seems to me that blue is a great choice in the original poll as framed even though there are many variants (in wording or outcome) in which red is a better choice. had fun playing with some alternate framings. my thought process in thread
Reframing the red/blue pill poll to expose framing effects
23 tweets · August 2023 · 330 likes · 4 retweets · read on Twitter
this tweet highlighted for me the way in which this *isn't* a collective action problem at least not the way a classic stag hunt is, where there's a huge gain from cooperating but if even one person doesn't then cooperators suffer while defectors do okay
I think the impetus to choose blue comes from pattern-matching from other situations / thought experiments, in which literally anybody MUST blue original phrasing: - if > 50% of ppl choose blue pill, everyone lives - if not, red pills live and blue pills die
on some reflection, it seems very likely to me that this is caused in large part by the phrases "everyone lives" and "blue pills die". maybe also by the ordering. it's rare for a thought experiment to have an option labeled "everyone lives" but there's another way all can live
ooooh also by the framing of "red pills" and "blue pills". there's a kind of identity thing. you see the "everyone lives" option. you want to pick it, because of course everyone living is good. but then you see "oh no, but if enough people are selfish assholes, I'll die"
this poll is probably a BRILLIANT way to study framing effects. this version (exact same outcomes!) - highlights the individual payoffs better - points out that people choosing blue/yellow are risking their own lives - makes red/green the "simple" option
and here's an even more over-the-top attempt—still getting a lot of pact folks. it seems plausible to me that there's a way to frame this that could get 100% of non-suicidal people picking the "I just live" option
here's a way to frame it so the prosocial/nonviolent option feels like the one that was originally labeled "red pill" and looked very violent
This one got WAY longer than expected 😂 I legit don't know what lizardman's constant is going to be on it, but in an important sense if the stakes were real (not thought experiment) this one (same structure!) should drive "blue pill" to zero.
I think in most real situations that look at all like this, either the choice is so obvious that it doesn't look like a choice, or it is an actual tragedy of the commons ish where a minimum number of people must take some risk or loss in order for things to work out for everyone
and thus people happily vote blue if it seems like there's a good chance for others to vote blue, because the "everybody lives" option seems simple and good, whereas the other one is messy and bad twitter.com/icryaboutlife/…
but once the requirement is much above 50% I feel like people voting blue would actually probably start being kind of afraid, and that fear is an ACCURATE sign to look harder at the situation and see if there's a better solution
all of the new poll numbers are of course absurdly suspect now, since the power of the framing effects goes away in a context where people have been discussing the choices in question, have already made several, and are primed to think about framing effects
I seriously think that psychologists studying framing effects could get a good paper out of variations on this one plus maybe studying the extent to which people can see both: - that the structure is technically the same - that framing matters since it affects odds of mistakes
contra Roko, coordination is not just usually but *necessarily* achieved by shared meaning-making, specifically by framing choices leadership in practice involves achieving stag-hunt-like results by creating a shared meaning-interface with the world where cooperating is obvious
also, while I'm saying the obvious: even more so than most thought experiments, this is a STUPID scenario as exactly framed. most people who aren't decoupling so hard assume they are being given a choice that isn't stupid, which suggests there might be a reason to coordinate
put another way, if you're assuming relevance (which linguists note is necessary to have collaborative conversations at all) then literally the only reason to even ASK this question IS for the purpose of running a coordination fire drill! and we passed! and this was a speech act
some would counter with: the actual reason here is for running a virtue-signalling trap, that will make people naively trust others around here but like, I think in the grand scheme of things people are already naively trusting for many other reasons and this doesn't matter.
anyway, thank you for coming to my TED talk, this was a wild ride today and I am gonna go. offline. now.
New experiment. My guess is that many people who answered blue in the original implicitly may have been adding some noise like this one explicitly adds. (a different way to frame this scenario below is that 1% of people get the opposite color they pick)
^ so far the above one is the only experiment of mine that changes what the buttons actually do as opposed to just changing the framing here's an alternative wordy one, emphasizing defaults and how convoluted options are often bad
I tried this one, and the converse (in thread), as a different way to explore defaults, but it's very hard to tell what they imply, especially given the actual lack of stakes and lizardman's constant and unclarity about what twitter counts as a "view"
this is by FAR my favorite reframe on the whole thing I claim that this one is actually in some very real sense isomorphic to the original, and that this evokes why people vote blue we (sometimes) identify with the whole, and the whole wants to live!