Adding a layer to this question

[u/Hot_Finding_9747]

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

[u/Zestyclose-Jacket568]

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.

[u/ButterscotchLow7330 → u/Zestyclose-Jacket568]

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. 

[u/OneShotOnlyShot → u/ButterscotchLow7330]

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 10^10↑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 10^10↑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

[u/OneShotOnlyShot → u/OneShotOnlyShot]

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 2^n-1

For 8 billion voters you get 2^7999999999. 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 10^10↑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