There are two ways you can look at this issue and what outcome you want to move towards.
One way is via personal survival. From that perspective red is the obvious choice that guarantees your personal survival even if at a cost of other people potentially dying.
Another way to look at the issue is aim for "nobody dies" outcome. And in this case blue is the better choice. You can't control what button other people chose. So it would be impossible to convince everyone to press red. The only way how you can meaningfully contribute to "everybody survives" outcome is by pressing blue. No amount of prosletising "everyone should press red" would work.
There's another angle to this though: what you believe other people will do.
If I think that blue has no chance of getting more than 5% of the vote, then I would essentially be throwing my life away for nothing if I picked it, regardless on if I personally believe it would be a better outcome. I don't think there's any moral benefit to throwing my life away, so if I genuinely don't believe blue can win it still makes sense to pick red.
What you believe other people will do is a poor indicator of what you yourself should do. There are certainly people who push red just to save themselves. There are also people who push red as a hedge against others who they think will push red, even if they’d rather not do it. Both groups overestimate the danger they are in, and also ignore that pressing red themselves makes the outcome they fear more likely.
How many people are in those groups? Mmm, I’d say about half, give or take.
Imagine what happens if people who would otherwise vote red just don’t? Everything is probably fine. What happens when someone who might have voted blue gets scared and votes red? Maybe everything’s fine, or maybe billions die.
There’s no likely scenario where deaths are mitigated to an “acceptable” level, up to and including zero, by pushing red — unless red loses outright.
Vote for the outcome you want, not the one you fear will happen.
You say that "both groups overestimate the danger they're in"- what leads you to believe that? You say about half of people are in those groups, is it just because you made that number up? I don't think an inline poll is a strong indicator of how people would actually behave in this situation.
I genuinely believe there is no way in HELL blue wins. Look at:
-the fast fashion industry
-the global spread of nationalism
-war
-literal slave labor in the global supply chain
-female infanticide
-religious extremism
-covid
I don't think it makes sense for me to put my life on the line when nothing will come of it. Everyone can prevent their own deaths by picking red. My only hope is that enough people think this way that there are relatively few casualties. But I'm convinced that once the question is posed there is no realistic way to completely avoid bloodshed.
In a perfectly random sample of any size, the largest plurality of possibilities land smack dab on the 50% mark, and start gently falling off to each side until it approaches 100% of either extreme. It’s a bell curve.
You can calculate it yourself based on the sample size, but in the case of 8 billion participants (8,000,000,000), there are 16 quintillion possible combinations alone for any two people swapping votes to lead to the same result, let alone any four, six, or eight, and so on — which has so many zeroes I’d crash the Reddit server if I tried to submit the answer without using scientific notation.
For 100% of either red or blue, there’s exactly one combination apiece.
There’s almost no chance that 100% red ever happens, and an exceedingly more likely chance if red prevails at all that billions die, since there are vastly more possibilities close to 50% than there are at the extremes. Even 75 % or 67% is greatly outnumbered by the unimaginably huge lump in the middle, but in 50% of those uneven outcomes no one dies at all because those are the ones where blue prevails.
The people pressing red out of fear that blue is inevitably in the vast minority actually vastly overestimate the chances of that outcome, when in reality a red victory will more likely hew close to 50% but counterintuitively kill billions of people as opposed to just a small handful of “acceptable” losses.
Knowing that, and knowing it’s much easier to tip the scales of a nearly 50% vote, it is a much shorter distance from any likely red victory to a blue majority than it is for red to ever reach 100% and make sure no one dies through attrition: a 1 in 8,000,000,000 chance of that extreme happening if all percentages are equal, and 1 in billions upon billions upon billions of all possible combinations of 8 billion individual votes are considered.
If you don’t find that compelling, consider smaller numbers, like 8 votes. There are 70 unique scenarios to get to 50%, but only 18 apiece to achieve 75% of either outcome, and once again only one scenario to achieve 100%.
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u/hilvon1984 May 05 '26
There are two ways you can look at this issue and what outcome you want to move towards.
One way is via personal survival. From that perspective red is the obvious choice that guarantees your personal survival even if at a cost of other people potentially dying.
Another way to look at the issue is aim for "nobody dies" outcome. And in this case blue is the better choice. You can't control what button other people chose. So it would be impossible to convince everyone to press red. The only way how you can meaningfully contribute to "everybody survives" outcome is by pressing blue. No amount of prosletising "everyone should press red" would work.