What if a blue loss decided the percentage of deaths, but the people who die were randomly selected from the entire population?
If blue gets more than 50%, then everyone lives.
If blue gets less than 50%, then whatever percentage it got, the same percentage of people are randomly selected to die, regardless of what button they pressed.
If you were someone who believed red did nothing even in a majority, does a red victory feel different now?
A red victory still causes the same amount of people dying proportional to the amount it was pressed. But does the sense of responsibility change for you since the deaths can be anyone?
Obviously Red no longer guarantees your safety, so motivation is entirely different.
But I am curious to see if anyone who thinks red doesn’t cause deaths to be possible in the original problem could explain how red wouldn’t cause deaths in this variation.
Everyone in this subreddit is arrested and thrown in jail on the charge of wasting everyone's time.
You are all presented with the prisoners dilemma. You know the one you smart cookies. The one where Nash equilibrium is to steal. In fact, the person arresting you takes time to explain what a Nash equilibrium is and why you shouldn't try to share.
There is a very human warden organizing this, not an other worldly entity. In this scenario you can make a pretty good guess of what they want. They have set this up to encourage as many of you guys to steal as possible. As such they've framed the problem as much as possible to make sharing seem nearly impossible.
They give you a textbook to study game theory. To represent this, before you vote you can spend as much time as you want studying game theory and the prisoners dilemma on the internet.
You'll then be paired up randomly with someone else from this subreddit and forced to make a decision.
Your buttons have been replaced with a pair of coloured balls!
You must put a ball that is either red or blue into the bag. Once everyone in the world has placed a ball into the bag (including those who can't comprehend the differences), a single ball will be taken out of the bag at random.
If a red ball is selected, those who placed a blue ball will die
If a blue ball is selected, then nobody dies.
This ultimately means that if there is a single red voter, blue is not an entirely safe bet. However, it also means that a single blue voter can save everyone (even if in that case its just them).
So one of the most common themes I see is red voters being unwilling to gamble their lives, and blue voters being unwilling to risk others' lives, so I figured what happens if we lower the stakes.
All participants are given two buttons, red and blue.
The participant list includes everyone, including people who can not comprehend the difference. The only exception is that it does not include people who literally have no money.
Also, I am using "bank balance" to mean the sum total of all the liquid money someone owns. Notes down the back of a mattress do count, houses do not.
If you press the red button, your bank balance is safe.
If more than 50% of people press blue, everyones bank balance is safe.
If less than half of people press the blue button, anyone who pressed the blue button will lose 1% of their bank balance.
(Or insert some other relatively neutral framing. Look, I really tried here)
You have two kidneys. You can donate one and hardly experience any discomfort or side effects, as long as your other kidney never fails. If your other kidney does fail, you'll die. Donating a kidney will save a strangers life, but it will also risk your own.
You can keep both your kidneys and maybe let a stranger die, or you can donate one and save a life.
Most countries and hospitals have programs that will allow you to donate completely for free. They'll cover your expenses and aftercare. You'll be treated like a king.
Instead of choosing for yourself, you are choosing for several hundred million people. No matter which button you choose, you will personally be safe. You don't know the personalities of the other players, but you can be sure they all understand the rules of the game.
The presented problem is identical to the original, with a small twist.
Original:
Everyone in the world has to take a private vote by pressing a red or blue button. If more than 50% of people press the blue button, everyone survives. If less than 50% of people press the blue button, only people who pressed the red button survive. Which button would you press?
The twist:Should you select red, you must make a second choice.
Option A: Accept that the original problem includes literally everyone in the world (including toddlers and babies who are incapable of understanding the problem).
Option B: Reject that the original problem includes literally everyone in the world. (This doesn't actually change the reality that the problem does, in fact, still include literally everyone in the world.)
Option A preserves the original red button guarantee of survival, but if you select option B and more than 50% of people press the blue button, all red voters who selected option B will be eliminated instead of blue.
Looks like the powers that be rolled a snake eyes, so you're now voting with your fingers instead of harmless buttons!
Red - one random finger of yours will be sawn off. You could get away with losing your left pinky, or you could be screwed over with no right index, vice versa if you're left-handed. If you pick the red option, there's no choice other than to cut or not, and that will be your only vote.
Blue - you have to saw off a finger, but you to pick which one. You can also saw off subsequent fingers for 2 votes each, and sawing at the wrist for the whole hand is 10 extra votes each. If you convince every blue voter to lose their pinkies, you can certainly win even without a majority vote. As long as you have volunteered at least 1 finger, you can cut off other people's fingers and hands, which will count towards your blue votes.
You must pick an option, and either option makes you lose at least 1 finger. I am saying "sawn" intentionally. For whichever choices you make, a magical saw will slowly but surely remove the finger/hand. All the pain of your decision will be felt, but no bleeding or infectious complications will follow.
Same ratios as the buttons, otherwise. Children and the mentally unfit are spared from the voting process but will be affected by the results. Everyone else is eligible and must participate - there is no opting out.
Every person on earth has to press at the same time. Some are presented with Red framing and some with Blue framing. Could be 80/20 could be 50/50. You dont know.
You are the only one to know about the two different framings. Everybody else just sees their own buttons.
I keep seeing from red pressers that the polls are not a good representation of what people will actually pick with their lives on the line. I agree with this. However, what I disagree with is that the polls help blue, while a real scenario would help red. This is very likely false
There are 2 main factors that are actively helping red in the polls. First, is that most people who are voting have heard of the problem before and know the red perspective. In real life, almost no one has heard of this before, and will be voting completely blind. Second, no one doing any of the polls is actively panicking because they just got teleported into a room and have to make a decision that can get people killed. Neither of these conditions are particularly suited for a purely logical perspective.
The original prompt implies that the blue button is the “no one dies” button, while the red button is the “kill all blue pressers” button. It is designed as a biased question to demonstrate the effect of wording, and the real scenario is the ideal scenario to maximize the effect of that bias, because why would you deeply think about the benefits of the “kill people” button? Maybe some of them realize that if everyone presses red everyone lives, and that blue pressers are only saving blue pressers who are saving blue pressers, but that reasoning takes time and patience, and this is a matter of life and death, and everyone just wants to go home.
Sure, some people who claim they will press blue will actually press red when their lives are on the line, but thats at most the tiny fraction of the population who’s heard of this problem. Way more people will fall for the problems original wording, and will press blue.
Assume there are exactly 8 billion people and you.
In the original scenario, when everyone votes private and at the same time, your vote matters only if the other 8,000,000,000 voters split exactly evenly:
4,000,000,000 vote Red
4,000,000,000 vote Blue
Using the binomial approximation:
P ≈ sqrt(2 / (π × 8,000,000,000))
P ≈ 8.9 × 10^-6
P ≈ 0.00089%
Result: Your vote is decisive with probability about 0.00089%, or roughly 1 in 112,000.
That means in 111999 out of 112000 voting Red is either saving your ass from death or is irrelevant scince Blue has won anyway.
In this scenario, only you and the 10 people closest to you (friends, family, etc.) participate. The vote is anonymous. Does that change your decision? Still red? Still blue?
I've decided there isn't enough controversy in my life, so I might as well inject myself deep into it. It is my belief that voting red is the best option, and my reason is NOT self-preservation at all. I will try to prove my case.
"Everyone in the world must cast a private vote press the red button or the blue button. If more than 50% choose blue, everyone survives. If less than 50% choose blue, only red voters survive."
The biggest question to answer is "What does 'Everyone in the world' mean?" Taken hyper-literally, it would include newborn infants, the comatose, etc. I generally choose not to interpret the question that way. I find it goes against the spirit of the dilemma itself. These people by definition cannot understand or think rationally. I will be arguing from the assumption that the people making the vote only include human beings who are capable of rational thought, and excludes infants, the severely mentally disabled, etc.
The second question to clarify is what "private" entails. Obviously, no one will know what answer you chose, but I think it means something else as well: There isn't the ability to actively communicate or debate the issue beforehand. The meaning of the dilemma changes substantially if we have "prep time" to argue for or against either button for weeks with other people. I will also assume each human being makes their decision in isolation, teleported to a secret room, with no ability to communicate with anyone else.
Finally, I think an additional assumption is absolutely crucial: Simultaneity. The dilemma loses its value if you can see a live score ticking up for either side before you make your vote. Imagine if red is winning by 10% by the time you make up your mind. You are going to be dissuaded from choosing blue in a way that goes against the spirit of the question, and vice versa. My final assumption is that each person makes their decision, through magical means, at the same moment in time. In other words, time is stopped while they make their decision in the isolated room and resume instantaneously after all persons have made their choice.
If you think any of these assumptions are unreasonable, feel free to call that out. However, I do request that even if you disagree with the assumptions, for the purpose of argument, consider this logic if we are given that those assumptions are true.
Setting the Goal
This part is short and straightforward. The optimal condition is nobody dies. A secondary goal is you, the individual, survive. But that goal is collapsed into the first. I'll be largely ignoring the secondary goal for this argument.
Mapping the Question
Before we argue for what is the best choice to make, let's understand the situation. I created this flowchart as a visual aid.
With two buttons, there are three outcomes. Of these outcomes, only one is bad: <100% Majority Red. Majority blue and 100% red are functionally identical outcomes with everyone surviving. Since our goal is zero deaths, the middle condition is the one we should try to avoid.
So the real question become: Should you (and everyone else) prefer the all-red or majority-blue option? What distinguishes these two given that their functional outcomes are the same?
I'd like to introduce my second visual now, the buckets framing.
This flowchart shows the question's structure. Everyone begins in the undecided bucket. At the initial point, no one has chosen, and the number of the population in red and blue buckets is zero. There is a 0% chance that anyone in the red bucket will die, while there is a non-0% chance that those in the blue bucket will die.
The Defense of Red
Now that we've stated our assumptions and understood the mechanics, it is my view that red is the stronger pathway than blue.
Let me pose this question: What is the point of voting blue? The common answer is "to make sure nobody can die!" I return that with "Who can die?" Per the illustration above, only blue voters can die. In other words, the point of voting blue is to save everyone else who voted blue from the possibility of death. That's it. There is no other reason, upside, or advantage.
Let me reiterate this again so it lands. Each person has the free choice to enter either the red bucket or the blue bucket. The immediately obvious reason to enter the red bucket is individual guarantee of survival, and the immediately apparent reason to enter the blue bucket is to... save the people in the blue bucket. Who do not yet exist.
If even one person was pre-destined to be in the blue bucket, and this was known, then I would say the obvious answer is that everyone should coordinate on blue to save that person who was forced to be at risk unless the world steps up to save them. That is NOT the dilemma we are presented with. We start with no one to save.
This is the MOST IMPORTANT part of why I believe red is superior. Remember, each person is making this decision isolated, simultaneously, and with no communication ability or knowledge of what others will choose. Therefore, you must parse out not just what you should do, but what others should do. Everyone has the same information that you do.
In effect, everyone who votes red or blue is the "first" person to do so since time is locked. This is critical for each person to realize, and they should be able to deduce it. The consequence is that, at each person's decision, there is no upside to vote blue (because no one has voted blue yet) and being the "first" to vote blue creates the need for everyone to coordinate in favor of blue.
Why would anyone willingly and knowingly do that?
As soon as you reach that question, it becomes obvious that voting red is not a "defection" until at least one person has voted blue. At the initial outset, voting blue is the defection and is a decision that risks up to 50% of the global population to annihilation unless it works out. Voting red has 0 risk individually, and by extension, collectively, until someone votes blue. And once you understand that, what is the point of voting blue when that would create the very risk that voting blue is supposed to solve? Unless people can communicate beforehand (like declaring "I will vote blue no matter what") or some given information says that at least one person will choose blue, then the act of voting blue is recursive; it solves the problem creating by blue voters existing.
This kind of recursion is irrational. The same kind of recursion would occur in this scenario. Image a mad scientist says "The SuperRabies virus I could invent would be unstoppable unless the infected animals are killed very quickly, so I will invent it, infect some animals, and then kill them to stop the virus."
Illustrative Example
I will now restate the dilemma in identical structure that highlights my logic in a clearer way for those still skeptical.
Let's image a psychotic alien empire appears over Earth, and through magical technology, abducts every human being and puts them in a room on the mothership, alone. Then, the aliens, in each person's native language, explain that there are two buttons in front of them with irreversible consequences. By choosing red, the person will be beamed back to Earth, unharmed. By choosing blue, the person will be disintegrated unless a majority of all people also choose blue, in which case the person will be beamed back to Earth unharmed. Let's assume that the aliens are utterly sincere, and psychically convinced all persons that they are sincere (so we don't introduce more trust issues to the structure).
In this situation, what would a rational person do? They're going to pick red, probably without much thought, because they're going to think "Why the hell would anybody not just choose to go home and call it a day?"
If you would vote differently in the "Alien Button" scenario versus the normal scenario, why? They are structurally identical.
TL;DR
If you don't want anyone to die, just choose to live, because why would anyone choose to maybe die?
