I think the setup is so far away from plausible that we’ll never know how many people would choose blue and die. I agree that there’s probably going to be a lizardman-constant amount of blues, but I don’t think there’s any path to a blue-majority without a fair bit of campaigning and coordination (which would be better spent getting more reds), and even then it’s not guaranteed, so my expectation is that a blue win is just a phantom option—there’s no actual future universe that contains that outcome.
which, of course means that maximizing red is not “choosing to kill at least 400 million people, and possibly billions”, it’s minimizing the kill that whoever set up this evil scheme is responsible for.
This is basically my position as well. Without (very) strong evidence that a majority would pick blue, red is the obvious choice. I would choose red in the “real” version and red in the “fake” version as well.
If there was a “practice” version so people could indicate their intentions that would be later followed by a real version, then I would pick red in the practice version and would switch to blue in the real version if blue got at least around 2⁄3 in the practice version.
There are a lot of potential coordination mechanisms that could convince me to go blue. In the case as given, where there is no such ability, I think red is the choice which maximizes total utility (by keeping more people alive than a doomed pretense that blue can win).
I think the setup is so far away from plausible that we’ll never know how many people would choose blue and die. I agree that there’s probably going to be a lizardman-constant amount of blues, but I don’t think there’s any path to a blue-majority without a fair bit of campaigning and coordination (which would be better spent getting more reds), and even then it’s not guaranteed, so my expectation is that a blue win is just a phantom option—there’s no actual future universe that contains that outcome.
which, of course means that maximizing red is not “choosing to kill at least 400 million people, and possibly billions”, it’s minimizing the kill that whoever set up this evil scheme is responsible for.
This is basically my position as well. Without (very) strong evidence that a majority would pick blue, red is the obvious choice. I would choose red in the “real” version and red in the “fake” version as well. If there was a “practice” version so people could indicate their intentions that would be later followed by a real version, then I would pick red in the practice version and would switch to blue in the real version if blue got at least around 2⁄3 in the practice version.
In the fake version conducted as a twitter poll, 70% picked blue.
There are a lot of potential coordination mechanisms that could convince me to go blue. In the case as given, where there is no such ability, I think red is the choice which maximizes total utility (by keeping more people alive than a doomed pretense that blue can win).