The game theoretic poll that made Twitter users angry
Picking red or blue caused users to block each other and study game theory
On August the 14th, Twitter user lisatomic posted the poll above. Just like the movie The Matrix, your job is to pick a red or blue pill — but this time it doesn’t look like the choice involves learning the truth about the universe. Or, that’s how it looks at first glance. It’s just a logic puzzle that involves survival.
The tweet containing the poll quickly gained thousands of retweets. Users familiar with mathematical puzzles noticed its similarity to the Prisoner’s dilemma. The poll, as well as the aforementioned dilemma are part of game theory, a branch of mathematics that studies strategic choices of two or more entities playing any game with well-defined rules.
If we want to find the optimal choice, we want to analyse the cost and benefit of each choice, while taking into account that other players are rational and will analyse the cost and benefit before making their choice too.
If we assume others are rational, they want to live — and the blue pill offers a world where you live as long as the majority picks it. On first hand, this sounds like a good idea, and that’s what over 64% of people did:
So we saved everyone, with a safety margin of 14.9%!
… But we are talking about life and death, and if you’ve read the Prisoner’s dilemma you know that strategic choices are nuanced, and in some cases the optimal personal choice is to betray everyone even though cooperation saves everyone.
In particular, users noticed the following fact: there is no case where a red pill dies.
If the majority of users pick red, all reds survive.
If the majority of users pick blue, everyone survives → all reds survive
It’s a fail-safe option. If everyone takes the fail-safe option, everyone is safe regardless of how manipulative and destructive others are.
At this point, people started arguing, with some blocking each other: how come it feels right to pick blue if it’s so wrong? Some lost faith in humanity and physicist David Deutsch remarked that it’s a gotcha question that involves skill that isn’t taught very often:
But there’s another point that needs to be made: game theory doesn’t involve mis-clicks, misreading the question, or the guilt of killing your grandma that chose the supposedly non-optimal blue. These social effects make a lot of sense in the altruistic camp:
The Canadian singer Grimes and the game designer Jonathan Blow think the final results 64.9% - 35.1% might not reflect reality:
In conclusion, this feels like the main character in Nolan’s Oppenheimer: it’s hard to articulate a coherent view when there are feelings involved. If you want to follow the latest discourse regarding this puzzle, you’d be interested in Roko Mijic’s Twitter timeline. If you like content like this, subscribe to the blog and follow me on Twitter.