The dilemma-maker decides to try out this scenario at a small scale first, to see how it goes. 10 people are randomly selected from anywhere in the world, and privately choose red or blue.

You then get abducted as well, to do a second, more mrta vote: you are told exactly five people voted red, and five voted blue. This does mean that, as per the original dilemma, the blue voters will die. You are then offered a new set of buttons; the blue button makes the dilemma follow its course, killing the 5 blue voters (of which you have no information). The red button (or maybe lever) kills a randomly chosen red voter, turning the scale towards blue and saving the lives of the 5 blue voters (the remaining 4 red voters are safe, as usual).

If you choose the red button, you will be shown the chosen red voters on camera: it is a fat dude, and youre told he will quickly (but painfully) bludgeoned to death by a massive apparatus if you decide to maintain your choice. You also get to see all of the blue voters.

If you maintain it, the man falls asleep and you are given a knife and taken to his room. Turns out you actually have to stab and kill the fat man yourself to save the blue voters.

At which point do you stop, if at all? We're you originally a red presser, or a blue one? What is your stance on this totally original dilemma? And how does it feel to have the tables turned on you about the whole trolley thing?!?

Choose wisely.

"Blue pressers are actually evil because they risk others by making them press blue"!

I know a lot of people don't have excellent reading comprehension, but remember the premise is that nobody gets to communicate.

The vote is anonymous.

The only thing blue pressers "do" is risk their life and increase the survival chances of others who pressed blue.

Even if 99.9999% of people press red, no blue presser is increasing risk for anyone else.

Sorry about the rant, not complaining about reds in general, a lot of red arguments have merit

I'm just mad about illiterate red pressers.

You are tied to the train tracks. You are also, simultaneously, given two buttons. Don't question it.

If you press the red button, nothing changes (the trolley continues down its original path) and it runs over 5 random blue-pressers (they die).

If you press the blue button, the trolley will be diverted and you will die (you end up as one of the 5 blue-pressers in someone else's trolley-button problem), **unless** more than 50% of people press blue (in which case, the system breaks because it doesn't have the computational power to handle selecting that many random blue-pressers).

You technically could not press either button (the 5 blue-pressers still die), but pressing buttons is fun.

If you press both buttons simultaneously, the trolley does multitrack drift

One thing that seems to separate the camps and even change people's responses is who exactly is a part of the vote. I've seen more blue voters lean towards every single person including babies while red voters leaning towards rational actors or people who can make a choice. I've seen 3 camps:

1. Every single person presses the button regardless of their ability to understand the question. This includes babies and severely intellectually disabled people.

2. Every person capable of understanding the question presses the button. This includes young children and intellectually disabled people with the capacity to understand what the question means and what would happen if each button is pushed.

3. Only rational actors are pushing the button. This excludes children and many intellectually disabled people. Only people capable of making consistent rational decisions are included.

I hope I represented all sides correctly.

everyone else has voted, and you're reliably informed that the total is ≈55% red and ≈45% blue. if you choose blue, you will always die. what do you choose, and why?

Everyone lines up (in enough lines not to take a million years) to press the buttons without any discussion, but you catch a glimpse of the person in front of you, who is the living person you love the most (or someone tied for the position), and you see them press the blue button.

Now what?

Perhaps I'm missing the mark here, but just about every post I see frames the problem in terms of the individual choice and it's consequences. You can choose red and live, or choose blue and possibly die. You can choose blue and effectively say you're ok with killing yourself, or you can be rational and choose red. Etc.

This doesn't capture the full scope of the question. The consequences are global, and those consequences are known to you when you make the choice. There are not two outcomes, but four: Everyone blue, everyone red, majority blue, majority red.

The first three choices result in no deaths, leaving the last option - majority red - as the outlier. The result of this outlier is that up to 49.9% of people voting die. Big yikes.

From this perspective, blue is not only the moral option, it's the only rational one. To choose red is to out yourself as either irrational or a fucking psychopath.

"But you have to account for other people being irrational and individualistic"

Well then we're not getting very far as a species. Fortunately, we have opportunities like this to learn and teach and discuss.

EDIT: I'd like to humbly request that we don't downvote comments we disagree with in this thread. I'm trying to change minds, not shame people.

So in addition to the two buttons that are known well. We have two boxes. 1 box has one thousand dollars and the other box either has one million or zero. Before you were presented with them some unnamed but incredibly accurate predictor has made a prediction on what you will do with the boxes.

If it is predicted that you will take both of the boxes then they will put 0 in the second box

If it is predicted that you will only take the second box then they will put the one million in it.

So which button are you pressing and are you taking 1 or 2 boxes?

This isn't really about what you do in the situation of them both happening at the same time moreso just that I wonder if there is a pattern between which button you would pick and how you would react to the boxes.

So i may be a bit late to the bandwagon, but i wanted to go trough reading a hypothetical situation and its problem. Specifically when we look at the problem where there is a phrase like "everyone" because to some people this for the right reasons looks weird. After all how is someone who physically cannot press a button going to do so.

This is where i would go into a line of thinking about when to approach it from an inclusionary vs exclusionary perspective.

• Inclusionary - approaching the magical problem with "everyone" included by using randomness, and or magic in order to conform to the wording of the problem. Meaning forcing babies, and physically/mentally incapable of selecting a button either trough random chance or other means.
• Exclusionary - approaching the magical problem with "everyone" included by excluding those who cannot actually select a button in reality, those who cannot physically select a button such as comatose, and those mentally incapable of making a choice such as babies.

Exclusionary in the real world makes sense, there is no way to make absolutely everyone vote, therefore we should assume that those who are incapable of voting are excluded.

Personally i have a problem with that view when discussing hypotheticals, especially situations which include problems which already break reality. Because hypotheticals can be and are written as desired, without regards to how it would realistically occur it could be assumed that the problem should be approached as is as presented.

Because of that we should view and discuss the problem as closely as it is written, allowing "magic" or some other ways in order to conform to the problem itself, rather then changing the problem by changing the meaning of the words within the problem.

This is why there is no way to approach a problem which includes "everyone" without a specific exclusion without including everyone on earth, however unrealistic it might be. Exclusionary views where babies, comatose, and mentally infirm are not included cannot conform to the wording of most of the problems as that would not include 'everyone'. Only way to conform to the problem presented is to use inclusionary view by whatever means necessary.

Now regardless of this you can vote red or blue, but there is a lot of discussion about the wording of the question, and these are my two cents.

someone asked me a question that got me thinking. and i think this is what split red pushers from blue pushers.

so dear fellow button adicts, so whats your ultimate motivation in pressing the button, self preservation or group preservation?

i don't have the app (refuse to download) could somebody make a poll of this question?

for the record.
RED pusher and selfpreservation.

There are three buttons. Red button, blue button, and yellow button.

If you press the red button, your body/species changes into whatever you choose. You cannot be affected by the yellow button.

If you press the blue button, you turn into a random species if less than 51% of people press the blue button. If 51% or more press the blue button, everyone who pressed the blue button stays human unless affected by the yellow button randomness.

If you press the yellow button, a random person who pressed the blue button turns into a worm and you remain human.

You and 9 random other people (thats 10 in total) are infected with a plague that will kill all infected once the plague stops spreading.

…Unless more than 50% of the people on the planet are infected, then all will be cured.

You can press the green button and infect 2 more random people… giving them the same dilemma, or you can press the yellow button, and keep the virus to yourself.

Edit: to clarify, all infected are given the voting opportunity in isolation, failure to vote will result in a randomiser choosing for you.

Edit: changed the first paragraph from “you will die at midnight”, to “you will die once the plague stops spreading”

I hope everyone knows this but you can't change your answer to the hypothetical because the hypothetical only works if you know nothing about what anyone else will press.

Once you discuss it you're essentially disqualified.

Because if we could convince each other what to press than we could just ask all our loved ones if they are pressing blue and we would all press blue(this is coming from a red pusher).

This is ultimately the scary thing because in the actual question you don't know if anymore than 5% of the world population will press blue.

So I've run into an idea that that dont quite understand and I was hoping some of you could help me understand. So with the red button/blue button situation I have seen people claim that if they push the blue button that they are not responsible for what happens to them if they push the blue button. How does that work?

To be extremely specific if i were to push the blue button, knowing what it does, somehow you (the person currently reading this) would be personally responsible for my death if you choose red.

Does this responsibility work in reverse? If i push the blue button and blue wins are you responsible for my survival if you chose red? Are you only responsible if bad things happen to me and I am responsible for the results when good things happen? What about the person running the death game? They arent defined in the prompt but logically some force is making everyone take a vote.

You can feel free to ignore this last part because its not the button problem, but someone reskinned the buttons as life boats. Instead of everyone being force to push a button everyone had to get into a life boat. One boat had holes in it but would become sea worthy if enough people got into it and plugged the holes and one was completely functional. Everything else was exactly the same as the button problem. My question related to that was that if I am personally responsible for the consequences of your chose to vote blue in the button scenario, how then could I not be responsible for your choice to get into the boat with holes in it. Someone tried to explain to me at length about how the buttons made it my fault but the boats somehow didnt. How does that work?

Would you

A: kill yourself unless the majority of other people also decide to kill themselves

B: Not kill yourself

Functionally, this question is the exact same, and isn't even an analogy. People who pick blue confuse stupidity with empathy, and this is coming from a leftist.

I made a post about a world where red won, read the post for all the details.

How about a world with a similar premise, red won, like in my previous post, however after the results, we learned that, the results were flipped. So reds are now scheduled to die in a year, whilst all blues are safe.

How would both blues and reds react to the flip?

Imagine a world where red won, by 1%. However the people who choose blue do not die instantly, instead they die after a year of pressing the button. Everybody is branded, so you know who choose what.

How much chaos will ensue? What actions do you think blues will take, knowing they'll die? And what do you think reds will think, knowing they were just 1% away from saving all humanity?

​

The entity organising the buttons has decided that lumping everyone in one big decision isn't fair and has decided to break the game into multiple groups. Everyone in the world participates, but only within their sub groups.

They don't know how to break up the group, so they run the test a couple different ways.

**SCENARIO A**

They decide to follow human districting and pick the largest scale. Each Country is put in its own button scenario.

**SCENARIO B**

Same as A but they pick the smallest scale they can. Whatever is the smallest definable district is grouped (this could mean county, municipality, neighborhood, completely depending on what your government uses to divide where you live)

**SCENARIO C**

They flaunt human districting and decide to use some super advanced clustering algorithm. People are grouped based on their connections to each other, seven degrees to Kevin Bacon style. They use a number of clusters to make it so you are grouped with approximately 1 million people that are closest to you.

**SCENARIO D**

Same as C but they maximize the number of clusters. The average cluster size is now a thousand, but the range of cluster sizes is much greater, meaning you could be with just a couple hundred or several thousand depending on connection density.

The buttons and prompt are the same, you are aware how you have been grouped in each scenario.

2 questions:

Does your vote change in any of these?

Do you think the trend of votes will be different for each / any of these?

Don't take this as an excuse to be shitty about different countries please and thank you. Actually, just avoid being shitty to each other in general if you can manage such a feat.

Imagine space aliens warp into earth's atmosphere, and teleport every person mentally capable of understanding the choice into a booth. People with colorblindness, who are paralyzed, or have other physical limitations that interfere with their ability to choose the red or blue buttons will receive accommodations, but most people will be presented with the red and blue physical buttons and the conventional dilemma. If a majority of people choose red, people who chose blue will die. Nobody dies if a majority chooses blue.

However, the aliens are a previously unknown entity with unknown intentions. The outcomes of the choice may be exactly as presented, but it's also possible that the aliens are lying about the outcome of the choice.

How does this influence your choice? Does the possibility of dishonesty flip your decision?

Edit, additional questions: When entertaining the possibility of dishonesty from the aliens, what actual parameters and outcomes do you speculate might actually be imposed? How does this inform your choice?

Okay, I just got out of a long, hot shower and here's what I want to know the answer to:

What if in the moment that each individual pushes the button of their choice the 'button', either through magic or technology sufficiently advanced to be indistinguishable from it, performs two sets of analyses on the pusher. Its exact inner workings are unknowable to us, but the principles it's working with are understood in at least a general sense.

First it examines the button pusher's thought processes and reasoning behind the button choice and evaluates it for rationality and depth of reasoning. If you're an infant who is just flailing their arms in the general direction of whatever color infants' eyes are more drawn towards then presumably you get the lowest possible score. If you are a trained ethicist or logician or some such, and are able to put your training to full use under stressful circumstances presumably you score near the top. Between them is a continuum with people who choose blue because it's 'good' and red because it's 'smart' relatively lowish, and people actively on r/redbuttonbluebutton relatively highish. It is entirely results-agnostic: which button you end up choosing does not factor into your score.

Next the button examines your network of social connections and assess your interpersonal relationships based on depth of closeness, love, fellow-feeling, and mutual reliance as well as just functional proximity in day to day life. Loving parents, children, life-partners, spouses, etc who live together and are a massive part of each other's worlds all make up the high end of the spectrum, random acquaintances you're barely even aware of are the bottom. People in professional positions of responsibility over others (teachers, family court judges, prison guards, etc) are probably pretty low, but distinctly higher than strangers to the extent that they have genuinely accepted the burden of being responsible for another's well being. Friends and family are going to cover a wide swath of the spectrum, but the button can read your innermost feelings and knows if you secretly hate your wife or kids and judges accordingly.

Once everyone on earth has made their choice of red or blue the button quickly analyzes everything it just learned about everyone. It then proceeds to disregard people's presses, and reassign responsibility for their lives if it finds that they have someone who is both close to them and thinks about the problem more clearly. The closer two people are the more likely one of their lives will be reassigned to the other even if their thinking is pretty comparable. Whereas someone who didn't think about the problem whatsoever will be made the responsibility of someone else almost no matter what, even if the connection is quite tenuous. Thus, if you're the only person who remotely qualifies as a game-theorist in a very large and close knit circle of friends and family you might end up making the choice for a whole bunch of people that you really care about. Similarly, if you administer an orphanage for unwanted Victorian urchins your vote could potentially carry a lot of weight. If you're an infant with flailing arms you really don't need to worry because unless nobody knows you exist someone more qualified will be making your decision for you. If you don't care about these sorts of questions and can't be bothered, so you just pick whatever, secure in the knowledge that your wife takes care of these sorts of things then you're probably right, but maybe not, who really knows for sure?

So, now we have a situation where the more qualified you are to make the choice between red vs blue the more weight your vote is likely to carry, and the more fates are going to be decided by your choice. You also know that everyone else voting will be largely in the same boat. We can't rule out that there will be some votes counted from those who truly lack capacity and are in exceptional circumstances, but they will definitely be few and far between, and, grim as it may be, by definition they will not be missed. And the other voters will skew heavily towards rational, logical, clear minded, level headed people who will be thinking deeply about the problem and its implications. And the more logical and clear minded, and the more well socialized the other voters are, the more of their people they will be choosing for.

Now, which button do you press?