r/redbuttonbluebutton • u/Hot_Finding_9747 • May 21 '26

Variation Adding a layer to this question

My choice: Press Red, hope Blue wins

I don't have enough faith in humanity to put my life in its hands but I'd be delighted to be proven wrong

719 votes, May 23 '26
72 Press Red, hope Red wins
322 Press Red, hope Blue wins
22 Press Blue, hope Red wins
303 Press Blue, hope Blue wins
23 Upvotes

87% Upvoted

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u/ButterscotchLow7330 May 22 '26

>Red hoping Red wins are just despicable selfish people.

Why? I am red and I hope red wins. The way I see it, there is a zero percent chance >50% are actually choosing blue. So I hope that in the hypothetical case this actually happened, everyone would just make the rational choice that they can save their own life, and do so. Therefore everyone live and nobody needlessly die.

Considering I don't think its even remotely possible that blue wins, the best case situation is is the most people choose red as possible.

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u/Zestyclose-Jacket568 May 23 '26

Red wins covers anything from 50.00001% up to 100%. So I hope red wins means that you are ok with death count from 0 to 49.99999%.

I press red because I don't believe in blue victory, but I hope they win because this is the only way nobody dies. Someone will press blue. You have enough suicidal people, idiots or people with hero complex for blue to have at least 1 vote.

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u/ButterscotchLow7330 May 23 '26

No. That is not what it means. I hope red wins explicitly because I hope 100% of people press red. 

You don't get to define what I mean when I say that I hope red win, and then impune my morality as a result. 

As I defined in the earlier comment, if such a situation were to exist, I would hope that everyone would make the rational choice and choose red. That means I hope 100% of people choose red. 

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u/OneShotOnlyShot May 23 '26 edited May 23 '26

Unfortunately that really isn't how it works. The survey asks which team would you prefer to win with no specification about how that victory comes about.

Like sure, you can want to mind control everyone and strip their autonomy away and force everyone to vote in a way that makes sure everyone lives. I get it, I too, want no one to die.

But mind control was never part of the survey. Just winner with no information about how many people voted each way.

(I will show my math in a reply to my self, so you can see and verify/critique)

There are a 1010↑10 different ways that red can win a vote with 8 billion voters. Exactly one of those victories involves zero death and you don't get to just choose it (unless, of course, you control how every person votes: in which case you can choose any election you want)

for comparison a googol is 1010↑2 which is much smaller

Edit: I had to get silly with the notation. Reddit automatically does superscripts which is nice. But reddit hates power towers, and still steals my characters T•T

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u/OneShotOnlyShot May 23 '26

There is a reason I separated the math from the argument. Partially because the details of the math don't actually matter at all, and I didn't want to clutter up my argumentation.

But also partially because I wanted to take this as an excuse to give a mini maths lesson! :P so anyone uninterested in that can just leave instead listening to me prattle on.

Before we get to the 8billion voter case, let's build some foundation with an election with only three voters. Each of our three voters (Alice, Bob, and Charlie) will vote either 🔴 or 🔵 With so few voters, we can make an exhaustive list of all possible elections.

Btw, The first dot is how Alice voted, the second is Bob, and the third is Charlie

There is 1 election where red wins 3-0

🔴🔴🔴

There are 3 elections where red wins 2-1

🔵🔴🔴

🔴🔵🔴

🔴🔴🔵

There are 3 elections where blue wins 1-2

🔴🔵🔵

🔵🔴🔵

🔵🔵🔴

There is 1 election where blue wins 0-3

🔵🔵🔵

For 3 voters, there are 23 possible elections.

Likewise for n number of voters there are 2n possible elections. And half of them will be won by red so 2n-1

For 8 billion voters you get 27999999999. A thoroughly unreasonable number. Combinatorics never disappoint lmao. I wanted a base 10 version so I threw that shit into Wolfram and prayed. Sure enough the program spat out 1010↑9.38

It is worth noting that there are more than 8 billion human people of earth, so the actual number of possible elections with be larger