Looks about right to me. Of course, the hard part is actually estimating P(B<⌊N/2⌋) for a given population under specific conditions, and the even harder part is figuring out what you can do in general to create populations where this probability tends to be very low. In such populations where the probability of a red victory is negligible, choosing blue is a way of protecting the tiny fraction of people who misread or misclick, suffer from a temporary bout of insanity, or just aren’t smart enough to comprehend the choice at all, at negligible risk to yourself.
Among earthlings, I think the issue would be more about a lack of coherence and understanding of decision theory and a desire to solve coordination problems, as well as common knowledge that such knowledge and desire was common (if it were in fact common), rather than a lack of altruism or any social pressure issues.
I would comfortably choose blue in dath ilan; on Earth under most conditions, I’d pick red for basically the reasons you give, but feel pretty sad about it.
I think my minimum condition for choosing blue would be if a supermajority of the population could pass a competence test, i.e. demonstrate understanding and independently generate valid explanations about games like this at at least the quality level in this post.
Judging from twitter, this is a condition which doesn’t hold even among rationalists, unfortunately. A further condition would be that there is no one playing who is confidently spouting wrong / crazy explanations and getting people to agree with them, whether they’re arguing for red or blue. (On a binary question, there will be lots of people who arrive at the right answer by chance; but that’s only relevant if they arrive at the right answer for actually-valid reasons, and if everyone can immediately see and validly refute invalid reasoning.)
Looks about right to me. Of course, the hard part is actually estimating P(B<⌊N/2⌋) for a given population under specific conditions, and the even harder part is figuring out what you can do in general to create populations where this probability tends to be very low. In such populations where the probability of a red victory is negligible, choosing blue is a way of protecting the tiny fraction of people who misread or misclick, suffer from a temporary bout of insanity, or just aren’t smart enough to comprehend the choice at all, at negligible risk to yourself.
Among earthlings, I think the issue would be more about a lack of coherence and understanding of decision theory and a desire to solve coordination problems, as well as common knowledge that such knowledge and desire was common (if it were in fact common), rather than a lack of altruism or any social pressure issues.
I would comfortably choose blue in dath ilan; on Earth under most conditions, I’d pick red for basically the reasons you give, but feel pretty sad about it.
I think my minimum condition for choosing blue would be if a supermajority of the population could pass a competence test, i.e. demonstrate understanding and independently generate valid explanations about games like this at at least the quality level in this post.
Judging from twitter, this is a condition which doesn’t hold even among rationalists, unfortunately. A further condition would be that there is no one playing who is confidently spouting wrong / crazy explanations and getting people to agree with them, whether they’re arguing for red or blue. (On a binary question, there will be lots of people who arrive at the right answer by chance; but that’s only relevant if they arrive at the right answer for actually-valid reasons, and if everyone can immediately see and validly refute invalid reasoning.)