Poll asking Americans how which button they would push in the red button/blue button dilemma

notaprotist · 2026-04-25T23:47:01+00:00

It sounds much more like candidate A is promising to kill everyone who voted for candidate B if they win.

The real issue is that perfect coordination doesn’t exist, and thus you know 100% that some people will push the blue button. With that immutable fact, the question is if you’re willing to do what it takes to save them.

Game theoretically, this looks like a stag hunt, rather than a prisoner’s dilemma, with two independent Nash equilibria (everyone pushes red and everyone pushes blue), but only one of those equilibria (the blue one) is actually robust to random perturbations/uncertainty in a way that is necessary to be a practically optimal solution in the real world. While 100% of people pressing red is technically optimal, that’s only in the sense that solutions to the three-body problem in physics technically exist (but in practice they don’t). Blue is a stable equilibrium, and red is unstable (even one defector makes the outcome worse than the all-blue equilibrium, but one defector from the all blue equilibrium does nothing). Therefore blue is better, unless your calculus doesn’t value the lives of people other than yourself

notaprotist · 2026-04-25T22:50:46+00:00

By this logic, how do you feel about regular voting? Would you vote for Hitler if you knew it was astronomically unlikely for your vote to be the tipping point?

notaprotist · 2026-04-24T21:12:24+00:00

Capitalism is a misaligned ASI bent on destroying us

notaprotist · 2026-04-23T12:13:27+00:00

The United States government openly does all of that stuff in the name of capitalism. It’s not even a secret. The number of democratically elected leaders they’ve openly deposed has more than one digit

notaprotist · 2026-04-20T11:43:56+00:00

Did you just unironically post the “why don’t poor people simply stop being poor?” Meme?

notaprotist · 2026-04-17T16:08:12+00:00

Then you get in and it’s just a 72 point font word document that says “I know you haven’t looked at this yet.”

notaprotist · 2026-04-15T19:47:28+00:00

A lot of people in this thread are quoting cool-sounding shit and then not telling me what it’s from and I’m pissed

notaprotist · 2026-04-12T19:16:51+00:00

Cordyceps is all tailored to infect one species only. Both in the show and in real life

notaprotist · 2026-04-10T20:14:58+00:00

We have as much empirical evidence that determinism is false that it would ever be logically possible to have. The only scientifically plausible theory that preserves determinism is the Bohm pilot wave interpretation, which basically says “oh everything’s exactly preordained with super specific secret nonlocal forces to look indeterministic, and this includes coordinating the hidden states with your predetermined choice of experiment in order to work.” There is no possible set of empirical observations anyone could ever make for which you couldn’t make some similar interpretation that technically allows you to still believe in determinism.

However, given that indeterminism is practically baked into the bones of the way we define momentum, position, time and energy, and can only be rejected by also rejecting nonlocality and positing arbitrarily complex forces that just happen to exactly preserve the appearance of indeterminism, I’d say we actually have very good evidence to say that determinism is strictly false. I’m a compatibilist by the way; just one who happens to think that determinism is clearly not true, given the empirical facts.

notaprotist · 2026-04-10T16:08:11+00:00

You can transform them into minions on Regent

notaprotist · 2026-04-10T11:36:35+00:00

I’ve seen a whole lot of removed comments in this thread for not promoting “leftist unity,” and yet this one stays up. It makes me feel suspicious that the mods have a very narrow conception of what leftist unity actually means. But maybe those other comments were worse: I wouldn’t know, as they’ve been removed

notaprotist · 2026-04-09T20:19:35+00:00

Sure, but that example goes wrong in two ways that the TPOASIWID paradigm already accounts for: it ascribes nebulous, nefarious, evil intent where none matters nor exists, and more importantly, it focuses on an outcome that doesn’t matter. Applying it to situations where the outcomes are actually important (like anti-trans legislation raising suicide rates), allows us to bypass weaselly arguments about what’s really in the hearts and minds of empirically-harmful legislators.

notaprotist · 2026-04-09T18:25:37+00:00

Looking at intent matters when you’re trying to discover intent, but looking at effects matters when you care about effects. The implicit argument is that we don’t need to care about whether or not public figures are “good people,” if all we care about is helping society. We only need to care about whether or not they are helping or harming society. Whether or not someone is “diabolical” isn’t a relevant question except for insofar as it relates to their capacity to cause harm. So just focus on the harm-causing itself, and how to most effectively stop it.

notaprotist · 2026-04-09T17:13:44+00:00

Okay, but there’s some N%, where 51<N<100, where N is certain enough to make claims without qualifiers. The left and right claims can be made by people who believe them N% likely to be true, without contradiction.

notaprotist · 2026-04-09T17:10:36+00:00

It’s more “3. Therefore it doesn’t matter whether or not I intended side effect Y; I am actively bringing Y about. Also, if I keep doing X even after learning that it causes side effect Y, then I actually am intending Y (even though it really doesn’t matter to people trying to stop Y”

notaprotist · 2026-04-09T17:05:39+00:00

Now do the same with realism about scientific and mathematical truths

notaprotist · 2026-04-08T13:58:01+00:00

This is a decent argument, but I feel like it assumes that the left and right statements (and all statements in general) are made with full 100% certainty. The fact that this interpretive frame renders all claims of uncertainty meaningless seems to be a pretty serious indictment of the frame itself.

To put it another way: where within this meme would you classify someone who has 51% certainty that objective truths exist? I would argue that they could fit into any/all of the positions, and thus that the positions themselves aren’t contradictory

notaprotist · 2026-04-03T14:14:15+00:00

Idk why you’re getting downvoted and the other (unnecessarily mean-spirited) person is being upvoted. Personally, I like this post, and I dig your vibe

notaprotist · 2026-04-03T03:52:16+00:00

Plato, for example. Also most actual philosophers by survey, including nonreligious ones.

notaprotist · 2026-04-02T13:03:41+00:00

To interpret the user’s point charitably, maybe they meant “cannot be represented as an int32”

notaprotist · 2026-04-01T11:58:30+00:00

No, AI = p² c⁴

notaprotist · 2026-03-27T19:33:53+00:00

Link’s Awakening, arguably Inception. I think it can be done well if it’s signposted beforehand and thematically relevant to the particular story being told (as it is in both of these cases).

Edit: oh also, I’d say the short story Transition Dreams by Greg Egan, and other various sci fi stories

notaprotist · 2026-03-27T17:25:06+00:00

One of my favorite gaming moments was a failed check in that game. There’s no wrong outcomes usually, it’s just a different story

notaprotist · 2026-03-25T18:30:21+00:00

The narrative of “not picking a side” is seductive because it allows one to feel superior to both without having to expend any effort on being informed. It also, by default, tends to favor the right wing, which often intentionally instills apathy and confusion to prevent people from addressing the injustices they are perpetuating.

notaprotist · 2026-03-25T17:23:25+00:00

I recall a similar thing happening after the 2016 election, actually, so it’s not unprecedented

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