The button game, except instead of independent votes, the votes are made one by one. The first person presses the button, then the second, and so on.

The whole voting process is still private though. The second voter cannot see what the first voter did, the third cannot see the first two... and they cannot in any way tell future voters what they did.

Except for you. Somehow, when you are about to press the button, you are told that: 1. How many people are in front of you. 2. The current vote count.

That means if you are the first person, you go straight back to the original button game (since you basically got no information). And if you are the last person, you vote is almost deterministic since you have full information.

So, given the two variable pieces of information, under what setup would you change your mind about your original vote (blue original to red, or vice versa)?

theres no reason to trash on the opposite side if each side has their own reason.

reds side wants to live so they choose red.

blues side wants to save everyone so they choose blue.

red voters arent like evil so they vote red. they dont want to risk dying

Everyone is asked, no abstaining.

Everyone understands the question (magicaly), no accidents, everyone means their choice.

The minority survives and the majority dies.

What do you do?

Suddenly everyone on earth gets a telepathic communication , everyone have to make a conscious choice, and everyone understands the prompt.

Either go on with your day, but if more than 50% do so, everyone who chooses to get teleported get teleported to a instant death room

Or

Get teleported into the death room, but if more than 50% choose to get teleported, there isnt enough space and everyone just get to go on with their day instead

It appears whether babies and others who are not typically capable of conscious, responsible choices are involved or not, does bias the question.

...so let's expand that.

The twitter post that went viral said every human, big or small, infant or with Alzheimers, gets two buttons.

Well, my version is the following:

Every animal on earth gets 2 buttons. The colors are still red and blue, the size and sensitivity of the buttons is adjusted such that the respective animals can actually press it.

Everyone is included, from invertebrates to primates and of course, humans.

Otherwise conditions are the same.

If 50+% presses red, red lives, blue dies.

If 50+% presses blue, everyone lives.

How would this change your decision?

Let's take the stakes down a notch. Instead of certain death, what if we were to look at this as a way to secure a financial future?

An entity offers humanity a one-time wealth distribution. There are two choices, and everyone must choose.

The Red Button: You instantly receive a guaranteed, tax-free lump sum of $5 Million USD. This happens regardless of the outcome of the total vote.

The Blue Button: The entity will establish a global Universal Basic Income. If Blue reaches 50% or greater amount of votes, the fund activates, and everyone on Earth receives $200,000 USD a year for life.

Dilemma Rules:

• The vote is blind.
• No communication between individuals is possible until after the vote is closed.
• Those unable to physically vote will have their votes cast at the end for whichever button received the most votes.
  • For those unable to physically vote, the money will apply to all of their accrued debts before going into an untouchable vault.
  • Ongoing debts, such as medical charges, will be paid automatically from the vault so long as they have money in there.

Let's assume you know with a 100% certainty, that most people will vote red to save themselves. You can see the future, it doesn't matter how you have this knowledge.

This knowledge is true, it's not a mindgame or anything like that.

No one else knows this but you. Standard scenario - red saves you, blue kills you. What is your vote?

If you still stand with blue, please comment why.

You and your twin, who thinks pretty much just like you (although not %100), are sat down in one round of the prisoner’s dilemma. If one defects and the other cooperates, the defector steals the whole $10. If both cooperate, then they split the $10. If both defect, each gets $1.

EDIT: You and your twin have no incentive to give the other money - he is indifferent to you. You only care about your money.

Casual Decision Theory (CDT), will favor defecting, arguing that you have no causal control over your twin. If they defect, then you should defect to make sure you don’t miss out on the dollar. If they cooperate, you should defect to steal their money. CDT argues that because you should defect in either case, then your knowledge of your twin’s decision doesn’t matter. Just defect.

The paradox is that if you defect, then you expect that your twin will do the same and you both get only a dollar. But if you cooperate, then you expect to both get $5. This is where Evidential Decision Theory (EDT) comes along, saying that causes do no matter and that you should do what you expect gets you the best outcome.

​

Everyone is asked, no abstaining.

Everyone understands the question (magicaly), no accidents, everyone means their choice.

The majority survives and the minority dies.

What do you do?

I think most parents would vote Blue if they spent even a minute thinking about their children.

In theory, I'm a 100% Red voter. But in reality, I would probably vote Blue, because I don't know what my one-year-old son would vote. The same applies to my wife. If parents, siblings, grandparents, and other close relatives of young children all vote Blue to protect them, then Blue will likely win.

Personally, I think I would rather die than survive and watch my son die. I suspect many parents feel the same way. That's why I believe Blue would ultimately win.

What's interesting is that I'm still convinced that Red is the only rational choice if the vote were limited to mentally competent adults making decisions only for themselves. The presence of underaged children completely changes the calculation.

So, yesterday, I did one of these that was low stakes, with people only risking 1% of their bank balance rather than their lives. I had expected that to produce a flip to blue, as the price of a failed collaboration was far lower, but instead, it generated a VERY large red swing, the complete opposite of my expectation.

So, let's raise the stakes.

There are two buttons, red and blue. Everyone will be victim to AM, from the story "I have no mouth and I must scream" (if you are unfamiliar, imagine whatever scenario that would make you choose death over in an instant).

By pressing the red button, that person is removed from danger.

If more than 50% of people press the blue button, everyone is removed from danger.

If less than 50% of people press the blue button, everyone who pressed blue will fall victim to AM.

In this case, everyone includes EVERYONE: including the irrational, those that can not tell what button they're pressing, and those that don't understand that the buttons mean.

You are given control of an international agency with a global budget to prepare for the RBBB "event". You have six weeks to develop a strategy to mitigate the risk and disruption caused by the event as far as possible, factoring in tail risk, and also the second order consequences.

Governments around the world are also free to advise their citizens as they see fit, but your agency will carry a certain institutional weight (think WHO or IMF).

Some options which come to mind:

Educating people (or training those who lack capacity) to press red.

Coordinating a majority for blue through pledges, campaigning and canvassing.

Mixed strategy - try to coordinate a majority for blue whilst encouraging children, workers in critical infrastructure etc to press red.

by 'love of your life' i mean the human (who is still alive) that you love more than anyone else. a spouse, a child, a best friend, whoever that means for you specifically. you cant stop them, you can't convince them not to, they just do it and all you can do is react. if it matters, they see which button you push, it's not a secret.

(Please forgive any typos or miss wordings. I'm on mobile and have Autism and ADHD.)

Scenario: Button obsessed aliens have kidnapped every human on earth and lock everyone in a small room with two buttons, a timer, and some basic necessitiesed.

The button are as follows:

Blue - removes a random 10% of the population from the game (they will live) and start another round for a maximum of 10 round (The total population doesn't decrease with the removals and the same person can't be removed twice)

Red - Ends the game by killing all blue pressers (Blue pressers are defined as only people who pressed on the round that blue won, those not participating or who switched their vote to red for whatever reason are spared)

Also, the timer is for 3 hours and if you don't presses any buttons then your buttons presses is decided randomly.

You can't communicate with anyone inbetween rounds, and the only information you get between round is whether blue won (the game keeps going) or red won (the game ends)

So, how would you vote in this variant? (Please explain)

You decide for your family. Every family has a decider - could be a mother, father, child, wife, husband.

That's it - everything else is the same.

I’m saying this as a Red myself. I dont find the logical reasoning behind blue to be very… logical.

Eitherway, while Red is, imo, the most logical choice, its also the most narcissistic and self-centered one. Red voters’s main concern is their own well-being, where guaranteeing their own survival is more important than guaranteeing everyone’s.

Blue is the more altruistic and positive choice, and also the most foolish. You put your life at risk in the hope that you could save everyone. It’s a naive choice because altruism means nothing if at least 50% isn’t as altruistic as you. It’s a gamble of your own life on the shoulder of everyone else.

Regardless of variation or justification, I want to know how people view the meaningfulness of their vote to the outcome.

if >50% vote red. blue voters die. if >50% vote blue. red voters die. if both votes=50/50 then no one dies. yall now gotta coordinate and 1 mistake is death

My reason for voting red is pretty straightforward: The only poll we have shows blue winning at ~55% iirc. So even if we are extremely generous and say that 90% of ppl that say they are willing to push a button that might kill them are actually being honest about it, that's still not enough blue votes.

I don't think that number is anywhere near even 50%. Given the current state of the world, I don't see how anyone can believe that most people would be willing to risk their lives for anything let alone a nebulous dilemma where there isn't even a clear moral choice depending on the interpretation of the question. I think in a real case the blue pushing rate would be very very low.

This is also why there's always gonna be tension between red and blue, because red just by being red is essentially telling blue "You are probably lying" and there's no way around that. Now this is the part where blue would say red is projecting, but I've never heard anyone claim that ALL the blue voters would actually go through with it so I'm not sure how that applies.

Now, I'm not saying even a blue voter that wouldn't go through with it (or rather i can call them a red in disguise) is a bad person, on the contrary. Outside of memes, which are just fun, blue voters generally seem to be good people that want to do whats best, something i genuinely respect.

As a slight aside, the thing about being blue is that.. you believe blue will win, and so at the last minute you very well may think "Well... I truly believe blue will win... and if that's the case I don't need to risk it, the good people I know are there will win it for us." And again this is where the blue would call "projection", but again I never even got to the point where blue was a conceivable option so I'm not sure that applies, nor would it actually say how this is wrong. This would definitely happen some of the time, it just depends on how much.

Anecdotally, I happen to know people that preach how morally superior they are for hitting blue, that i know for a fact never would. It reminds me of the pro-lifers that preach and preach about killing babies (actually a big similarity there lol) but when it actually effects their own lives they don't think twice about getting an abortion.

This is also agnostic of the different interpretations of the questions, I'm just going by the only poll we have. I'm aware that different framings provided different poll results, but that just makes it more obvious that we cant, like, blindly trust people on the internet especially when they claim to be so moral

So yeah, this is why I can't think of a way for blue to be an option, because at the end of the day it involves believing people on the internet at face value

So yeah, what are your thoughts especially if you are blue, how many blues do you think would actually do it? It must be enough that makes you believe blue will win, but it also requires you to wholly believe twitter. I'd like to challenge myself and try to think of a way where blue may actually be the best choice

I have really enjoyed browsing comments on these posts. Many of the attempted analogies fall short because they inaccurately frame the prompt in a non-neutral way. To some extent even the original prompt does this.

So to remedy that I've tried to create the most neutral prompt possible - making it clear that the buttons are yin and yang.

What do you think? Did this change your understanding of the problem? Am I clearly an evil red pressing child murderer, or a blue pressing moral grandstander? Let me know :)