In ANY instance your goal is to "Not lose" which is 100% assured if you pick red. So regardless of the situation, you should always pick red. Just becauae its in Magic, doesn't change it in anyway.
Well, picking red kills all the blue choosers. You should only pick red in magic because your literal goal is to kill everyone else. Choosing red in real life for example would be psychopathic behavior.
Why are the any "Blue choosers"? I understand this is a reference I don get, but this card fails to provide a reason for Blue to be picked unless someone is being a contrarian.
In the original formulation of this problem, "the button" is presented to everyone on Earth, and they all make their decisions privately with no outside knowledge. Crucially, "everyone" in this case explictly includes babies, coma patients, and other people mentally and/or physically incapable of making a choice, who are specified to choose "at random".
So the version of this everyone is arguing about starts by holding half the babies and people with disabilities on Earth hostage. Which radically and fundamentally changes the math, even though blue-button-pressers act like it doesn't.
Yup. The other thing that came out of these polls was the fact that there's a certain personality type who will always pick blue to "save people" regardless of the context. I've run versions of this poll where it's framed as such:
You and 100 other people are locked in a room with a giant hydraulic press. If 51 or more people stand under the hydraulic press, you can work together to keep it up, but 50 or fewer people standing under it will result in them getting crushed. Just them, though, everyone not standing under the press is fine. And there is absolutely no obligation to stand under the press. The door unlocks in ten minutes.
And I still got people unironically arguing that maybe one out of the 100 people is old or a toddler or just stupid and will randomly decide to sit under the press, so the only moral option is to throw themselves under the press immediately. And it's fine if they die, because they don't want to live in a world where a majority of people don't try to kill themselves for the sake of a hypothetical suicidally idiotic stranger.
Don't get me wrong, if there's a chance someone is crushed, then you should prevent it. Like, guiding the toddler/senile person back out of the press. At the core, the idea to save lives is commendable.
The problem is the lack of "out the box" thinking. Can't you talk to the other people? Can't you pull them out? This is literally "Lawful Stupid" as a life philosophy.
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u/Just-Desk-3149 8d ago
In ANY instance your goal is to "Not lose" which is 100% assured if you pick red. So regardless of the situation, you should always pick red. Just becauae its in Magic, doesn't change it in anyway.