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.

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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.

Day 5002 of people not doing what I want

"Is there any good person in the world whose reputation would not be instantly and totally destroyed if they were filmed passing by someone who was torturing an animal without doing anything about it?"

The reader can imagine that I posted this question on Ask Reddit, and it didn't get deleted by automod, and no one could name someone whose reputation would survive this. If it's bad for me to be saying anything, I don't want to act like I'm trying to hide the fact that I'm saying something.

There is no agreement about whether it's bad for someone not to share this idea, mainly because no one is sharing it, and people never define what the majority does as 'bad'. When I created a moral standard, even I didn't say that not sharing this idea is 'bad': I just said that benefiting from associating with someone who doesn't share it is 'bad'. But if people did talk about this idea and agree that sharing it is good, and not sharing it is bad, or even that supporting its use (with the objective of ending war and so on) is good and not supporting it is bad, then this question about someone torturing an animal has immediate relevance.

I don't like to go into more detail even in a question, regarding what "torturing" is supposed to mean. But it's precisely because people can imagine "torturing" to mean doing something worse to an animal than someone would be able to get away with doing in public to a human, that the question makes people understand that ignoring the situation is morally unacceptable. Humans can also be treated poorly: someone screaming at their child, who is looking at the ground and crying etc., but humans still find reasons to treat other humans poorly, because punishment can deter behaviors seen as bad or dangerous. But humans can also receive protection if they report bullying, while animals cannot identify a perpetrator except in Black Mirror episodes.

It's been two weeks so I don't have to feel bad about saying something because of Greta posting on Instagram. Greta posted a Story made from https://www.instagram.com/armeniaexplores/reel/DXeG5goCHWp/. About social media, the same account also posted https://www.instagram.com/armeniaexplores/reel/DXeKEUlCAP    x/ which is almost exactly the same except for the overlaid text, and it has just 11% of the Likes. I guess it shows, among other things, the importance of language: the videos both use mostly the same clips, with the same music, and no talking, but the significance changes completely because of a few words that only someone who knows English could read.

At 0:17, there is a short clip, less than one second, of a bunch of flags from many countries. And I thought, all of them have the same visual pattern. The US flag is different. If the US flag were to be shown in a group of other flags, the US flag would stand out visually. Maybe it's a non-trivial part of why people from the US consider themselves to be 'special'? Our flag visually invites comparison and conflict with other people, and if we don't attend events like this with other people due to not feeling similar, it just leads to more cultural separation as a positive feedback loop. (US states also have flags, which might be more similar visually to the flags of other nations, but most US state flags would not be recognized by people from other US states.)

Greta also posted a Story made from https://www.instagram.com/ajplus/reel/DXfYAQ3jJc5/. An unrelated video, also recently posted by ajplus: https://www.instagram.com/ajplus/reel/DXhQAMmDTQE/.

What would Japanese kids do if they had to take a detour to reach their school, with the most direct path being blocked by barbed wire? They would not protest in this way. Is it better to protest, than to not protest? Presumably people in the cultures who act a certain way think that acting that way is better.

Trump has this as his pinned tweet, from a day ago: https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/116455604892115486

It made me think of this post from https://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/2003/08/ on 28 Aug 2003:

Listen to this little anecdote. One of my cousins works in a prominent engineering company in Baghdad- we’ll call the company H. This company is well-known for designing and building bridges all over Iraq. My cousin, a structural engineer, is a bridge freak. He spends hours talking about pillars and trusses and steel structures to anyone who’ll listen.

As May was drawing to a close, his manager told him that someone from the CPA wanted the company to estimate the building costs of replacing the New Diyala Bridge on the South East end of Baghdad. He got his team together, they went out and assessed the damage, decided it wasn’t too extensive, but it would be costly. They did the necessary tests and analyses (mumblings about soil composition and water depth, expansion joints and girders) and came up with a number they tentatively put forward- $300,000. This included new plans and designs, raw materials (quite cheap in Iraq), labor, contractors, travel expenses, etc.

Let’s pretend my cousin is a dolt. Let’s pretend he hasn’t been working with bridges for over 17 years. Let’s pretend he didn’t work on replacing at least 20 of the 133 bridges damaged during the first Gulf War. Let’s pretend he’s wrong and the cost of rebuilding this bridge is four times the number they estimated- let’s pretend it will actually cost $1,200,000. Let’s just use our imagination.

A week later, the New Diyala Bridge contract was given to an American company. This particular company estimated the cost of rebuilding the bridge would be around- brace yourselves- $50,000,000 !! 

My search for "site:riverbendblog.blogspot.com bridge cousin engineer" also turned up https://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/2006/01/, where the first post, from 18 Jan 2006, lists damage from the war.

So I think it's great that Trump was able to save money with the Reflecting Pool, that was leaking 500k gallons of water per week before the first restoration in 2012.

People saying "just spend the $300 million on the pool", just like they said "just spend the $50 million to rebuild a bridge in Iraq": a few days ago, my younger relatives were watching videos that made them stupid and would make other people think my relatives are stupid. I could have forced them to stop, but I did not, despite my complaints about their poor reading ability. People being stupid, and therefore inefficient, creates more jobs, and therefore arguably a better outcome for society. I would prefer a society where being more efficient improves society — what this idea would do — but it is not the society we live in. Since watching the dumb videos made my relatives happier and was also better for society, I did not stop them.

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Update 24 Apr 2026, 15:39

I thought of a poll, which someone with the ability to make polls (I can't at the moment, except on traditional message boards) should make after making other polls like the one that I suggested that Greta make but can't remember at this moment:

"If you act in a stupid way and avoid activities that make you smarter, the world will be better off but you will be worse off. Do you act in a stupid way?"

Day 5001 of people not doing what I want

A second serving, 275g, of turkey and rice soup. Its appearance, with a lot of broth, made me think of the scene from one of the films about Oliver Twist where he asks for more food.

I saw the film when I was young and don't remember much; "you've got to pick a pocket or two", a song with chanting of "Oliver", and that line. My siblings and I might have facetiously used the same words to ask for more food at mealtimes.

I'm sure that I did not notice when I was young how the female in the scene restrains the male from reprimanding Oliver before he approaches, and how the body language of the male when he takes Oliver to see the people with power over the orphanage shows that he wants the kids to be able to have more food.

Mentioned Spain in a recent post. This survey is not precisely about the same issue; it doesn't mention immigrants:

Would you rather get money from your parents or earn your own money?

but many of the young people in Spain who can't get jobs, presumably due to fierce competition for jobs (or for well-paying jobs, if they don't apply for jobs with low wages), do get money from their parents. If they don't ask for policy changes that create jobs, like Oliver asked for more food, their parents might think they are fine with just getting money for free. And the same at a global scale.

Delete

https://nitter.net/EllieAsksWhy/status/2047329305714401478 seahorse emoji, food pyramid, salt in diet. Dangers of deciding "this thing can't be trusted" without the ability to provide feedback to correct a situation that other people might misinterpret.

Day 5000 of people not doing what I want

My mum is watching a film which an AI query for "british film about a young girl who is abused and forced into prostitution" identifies as No Child of Mine (1997).

I identified the issue in the post, "A Message to No One", as "activities that are seen as unethical, like sex work and finance, being paid at a higher rate." I also mentioned it in this argument as "child abuse".

Finance being seen as unethical? Kate may or may not remember me; on her old Chirp Club account, which she apparently lost access to, she retweeted this status from Elon Musk:

u can’t sell houses u don’t own
u can’t sell cars u don’t own
but
u *can* sell stock u don’t own!?
this is bs – shorting is a scam
legal only for vestigial reasons

After I ran out of money when I was living outside and was about to stop, I said in an email to Mei and Kate that I would probably get a job in software development or finance. I did not. I also said that I would probably never contact them again. Whether this came to pass might be debatable; I sent more emails about the idea to everyone in my contacts that included both of them as recipients, but I have not sent another email to Kate since then (~September 2012) that was not also to everyone else in my contacts, or 50~100 people. I sent one or two to the email address I had for Mei, but they returned an error indicating the account had been closed. This was after Mei had apparently closed the other email account she had in late Dec 2011, possibly because I had accidentally sent an email to her other account after she replied to me for the first time since mid-2009.

So anyway. I definitely found some amusement in grouping finance with sex work. But if it's a problem that these activities receive higher pay, does that mean the price will go down and everyone will be able to afford it?

Some clarification: a high price is a problem because it encourages people to do it. If the 'price' is no higher than other activities, people have no special reason to do it, but the 'price' includes the risk of punishment. The reward for robbing a jewelry store is not high because the price is high, even if it's a crime that can be carried out using only a hammer. (That's a video I remember finding so funny that it was hard to continue watching due to laughter, when I first watched and downloaded it on 25 May 2012.)