@davidshor

To close out red/blue button discourse, we polled ~14k people and crosstabbed survey responses by 204 commonly used psychometric questions.

The top four personality questions most predictive of button choice are displayed below pic.twitter.com/p7OrFlBDMl

part of the reason discourse around this gets so heated is the decisions are clearly quite analogous to large swaths of real world decisions. and in the real world society functions via many altruistic members enduring the free rider costs imposed by selfish individuals.

of course red voters are somewhat bad people. they're making the correct choice if they're living in a world full of people like them! cheaters and liars always assume most people are actually behaving in the same ways and that if they did otherwise they would fall behind

it's really hard to grasp the point that by being a selfless and giving person, you actually allow for and create a world in which others are also selfless and giving. it feels causally untrue, and that's accurate, your disposition often has no direct causal chain.

still, by being the type of person who doesn't cheat even when no one's looking, who doesn't lie even when they won't be found out, who gives even when nothing will be directly given in return, you ensure that other minds like yours make the same choices. and we're all better off

anyway, i forgive the red voters. society has room for selfish people too. that's kinda the whole point.