Red or Blue
On August 13, a viral and divisive poll was made on Twitter: https://twitter.com/lisatomic5/status/1690904441967575040
Many intellectuals took the red side; some were dismayed or even disillusioned with humanity because so many people chose “the wrong color,” blue.
Arguments for red’s side seemed to range from “If everybody picked red, everybody would live” to “Red is the correct choice according to game theory” to “It’s not worth risking my life to save those who were too stupid to save themselves.”
To me, the obvious choice was blue. I wrote up a tweet thread explaining my position, and, me being the genius that I am, it elegantly captured the essence of the “blue” phenomenon while exposing the fundamental weaknesses of “red’s” various rationales. Here’s the contents of the thread:
Here’s my thread on why picking
blue is right and picking red is wrong (or at least less right).
I’m not convinced that picking blue is in any way an imperfect decision. You
know that a lot of people will pick blue (for whatever reasons), and you don’t
want them to die (whether their decisions were imperfect or not), so you
(altruistically) pick blue at your own risk to help increase the chances of
saving everyone. Is that imperfect? No, it’s conscientiously inclusive. What
about all the people who picked blue that you’re trying to save? Did they pick
it imperfectly? Not necessarily, most of them probably picked it for the exact
same reason you did, which we’ve just established wasn’t imperfect! So, even if
you argue that it’s imperfect to try to save people who are too imperfect to
save themselves (which is obviously debatable; everyone’s imperfect in some way
after all, and tolerance/acceptance/forgiveness/grace and accommodation are
virtuous things and make for a better society), it doesn’t apply because they
weren’t imperfect to begin with! In fact, they’re more perfect than the red-pillers
because they’re less selfish.
It’s true that this logic implies the whole “problem” of many people picking
blue is circular/self-created, but so what? It still makes perfect sense from
the *individual’s* standpoint, as argued above, and it’s only individuals who
are making the decision! And the whole ouroboric phenomenon is a beautiful
expression of human compassion AND mutual trust, particularly trust in each
other’s compassion!
As for the arguments for red I haven’t already covered, it doesn’t matter that
it’s not the correct choice according to game theory, as that’s only because
most game theory models assume all agents are 100% selfish. And there’s no
reason to bring game theory into it anyway. The logistics of the game and the
consequences of choosing are immanently obvious. The only questions are ones of
the nature of the average human mind (i.e., what are the chances >50% of
people will vote blue?). It’s kind of like playing the stock market in that
respect, in that everyone who’s playing (or at least, everyone who would
consider voting blue) is betting on what everyone else who’s playing would
likely do.
The other argument I tend to see is that “if everybody voted red, everybody
would live,” but that’s wholly irrelevant because most people know damn well
that many people won’t pick red. (You could argue that this means the people
who picked blue are mistaken, and it’s not worth saving people who mistakenly
wouldn’t save themselves, but that’s not true either as I’ve already shown why
they’re not mistaken.) Not everybody picked red because people know that some
people will pick blue because they know that some people will pick blue because
they know that some people will pick blue, and so on and so on. It simply is
what it is. (See the earlier comment regarding the beauty of the ouroboros).
For whatever it’s worth.