Handed Over

“James Madison’s design — ‘ambition must be made to counteract ambition’ — assumed that Congress would jealously guard its powers against the executive. He did not imagine a political party that would surrender its institutional ambition to the personality cult of one man.”
The Week, quoting Fareed Zakaria in The Washington Post.

I understand Mr. Zakaria’s point, but I feel it somewhat obscures an important factor. For many Republican lawmakers the congregants in “the personality cult of one man” are the people whose support they need to be reelected. No matter how well a lawmaker’s chosen policies might serve the nation as a whole, they cannot implement them if they are voted out of office.

Donald Trump controls the Republican Party because he is able to influence it’s activists and primary electorate to vote in accordance with what he understands his interests to be, because those voters believe that those are also their interests. And this is due to a long history of “the political establishment,” as it were, paying lip service to making people’s lives better, but sacrificing their direct interests at nearly every opportunity. Donald Trump only needed to have just enough credibility to get people to think that “this time might be different,” and he was in.

Republican members of Congress have the ability to neither counteract the ambition of the President with their own ambitions nor to jealously guard their powers against the executive, because any ambition other than using their powers to be an instrument of the President’s will is punished by the “MAGA” base. And a public airing of the missteps that brought Congress to this place won’t do anyone any good. As long as those people who are motivated to turn out for Republican primary elections believe that if President Trump stood in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shot someone to death, that it would be the best thing for them and the nation at large, the Republican party doesn’t need to “surrender its institutional ambition;” it has already lost any ability it may have had to retain it.

The best way to save a home from a fire is to prevent ignition. Once hoses are being taken from the hook-and-ladder and attached to hydrants, the question isn’t “Will the structure burn?” but "How much of it will remain once the flames are extinguished?”

Mr. Zakaria’s point, at least as quoted by The Week, starts with noting that for partisans, corruption isn’t about what is being done, but about who is doing it. This interpretation of The Rule of Law is nothing new at this point. This is a function of the fact that holding a member of one’s own “tribe” accountable comes with costs. People who understand impartial application of the rules to be fundamentally unaffordable are predictably unwilling to pay what it asks.

Exceptionality

Anyone can be an exception to a rule. But when a large number of people all claim to be the same exception to the same rule, they have simply defined a new rule.

I find it interesting which supposed "rules" of society are so broadly unpopular that that the appear to exist for no other reason than to allow people to loudly proclaim that they are an, if not the, exception to said rules.

I suppose it's another way of seeking meaning in life by being better in some way than other people, by presuming that the "average person" blindly, or by virtue of their own mediocrity, falls into some or another undesirable category, when living, breathing examples of such people are nearly impossible to actually find.

The Mountain is Out

 

"The mountain is out" being a local idiom for a being a clear day.

Puget Sound is one of the best places to get a good view of Mount Rainier, and since I had occasion to ride the ferry today, I decided to take advantage of the sunny weather to get a few shots of it.

It's a deceptively placid vista, given that Mount Rainier is still an active, if slumbering, volcano.

Degrees of Human

I've seen a number of "The most valuable professionals of the next however many years will be" posts on LinkedIn recently. If you've seen them, you likely know the sort; they generally end in some bland aphorism about "being human."

And I get it; the goal is to affirm that there's a way to dodge the generative automation "jobpocalypse," at least for a time, by presenting some or another skillset as being immune from automation. But also as accessible. I checked the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics' Fastest Growing Occupations data, and according to that, the most valuable professionals of the 2024 to 2034 period all have a "Doctoral or professional degree" which, according to the National Center for Education Statistics will run someone about $20,000 a year (or about $50,000 with living expenses factored in) on average for a 4 to 8 year program. So, it's understandable that telling people that things they can learn during evenings and weekends will move them to the top of the pile is enticing.

But it doesn't speak to how high the pile actually is. "The people who are getting ahead are doing X" does not entail that everyone who does X gets ahead. If the number of people who have skills that combine "business and data" (to use one common formulation that I've seen) is fairly large compared to the actual number of roles that will exist, then people with those skills might be "the most valuable professionals" on a relative basis, but not an absolute one. And honestly, I haven't seen any particularly scarce skills on people's lists.

These sorts of posts strike me as being an outgrowth of American individualism, placing the onus for being in-demand on the individual, rather than seeking to understand what the broader society would need to look like to keep the overall demand for human labor high. Which is fine, as far as it goes, but as a strategy, history tells us that it doesn't work as well as it's often advertised. As individuals, "leaning into our humanity," whatever that means, will not, in and of itself, solve the problems that will arise if ubiquitous automation torpedoes the careers of a significant number of people. It's going to take something somewhat more focused on the broader question of aggregate demand than that.

Future Present

So, as I noted back in January, I've been re-reading William Gibson. Specifically, the "Sprawl Trilogy" of Neuromancer, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive. I've been picking the books up as I found them, and it took a while for there to be a new copy of MLO on the shelves anywhere nearby.

I'm still fascinated by how retro-futuristic it all seems, with random bits of technology, some arguably available today and some still pretty fare out, layered on top of a world that's still recognizable as being the mid-1980s. And it's the degree to which the technology isn't actually all that important to the story that stands out for me, in a way that it didn't when I first read the books back in the 1990s.

The idea that the technology is merely part of the set dressing is a common one; I suspect that a lot of the Star Wars franchise is built around the idea. The difference with Gibson is that he manages, at least to me, to still build a coherent world. Given the amount of data that various technologies in the world are capable of moving wirelessly, the lack of cellular telephony seems strange, but it doesn't give me the sense that it's random, in the way that much of the technology in Star Wars did.

Perhaps this is because it's done more in service to the story being written. When Case walks past a bank of pay phones in Neuromancer, and they each ring as he passes them, the understanding that the AI is attempting to reach him comes through clearly, and this softens the idea that the phones simply shouldn't be there.

I suspect that near-future science-fiction is always going to have a problem with "stepping on its coattails" as it were: technology that's going to be ubiquitous in 50 years time might still be so out in front of what's currently available that only a select few people are even aware that it has any potential. And this makes projecting into the future difficult, outside of "obvious" advances.

For myself, I find the look back into what a compelling vision of the future looked like more than a quarter-century ago to be fascinating. Perhaps I should pick up some other science-fiction of the 80s and 90s, and see what other version of the future resonated with people.

Good Reads

What does it take to be a "good news consumer?" Pew research asked this question, and posted a short article on the answers recently. While a plurality of people (some 32 percent) didn't answer, and a about 10% gave an answer that Pew coded as "Other," the most popular answers are listed below, in order of popularity:

1. Be discerning or skeptical
2. Follow the news or stay informed
3. Get news from quality sources
4. Research or fact check the news
5. Get news from a variety of sources
6. Get news from a variety of perspectives
7. Not share inaccurate information
8. Use the news to make decisions

I suspect that I would have fallen into the other category, because the first thing that comes to my mind is to understand the difference between being informed and being entertained. While I agree with the 3% of people who gave an answer of "Use the news to make decisions," I don't generally find most news to be actionable in that way. It's interesting, occasionally very much so, but things like "The U.S. threatens to revoke the Palestinian U.N. ambassador's visa," "Can the West survive ‘drastic’ Colorado River cuts?" or "Trump's priorities are in deep trouble after his revenge tour" don't have anything in them that I need to, or can, act upon.

And in that sense, they're not really all that informative. Not because the information wasn't new, but because there isn't much I can do with it, when it comes to decision-making. And this doesn't even touch upon the stereotypical "if it bleeds, it leads" type of story, which may give people a certain sense of danger, but doesn't offer anything in the way of solutions.

Now, I'm aware that my own news diet is particularly sparse when it comes to actionable information because I don't follow the news consistently enough to pay to subscribe to anything. And if one really wants information that's useful in making decisions, paying for it is the way to go. I've been toying with the idea for some time, but I'm the sort to go for a few days without really checking in on things, and in a situation where what's really being paid for is temporary access, that's a recipe for wasting money. I'm also unenthusiastic about trial periods that require credit cards, and automatic renewals, in the hope that I'll simply forget to cancel and become a recurring revenue stream. (But I understand the incentive structure. And the fact that this is a case where pretty much everyone is doing it.)

Am I a "good news consumer?" I suspect not. While I understand the difference between actionable news and the sort of things one reads as a diversion, I'm not really motivated to seek out "news I can use," as it were, and that limits my intake to things that I don't really gain much by learning. Perhaps I should rectify that.

Here "We" Go Again

Cure cancer... really? That's pretty big news, I wonder why it hasn't gotten out farther.

I think I'd like to nominate the human willingness to pass the buck as the most annoying thing. This is the sort of post that one makes to bask in the likes, upvotes and other forms of Internet applause that come from calling out a problem and laying it squarely at the feet of people who have better things to do than read social media posts by some rando.

"Greed and billionaires" are wonderful targets specifically because most people won't be bothered to stand up for them, and it allows for feel-good slacktivism; the audience can feel good about themselves for being supportive of the stand being taken, but that support comes at absolutely zero cost to themselves. "Billionaires" aren't going around with vacuum cleaners, sucking the money out of everyone's pockets: they're investing in and/or running businesses offering goods and services that everyday people want. Things that people like me (and yeah, I'll own this) would rather have. Would an end to world hunger, global climate change and cancer (I'm still dubious about that last one) be good? Absolutely. Is it worth more to me than the books I just bought the other day? Apparently not.

And I'm not the only one. There are any number of people who would rather spend their money on things that they feel enhance their material well-being than fund capturing human potential. That's how investors and board chairs and chief fill-in-the-blank officers become billionaires in the first place.

There's an idea that a bunch of wealthy people could get together, shell out a bunch of money and make the world a better place overnight, and still remain fabulously wealthy. (Whether or not that would actually be the case, I don't know.) Which is really just another way of minimizing the costs to others of the things that people want.

Presuming that there are cures for cancer that are waiting on nothing more than enough funding to float down from the heavens, it's somewhat within the power of the public at large to solve these problems. Wealthy people became so because the current rules allow for it. So step one is to change those rules.

But that becomes a collective action problem. The legislative majorities needed to enact such policies would require that a pretty good-sized chunk of the populace, at least here in the United States, put aside their differences and work together towards a common goal; and believe that they can reach that goal without inflicting unreasonable amounts of pain on themselves or otherwise doing something unpalatable.

And that's why it becomes easy to blame "billionaires." They could supposedly make all of these problems go away with sweeping acts of charity, and criticizing them for not doing so conveniently does away with all of the arguing and messiness that enduring solutions would entail.

Error Handling

When I was younger (a rather long timeframe, these days), I too would indulge in attempting to refute other people's ethical frameworks by coming up with a situation in which the correct thing, as presented by them, conflicted with my own ethical intuitions. There are a lot of different ways of answering this tactic, but one that I'm somewhat surprised that I never encountered is just to say: "Yes. And..?"

If the goal is to determine what some or another system of ethics says about something, what does it matter what a critic's intuitions says about the matter. The perception that the ground is level can easily lead someone to an understanding that the Earth is flat; and the most common response to this is, basically, to tell that person that their intuition is wildly incorrect, and leave it at that. So why is this not a more common tactic in ethics?

Of the approximately eight quadrillion variations on Phillipa Foot's Trolley Problem that people have come up with, a common one is to posit a doctor who has six patients, five of whom are in dire need of organ transplants, while the sixth has healthy organs. Leaving aside the real-world logistical problems of such an act, a common knock on Utilitarianism is the idea that it says that it's ethically acceptable to kill the sixth patient so save the others. But I'm not sure why an actual Utilitarian would care: If killing patient six is the ethical thing to do, it's the ethical thing to do.

After all, the idea that other people's ethical intuitions are faulty when they disagree with one's own is not particularly controversial: the idea that the Trail of Tears was ethically unjustified, and that the people who supported the forced migration were wrong is mostly taken as given today. To argue that people at the time wouldn't have supported it if it had been ethically suspect would likely go nowhere.

So I wonder why so many people seem uncomfortable admitting to disagreements with other people's ethical outlooks. If the point behind the study of ethics is to get to a correct understanding of right action, it shouldn't matter if people feel validated by it.

Evaluated

I saw a social media post today claiming that Alphabet was now "worth $4.8 trillion." Considering that I didn't see any reporting on that anywhere, I'm dubious about that number, but it started me thinking. Just how does one determine how much a company is "worth."

After all, it wouldn't be possible to simply hand over $4.8 trillion and just own Alphabet... if a significant number of shareholders were all looking to proactively sell, the price would immediately drop. Likewise, if someone (or an organization) with a remarkable amount of liquidity decided to buy up a significant portion of the shares, the price would rise. Stock prices are generally set between buyers and sellers, and valuations are generally determined on the basis of some average of the transactions that take place over a given timeframe. So, at least as far as I'm concerned, the statement that "a given company is worth some number of dollars," doesn't really tell us anything.

Except, maybe, about investors. It occurs to me that to value a company is to presume that it's possible (at least in theory) for all of the shares to change hands over a reasonable span of time. Leaving aside for a moment the changes in share price that such a shift would bring about, any valuation implies that some amount of money is currently tied up in the company's stock. Some of it can be thought of as not being "real," since it doesn't matter how long the stock has been held by it current owner; if it hasn't been sold recently, and isn't currently for sale, no-one has to actually produce the money to buy it... but the owner is credited as having grown wealthier all the same.

And that wealth is counted just like money in the bank would be. A lot is made of wealth inequality, but it's rare to hear about how much of that wealth is represented simply in terms of an expectation that, if someone were to sell something, they would be able to receive a certain amount of money for it. But if all of these expectations were added together, how would that compare to the amounts of hard currency there is? Could people actually buy all of these companies at their stated valuations? Or do expectations represent the bulk of modern money supplies? 

Euphemized

I was listening to an episode of The New York Times "The Opinions" podcast recently, and the topic was theft as a form of political action. The podcast coined the term "microlooting" for this activity, which I suspect is known to most people simply as "shoplifting." The New York Times being part of the "mainstream media," the term has quickly become a front in the United State's culture wars, with Conservative outlets being quick to jump on the practice as yet more proof of Liberal moral turpitude (not to mention un-Americanism). But for me, the real problem with shoplifting as a form of "direct action" is that it does nothing to solve the problem, and framing it as some sort of political protest obscures that point.

In 1978, when Jimmy Carter was President of the United States, the highest marginal income tax rate was 70%, payable on income over $108,300. In 2024, the rate was 37%, payable on income over $609,350. This represents about a 50% cut in the rate, given that $108,300 in 1978 was about $531,400 in 2024 dollars. Sneaking lemons out of Whole Foods does nothing to address this simple fact.

Politicians have been offering up tax cuts as a means of purchasing political support for my entire adult life by this point, and people have gone along with it, because a lowering of taxes feels like some sort of relief of their own feelings of poverty; until wealthy people, whose taxes also went down, started pulling away from them. There would be much more money for public services if tax rates went back to where they had been in 1978, but no-one wants that; the general feeling that "someone else" should be paying for it is fairly deeply ingrained in American culture by now.

The problem with large-scale direct action and political protest in the United States is not the collective action problem that it's made out to be. It's a social trust problem. The Right and Left of American politics have very different idea of what an ideal society should look like, and their mutual animosity tends to lead each to want to place the costs on the other. Both are effectively faith-based approaches to issue of governance that regard the other as heretical. And both of them are beholden to large segments of the American public that are basically looking out for themselves.

Because when Amazon was offering better prices than brick-and-mortar retailers due to not collecting sales taxes for whichever state the buyer was in, or Uber and Lyft were undercutting taxi companies by simply not following the rules those companies had to follow, the public's silence on this was taken as approval. And now that people are saying to wealthy executive and investors "Okay, now share some of the take with the rest of us," they come across as surprised that the answer is mostly "No."

High levels of income and wealth inequality are solved in the same way that housing shortages (and resulting high prices) are solved: one doesn't let the situation get to that point in the first place. Because there are now a lot of people whose material comforts explicitly rely on the current status quo, and many of them aren't in "the 1%." And they're going to turn out to protect their interests. This is just how loss aversion works.

Many people in the United States feel that political apathy is something that they're entitled to, and therefore, shouldn't have to pay a price for. But everything has a price, and deferring payments rarely make them go away.

Unsolicited

Now that it's graduation season again, I've pulled together some of the things that I've learned about life from having lived it for the past few decades. I don't know that anyone will find them useful, but here they are, anyway.

• Enjoying what you do is important, because you're going to need to put in a lot of hours to be exceptional at it. It's hard to excel at something you hate doing. Drudgery and chores are rarely paths to greatness.
• The fact that something doesn't feel like work when you're doing it doesn't make it valueless or trivial.
• "Do what you love" isn't advice, it's a sound bite. Cultivate your interests as broadly as you can manage; that will make it easier to find something within them that other people need doing. That intersection is important.
• The best way to learn a skill is to tackle a problem that's 1) important to you to solve and 2) requires the skill in question. 
• Be careful about fighting with people (physically or otherwise), because the costs can be high even when you "win."
• Whenever someone is doing something that doesn't make any sense to you, set out to learn what they're being graded on, and who is doing the grading.
• At Some Point, Everybody's New (ASPEN). Don't be afraid to be the new person and don't make others afraid of it, either.
• You will never be perfect. You can play whack-a-mole with your weaknesses for the rest of life, and still not fix them all. Unless you literally have no other choice, always play to your strong suit(s).
• Partner with other people, so that they help make up for your shortcomings, and you help make up for theirs.
• Learn from the mistakes of others; you'll never live long enough to make them all yourself.
• When conversing with someone, you're speaking from your assumptions, experiences and outlook. But they're listening from theirs, and everything you tell them will be filtered through that. And, just as importantly, vice versa.
• When you see a chance to connect with someone over something, make time to take it, especially if you've had a difficult relationship with them in the past.
• Understand what's important to you; what you are willing to make time for, and what you have to make time from.
• The job of an influencer is to sell a lifestyle; not the work it takes to attain it.
• Common sense requires common experience.
• Don't look for reasons to take things personally.
• People will line up around the block to tell you how terrible you are; they need neither your help nor your competition.
• When people are confident in you, trust that they have good reason to be, and then work to prove them right.

Shortfall

Many of the negative consequences of consumer AI usage are caused by loneliness, isolation and gullibility.

Seth Godin. "AI together."

I would disagree with this, somewhat. Or maybe I would simply re-frame it. What I think are at work in cases of "AI Psychosis" and similar technologically-driven maladies are simple unmet needs. And part of what generative automation strike so many people as "sycophantic" is that it's designed to meet user needs. And like a lot of consumer products, it's not designed to care precisely how it does that.

People are always sensitive to their unmet needs; although perhaps "driven by" would be a better way to put it. And one of the aspects of American culture that people are constantly pointing out is its tendency towards individuality. And this means that people are less likely than one might want them to be sensitive, and responsive, to the needs of people around them.

And into that deficit steps generative automation. And people who can't find enough connection, community or validation from the people around them now have a ready source; and one that never becomes tired, impatient or needy itself. Why would anyone expect that people wouldn't cling to that? If they'd met a person with those traits, they'd be considered foolish to not hold on to them for dear life.

So I'm not sure that trying to steer generative automation in a direction where it doesn't meet those people's needs either is really the best way to go. Even if it is much easier than changing our society, and it's response to people. 

Reasons

With average gasoline prices in the United States having climbed from a little below $3.00 a gallon back in late February to just north of $4.50 a gallon as of this week, I'm curious as to what the broad message from the Trump Administration is going to be; and to whom it will be directed.

Generally speaking, the Trump Administration care about reliable Republican voters, who, for the most part, don't need much in the way of reassurance from the White House or Capitol Hill, because they tend to be willing to give the Administration the benefit of the doubt. This is one of the more tangible benefits of negative partisanship. But it seems unlikely that, even with aggressive gerrymandering, that a reliance only on high-propensity Republican voters will allow Republicans to carry the House of Representatives. The recent Supreme Court decision allowing for the breakup of "majority minority" districts might help, but not if enough Republican voters stay home, and low-propensity voters, are, more or less by definition, the most likely to skip this upcoming election cycle.

Which may mean that the Administration will have no choice but to defend itself as November comes closer. The President may have enough sway with Republican primary voters to punish Republican defector from his gerrymandering plan in places like Indiana, but that's not the same as being able to drive general election turnout. And there have been indications that people who voted for President Trump because they believed his campaign promises about creating economic boom times and not having the United States involved in foreign entanglements don't think that his tariff regime and strongarming NATO line up with what they thought they were going to get. And they're not part of the activist class that believes that the Republican Party is entitles to leadership by virtue of being right about all things at all times.

On the other hand, the Democrats may be of the opinion that their job is too easy at this point. Despite more than a decade of President Trump and the Republican party being able to do more or less what they want without a significant erosion in their core base of support, it seems difficult for Democrats to come up with any message more cogent than "Trump bad." Which may be true, but it's a very limited message for a political party that's supposed to be the standard-bearer for the idea that government can, and does, solve people's problems. Simply changing the occupant of the Oval Office is not the same as actually making changes that impact people's lives for the better.

So I'm somewhat looking forward to what the parties' messages are going to be, as November comes closer. Being in a reliably Blue state my own House and Senate races are highly unlikely to bear any resemblance to "competitive" so the local media market is likely to be quiet. Which will likely mean seeking out the various party talking points; which is perhaps what more people should be doing anyway. 

Bounced

While we're on the topic of job searches, I was scrolling through LinkedIn today, and came across a post from someone who said that they were "85% to 90% qualified for." They'd tailored their résumé for the position, and "had a decent feeling that [they] would be called back for an interview."

They weren't. Instead "Not even 24 hours later, [they] received an email that basically said that [their] qualifications were impressive, but [the company] decided to go with a different candidate." The poster claimed to be "baffled" by this, and concluded: "The ATS screening likely didn’t see direct industry language and automatically rejected me, even though I do the job they described, just in a different industry."

Or, someone (or more likely, multiple someones) who was (were) 90%+ qualified and had same industry experience applied, and interview queue was filled before anyone got to their résumé. While I'm not a betting man, if I had to put money on it, one way or the other, I suspect I know which one I would go for. Because the unemployment rate in the industries that are most represented on LinkedIn is fairly high. It's not rocket science; if companies can receive 200+ résumés in 24 hours for an open position, their chances of finding someone who's more or less a 100% match is fairly good, unless they've been thoughtless about their qualifications or job descriptions. (Companies looking for 5+ years of experience on technologies that are not yet 5 years old still abound.)

Applicant Tracking Systems, especially those that have generative automation baked into them, are common bogeymen in today's employment market. It's easy to point to examples of people receiving rejection letters on very short turnaround and complain that no actual human beings ever look at most résumés. But in an environment where a company can be flooded with applications in short order, of course most résumés will never be reviewed by a human being... no-one's in the business of hiring armies of people just to read résumés.

Known Quantity

Back in 2020, I'd made a note to myself of the following:

According to Lee Hecht Harrison, there are three basic ways in which people obtain new roles:

Created Position: 5%
Known Candidate: 70%
Applicant Pool: 25%

In effect, in 80% of hires, the new hire is a known quantity.

I wonder if the numbers have changed, and if so, what they are now. The current employers' market in the technology industries has been driving a lot of angst, but, at least in the circles I move in, I've been seeing a lot of people looking to crack the Applicant Pool section of things.

Perhaps one of the good things about having been in the labor force for as long as I have is that I'm known to a lot of people. I've put quite a bit of effort into leaving positive impressions, and it's paid off on a couple of occasions.

Back in the day, I tended to view such networking as akin to cheating; but I like to think that I've matured in the interim.

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.