Hm. I’d been thinking the whole thing would work better if each party could perform some small negative-sum defection against the other. Along the likes of, each party commits to destroy $10, and has the ability to restore $1 to themselves while increasing the other party’s obligation by $2 up to a max of $30. (And after either party gets nuked, the money values remain fixed.)
I think that would be a good thing for us to practice, but I agree the “just don’t press the button that you have no reason to press anyway” variant is also good to practice.
Adding money to the mix for some reason just makes it more salient to me that pushing the button straight up makes you a jerk. (Although your setup here is… somewhat better than the variant someone else proposed, where you more directly give each other money. By virtue of being a weird setup that I have to think about before having opinions about)
The idea I came up with yesterday which I actually like is something like “if you push the button, there’s a cool ceremonial bottle rocket to launch or sparkler or effigy you burn or something”, that’s cool enough to look exciting and tempting, but whose value is entirely symbolic and fun.
Because of the nature of the holiday, a prize that involves harming the other group actually feels worse-than-nothing (making me definitely not want to press anything), whereas a prize that involves a cool symbolic thing for ourselves is more tempting.
Hm. I’d been thinking the whole thing would work better if each party could perform some small negative-sum defection against the other. Along the likes of, each party commits to destroy $10, and has the ability to restore $1 to themselves while increasing the other party’s obligation by $2 up to a max of $30. (And after either party gets nuked, the money values remain fixed.)
I think that would be a good thing for us to practice, but I agree the “just don’t press the button that you have no reason to press anyway” variant is also good to practice.
Adding money to the mix for some reason just makes it more salient to me that pushing the button straight up makes you a jerk. (Although your setup here is… somewhat better than the variant someone else proposed, where you more directly give each other money. By virtue of being a weird setup that I have to think about before having opinions about)
The idea I came up with yesterday which I actually like is something like “if you push the button, there’s a cool ceremonial bottle rocket to launch or sparkler or effigy you burn or something”, that’s cool enough to look exciting and tempting, but whose value is entirely symbolic and fun.
Because of the nature of the holiday, a prize that involves harming the other group actually feels worse-than-nothing (making me definitely not want to press anything), whereas a prize that involves a cool symbolic thing for ourselves is more tempting.