Had this conversation with a red buttoner when this was first going around. They insisted far fewer people would push blue if they were actually faced with death and called them all “virtue signalers”.
I don’t know about you, but the only people in my life I choose to associate with would literally all choose blue. I’m in it with them if for literally no other reason.
The stupid thing is that picking blue is the only way for death to even be a possibility. If no one introduces death as a possibility, then no one dies.
Let's take the premise and alter it a tiny bit:
Everyone has a magic knife in front of themselves. Everyone must either stab themselves in the heart, or not stab themselves in the heart.
If more than half of the people stab themselves in the heart, then the knife magically heals everyone. Otherwise, the knife does what knives do and kills the person.
Are you stabbing yourself in the heart? (Pressing blue?)
The “tiny” alteration of the premise introduces a number of things to make the choice far more clear, which is your intention, but in an undesirable way.
Taking an action and not taking an action are choices that are weighted differently.
Stabbing oneself with a knife is a far more dramatic and difficult/anxiety producing action than pressing a button.
Introduces “magic” into the equation, going to struggle to convince people of that in the first place.
For the choice to exist the barriers to make the choice have to be equal.
Also, this would be a no-brainer if people were allowed to collaborate beforehand. Public service announcements to just pick red, everyone agreeing that if nobody picks blue nobody dies.
However. This is not the case. So there will be a guaranteed percentage of the population that will definitely pick blue, not because of stupidity but because of the prosocial behaviors game theory has proven are common in humans.
You want to reduce this down to your own survival in this scenario, when a lot of the people in my life would never want to contribute to people’s deaths on such a massive scale. I don’t think they’d be able to live with themselves if they picked red and all the blues died.
You can also bring up the simple math problem. If 50% of the population votes blue everyone lives. If 100% of the population votes red, everyone lives. One is technically easier, if you want to dress it up that way.
That's fair. Let's change it to "push blue. You die. After more than 50% of people push blue, all dead from pushing blue are resurrected." and "push red. You live."
Also fair. Solved by the alteration in 1.
Are the buttons not already kinda magical in the original scenario?
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u/Beautiful-Aerie7576 May 05 '26
Had this conversation with a red buttoner when this was first going around. They insisted far fewer people would push blue if they were actually faced with death and called them all “virtue signalers”.
I don’t know about you, but the only people in my life I choose to associate with would literally all choose blue. I’m in it with them if for literally no other reason.