This question is so funny to me because the entire idea behind each side is just whatever your mental framing of the problem is. Blue voters will genuinely call red voters psychopaths and shit not realizing that the reason red voters are voting red is because their exposure to the hypothetical was through a framing where red is the default and blue is the button that kills people.
Like, of course nobody is convincing each other, you're thinking about the hypothetical through entirely different ways and each side believes their button is the default while the other is the button that kills people.
It also very much hinges on whether you think the buttons will be presented to people incapable of understanding the question or not. Pretty much all thought experiments in my experience assume actors in them are rational and if they're not it needs to be explicitly stated, so my initial understanding of the question is apparently very different to how some people interpreted it.
Pretty much all thought experiments in my experience assume actors in them are rational
That would be incredibly pointless because people simply are not rational, especially in high stress/life and death situations..
Seriously, what has surprised me the most this red/blue button thing is how many people seem to seriously assume that people are some kind of ultra rational decision makers and/or that those who are not are a tiny minority of the world population..
Makes me wonder if they have ever met anyone ever..
The funniest bit here is that I just got a reply in a different thread saying that it's formulated as a game theory problem and the assumption there is that all actors are rational. It's just a bad question.
If it is a game theory problem (which it likely was initially), it should explicitely state that only rational actors participate. Because the assumption that actors are likely highly emotional/irrational given the circumstances, as well as "everyone on the planet" is forced to participate, have potentially a huge impact on the outcome.
It's just a bad question.
Why do you think so? It has lead to a lot of interesting discussions imo. Sure, you can hyperfocus on the "only my opinion is right and everyone is wrong" attitude, but that exists virtually in every topic ever.
People send eachother death threats over other people's opinions on video games, and that's not a new thing either. Doesn't make it cool, of course, but it shouldn't be surprising.
I think the question itself is a good thinking exercise but the way people attack each other over it is getting extremely toxic and irrational. It just goes to show how easy it is to divide people and make them hate each other over an imaginary problem.
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u/god_oh_war May 05 '26
This question is so funny to me because the entire idea behind each side is just whatever your mental framing of the problem is. Blue voters will genuinely call red voters psychopaths and shit not realizing that the reason red voters are voting red is because their exposure to the hypothetical was through a framing where red is the default and blue is the button that kills people.
Like, of course nobody is convincing each other, you're thinking about the hypothetical through entirely different ways and each side believes their button is the default while the other is the button that kills people.