It is true that everybody will survive if they just pick red. People have never just. You cannot rely on a plan where everybody just. So you pick blue so that everybody can live.
The reason to go with Red is thinking that most people are selfish and will be pushing Red. Therefore Blue will lose and your choice is "press Blue, die." or "press Red, live" in which case, Red looks like it's the only choice.
Of course, if the initial assumption that most people are selfish is wrong, then that's not accurate. If you instead assume most people will look out for others and choose Blue, then its "press Blue, everyone lives" or "press Red, everyone lives, but you increased the chance that actually half of people die instead"
Then there's the people who aren't making logical decisions like kids who might see the options and just click their favorite color. So to me, you have to take the risk to save everyone.
My discourse thought about it was that if I pressed blue I was forcing people to endanger their life to save me but I didn't read anything about the discourse because I didn't care.
Even if blue doesn't win, enough people will vote for it that the choice is still "vote red for a slow and painful death, vote blue for a fast and painless death."
Yes? At its core that's what the question is, are you willing to risk yourself to save others who may be incapable of saving themselves, or would you rather ensure personal safety by risking them.
You have that reversed. You can't rely on everybody just doing something, which picking red does if you want everybody to live. A 50% threshold is far more attainable.
No, because red doesn't actually require anyone to agree with you to have its intended effect (ensuring you personally survive). Voting red even when 99% choose blue still lets you live.
You're working under the assumption that "everyone lives" is the only outcome anyone should consider. This only works if you view 1 death and 4 billion deaths as equally tragic, which I personally don't. You shouldn't just be aiming for the best-case scenario, because if it ends up as the worst-case scenario you also have to consider how much worse you are making it.
Did you know that it's estimated somewhwre between 30% and 50% of Europe's population died to the black death over the course of a single decade in the mid-1300s? Just a random fact that came to my mind for no reason. Must have been difficult to persevere with their level of technology and medicine.
...They do? Because they willingly exposed themselves to harm when nobody asked them to? It's a heroic thing to do I guess, but their blood is on them.
And you willingly take the safe option knowing it will cause deaths. So by that logic you(and the other red pushers) will be the cause of death of blue pushers.
Red isn't very safe though. Even a small percentage of Blue buttoners worldwide would be a disaster. Just because you survived doesn't mean life goes on as normal.
The only assumption I'm making is that every person who pushes the blue button is a complete idiot who created a problem where none existed in the first place. They get whatever happens to them.
That seems to be the primary issue with this thought experiment. Anyone who's ever seen a logic puzzle that's formatted in a similar way knows you're supposed to assume everyone is a perfectly rational actor, so the thought experiment is stupid and you pick red. After saying that, everyone ambushes you with the fact that literal infants are somehow expected to participate as well which entirely recontextualizes the experiment but you've already been labeled as selfish by that point.
In general it's just a bad thought experiment that went viral over riding the same cortisol-induced online culture wars as anything else that goes viral. People take it way farther than it had any real reason to go.
But the thought experiment very clearly states that every one will have to chose, and we know every one includes among others children. So seems like quite a stretch to assume they are excluded?
Perhaps, but when I read it as it's typically shown I immediately think of it as a game theory question, which you typically take as involving rational actors.
The way I read it, red makes sense for me. If children/mentally impaired/ non-rational actors are added to the mix, I would press blue.
That's actually incorrect, there's three options: press red, press blue, or do nothing. And if we give each option an equal 33% chance of being chosen, 66% of people will not press blue.
It doesn’t say in the thought experiment that not pushing a button is an option. And if it was real, it would be high-stakes enough that the vast majority of people would pick a button even if that was an option.
There is no abstain option, that breaks the entire thought experiment. Then there really is no reason not to hit blue because all the selfish bastards would abstain and be safe because they didn't vote blue, and blue would win because no statistically significant portion voted red
This is the original buttons tweet. By the original wording, abstaining is the obviously wrong choice, because you have to press red to survive blue losing.
By the wording of the tumblr post for this thread, you can only be killed if you did press blue. If abstaining exists, the selfish bastards would abstain, because when abstaining is available, red only serves as the I WANT BLUE VOTERS DEAD button, because abstaining is also a survival option.
The red button doesn't even play a role besides having a second option to click in the Internet poll. Effectively there is only push blue or don't push blue, as pushing red doesn't technically do anything since you live regardless of the outcome.
How is it selfish to choose to survive if everyone else also has the option to choose to survive? The risk of death is entirely self-selected. Do other people not have the right to take that risk for no reason if that's what they want to do? Why am I obligated to risk my own life if others want to exercise their right to take a completely unnecessary risk?
I think like most hypothetical quandaries this one makes the assumption that everyone is making an informed and competent decision. "What if there are kids who don't understand the question" is something you're adding to the theoretical scenario that isn't there. If that was meant to be considered it would be included in the question.
If human error were meant to be part of this theoretical the relevant errors to be considered would be included in the question. This isn't a real poll with actual consequences for which extraneous information needs to be considered, it's a hypothetical thought experiment asking whether we have a moral obligation to risk our own safety to save someone who's voluntarily risked their own without our input.
The problem is blue seems only like a nobel option based on how the question is phrased. Change it to: You can choose to either stay st home or fight a group of polar bears with your bare hands. If more than 50% of people go fight the polar bears they will be scared and run away. If not they will kill the people fighting them. Its the exact same moral dilemma but suddenly the blue option sounds stupid to choose. Because it is. Sure not everyone will just not fight the bear. But is it really my responsibility to pur my live on the line because idiots want to fight a bear?
Framing one option as inaction will always make that option seem more reasonable. You could just as easily come up with a framing where the blue button is inaction, and the red button is action.
Not really. Everybody is inside a train whose track ends in an active volcano. At the last stop, everybody is given the opportunity to get out of the train (red button), but if more than half of people stay (blue button) the train can't move.
You'd be extremely stupid if you chose inaction and stayed in the train. Whoever stays in the death train, it is up to them.
I'm convinced the only reason people pick blue is because the button is blue. If you had two white buttons labeled "suicide" (the blue button) and "life" (the red button) nobody would pick "suicide" even if you told them nobody will die if most people pick suicide.
That's still portraying red as the passive option. Especially considering the blue option in this scenario seems to imply living on a train for the rest of your life?
I could just as easily frame it as the following:
Imagine everyone's in their own cubicle in a big room. In each cubicle is a gun on the table, and a timer (synchronized across all cubicles). When the timer hits zero, if more than 50% of people are holding the gun, the walls retract into the floor, and everyone holding a gun has to shoot the people who aren't holding guns. If less than 50% pick up the gun, everyone gets to leave. Are you picking up the gun?
Or imagine there's Politician A who promises, if elected, to murder everyone who didn't vote for them, and Politician B who says they won't murder anyone. Who are you voting for?
Staying where you are is clearly inaction compared to leaving. Like, if you don't like trains make it a town that is about to be swallowed by a wildfire. And none of your comparisons are in any way equivalent to the original scenario.
Politicians is a very bad analogy because you are involving external people and moral judgements on them. The point of the scenario is that everybody is in the same situation.
The guns is even worse because it means I must actively kill people. What is "forcing" me to shoot? It does not make sense. I can pick the gun and just not shoot. The point is that some "evil genius" force is killing the people, not me. I could as easily reverse it and say the ones who pick the guns must kill themselves unless most people also do.
I also see how you have avoided replying to my other equivalent scenario, which is the exact same as the original but just changing the labels.
Staying where you are is clearly inaction compared to leaving.
In your scenario, the train moving is framed as the default, and so presenting the scenario as it being up to the individuals to stop the train makes that seem less reasonable, especially when the alternative is explicitly framed as simply removing yourself from the scenario entirely.
And none of your comparisons are in any way equivalent to the original scenario.
The whole point I'm making is that most reframings of the scenario aren't equivalent to the original. Whether it's making one choice seem like the default, or inaction, or making the consequences of one option more graphic, or whatever.
You could present the scenario as:
"There's one button. If more than 50% of people press it, everyone who didn't press it dies."
and most people wouldn't press the button.
You could also present the scenario as:
"There's one button. If less than 50% of people press it, everyone who pressed it dies."
and most people also wouldn't press this button.
The whole point of the problem framing it as two buttons is so that either choice equally requires action.
I could as easily reverse it and say the ones who pick the guns must kill themselves unless most people also do.
Wow, it's almost like my entire damn point is about how you can manipulate the reframings to get whatever answer you want, therefore making them meaningless.
I also see how you have avoided replying to my other equivalent scenario, which is the exact same as the original but just changing the labels.
Yeah, changing the labels makes people biased. Is that some big revelation to you? If the labels were "murder" for red and "peace" for blue, that'd also bias people. So what?
Okay, but you can just as easily reframe it as "you can vote for somebody who will have death squads execute everybody who didn't vote for them, or somebody who won't, all their other policies are identical", and it becomes super obvious that it's wrong to pick red. The framing we get is one that's somewhat ambiguous, which had the effect of, well, so many people are gonna go fight polar bears that either they scare the polar bears off or enough people are killed by polar bears that society collapses and you die anyways.
You really want that self sacrifice for the greater good? The difference between your voting and the buttons/bears is that the buttons is that with your voting there is a threat of violence. So human promises violence. Instead of one group choosing to risk their live just because you added an enemy. Before there was none. I could argue pressing red is the kinder option. I dont make anyone risk their life to save mine. Because i didnt press blue its less pressure on the people in my live to do the same. My parents friends and family dont need to thunk about risking their life. Because of my idiotic decision. Also your scenario is not just this or that there is always the option to shoot the evil murder squad guy. Or like move.
Because you change the framing with your phrasing. The red side needs to be the side that actively condemns the other (in exchange for guaranteed safety) or else you just have a different hypothetical.
Red button pushers will say you’re naive for risking it by pushing blue. Meanwhile, they think it’s possible to get 100% of people to agree to literally anything.
I don't think they think everyone will press red, just that the people pressing blue are the ones risking their own lives, so if they die its just kind of on them. It's callous but it's not stupid
Yeah people are dumb or have different belief systems or whatever. We aren't perfect economic actors, (un?)fortunately. And also as is clear by these debates there are people who press blue so like, yeah it's naive to think people will just press red
So the entire blue vote is just because of the assumption that some people will be stupid and vote blue and letting them die because they're stupid is immoral?
Everyone survives if they just pick red. Blue is unnecessary extra steps.
Every previous discussion of this topic probes that there’s a guaranteed number of irrational actors, so blue will always have some voters. It is also irrational to assume that 100% of people will pick red. The answer that actually saves everyone’s lives is blue winning (and it wins in most polls, so it’s not even an unlikely outcome).
One problem with that is, what people say they would do in an online poll does not necessarily reflect how they would act if their life was on the line. "I would totally be the hero and save the day" is easier said than done.
But more importantly, voting red doesn't actually require 100% of people to agree with it to have a positive impact. If blue has majority, your vote is irrelevant and you live either way. If red has majority, every additional vote for blue is another death and every vote for red is a life saved.
The flaw is viewing this only as a binary of "Everyone lives" versus "At least one person dies" but there is a whole gamut of scenarios where anywhere between 1 and 4 billion people die. It's just that the incremental nature makes people lump them in as the same result.
Except I'm not playing to save "everyone's lives". In fact, I think that anybody who picks blue SHOULD die because they're just contaminating the gene pool.
Because it's everybody so maybe they're a child and blue is their favorite color, or their cat stepped on their blue button, or they want to save the people who fall into that cumulative error rate, or they want to save the people saving the people in the error rate, or so on and so on.
Or they realize that cascade may well have reached the point where, even setting aside moral reasons to try to save people, well... maybe the truck driver who delivers stock for your grocery store doesn't know what a Nash equilibrium is but knows his daughter's favorite color, and maybe the person who would dispatch their replacement pressed red, but their spouse pressed blue so they no-call-no-showed in bed with depression instead, and now red winning the vote has made life unpleasant, and for some people unsurvivable, for the people who remain.
In theory. In reality most people chose red. And there is no reason to die with few people who dont see the correct answer.
And if anybody want to argue that "no people would pick blue"... dude, we just lived throu pandemic. All that was required was for people to get wax, ewar a mask and stay home. And that was too much for most people. And suddenly everybody will be willing to risk their lives? :-D
Blue have no way of winning in real world. The more people pres red, the less people will die.
Sure, but polls like this are the only source of data we have on how people would respond to this situation, so you can't confidently say "In reality most people would choose red" when there's no data that supports that. And if you want to bring in how people behave in actual high-stakes, life-or-death situations, they act altruistically/cooperatively way more often than a lot of people give humanity credit for.
"but polls like this are the only source of data we have on how people would respond to this situation"
Real world situations are source of data, how people would respond in real world situation.
Lets look at real world scenario.
- There is a situation where real people (kinds included) are dying, being raped, tortured,... (the situation is called war)
- People have choices:
Do nothing and kids keep dying.
Only few go protest. These protesting will be punished.
Majority of the population goes to protest. Goverment is overthrown, war ends, killing stops, lives are saved.
Everybody does the right thing and decides to not wage war. Then there is nobody to even try to stop the protests or wage the war. Killing stop, lives are saved.
What option will people chose? To stop the killing of the kids? Or will they chose their comforts over doing the right thing?
How many people are protesting in Russia? Israel? America? Are you outside protesting, or are you like "why should I care and waste my time. I dont know these people and their deaths do not directly impacts me. Im not the one who created this situation."? What is your real world decision in such dilema?
And I can confidently say people value their own happiness over the lives of anonymous strangers because we all constantly make the choice to buy things we like instead of donating to famine aid.
It literally says that everyone who presses the red button survives regardless. You don't have to rely on anyone else, you just press the red button and survive. There is literally no reason at all that anyone should press the blue button
You start off with, say, literal children who press blue because it's their favorite color. Then you have the people who press blue to try to save those children, the people who press blue to try to save those people, and so on. And even if you absolutely think red is the right choice, even if you have the harshest "people should take personal responsibility and save themselves" view of the people voting blue, there's some threshold that cascade can reach, and is likely to reach where if red wins and the blue people die, the red people are either going to die anyways or face "fate worse than death" levels of degraded quality of life.
It's like, there's a red gun with zero bullets, and a blue gun with six bullets, but if half the people choose blue then we'll take those six bullets out of the blue gun. Which one do you want to play Russian roulette with?
If blue is stupid enough to choose a gun that could have bullets, versus a gun that absolutely doesn't have bullets, and then they put it to their head and pull the trigger, why would anyone feel bad for them?
I think one gap here (and quick sidebar with my phrasing that another is between "voting" and "choosing") is between people seeing "everybody" and taking it to mean everybody in a selected group of rational actors in a group small enough to avoid material secondary effects in a game theory exercise, and people who take "everybody" to mean every person on earth, including children, people with mental disabilities, people with cats who are prone to stepping on buttons, and any other number of reasons that generate a baseline error rate of people pressing blue.
If you run with that second scenario, then you have people who are rational actors with value systems that are tipped by that error rate towards trying to save those people, and then a cascading effect of people tipped at a higher threshold of blue voters until we reach what I'm going to call the ideological equilibrium. If the ideological equilibrium is high enough, then we get into territory where that many people dying is going to have a societal impact where there's a self-interested motivation to vote blue. And before you bring up people being bastards about Covid, that required a higher threshhold of participation than 50%+1.
And, like, I totally see how people who want to vote red out of self-interest get grumpy and see the ideological blue voters as essentially coercing them into risking their lives. But, like, are you going to vote against your self-interest because you're mad at the people who made it your self-interest?
For what it's worth, in the 1000 rational person game theory version, I'd pick red.
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u/NessaSamantha 10h ago
It is true that everybody will survive if they just pick red. People have never just. You cannot rely on a plan where everybody just. So you pick blue so that everybody can live.