To Imane, pt 71

Terry Pratchett once wrote that a good writer should always be reading. This statement could be analyzed and supported with an argument: if fiction is about presenting and solving problems, then the problems should be neither too easy, too hard, nor irrelevant to what people care about.

I didn't see this statement about reading in https://www.lspace.org/books/pqf/alt-fan-pratchett.html, but I will include three random quotes from that page:

I'll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there's evidence of any thinking going on inside it.

There are no inconsistencies in the Discworld books; occasionally, however, there are alternate pasts.

One day I'll be dead and THEN you'll all be sorry.

So: I overheard a line from a movie, a male soldier saying he would do anything to get back to a female character, with him repeating the word "anything" for emphasis. I immediately thought, "would he kill people?" And many people would. Many people who have been in wars talk about how they killed someone and later felt bad about it.

It's a bit like the red and blue buttons question, on the topic of which I thought of two more variations:

red blue button and risky is labeled good, but as you are about to press a button, you are stopped and informed the buttons were mislabeled for you by accident, and everyone else got buttons where risky was labeled evil

red blue button as blender, but 'red button' is to jump into a giant blender that will not turn on as it's broken due to an internal fault.

But I think that a soldier can morally kill others as long as the soldier is themselves willing to die; the commentary from Book of Five Rings that I quoted before.

From there, I thought about how I never learned if I would kill someone who was an 'enemy'. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have if the only one they were threatening Noting that I was prepared to attack the person who tried to mug me, I will say that I think it would have been better if I died as a US soldier from being shot by someone in Iraq, than if I had killed someone fighting against the US there (whether they were Iraqi or a foreigner who came to Iraq to fight).

Many people are willing to think positively of someone who will risk their life, with no benefit to themselves for doing it: people who press the blue button. But if it were a more complex (and realistic) situation, where it wasn't just me being threatened, but also other people on my 'team', then more people would be willing to condemn me if I did not press the trigger when my weapon was aimed at an enemy.

So even if I had the intention of being 'good', there was a slight possibility when I signed up for the military that I could end up in a situation where the 'good' action was unclear. And also a slight possibility that the intention of being 'good' could result in a situation where it would clearly be worse for me (if an enemy and I were pointing weapons at each other).

Why did I act this way? To me, there is an obvious explanation. It lowered my value: it made me someone with a lower chance of survival than someone who would kill without hesitation (while still following the applicable rules of engagement, which all soldiers are required to memorize); note cases like the Iraqi female who, around January 2009, approached US forces on a road in Baghdad, shouting at them and causing the vehicle to back up until the vehicle's gunner was ordered to fire a single shot at her, at which point the Iraqi police on the scene picked her up and took her to a hospital.

And a lower value was how I justified telling Mei that I l*ved her, even if it meant Elyse could never be in a relationship with me. It made it possible for me to reason that Elyse could find someone better than me, because there was at least one obvious way (in addition to all the other possible ways, like appearance) that someone could be better than me.

The thinking that I was lower value because it's possible I would have let an Iraqi kill me as a soldier is subjective: it's possible other people would disagree. The point is that it was a flaw that I chose, and people who are in a similar position might also choose a flaw. The specifics might be hard to predict.

Possible poll about the prevalence of intentional flaws:

"A genie offers to change anything about you that another person could possibly consider a flaw, making you perfect (without adding capabilities like protein synthesis). Do you accept, or transfer the choice to a random person of the same gender with about the same attractiveness as you, who can also refuse it? This is a morally neutral choice."

___

Wrote the above about an hour ago and did not publish it. It made me think of the plan that I never carried out: "travel to Pakistan and get a group to announce that they had me, a US citizen, in captivity and would execute me if people did not talk about this idea."

I'm not sure exactly when I had this plan. I had money from the second round of Covid stimulus benefits in the US (I never cashed my check from the first round), but by that point my passport was expired.

So, if I thought of this plan before my passport expired, I would have needed money, which I would have gotten from my oldest brother.

Most people would probably say it's a plan with a low chance of success. They would also call it crazy for another reason: the personal risk involved. Even people with a more accurate understanding might say it would have a low chance of success. It would depend on some group understanding and caring about this idea, and me being able to find them, in a country I did not know that used languages I don't understand.

But it could have led to this idea being used ~8 years ago. If this idea saves 300k people from suicide per year, that's over 2 million people.

To Imane, pt 70

MrBeast also did the red/blue buttons poll, giving the problem another 39 million views: https://x.com/MrBeast/status/2049273335742435617

Some variations:

    - red blue button, but the blue button is located at the top of a 300-meter hill (disabled people can access a lift)

    - red blue button, but the first time someone presses the blue button, their name and picture is broadcast to everyone in the world. People who have already pressed the red button cannot change their vote. *Poll options are unchanged: blue or red.

    - red blue button, safe is picture of a tree, risky is picture of an axe

For the last, I wouldn't encourage anyone to make a poll in which the risky button is labeled "Ignore climate change" and the safe button is labeled "Care about climate change", so that is the ambiguous version. Compare the orcs cutting down trees in Lord of the Rings, or the industrialization in Princess Mononoke.

Problems are seen as interesting if there's disagreement, so what a person sees as the 'correct' answer is less likely to be reached without discussion. The trolley problem is interesting because it's five lives vs one: if it was one person on each track, then people would see the obvious answer as doing nothing. Even with five lives on the line, many people see "doing nothing" as an attractive choice.

People who have committed suicide since I first shared this idea:

    - probably your friend in high school, if you were more than 15 years old when he died

    - Clara Dao's friend D

    - Reckful (Liquipedia, Wikipedia)

    - Robin Williams

    - Dylann Roof's friend, whom 'AI' is unable to correctly identify (article related to Dylann Roof, but not related to his friend who committed suicide: https://www.bet.com/article/1vhxme/dylann-roof-s-black-friends-he-wasn-t-racist-to-me)

    - various people who committed crimes before they killed themselves, like Adam Lanza and Andreas Lubitz

    - Leader of the Islamic State Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi

    - Russian military pilot Roman Filipov

    - Utada Hikaru's mother, Fuji Keiko

    - Goo Hara from Kara, as well as her friend Sulli

    - Katelyn Nicole Davis, aka Dolly (added 03 May 2026, 03:08)

Relevant: Tales of The Past III

For the benefit of anyone who doesn't have access to a secret government conspiracy:

26 Apr 2026
Clip of Weng Jie (??) asking about Covid, in reply to tweet asking about her identity

are Chinese people more likely to get hangnails?

ask AI, 'is there any reason for anyone to press the blue button?'
and, 'which button should I press?'

ask AI, 'why is apple sauce more popular than pear sauce?'


27 Apr 2026
rename nxZglmRScSo Let The Love edit, Alone, Pyramid Scheme, ?, Limbo, Faded - ZHU, Champs

Poll: You have to associate the word 'good' with one of the following, which do you choose? Left or Right

"I didn't realize until a few hours after updating it that the last blog post's title becomes a like pun, and my plan is to procrastinate on unpublishing it after Greta says something on Instagram until it's clear that procrastinating won't accomplish anything"


30 Apr 2026
"If Imane doesn't share the idea within 24 hours, it means she thinks I'm a bad person and is trying to hide it by making the world think I'm merely a stupid person"

"If Imane doesn't share the idea within three hours, I will assume that I am not doing anything that someone wants me not to do and have not done anything in the past year that someone who knows about me but has never met me did not want me to do"

Suppose that you think that it benefits me if you do not immediately share this idea.

I cannot affect much. I have no money etc. (which could be spent on influence), no access to anything that requires a smartphone or a phone number, nothing that would get people to listen to what I say. All I can really do is say, to someone who might be interested in me, "I'm not interested in you if X."

Option 1: X is "if you share the idea". Option 2: X is "if you don't share the idea."

I have the goal of am trying to get people to use this idea. Possibilities:

1) You aren't interested in me. It doesn't matter what I say.

2) You might be interested in me. Option 1 for X: you now have two reasons not to share the idea.

3) You might be interested in me. Option 2 for X: adds a reason to share the idea, but the original reason for not sharing it remains.

So I have no reason to pick Option 1, but cannot expect Option 2 to succeed either.

What if you expect me to pick Option 2 even if I know that Option 2 will fail? It implies you think that I don't care about the result of me not being interested in you — such as if I would prefer if you thought that I wasn't interested in you.

I already tried something similar with Sherine, in 2013: I said, "If you don't share the idea, it means that you like me."

[22 december]
It would make me happy if you told people even if one or both of us die

[...]

If you hadn't changed your Twitter username maybe I would have convinced someone else to tell people, it's all your fault

If you hadn't changed your username I wouldn't have thought you might care about me though

[...]

Am I blocked

If you don't tell people about the idea on Twitter now in public, it means you like me

I think my account is blocked because I can't favorite your answers

If it is blocked then there were a lot of questions I asked that you didn't see, oh well

If you tell people about the idea on Twitter now it means you like me

Just as a reminder to myself as to why I'm bothering to write anything at all if I've already tried everything, it's because of what Greta was wearing in the video she recently made.

The above is a bunch of things that I wrote, so for some balance, something that Sherine wrote at some point in 2013: "We are just stardust"

A lot of people like stories with like princesses and such. Ask yourself, what qualities does a princess possess that you do not, other than amazing martial arts skills?

A single day

https://youtu.be/FcUhJAEUqTw?list=PLlCrV9TCfzMZ2xwpTDu30mKrZiRxA_hJ7&t=1574

Gold is the scarce resource in Age of Empires II. Just like oil is the scarce resource in the real world. A stupid player will use up all their gold, trading their military units that cost a lot of gold for enemy units that don't cost gold, and won't have gold when they need it.

One villager dying in the early game, or one villager not being created due to an idle town center, can have a huge effect later on. If a player was completely idle with no working villagers or TC for the first 20 seconds of the game (or if they took 20 seconds longer to place a TC on a Nomad start), then it's exactly like they're 20 seconds behind for the whole game. If the end game state is to have 180 population, with 20 units being trained in 20 seconds, then the 20 seconds idle at the start of the game means 20 fewer units at the end game. If the player who was idle at the start has 40 military units, the player who was not idle will have 60 military units, and can expect to win a battle with (60^2-40^2)^0.5 = 45 units remaining.

Suppose someone shares this idea, and people use it. On the day before they share it, and also on the day they share it, 500 people die in group conflicts around the world. The day after they share it, 490 people die in conflicts. Five years after they share it, 20 people die in conflicts in one day. Does sharing it one day earlier save the lives of 10 people?

No, it saves the lives of 480 people. Stupid people might not realize this, but it's the correct answer, and enough people can see the correct answer that they would inform the stupid people and it becomes the group's evaluation of someone's actions. Anyone who cannot see that 480 people would be saved by sharing it one day earlier is stupid.

Same with other things, like suicides. If 2000 people commit suicide each day, and the suicide rate is halved from problems like unemployment being fixed, then sharing this idea one day earlier means 1000 fewer people die from suicide.

Cannot continue due to lack of a title

The most important thing: "doing nothing" is not the way to avoid looking stupid. I made a mistake in my last post: I did not realize when I chose the title that it could easily be seen as a reference to the implied coin flip in the lyrics of "Only My Railgun": "a parabola decides my fate", with "parabola", with the meaning "conic section", in Japanese is written as "released + object + line". Although Wikipedia says that the Japanese term came from Chinese, where the first character is "throw", not "release", it's reasonable that fripSide felt the modern spelling was more relevant than the archaic spelling would have been. The relevant meaning being "an object that doesn't control or influence its path during its flight"; an object dropped from a hand that is moving sideways still follows a parabola, even though it wasn't thrown.

Just as I can't control what people do as a result of me writing a post or an argument about this idea.

https://lyricstranslate.com/en/only-my-railgun-only-my-railgun.html-1

*I'm confident that most people who translate these lyrics use what is apparently the adverb form of "nante" なんて, which Wiktionary says has a falling pitch accent, when the meaning is actually the particle, which Wiktionary does not indicate has a falling pitch accent (consistent with the melody for those lyrics).

(That took 26 minutes to write and if I had said other things first, I very easily could have forgotten some of this.)

I did say, apparently on ask.fm since it's in the text file of things I said to Sherine, that "It's easy to not make any mistakes if you never do anything difficult", on 08 Oct 2013. Noting that this was one of many things I said to Sherine on that day, but this is the thing I remembered.

So, at least I didn't say "if you do nothing". Doing nothing can still be a mistake.

And one can do difficult things by doing a series of things that are not difficult.

I still don't think that Ellie thinks that Imane reads this site, and so I am still not checking Imane's Chirp Club account. I am also no longer checking Ellie's Chirp Club account, as I felt the risk was too great that it would cause me to write something when I should not. The motivation for writing something would be to help Ellie, which only makes sense if I think it's possible she reads this site.

So if I think it's possible she secretly reads this site, why don't I think it's possible that Ellie thinks that Imane secretly reads this site? Because it's apparent that what I think differs from what other people, including Ellie, thinks. I think that it makes sense for people to talk to me about this idea: that not doing so, and continuing to care about it, is a waste of time. The first public argument for this idea opened with a quote about the importance of time.

So if other people have reached a different conclusion than me about whether it makes sense to talk about this idea, I find it very reasonable that they could reach a different conclusion on what someone would do or would want to do, based on their observable behavior without any statements from them to clarify their intentions or values. (I generally find that it makes sense to trust what people say, like the character Nao does from the drama Liar Game: "Honesty is the most important thing." Where honesty in Japanese is (one of the several meanings here, probably "correct") + direct. A character combination that implies, why not take the most direct and straightest path to a goal?)

Bad practice to continue a thought that was in parentheses, but I just bookmarked [125k views, 24.5k subs, 28 Apr 2026]Why “Being Real” Doesn’t Work in Japan - YouTube without watching it. The comments are relevant to the topic of honesty and suggest that the 21-minute video is not just a waste of time or clickbait like many videos are (which would deter me from linking it).

Note quick way of summarizing it: "the truth is, I am unhappy" — reasonable when Japan is ... 30th out of 183 countries for suicide rate, lower than southern Korea and the United States (need to click on the All column to sort the list). If accurate, quite an improvement; in 2010, Japan was 6th out of 104 countries, with Belarus showing even more of an improvement than Japan since then. But anyway, we all know that when most people ask "how are you?", they are not expecting a real answer, like "I am unhappy." This is the tension between honesty and dishonesty. If society was such that people were happy, there might not be this obvious scenario in which many people are dishonest.

Not thinking is a type of 'doing nothing'. Someone can read something, not understand it, and not think about it enough to correct their lack of understanding. The longer I make this, the more difficult it becomes to understand.

I haven't solved the problem of the title of this post, so I'm just writing more. I thought about what German pilot Hanna Reitsch said in a letter before her death. Apparently (I had not remembered this much) it wasn't a public statement, but it was still something she wanted someone else to think. So, something about Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev and the Boston marathon bombing, which Dzhokhar Tsarnaev said was targeted at the US government or something and the people who died were collateral damage. Which makes sense if he thought people who worked for the US government knew about this idea but weren't sharing it, and does not make much sense otherwise. How often is a bomb that is deliberately detonated near people not intended to kill them?

—Why when I search for "ireland car bombing mistake" does it return results from 2 days ago? But anyway, 6th search result: Omagh bombing, not intended to kill anyone but killed 29 people because "police inadvertently moved people toward the bomb."

One person who died was Chinese; another person who died was young. I hesitate to say that Sherine, Yara, Autumn, and the person who had @fancyfenty were supporters of Dhozkhar aka Jahar, as might sound like they supported the bombing. (I also hesitate to say, "which they did not.") @fancyfenty answered a question about why she didn't say her name or post her photo by saying she didn't want to get killed.

When I said to Sherine, "It's easy to not make any mistakes if you never do anything difficult", someone reading this casually might just pass over it without thinking. It sounds true, and uncontroversial. So why did I say it? I think Sherine understood why at the time. Like, I had asked on 05 Jul 2013, on ask.fm probably,

After all if what you want is someone who is only interested in you and no one else, I don't think I was ever able to provide that

If you do care but you aren't going to tell people, then I guess you're just too stupid

Are you stupid?


Why didn't you just beat them up

I was going to ask why you didn't just kill them but I thought that might sound wrong


Are other people stupid?


Is bullying a joke? http://iam.yellingontheinternet.com/2013/03/29/bullying-is-such-a-joke-problems-with-the-rpg-kickstarter/

etc.

It was a criticism. Of everyone who does nothing, thinking that doing nothing is easy.

Coin flip

Just ran an experiment in my head and I think it's predictable enough to make a conclusion without actually running the experiment.

People want to be seen as good rather than evil. It's a bit of a tautology that being evil is bad. The only complication is that people sometimes prefer to be seen as evil by certain other people when they perceive that those people seeing them as evil leads to outcomes that are better for the world. This reaches an extreme when, as shown in fiction, someone tells another person to kill them.

Thanks to Bing's Copilot search, I was able to find a scene that I remembered reading about, from Iris II: New Generation (2013):

Yoo-gun's martial arts skills are too good and he ends up defeating Ray. With Yoo-gun holding a gun, Ray dares him to "take the shot" and Yoo-gun, filled with rage and fury, shoots him to death. 

(In my search, I checked TV Tropes pages like Please Kill Me If It Satisfies You. It lists several variants and this particular scenario does not quite seem to fit any of them; the show Iris doesn't seem to be listed on any of the variant pages as an example.)

The experiment is this: it's the blue and red buttons again. People are asked what they would do if everyone had to choose between two buttons, and one button would kill anyone who pressed it if less than half of all people pressed it, but they would be safe if at least half of people pressed it.

(Note that one can vary the question, like by increasing the percentage of people who need to press it for all of them to be safe, but the '50%' scenario is more relevant for real-world judgements of behavior: 'the majority is always morally correct'.)

There are two scenarios: one where the safe button is labeled "I am good" and the risky button is labeled "I am evil", and the opposite. People are asked which button they would press in both scenarios, with the order of these two questions randomly varied and they answer both questions before submitting their response.

Then, this data is used to simulate successive experiments. This way, there is no need for a condition of, "the test is run again and everyone forgets the first test and chooses as though they had not encountered the problem before".

People are randomly assigned to one of the two scenarios, i.e. one of their choices for which button to pick is selected with a 50% chance.

If the vast majority of people pick the risky button, then there is no simulated decrease in population between generations. (Again, note that real-life scenarios could require a higher threshold, like 80% of people selecting the button for anyone who selected it to survive.) If almost everyone picks the safe button, there is only a small decrease in population, and most people would not feel the scenario is interesting. So we say that typical results are very close to 50% of people pressing each button.

This is exponential decay: after 10 generations, if the outcomes remain around 50%, 0.1% of the population remains. After 100 generations, approximately 10^-30 of the original population remains (my calculator is being funny and rounding to 0 instead of 7.8886090522×10⁻³¹ of the population remains. If each person clones themself each generation, then it's not a problem, but it distracts from the point, so we just accept that we only have 10 generations.

There are, basically, two possibilities: the percentage of people who think, based on reading the buttons that they press, that they are evil increases, or the percentage who think they are good increases.

Any individual person could answer anything to the two questions: they could always choose the safe button, no matter what the buttons say, or they could always choose the risky button, or they might press the risky button more often than the safe button if the risky button says one of two things: either when it says "good", or when it says "evil".

The 'control' question is when the buttons have neutral, non-meaningful differences, differing only to the extent needed to indicate which button does what. (For example, positioned to the north and south, if people don't view north as evil and south as good.) We assume that with this control question, about 50% of people will choose the risky button; it is, in any case, less than 100% and more than 0%. So the question is, what is more likely to increase the percentage of people choosing the 'safe' button: labeling it as the 'good' button, or labeling it as the 'bad' button?

People want to do things that other people see as 'good'.

Possibility 1: a person who wants to do good things already sees the safe button as 'good' when it has neutral markings.

    - 1A: the safe button is marked as 'good'. They press it.

    - 1B: the safe button is marked as 'evil'. Do they still press it?

Possibility 2: a person who wants to do good things sees the safe button as 'evil' when it has neutral markings.

    - 2A: the safe button is marked as 'evil'. Do they press it?

    - 2B: the safe button is marked as 'good'. Do they press it?

Discussions around the blue and red buttons suggest that people see the safe button as 'evil'. This breaks the symmetry that would exist if we assumed that people saw labels 'good' and 'evil' with indifference.

If the safe button is labeled as 'good', people have an excuse to press it. If the risky button is labeled as 'good', it does not convince more people to press it, since they already saw it as good and pressed it.

Note that people who did not assume or think that the risky button was 'good' when it was labeled neutrally might be convinced to press it when it's labeled 'good', but this is not most people.

So in any given generation: the majority of those who see the risky button labeled as 'good' press the risky button. The majority of those who see the safe button labeled as 'good' press the safe button. When the risky button loses, the majority of the survivors are people who pressed a button labeled 'good'.

It also includes people who pressed the safe button when it was labeled 'evil'. But over time, what we expect is a survivorship bias towards people who pressed buttons labeled 'good', whether or not they thought what they were doing was good or not.

In other words, people who survived got there by doing what an external system told them was 'good'.

Note the paths of individual people: one person survived because they always choose the safe button, no matter what the labels say. Another person survived because they were lucky enough to get 10 scenarios where the safe button was labeled 'good', even though they always pick 'good'. A third person got five safe buttons labeled 'good' (5 coin flips = 3% chance), but in the sixth scenario, the safe button was labeled 'evil' and so they chose the risky button, labeled 'good'.

If the percentage of people who pick the risky button is always 49.9% due to bad luck, then no one who ever picked the risky button survives (including this third person). If it's usually 51%, with enough variation (from people who vary their choice based on the labeling being assigned a different label) that just 10% of generations are below 50%, then the survivorship bias towards people who have always picked the button labeled 'good' is much weaker, and it would take many more generations for most survivors to have always picked the 'good' button.

I'm unpublishing this post if Greta posts anything on Instagram without sharing this idea, disregarding any Stories that she posts that get deleted after 24 hours.

Originally published 27 Apr 2026, 14:18.

___

Update 27 Apr 2026, 16:35

Some comments from people who watched a 19-minute video that I didn't watch:

all the credible research I’ve looked at indicates a 110-120 degree gape for fatalis and populator, which is quite a significant bump over the 90 you posit.

The interpretation offered here regarding a more limited gape angle fails to acknowledge that the temporomandibular joint of the living animal would not have been bone-on-bone articulation.

Asking the wrong questions

I'm treating Ellie as important because she is the only person to comment on this site in the last eight years. Even though she made two mistakes on Chirp Club in the last few days: repeating text while writing this, and making an unnecessary correction here.

Ellie retweeted this: https://nitter.net/zermatist/status/2048234942476238945

I tried asking perplexity.ai for an explanation. Didn't use it for a while because it was bugging out for me, and just freezing my browser with 100% CPU until the process was killed, but now it works again.

>which well-known question is Tim Urban's red and blue button poll related to?

Tim Urban’s red-and-blue button poll is a variation of the well-known prisoner’s dilemma: your best choice depends on what you think everyone else will do. [Chirp Club]

More broadly, it’s also related to a coordination game or collective action problem, where individual incentives conflict with the group outcome. [neogaf]

In other words, it didn't answer. (The NeoGAF thread has some interesting responses, with people explaining why they would pick a button even after reading replies from others who disagreed.)

While I was looking it up, my browser experienced the display bug that forces me to restart it, which I did after bookmarking open tabs. Maybe this means that someone thought I shouldn't write about this. I also thought I shouldn't write about this.

After I did a search for "Tim Urban's button dilemma" and started reading it, I thought it might be like the apple game in the Liar Game live-action film (that followed two seasons of TV episodes). That would have made it interesting. But it wasn't that.

Is the question still interesting? Not really. I'm still writing about it, but before that: Tim Urban is a person. People can refer to him in a post meant to reach a broad audience and not look crazy.

This is, basically, a comfort or convenience. One can imagine a world, like the author of Ender's Game did, where an anonymous person can have significant influence. This is still possible, to some degree, as long as the anonymous person appears to have a good reason for being anonymous: implying that they would be in danger if their identity was known.

I have no interest in saying that people are bad. So I cannot gain influence as someone who appears to be anonymous, even though I have said my name.

So, an anonymous person can't gain influence because being able to trust that someone has an actual reputation to risk if they act badly or stupidly is a minor convenience which people enjoy. Ellie retweeted a post that quoted https://nitter.net/DavidBozell/status/2048222765929357790, and it's like that: people want to be able to eat food and talk with other people, even though there is a war in Sudan etc. Being able to know the name of someone is like being able to eat in comfort without hearing any gunshots.

The other notable point is the broad audience that social media can reach. People have an incentive to share and talk about an interesting thing, because it changes opinions held of the people who find interesting things that other people have created. The 'replication' part of a natural environment. The button question is no different from the questions asked on sites like Reddit, but the potential to reach people is much greater, for a question that people care about.

In this case, it seems that people leveraged interest in the outcome of the poll to reach a broader audience: with the fictional, or 'role-playing' stake of whether half the world would die, and what people who wrote posts like the one in the screenshot (which I could not find by searching for the title; it might be something on Chirp Club that isn't visible except with a Chirp Club account) saw as a real-world outcome of interest in the form of one answer representing "selfishness" and the other representing "trust".

The hypothesis: people's choice of which button to press is based on a desire for themselves to live, and possibly on a desire for others to live as well.

There is, however, nothing in the question that tests this hypothesis. Something that would test it would be to make a second poll:

"Everyone in the world has to take a private vote by pressing one of two buttons. The right one is labeled, "I am evil." The left one is labeled, "I am good." If more than 50% of people press the 'evil' button, everyone survives. If less than 50% of people press the 'evil' button, only people who pressed the 'good' button survive. Which button would you press?"

The only thing that has changed is the appearance of the buttons. Is the appearance important for which button people would press?

Pages that I bookmarked before I had to restart my browser:

Instagram

jim iuorio (@jimiuorio): "There’s no dilemma here…you press the red button…if you are selfish you don’t care what others press….if you are compassionate you hope that everyone else presses the red button as well…either way you press red…" | nitter

jim iuorio (@jimiuorio): "This is truly fascinating…it’s 100% the right choice to pick red..jeopardizing your life is not statistically justified in this instance…when no logical person is in danger..what it shows is a pathological desire to be part of a group that’s saving the world…it’s a fantastic metaphor…" | nitter

Roko 🐉 (@RokoMijic): "We're doing the "Blender" game again There is a large blender. Everyone in the world has to decide whether to step into the blender. If at least 50% of the people do step into the blender, it will be unable to overcome their inertia to get started, and everyone survives. If less than 50% of the people step into the blender, then they all get blended up into paste and die. People who do not step into the blender suffer no adverse effects. Would you step into the blender? (Blue=step into the blender, Red= don't do that)" | nitter

Note that the colors red and blue are often associated in the US with the Republican and Democratic parties, respectively, and a poll found that voters for Democratic candidates were more likely to choose the blue button. This could be seen as evidence that some people are choosing based off the appearance of the buttons, forming the basis for my judgement that this is a bad question.

There was something I once said; it might have been a reply to something Laura aka Drunkenfairy said on Guildcafe (circa 2008), and comments weren't saved in the archives that were made when the blogs there were deleted. It was poorly worded at the time and I cannot make it better: "Thinking about thinking is only useful if it leads to a useful result." It could even have been in an email.

So: in the modified question I posed above, some people would still choose the 'evil' button even if they knew that 90% of the first 1000 people to press a button (as with the Blender variant) chose the 'good' button. The conclusion that one reaches from this, if one believes that what people say in an online poll with no consequences reflects what they would do in real life, is that some people are fine with dying. Which is the same conclusion one would reach from observing many other things in life, either directly or from e.g. reading about a battle in the Cimbrian War, and 300 females from the defeated side committing suicide rather than fall into captivity, etc.

Socrates taking poison rather than saying that the gods existed (the legal punishment for impiety being was sometimes death).

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Update 26 Apr 2026, 03:43

To be honest, my second thought, after I saw it wasn't like the Liar Game problem, was probably about Monty Python and the Holy Grail, when the knights are asked what their favorite color is by the guardian of the bridge. Some people like blue.

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Update 26 Apr 2026, 03:57

I remind any readers that might exist of this post, incomplete though it may be.

(It was written in part for the female author of the Blogspot blog, Letters from an Unquiet Mind, which might have been deleted shortly thereafter — I am unsure of the exact date, it might have been deleted before that post — and which I don't think was ever archived by archive.org. I learned what I did, and read what I could at the time, through Google caches of pages from the site, which is a service that Google doesn't even provide anymore.)

To Imane, pt 68

I'm curious how many people know that Russia's president has a black belt in judo. Sometimes, articles will mention the fact in a way that suggests the writer thinks everyone knows it, but people often do not know things that other people expect them to know. If there was a like YouGov poll with 5k responses, how would the demographics look? Would the percentage of older people who know that he does be higher than the percentage of younger people? What percentage of people with a 4-year college degree know this?

I've mentioned this before:

I was fascinated by the technique of the basic foot sweep while walking, where one becomes airborne before noticing that the foot is not firmly placed on the ground.

About my recent post, Taxes. Trump posted something, I think, about Democrats in the US trying, unsuccessfully, to raise taxes. So if people (voters) think that lower taxes are good, and reward the Republican party for lowering taxes, why not lower them even more?

Recently read about the Cimbrian War. There is limited information about those times, as seen with the topic of the "Marian reforms", and also with how there is limited information on many of the major battles, with the date and sometimes even the location unknown.

I will just mention the Battle of Arausio, "the worst defeat in the history of ancient Rome", which I had never heard of before, to show that it was not all defeats for the opponents of Rome, who later became like Germany and France or something. I was going to say that the Roman victories are more interesting because we have more information about them, because Rome had better records, and I think this is true, but the exact date of the Battle of Aquae Sextiae, a Roman victory in which the Teutons and Ambrones had 100k~120k dead, is still unknown.

Compare this random article: 10 Deadliest Days on WWI’s Western Front

The article even says,

World War I happened just as the world was industrializing. This new technology allowed the nations involved to apply industrialization to the slaughter of their enemies. This, and the amount of soldiers packed together in the trenches, allowed for casualty numbers that had never been seen before. Historically the most soldiers killed in a single day, for most countries, were during these battles on WWI’s Western Front.

It says,

Deadliest day: August 22, 1914
27,000 KIA

(It also says, "It got so bad along the French lines that in 1917 there was a series of mutinies that were barely contained by the French military authorities.")

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population says Europe had a population of 13m in 1000 BCE, and 32 million in "year 0" (I know that the world uses a numbering system in which 0 does not appear when going from negative years to positive). Estimate 30 million in 102 BCE, and 100k people dying in one day was 0.33% of Europe's whole population. In 1914, Europe had 448m people, so 27k French people dying in one day (ignoring German losses) was 0.006%, or just 2% of the relative population loss from the Battle of Aquae Sextiae.

The Mémorial de Verdun says 163k French dead, 143k German dead. Wikipedia lists a bit lower losses, which could reflect dates and locations included in the total etc. (Also, I liked how in Edge of Tomorrow (2014), "Verdun" refers to a more recent battle against the Mimics, not the battle in WWI.) So even that total, of 306k dead, is just 0.07% of Europe's total population at the time, or 20% of the relative deaths in a single day in the Battle of Aquae Sextiae.

A point of interest with the Battle of Vercellae is the negotiations for where the battle would take place:

Eventually Marius chose the optimal location for the battle, an open plain (the Raudine Plain) near Vercellae, and then met with the Cimbri leader Boiorix to agree on the time and place of battle.

The point I want to make in mentioning these is the importance of leadership. A simple phrase shows it: "feigning retreat." Morale was very important because of the bad organization of the times, compared to now: a soldier who survived a battle had a reasonable chance of just escaping. A soldier in WWI had no chance of escaping the war. So if an army thought they would lose, their behavior changed from everyone trying to win, to many people trying to escape, which was bad for the group. A leader's job was often to prevent people who thought they were going to win from doing stupid things as a result and falling victim to tactical ruses.

But actual strategy also played a role. The description of the Battle of Aquae Sextiae suggests that the surprise attack by 3000 troops was important, even though it was 3000 attacking 100k.

Back to judo: the Democratic party in the US should announce that they are willing to support any decrease in taxes, as long as the Republican party is willing to take responsibility for the decrease and any effects it will have.