Hot-Button Issue

Everyone in the world has to take a private vote by pressing a red or blue button. If more than 50% of people press the blue button, everyone survives. If less than 50% of people press the blue button, only people who pressed the red button survive. Which button would you press?

This has been making the rounds of the Internet, and sparking a fair amount of discussion, some controversy and (no surprise) a fair amount of vitriol. Most of the discourse around the question frames it as one of empathy: Pressing the Red button is the self-centered choice, while pressing the Blue button is the caring for others choice.

The seeming alignment of Red and Blue to Conservative and Liberal (Republican and Democrat, more precisely) political ideologies in the United States is fueling the debate, with people who chose the Red button being cast as overly individualistic and unempathetic and people who chose the Blue button being stereotyped as virtue-signalling would-be martyrs.

But thinking about the problem reveals another dividing line: the attribution of responsibility. To illustrate this, lets reduce the number of players from "everyone in the world" to seven people: Jack, Jill, Tom, Dick, Jane, Sally and Harry. I've randomly assigned Jill, Tom and Harry to select the Blue button, and Jack, Dick, Jane and Sally to select the Red button. Since "less than 50% of people" have selected the Blue button, only Jack, Dick, Jane and Sally survive. So the question becomes, who is responsible for Jill's, Tom's and Harry's deaths?

The "easy," but unhelpful answer is: everyone (presuming, of course, that one doesn't simply say "me," given that I'm the person who rolled dice to place the players into their groups). It required both that Jill, Tom and Harry pressed the Blue button and that Jack, Dick, Jane and Sally pressed Red for the game to slay Jill, Tom and Harry. But the discourse around empathy in the choice tends to turn on more specific attributions of fault, so it's worth looking at those.

The "Press Blue" camp tends to lay the responsibility at the feet of those people who vote Red. But for the fact that Jack, Dick, Jane and Sally pressed the Red button, Jill, Tom and Harry would have been safe, regardless of which choice they made. After all, those four are the majority in a group of seven, and if they'd all selected the Blue button, Jill's, Tom's and Harry's would have become irrelevant; they would have lived regardless.

The "Press Red" camp. on the other hand, places the responsibility for Jill's, Tom's and Harry's deaths on, well, Jill, Tom and Harry. But for the fact that Jill, Tom and Harry pressed the Blue button, they would, individually, still be alive, regardless of what Jack, Dick, Jane and Sally chose.

And this brings up one of the primary differences in outlook between the two camps. The "Press Blue" camp is looking at the matter as a collective action problem: anyone dying is the result of the failure of the collective; and the collective failed because a majority went with the Red button. Clearly, the "Press Red" camp doesn't see it this way, I suspect because they don't really judge the optimal choice to be different, regardless of what the players know.

Let's say, for a moment, that Harry is given the choice after the other six players have already made their choices as outlined above. And he's told that four players have already selected the Red button, and two have chosen Blue. While one could make a case that Harry might, for whatever reason, die alongside Jill and Tom, outside of that, it's hard to make the case that selecting the Blue button is the optimal choice here. For Harry to select the Blue button would appear to be actively suicidal. (We would also envisage a altered version of the game, in which Harry is given a choice such that the outcome only bears on himself: if he selects the Blue button he dies, and if he selects the Red button, he lives. Both variations have the same outcome for Harry, personally. This second variation provides even less of a reason to select the Blue button.)

Dealing specifically with Harry, it seems reasonable to place the responsibility for Harry pressing the Blue button with Harry, himself, regardless of which variation on the single-person choice we go with. Harry understands that pressing the Blue button would result in his death; it's possible that stress or carelessness could induce him to press the Blue button, even if he highly desired to live, but those factors aside, the choice is fairly clear.

For people in the "Press Red" camp, the logic, and the responsibility, doesn't change between knowing that there are already some people who have selected the Blue button, and not having any information about other's choices at all. (Or if we go with the altered version of the game, that the Blue button always results in the death of a single player.) If Harry decides to commit suicide, or misclicks due to stress or carelessness, the responsibility still lies with him. Pressing the Red button eliminates the risk of death, and the "Press Red" camp extrapolates that out to the broader game.

For people in the "Press Blue" camp, however, the logic is different, even if they agree that selecting the Blue button in constrained circumstances is a bad choice. Whether someone is being suicidal, or acting in error, enough other people acting together will rescue them from their choice, and failure to rescue a person from a bad choice when the opportunity for rescue is there is no different from deliberately inflicting the consequences of that choice.

If we switch the single player to Sally in our first one-person variation of the game, the fact that she understands that if she selects the Red button means that three people will die means that for the "Press Blue" camp, if she chooses to press the Red button, she has chosen to kill the players who selected Blue; the full responsibility for their deaths lies with her, not with Jill, Tom and Harry, nor with the presumed designer of the choice architecture of the game. Sally owns the outcome, no matter what other people have done.

Importantly, as near as I can tell, each camp tends to understand its own viewpoint as being the self-evidently correct one. This is the reason for the vitriol; it's something you'd expect when people understand one another to be willfully perverse. But it's worth keeping in mind that there are likely real differences in personality and worldview that underlie these viewpoints, just as Conservative and Liberal Americans tend to differ from one another when tested for the Big Five/Five Factor Personality Model.

The other interesting factor in the discussions around this is the fact that it tends to be framed as what one "should" do, even though the original question asks what one would do. In this, it's like Phillipa Foot's Trolley Problem: many people debate it with the goal of arriving at one "correct" answer, even though the problem is likely much more useful as a means to understand how one comes to such determinations. And again here, for many people, there are perceived factions: engaging the switch to divert the Trolley is seen as the Utilitarian choice, while Deontology is said to demand leaving the switch alone, despite the fact that either camp can make a case for either choice.

The Red Button Versus Blue Button "Dilemma" does offer interesting information; just not about empathy. And I think this is why it's perceived to generally align with American politics. The "Press Red" camp doesn't see people as having direct responsibility for a choice that someone else made, whether they made that choice intentionally, or not. The "Press Blue" camp, at least in this circumstance, does. Accordingly, I expect that for many people in the "Press Red" camp, contrivance aside, the scenario as a whole represents personal risks; the sort of thing where being careless has individual consequences. For many people in the "Press Blue" camp, on the other hand, the scenario represents broader risks to people, like climate change, that can be overcome by collective action, but are largely unaffected by individual choices. And that divide, between individual and collective responsibility plays out in a number of different ways across the American political spectrum.

I think that another thing that plays into it is the fact that pressing the Red button results in safety, no matter what happens. If the final tally favors Blue, everyone lives, regardless of the number of people who pressed the Red button, and if it favors Red, it's only those people who pressed Blue who suffer a consequence. Given what I understand of the online discourse, this asymmetry feels a lot like free riding... If collective action vanquishes a threat, those who didn't assist benefit as well. Of course, real-world problems don't normally operate like this; if global warming wreaks havoc on the climate, everyone suffers, but these sorts of disputes are as much emotional as logical.

The Colorful Season

 

Now that it's mid-Spring, the rhododendrons are starting to bloom, and adding a lot of color to the vicinity. One can generally find rhododendrons in bloom during the Spring, Summer and Autumn, but they're pretty much absent in the Winter.

Given that they're very common plants around here, finding some to photograph isn't difficult, and given their often vibrant colors, sometimes it seems that one has to go out of one's way to not find a giant bush of them, calling attention to themselves. 

More of the Same

For many in the ballroom at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner on Saturday night, the scene was painfully familiar. Shots fired, confusion and panic, and a sense that the normal order of things had been violently interrupted.
Political violence jolts the US once again - with a familiar response

This may be true, but for a lot of people who weren't in that ballroom, shots fired is the normal order of things. The United States is a pretty violent place, considering that it's not a third-world nation. Lethal force is often seen as a solution to problems, and not a problem in and of itself. While a lot of made of political violence, what's happening is that a segment of the American public that's normally shielded from the sort of violence that's an everyday occurrence in much of the country are starting to find that it's coming for them. Because more people are coming to the conclusion that some action or another is, in fact, a form of violence, and so violence in return is warranted.

While attempted assassinations often prompt yet another tiresome round of The Political Blame Game, the fact of the matter is that politics really has very little to do with it. It's easy to point to this or that bit of political rhetoric (often taken out of context) and claim that it's a driving force in the spread of attacks on people, but this is really only pandering to constituencies who want to see those not like them as willfully perverse. Because the United States doesn't look back on events like the American Revolution, or even the American Civil War, as tragic wastes of people's lives; they're seen as heroic, and necessary, undertakings. Many people in the American South have effectively retconned the whole history of the Civil War in service of that particular viewpoint.

As turning to violence starts to become less a trait of the poor, minorities and the generally marginalized and more a trait of Americans as a whole, I can understand how a certain level of hand-wringing becomes commonplace. But I can also understand why it doesn't do anything to arrest the shift. Because it doesn't do anything to either solve the problems that people are responding to, or to create conditions where the use of violence is seen as broadly disqualifying (as opposed to simply a cudgel with which to beat political rivals).

Collared

File under: Isn't it always the same? "Students seeking blue-collar careers face sticker shock."

Sudden and rapid increases in the costs of vocational training strike me as a failure of policy. What's needed is a greater focus on not only helping people see where their best paths for the future lie, but in growing the pipelines to those futures. What's driving up prices are large numbers of people crowding into a space that doesn't have the resources to expand to accommodate them. Allowing to things to get to a point where people are beginning to panic about their futures and then hoping that the for-profit actors who enter the space will place as great an emphasis on quality education as they do on  maintaining profitability for owners and investors is a recipe for bad outcomes. Because it's not like we haven't seen this play out before. Private, for-profit schools spend heavily to market themselves to prospective students (and their parents) and that expenditure has to be made up somewhere along the way.

In the end, it's like any other gold rush. The fastest path to wealth is not to be a miner, but to sell picks and shovels to the people who expect to use those tools to better themselves. Sooner or later, presuming that it hasn't happened already, some unscrupulous operator is going to open a school and decide that actually giving the students the tools they need to succeed in a career in the skilled trades is simply too resource intensive. And it only takes one to ruin a lot of lives, perhaps irrevocably. And this is going to happen because, as a society, the United States does not value the sort of planning and oversight that it takes to prevent it. "[A]n aspiring aircraft maintenance technician must shell out $40,000 for a 14-month course in Florida," because the up-front resources to ensure that there were enough programs to keep the cost down weren't spent. Meanwhile, Governor DeSantis recently signed legislation to ban local diversity, equity and inclusion programs, and block carbon taxes in the state. And this does precisely what to increase access to (and thus lower costs for) blue collar training programs? Hell if I know. But it projects to the Republican activist class that he shares the values that are important to them.

Just like when I receive yet another political fundraising e-mail (note the last time I interacted with a political campaign was in 2004) here in Washington (the opposite corner of the lower 48); there's nothing about training people for the skilled trades, or other jobs of tomorrow. It's hyperbolic warnings of how the world will come to an end if I don't start writing checks.

And this is why there are failures of policy. Because there tends to be little or no real concern for them until people are being pulled out of the wreckage and the hunt for guilty begins. I'm constantly reminded of George Will's statement that the United States does not attempt to prevent disasters; it simply cleans up after they happen. Despite the fact it's a bad habit, it's constant enough that one can count on it.

Mystery

Some things are just going to be mysteries. But I also know that I’ll always want to know, that I’ll always want everything to fit together nicely and neatly into a workable pattern that explains everything. And perhaps not coincidentally, tells me that I really see things as they are.

Imagine, If You Will...

Somewhere, in the past 12 years, that changed. The desire to know, the desire for things to fit together and, perhaps more importantly, the desire to understand that I see things as they really are, went away. I've become comfortable with the yawning chasms that dot my worldview; so much so that if I hadn't written in this blog that I hadn't, I would never have recalled it. (Which, honestly, is one of the things about writing it; it provides insight into my past self that memory alone is not up to the task of.)

I am reminded of the fact that I am poor at predicting the future, even when it pertains directly to myself. But I am also reminded of the impermanence of personality, and perhaps even the self. Back in 2014, I clearly had no inkling that my need to know and understand would change. I don't recall having been working to alter it at the time. But it has, in fact, shifted. I'm much more at peace with the idea that there will be mysteries in the world, and I've come to believe that it's hard to ever claim one knows anything while also being unwilling to be wrong. I think that I've become more comfortable with believing in general, and the understanding that I believe as I do not because it is demonstrably correct, but because it works well enough for me that I can get by on a day-to-day basis.

If I'm still around, and writing this, in 2038 (given the way my family has worked, that's very much up in the air as of now), perhaps I'll see further change in myself. Or whomever I am then.