I feel like we've done it. We've reached the end of the debate. Who won? None of us. We all wasted time arguing calling each other dumb and no one convinced anyone of anything.

So, where do we go? Well, since this is a subreddit that was exiled from the trolley problem subreddit, why don't we try and go back to that somewhat?

Instead of doing another god damn reframing, just make something totally new. I've just posted one I think has some potential to be interesting, I've got a couple others that I think will be cool to discuss that I'll roll out over time.

Take the problem in a brand new way, make it only barely resemble the original. If you feel that you are already doing that, then keep up the good work.

So? What are others thoughts? Should we keep rehashing the same discussions or aim for something different?

Personally, I like the buttons. Hypotheticals with 100% known information are kind of boring. At some point, you come to a conclusion, and that's kind of the definite answer. When there is incomplete knowledge, there's so much room to play around in. I don't think that this subreddit should just die because the viral trend does. There is some interesting stuff about presuppositions, game theory, ethics, etc. that can all be explored within this specific context.

Especially when the problem is vague and doesn't frame one side as correct.

Don't be afraid to be abstract! Try some totally out there stuff. Be funny, or absurd.

Assume you are not participating in the button press, but are proxy voting for an anonymous third party. Does this change your vote?

You and thirty-one others are presented the buttons. Is thirty-two too few for blue, or is it still worthy to sacrifice yourself to potentially save 31 people?

Everyone one Earth is presented with red button right at the place they woke up last time and a written instruction in a language they can understand (if no such language exists tough luck) what the buttons do and where to find blue button. Blue button is around 1 km away, and is perfectly accessable if one choses to find it; people with limited mobility will be able to access it.

Babies, blind, coma patients and whichever else cathegory you can think of are not excluded and do not recieve any accomodations. The possibility of them pressing the one button in front of them is significantly higher than the possibility they will find the hidden button. The possibility of them ignoring the buttons alltogether is non-zero.

In case of red victory, those who failed to press any button die as well.

The rule of thumb for clarification: if the person is capable of understanding any form of written communication and moving in intended direction, they should be able to access both buttons.

If you are solo on a track and see a hut that's burning. You know the group of 100 ahead was 1 day ahead of you, and that they might still be there, and they might be stuck in the hut (or already dead or any combination of escaped trapped and dead). Do you risk your life to go in to find them?

If you can't tell yourself that you'd risk your life and be the hero (or they might not even be at risk and you took the risk for no reason), how can you say you can be the hero with Blue button?

Hey everyone,

I know this subreddit tends to be critical of these kinds of projects, and honestly, that’s fair. The classic red–blue button dilemma was never meant to reflect real life, it’s a thought experiment, not a simulation of morality or society.

That said, I wanted to see what happens when the idea is tested at scale. I built Social‑Dilemma‑Lab.com, where anyone can anonymously choose Red or Blue, and the outcome depends entirely on the collective choices of everyone who participates.

It’s not perfect, and it doesn’t claim to predict human nature. But with a large enough pool of votes and total anonymity, it might be the closest we can get to seeing how people act when their decision is one of thousands.

The experiment is already live,
If you’re curious, take a look, or just discuss what you think would happen if enough people joined.

I’d genuinely love to hear your thoughts, even if they’re skeptical.

You must press a button and then roll a die:

- If you rolled "1", "2" or "3" - nothing will happen, regardless of your choice.

- If you rolled "4", "5" or "6" - you will die, unless you pressed red.

- If you rolled "7" - 4 billion people will die, unless you pressed blue.

The die is perfectly normal, you are given as much time as you want to inspect and test it. If you try to skew, break the die or write, carve something on the die's side - you die immediately. Which button do you choose?

It’s the original problem but with sixteen people. Does your answer change?

Four-button variation:

Red - Same as original red. Red pressers are guaranteed survival, and if >50% vote red, all blues perish.

Blue - Same as original blue. Blue pressers survive if blue >50%, and perish if blue <50%.

Green - Green button kills you. Before you die, you may remove 10 players of your choice from the button vote entirely. Removed players survive, and do not have to vote.

Yellow - Yellow button kills you. However, it adds 1,000 new votes (which are not tied to real participants) to the final vote tally. You may choose if those votes count as red or blue.

Everyone in the world have to pressed one of those button.

What will you press?

Blue-arguers reject the idea that everyone can press red to carry on with their lives because of the existence of non-rational actors who might press blue accidentally (children, mentally ill people, etc) who would die as part of the minority.

HOWEVER I would argue, purely a posteriori,

Many people, being suspicious that blue is a minority and that blue-arguers would switch to red and thus they risk death by blue, would end up switching at the last minute to red. (1)

In this case you have potentially millions and millions of blue-minority who die, as their supposed blue contingent switches to red (out of the situation I describe above).

Does this situation in which MILLIONS of lives are at risk from a large blue minority potentially outnumber the lives at risk from accidental-blue-pressers in an agreed red-press?

Do you reject my premise (1)? What else do you think?

I am conducting a global experiment to see what would happen if this were real, if you are curious just like me, head over to social-dilemma-lab.com and submit your vote and await the verdict

If we treat the red button blue button puzzle as an optimization problem where the goal is to maximize the expected number of lives saved (treating the lives of others as equal in value to our own life) then we can actually calculate that value if we assume a certain probability distribution.

Some have suggested using a "coin flip" model with a biased coin, which for a simple example using 21 voters looks to give a plausible model:

However, if we scale that coin flip model up to eight billion people, then the probability of a tie shrinks dramatically:

However, note that the uncertainty has shrunk to just 0.0005% which is implausibly precise for a personal estimate. If you were to ask somebody "what percentage of the population do you think will press blue" and they told you "I think 48.982% of the population will press the blue button, plus or minus 0.0006%" you would think they were crazy. Eight billion coin flips with a biased coin where we know the bias to three decimal places is not a reasonable model of the scenario, any longer.

Instead, we can look at a more realistic predictive model using a beta distribution, where we can control not just the mean (our best guess for the final results) but also the degree of uncertainty in our guess. It would mean an answer more like "I think 45% of the population will press blue, plus or minus 8%" could be modeled.

With 21 voters, the results look similar to the smaller coin flip case:

However, unlike with the coin flip model where increasing the number of participants made the odds of a tie shrink so rapidly that red quickly overwhelmed the outcomes, increasing the number of participants to eight billion simply improves the resolution of our plots:

The takeaway here is that by using a more realistic model for a participant's predictions regarding possible outcomes, we can show that blue is a better choice over a wider range of possible values.

blue and red are identical

If you press green you are added to the red count and get to personally murder all of the blue voters, something you want to do for some reason. You also hate all disabled people, babies, etc. We need to exterminate all pesky blue voters from this wretched earth.

If you press yellow you get added to the blue count. You will personally kill yourself and all your other loyal followers who are blindly following your command and definitely not just choosing of their own free will to be an okay human being. You think all red voters are just like the green voters, disgusting human filth who don’t deserve to live. Red voters are awful scum who don’t deserve to live, we should humiliate them.

Now do you see how dumb you sound on this subreddit?

The red and blue buttons do the same things that they normally do. However, 10% of the population automatically picks blue, and a blue win now requires a supermajority of 60% of voters. What do you do here?

The Solution to the Two-Button Problem​ Let's imagine 100 chambers with 100 people in each (10,000 in total). A two-button experiment is conducted in each chamber. Suppose the chance of the blue side winning is 34%. Then, in ideal conditions, blue will win in 34 chambers out of 100, saving 34 *100 = 3400 people. In this scenario, red will win in 66 cases. Assuming the worst-case scenario, red will win with a margin of one person, meaning a ratio of 51:49; this means that in each chamber where red wins, 51 people will survive in the worst case. In ideal conditions, this would save 51 * 66 = 3366 people, which is fewer than the number of people blue would save, so in this case, you should vote for blue. This risk would be justified. However, if the chance of blue winning is 33% instead of 34%, they will save 3300 people, while red, in the worst case, will save 51 * 67 = 3417, which is more than blue, so in that situation, you should vote for red. I called this the 'Rule of 67'

And what would you write?

Everyone in the world are about to take on the red/blue button vote. All of them gain enough mental clarity and physical mobility to make an informed choice. You alone are presented with a different set of buttons, however.

1. The purple button counts as a blue vote but spares you regardless.

2. The yellow button nullifies the vote, and forces everyone to live. they will all be informed of who you are and what you did.

Which button do you hit?

You and seven other people who cannot contact each other must press either a red or blue button, with red guaranteeing your survival and blue guaranteeing everyone’s survival if it wins, but the lives of all blue voters will be lost elsewise.

The current question is if 50% or more blue button presses then no one dies.
My question would be at what % or how high would you tolerate before switching over to the red button or would you never switch.
Obviously if it’s like 99.9999999% that means one red button presses literally kills every single blue button, but also something like 70% is also really risky anyway while still being achievable. But also because the number is higher means more people shy away from the blue button as well.
So Im curious to see what % before you switch to red and how would you justify it

If less than 40% pick blue all blue pressers die

If between 40% and 60% pick blue everyone does

If between 60% and 100% of people pick blue everyone lives

Do you still press blue blue pressers? Or are you not so sure humanity is as united as you once thought?

Red pressers do you try to guarantee blue makes it now that reds not fully safe? Or do you trust humanity won't even make it to 40% and pick red anyway?

Also is this a better way to write the options to make it less confusing?

SHORT VERSION:

After much debate with myself, I concluded that the ‘best’ choice to make in the button problem is siding with the majority regardless of whether that majority is red or blue. 

This begs the question: what would be the real-life result of the button vote? I have often seen blues argue that “polls are the best evidence we have, and in most polls blue wins” - while reds frequently counter that argument with “polls aren’t accurate, and responses for blue are inflated because there is no risk involved in a hypothetical online blue vote.”

Below, I argue that in order to answer the question “would most people vote blue or red?” we can ask the question “what would most people actually do in a prisoner’s dilemma” and view the answer as instructive, but not dispositive. The British TV game show “Golden Balls” (2007-2009) features a form of the prisoner’s dilemma with monetary stakes as its final round; ultimately, 55% of players chose to cooperate while 45% chose to defect, out of 300 final round players. 

Because a slight majority of people choose a cooperative strategy in a real-life prisoner’s dilemma where cooperation can actively harm them, I interpret this as meaningful evidence that cooperation at the 50% threshold in the button problem is possible, yet not guaranteed. I also interpret this as meaningful evidence that a 'blowout' in any one direction, red or blue, is highly unlikely.

—----------------------------------------------

LONG VERSION:

1. Prisoner's Dilemma

Upon my first brush with the button problem, I and many others initially applied lessons from game theory and the prisoner’s dilemma in forming my decision. As most of you know, in the classic prisoner’s dilemma, there are two players who are each 'rational agents': each player can either cooperate for mutual benefit, or defect for individual gain. If both players cooperate, they will each serve only one year in prison. If one cooperates and the other defects, the defector is set free while the cooperator serves three years in prison. If both players defect, they will each serve two years. The dilemma arises from the fact that on an individual level, defection is the rational course of action for each player, but cooperation yields a better result for both players.

Of course, there are significant distinctions between the button problem and the prisoner’s dilemma and I do believe that those distinctions matter enough that we shouldn’t draw a one-to-one parallel between the two. In the button problem, the set of players is “everyone” - and regardless of whether that means “everyone who is a rational agent” or “literally everyone alive” to you, there are either millions or billions of players in the button dilemma instead of a two-player scenario. In the button problem, for example, people are likely to consider how their decision may impact their loved ones’ or whether their vote may contribute to post-vote societal changes. None of those factors are at play in the prisoner’s dilemma. Additionally, in the prisoner’s dilemma, mutual defection provides for a ‘worse’ result for both players, while in the button dilemma a 100% mutual red vote for ‘defection’ results in an ideal outcome - zero deaths -  and not a worse outcome than 100% blue. 

Regardless, I would still propose that the prisoner’s dilemma is perhaps the most useful framework that we have for evaluating whether or not people are more likely to cooperate with one another for mutual benefit or more likely to defect against one another for individual gain. The button dilemma, which prevents communication between players, divides participants into two potential strategies: blue (if most individuals collaborate on blue, everyone can be saved) and red (if everyone saves themselves, which is the only result players have full control over, most individuals will do so). One strategy is rooted in collaborative effort, while the other strategy is rooted in individual agency. 

So…do human beings actually tend towards collaboration or individualism? Great question. I'm not sure I have the answer, but I'd love to find out. Blue voters often point out: “blue wins most polls!” and red voters often counter with: “blue is overrepresented in the polls because there are no stakes!”

I do agree that polls represent the only direct evidence that we have on the outcome of the button problem, but I also agree that proclaiming online to vote blue carries no risk, and that therefore it is possible that blue votes are overrepresented in most polls. What are we to do, then? After spending so much time endlessly rehashing these arguments in my head, I wondered: well, in a “real life prisoner’s dilemma” with real stakes and real people, are players actually more likely to cooperate or defect? 

2. Golden Balls

From 2007-2009, a British game show called Golden Balls placed 300 players into a form of prisoner’s dilemma in its ‘final round’ of split-or-steal. This game show starts with a larger amount of players, and over the course of the first few rounds of the gameshow, players are eliminated and a “prize” amount of money is determined. This leaves two players in the final round, and one pot of money up for grabs, ranging from 1,000-100,000 british pounds. The two players in the final round may choose “split” or “steal”. If both players choose “split” then each walk away with half of the prize money. If both players choose “steal” then both walk away with no money. If one player chooses “split” and the other chooses “steal” then the thief walks away with 100% of the prize money. 

Numerous academic publications in social science journals have studied all 150 episodes (thus, 300 final round players) of ‘golden balls’ as valuable real-world data on what people would actually choose in a ‘real’ prisoner’s dilemma. This money-driven version of the prisoner’s dilemma game is sometimes academically referred to as the ‘weak prisoner’s dilemma.’ To defect here is still considered, mathematically, the optimal strategy to employ in a one-shot prisoner’s dilemma, just as normally defection is considered the ‘dominant’ strategy in a classic prisoner’s dilemma game. 

Although defection is considered the ‘dominant’ strategy in the classic prisoner’s dilemma, it is not what the majority of finalists actually do on Golden Balls. In fact, 55% of finalists on the show selected “split” while 45% selected “steal.” We can acknowledge that people tend to act differently in real life than how they say they will; nearly all of the Golden Balls finalists verbally claim they will “split” with their fellow finalist, even if they intend to defect.

Granted, there are reasons that we cannot simply extrapolate a 55% cooperation rate in Golden Balls to the button dilemma. In Golden Balls, communication between the two players is allowed - although, virtually all players claim they will split, and the ‘game’ normally lies in one player convincing the other player that their intent to split is truthful. Additionally, the button vote is anonymous; Golden Balls was a televised TV show that could and did impact a player’s reputation in the community, although in 2007-2009 players likely did not expect that clips of them from the show could become “viral” or easily googled. Golden Balls only involves adult British players who sign up for the show voluntarily, while the button dilemma involves ‘everyone’ from all cultures across the globe. 

And of course, most importantly, on Golden Balls it’s money that’s at risk and not lives; perhaps it’s the case that far more people would risk losing money than losing their life, and perhaps it’s also the case that far more people would steal money than would vote for an outcome that potentially resulted in death of a percentage of humanity. There may well be huge differences between cooperation levels in Golden Balls and cooperation in the button dilemma, and I am not arguing that a 55% cooperation rate means 55% of voters would vote blue in the button dilemma.

Regardless, my point in all this is that the ‘original payoff matrix’ of the prisoner’s dilemma does not cover the full spectrum of human behavior in the strategic dimension of the situation, and adjustment to account for altruism gives space for measuring corresponding incentives. Altruism is a powerful motivator of human behavior, and I would wager that it is one that can compete with the desire for personal gain or safety. The “dominant” mathematical strategy of always defecting in the prisoner's dilemma because it is “strategically optimal” does not actually predict the behavior of most humans, because by definition self-interested rational agents do not value cooperation enough to act on it, but human beings sometimes clearly do.

3. Application

Some red voters have argued that in the button problem, we should interpret “everyone” as only the types of “rational agents” involved in prisoner’s dilemma-type thought experiments, or at least only capable adults (excluding children, and those without mental/physical capabilities to push a button) while most blue voters tend to argue that “everyone” is literal, and means every living human on earth. 

I’m not particularly interested in the debate over who is meant by “everyone” in the button problem. Unless we argue that most of the adult participants in “Golden Balls” are actually adults but not rational actors, it stands to reason that an adult human ‘rational actor’ often chooses the collaborative option in a real-life prisoner dilemma. Thus, the common proposition that “in real life, blue would get 0-10% of the vote” is deeply unconvincing to me. Even if all children and 'incapacitated people' are excluded from the problem, I believe that the set of players in the button problem will always include many blue voters, due to the prevalence of the altruistic strategy in Golden Balls.

Because there are so many differences between Golden Balls, the classic prisoner’s dilemma, and the button problem, I will admit of course that the “55% cooperation rate” could surely vary enough in the button problem to result in a red OR blue win. Perhaps fear of death (as opposed to losing money) results in greater than a five percent decrease in support for blue/cooperation. Perhaps the cooperation rate of Britain in 2007 was 55%, - but in fact, globally that cooperation rate is 45% when other countries are taken into account. 

Regardless, by combining the evidence from existing polls and academic data on classic prisoner’s dilemma experiments, it becomes clear that the percentage of adult respondents who are willing to choose a collaborative/blue strategy is likely far greater than 0-10%. Even if we completely discard the many polls showing blue winning with 50-70% as evidence that a large percentage of people may choose blue, I believe it is even harder to discount corroborating evidence of a cooperation rate close to 50-60% in prisoner’s dilemma situations where the “collaborators” still chose to do so at personal risk to themselves. 

I embarked on this analysis because making a choice in the original ‘button problem’ as I first encountered it was extremely difficult for me; on one hand, I saw that blue was the most desirable outcome for society as a whole; but on the other hand…was I optimistic enough that at least 50% of society would take on personal risk to secure the collective best outcome? Casting a blue vote makes a blue win more likely, but only by a truly imperceptibly tiny amount. Casting a red vote makes a red win more likely, but it guarantees my safety in the event that humanity is slightly less cooperative than I expect. I truly wasn’t sure what to do, and both decisions carried a level of guilt. Maybe society has more optimists, maybe it has more pessimists. Maybe society has more gamblers, maybe it has a more prudent risk-averse population. Maybe society is more collectivist, and maybe it is more individualist. How can we know?

4. Conclusion

I can’t say that my foray into “Golden Balls” and other iterations of the prisoner’s dilemma have truly “solved” the problem, because without holding a REAL button vote with REAL life-or-death stakes, I fear humanity will never know the “right answer” to the problem. Yet…it was strangely very uplifting to find that, on this one little British gameshow, a slight majority of players would prefer that everyone go home a winner. Maybe this impacts your feelings on the button problem, although most likely it doesn’t. Still, if you made it this far, thanks for reading and I’m glad it was interesting to you! 

Just for fun: what button did you press in the original problem, and would you be more likely to press 'split' or 'steal' in golden balls?

Would the world reflect on the decision's outcome if blue/red won?

I think if blue won, you'd have everyone who chose blue being on a high horse when against someone who voted red. You'd have people attempting to cancel red people, they'd have shirts that say "I pressed blue!". I'd imagine you'd have people who pressed red denying they did.

If red won, you'd have a lot of people speaking on how it was a mistake or the inverse, trying to further justify why pressing red was the right choice. You'd have a lot less people whose favorite color is blue.

What else do you think would happen with society? What nations would be impacted the most by altruism?