Red vs blue button

The internet has been talking about this red vs blue button problem. Since I’ve been talking about game theory lately, why not talk about this one too? You know, as a treat?

Here’s the problem. Everyone in the world is presented with a choice between a red button and a blue button. If the majority of people press the blue button, then everyone lives. If the majority of people press the red button, then only people who pressed red live, while all the people who pressed the blue button die. Which do you press?

As always, I find it funny that these questions posit life or death stakes. What if instead of dying, people were just mildly inconvenienced? Like, if they were forced to do nothing for five minutes, would that change how we approach the problem? I guess if it were framed that way, then it would be obvious that it’s not worth arguing about for more than five minutes. But anyways…

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Link Roundup: May 2026

Sawatsky: Sexual pain in Christian Women | The Asexual Agenda – Okay, so this is for my journal club, and I wrote up the discussion notes.  But I have a few things more to say here.  The paper is exploring possible causes for the high prevalence of sexual pain among Christian women (primarily Evangelicals).  But the authors of the paper are evangelicals, and they frame it like religious belief is generally great for sexual outcomes.  To them, sexual pain is this one mysterious exception where religious women are doing worse.  Color me skeptical.

I recalled that a long time ago, there was a study that circulated among atheist blogs, seemingly claiming the opposite, that people who leave religion have better sex lives.  The study was called “Sex and Secularism” by Darrel Ray in 2011, and it was based on a survey that recruited a lot of participants through Pharyngula.  You can find news articles talking about it, but the article itself is totally gone. I’m skeptical of that study too, and the ephemeral circumstances of its publication certainly don’t help.

The thing is, “better sex life” is a normative judgment, and perhaps it’s not very surprising that any given value system results in better sex lives, as measured by researchers who share that value system.  Obviously my values would overlap more with Darrel Ray’s than with the evangelical authors.  But I’m also ace, which tends to come with its own sexual values.  Like whenever “better sexual outcomes” means higher frequency of sex, I’m just going to roll my eyes.  But sexual pain, that’s uncontroversially a bad thing, even when ace people have it.

Why was I invited to Beast Studios | Folding Ideas (video, 1:30 hours) – MrBeast is the most subscribed youtube channel of all time, valued at $5 billion dollars.  But they’re losing money, viewers, and their film production is at once lavishly expensive, yet made of paperclips and glue.  Dan makes few attacks on Mr. Beast’s character, yet exposes the organizational rot at the heart of his media empire.  They prioritize viewing metrics above all else, and seem uninterested in hiring any real expertise.

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The Goomba Fallacy

The goomba fallacy is when some people say A, and some people say B. And then you say, isn’t it ridiculous that people believe A and B at the same time? But it isn’t necessarily true that anyone believes both at the same time.

Never heard of the goomba fallacy? That’s because it’s new. It was coined in 2024. It’s widely circulated in certain parts of the internet, and if you’re not in those parts of the internet then good for you, you’re not missing much.

goomba fallacy original image

The goomba fallacy doesn’t have anything to do with goombas. It’s just that the meme image that popularized the fallacy contains goombas. Source

My instinct when learning about a fallacy has always been to pick it apart. What exactly makes the fallacy wrong? Are there contexts where the fallacy isn’t wrong? What is the goal when people commit the fallacy, or point out the fallacy? So here is my overanalysis of the goomba fallacy.

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Origami: Polyrhythmic flower

Polyrhythmic flower

Polyrhythmic flower, designed by me

This is a pleat-based design, similar to other designs I’ve posted before.  They’re fairly simple to fold on the spot and improvise.  This probably took me like 20 minutes to fold, but I like the idea.

So what’s the idea behind this one?  I fold the paper into 16 divisions… and also 15 divisions.  So the outermost pleat is 1/16 – 1/15 = 1/240.  The next pleat is 2/16 – 2/15 = 2/240, and so on.  So the pleats are very small towards the edge of the paper, and very large towards the center.  Ever since I demonstrated this idea to myself, I’ve been wondering how I can apply it to make more complex designs.

How do I fold 15 divisions, you ask?  I have some diagrams here, but I’ve been thinking for a while I ought to make some clearer diagrams.

Trolleyology bad

In my last post, I offhandedly disparaged the Trolley Problem as a serious thought experiment. Let me elaborate.

Any philosophical thought experiment contains stipulations about what is going on. In the trolley problem, it is stipulated that by flipping the switch, it *will* prevent five deaths, and it *will* cause another person’s death.

Question: do we believe that stipulation? We don’t exactly believe in it, it’s a fictional scenario. But you at least have to accept the stipulation to think about the problem on the level that it was intended.

In the variant of the trolley problem, it is stipulated that by pushing a fat man in front of the trolley, this *will* prevent five deaths, and it *will* cause the death of the fat man.

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Newcomb’s Paradox occurs in real life

Newcomb’s paradox is a philosophical thought experiment. There is an entity called Omega, who can predict your choices. Omega presents you with two boxes; you may open one or both boxes, and take whatever you find. The first box contains $1k, guaranteed. The second box contains $1M if and only if Omega predicts that you will leave the first box alone. So the dilemma is between “one-boxing” (taking only the $1M), or “two-boxing” (taking both boxes, finding a total of $1k).

When I put it that way, it seems obvious that $1M is more than $1k, so therefore you should open only one box. The two-boxer argument is that Omega has already decided whether the box contains $1M or not. So whatever’s in the second box is a constant, and it’s only rational to take the free $1k. Omega may have chosen to arbitrarily punish players who behave rationally, but what’s done is done, might as well collect the $1k consolation prize.

Do we care about Newcomb’s paradox?

Newcomb’s paradox has received a great deal of discussion from Rationalists, i.e. the community popularized by Eliezer Yudkowsky. That’s how I know about the paradox. But I’m an outsider, and it appears to me like Rationalists stared at this paradox for so long that they went mad. Yudkowsky is a dedicated one-boxer, and has attempted to construct elaborate theories to justify it. Some of these ideas were crucial in the construction of Roko’s Basilisk.

I believe the reason Yudkowsky and others are so obsessed with Newcomb’s paradox, is because they’re transhumanists. They believe the future will contain a super powerful AI. To most people Omega sounds fantastical—how can any entity make perfect predictions about our actions? But to a transhumanist, a super powerful AI could easily step into the role of Omega.  Additionally, we can think about what happens when AI steps into the role of the player. If the AI is deterministic, then of course we can predict what the AI will choose. So Yudkowsky’s interest is ensuring that an AI will choose correctly in this situation.

But for the rest of us folks who aren’t transhumanists, does Newcomb’s paradox make sense? Is this a problem we even need to think about?

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War mismanagement, in Helldivers

Helldivers 2 is a game that takes a significant amount of inspiration from Starship Troopers, being basically a satire of fascist propaganda. Players take the role of Helldivers, who fight on the side of Super Earth in a galactic war. Super Earth’s goal is to spread liberty Managed Democracy. Managed Democracy is basically a totalitarian government where an algorithm votes on people’s behalf, allegedly based on a prediction of how they would vote.

But where Starship Troopers is a short self-contained movie, Helldivers 2 is a game that people pour hundreds of hours into. It can’t just be a satire of fascist propaganda. It can’t be any single thing. There are many narratives that emerge from it, some of which are at tension with each other. For example, in the interpretation of Starship Troopers it is possible to argue that the bug aliens did nothing wrong, and the humans are the aggressors. On the other hand, Helldivers doesn’t lend itself to such a straightforward interpretation, because there are many clear examples where the aliens are the aggressors.

So I’d like to explain a grander emergent narrative that took me months to understand. It’s a narrative about how players are kept in the dark, and how this leads to a mismanaged war that wastes billions of lives.

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