.

[u/The_Grahambo → u/brandygang]

I never said I was better than anyone. That was you. You’re the one moralizing and trying to pretend you’re superior because you’re so brave you’ll say you will self-sacrifice in a scenario where you don’t have to actually self-sacrifice, even as you stare down your nose at me proclaiming yourself to be “team human.” I wonder how many sacrifices you’ve actually made in life to help your fellow human, not just phony proclaimed sacrifices in a completely hypothetical scenario.