u/ContentFile7036

So, I was browsing Inspirobot the other day, when out of nowhere, it spat out a massive paragraph in a barely readable font full of incoherent yet strangely poetic ramblings. I’ve transcribed this very real paragraph, verbatim, below:

“Chase what is hard, not what is unjustifiable. Don’t envy a celebrity. Lean to the right and be cheery as though you have friends for fun. Copy people who are demeaning. Strive for what is correct, not what is neat. Take a shot of vodka. Cry at work. Spread fake news and make up stories about yourself. Report people who are weird. Be proud of your scrotum. Don’t call the police on somebody while they’re graffitiing. Be upfront, or at least don’t deceive. Be avoidant and introvert for fun. Don’t ally yourself with someone who has something interesting to say. Stand up straight and pretend that you have a meaningful life when meeting your in-laws. Stand up straight and adjust your chest. Live a lie, or at least don’t be upfront. Hide your neck. Don’t compete against a person with a life. Compete against a mental patient. Cover your scrotum. Don’t tickle boys while they’re working. Walk around with a smile on your face when you can. Get romantically involved with your best friend. 

Don’t ever fondle a monkey when you feel like doing that.”

-Inspirobot AI

That last bit was in stark red text in the middle of the page. I swear the bot was possessed by a demon or some shit. Anyway, would love a sequel to that video!

You have been selected as one of just 8 people in the world to participate in a mini-vote deciding the fate of the global population. Each of you was chosen to be a representative of both your own life and the lives of approximately 1 billion randomly selected people out of the 8 billion people on Earth.

You are given the same buttons as usual - red and blue. If 1-3 people press blue, the representatives who pressed blue and the randomly assigned portions of the world population that they were assigned will die. If 4-8 representatives press blue, then everyone survives.

Does your answer to the original problem change or stay the same given the added weight of your decision, and the consequences of either adding to the blue minority or causing the red majority? You do not know who the other representatives are, what their personality/worldview is, and you cannot interact with them.

Disclaimer: This is graph is based on numerical logic, not morality, reasoning, or anything else that most people use to argue one button or the other. These are equations. Equations do not have opinions. If I made a mistake in how I set up this calculation, ***please*** leave me a comment so I can correct it in Desmos.

This graph shows you which side you should pick, and how much the benefits of you picking it are, based on the expected utility of the Red Button and the Blue Button. These two utilities are the opposite of one another, since anything you get from the Red Button you won't get from the Blue Button and vice versa - it's called a dilemma for a reason. Hear me out, and please click the link to view and play with the variables to see which button you should choose.

Variables:

I based this calculation on a normal distribution. The mean of this distribution is the prediction variable P, which equals the percentage of people you believe are going to press blue. For instance, if you believe everyone will press Red, set P to 0; if you believe everyone will press blue, set P to 100; if you believe 1 in 4 people will press Blue, set P to 25, etc.

The second variable is the certainty variable C, or the standard deviation of the distribution. Basically, the value of C is inversely proportional to how confident you personally are that your prediction about the percentage of the vote is correct. If you are super duper confident that the vote will be close to 50/50, set P to 50 and set C to a lower value, like 2 or 3. If you are only slightly confident that the vote will be 65 percent blue, set P to 65 and set C to a higher value like 10 or 12.

(Note: very low values of C like 1 and below equate to you being 99 percent confident that you are exactly correct, and very high values of C like 30 and above basically mean you are completely clueless what the vote will total to. Both of these are uncommon. Use the shape of the bell curve to guide you as to what you believe is about right - when the black line is higher, it means that value of percentage is more likely compared to others)

Reading the Graph:

Once you set your prediction P and your confidence C, look at UtilityRed and UtilityBlue. These numbers reveal the average amount of lives you are projected to save based on your own evaluation of what is probably going to happen during the vote.

For instance, if UtilityRed reads -8 and UtilityBlue reads +8, then you should pick Blue because by your estimate of the vote, you will save 8 lives on average if you pick Blue.

If UtilityRed reads -.98 and UtilityBlue reads .98, you should pick Red, because on average, you will probably save about one life net for net. Note that the Blue utility can go to very high numbers but only as low as -1, and the Red utility can go to very low numbers but tops out at +1, because your own life is the only one you are risking by voting blue.

That's about all you need to know to read the graph. Just make sure to pick the right button!

How I Did This (You Don't Have to Read This Part)

To make the graph, I started out with a normal distribution based on mean P and stdev C, the prediction and certainty, respectively. Both of these can be adjusted as desired, as seen in the previous explanation.

I then added an expression to calculate the "Yourdeath" value, or in other words, the odds that you will die by picking blue. This was simple enough, all I had to do was add an integral from an arbitrarily small value to the 50-percent mark. (I added in values below 0 so that Yourdeath would not be 1/2 if you set P to 0 and C to a small to midsized value, since obviously it's not a 1 in 2 shot if you think Red is going to dominate the vote. I couldn't figure out how else to factor in the missing probabilities without cutting off the domain of P, which I wanted to go from 0 to 100. This shouldn't be a problem most of the time, since the area of the distribution in the second quadrant is usually so infinitessimal it doesn't make a difference anyways) "Yourdeath" is just the amount of life you will save if you vote red instead of blue; if you believe the vote is 50/50, then Yourdeath is 1/2, subtracting .5 from Blue's utility and adding .5 to Red's utility.

The "Decision" expression was more complicated. You see, the only benefit that could possibly come from voting blue is if your vote is the one that gets the tally over 50 percent, which would mean the vote percentage is within a tiny range such that one more vote would put it at greater than or equal to 50 percent blue or less than 50 percent blue, depending on your choice. For this to be the case, the percentage must be close to 50 percent within a certain microscopic margin of error, equal to the weight of 1 vote. Now, the weight of one vote, denoted E, to my mind ought to equal a segment of the 0-100 range of the graph, equal to all other 8.3 billion other segments. Since the world population is about 8.3 billion, the weight of one vote E is the range of 100 divided into 8.3 billion little pieces, or in other words, 100/8,300,000,000. The critical region of the graph in which one vote will decide the majority at either the cost or salvation of 4,150,000,000 lives is from 50-E to 50+E.

To derive the utility of the "Decision" expression, I set up an expression to integrate the probability density function from 50-E to 50+E. No matter how you slice it, these aren't great odds; but that doesn't mean the case for the blue button is dead. In fact, by multiplying this 50+/-E integration by the potential lives it either saves or kills, in other words 4,150,000,000 (since the deciding vote will always determine the fate of exactly half the population), the Blue button utility usually becomes a reasonable number from 0-50 by way of the product of a massive number and a tiny number.

Finally, to calculate each utility, or the supposed number of lives that will be saved, I took each button. The Blue button's utility is the Decision expression minus the Yourdeath expression, since Blue fights for a majority but risks one life. The Red button does the opposite, ensuring one life at the risk of Blue losing the majority. This is valid because even if it Red wins at a high death toll, that would have happened no matter what your vote was unless the vote was decided by one person; you have no responsibility for anything outside what you can control, so the positive Blue utility is only useful if taken within the threshold range of 50-E to 50+E.

Trends I Noticed

• All utilities, positive or negative, tend to diminish with lower certainty
• Blue utility skyrockets when you believe the vote will be close to a tie, and shrinks to just above 0 when you predict a higher blue percentage
• As predictions tend toward a Red majority, the utility of Red converges to 1, as one would expect

Thanks and feel free to look at and use this graph. Hope this helped with the debate somehow!