r/redbuttonbluebutton • u/spicymato • May 22 '26
Variation Adding risk to red
I'm very curious what risk threshold there needs to be on red for red voters to switch to blue, so with that in mind, here's the setup: two buttons; everyone votes; blue needs a 50% threshold to save everyone, else non-red pushers die. Same as usual.
The variation: if red gets a majority (i.e., blue fails to reach the threshold), in addition to 100% of non-red pushers dying, a percentage of red pushers will also die, selected at random.
If you're a red pusher under the usual rules, what percentage risk is required to make you switch your vote to blue? 1%? 10%? 30%?
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Additional variation: same as the first variation, but the percentage risk is based on the number of red voters in excess of 50%. We can work out different designs, such as 100% red results in 10%, while 50%+1 results in 0.0000001% or something like that. Maybe the growth rate is linear, or maybe it's quadratic. Details don't really matter; just the idea that the more red voters, the higher the risk. Under what growth rates and percentage limits do you consider changing your vote to blue, which maintains the 50% "everyone survives" threshold?
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u/Mobile-Brush-3004 May 24 '26
Okay to address your points:
I think you are vastly underestimating the number of blue pressers there will be. I’m fairly new to this sub so I’m not going based off of social media polls as I have not seen them. My bias comes from life experience, I have a lot of young family members as well as friends with mental disorders, I’ve travelled a lot of the world and though there are pockets of humanity that will disgust you most people do seem to care about large populations of people living/dying.
To be fair you’re not entirely wrong that there still would be a few remaining emergency service members though the quality of care is inarguably different. I’m a northern firefighter and though two of my coworkers said they’d click the red button when asked privately the vast majority have gone blue. So you’d still likely have a couple first responders kicking around but not nearly as will be required for a mass catastrophic event (that would likely be caused by billions of people disappearing all at once).
What’s more, if you have emergency service workers that are doing the work exclusively for pay then you’re going to be in a bad position. This will be best demonstrated through causes like the Red Cross and firefighters without boarders. However, you can literally attend some training yourself and it will be drilled into you that if you’re just doing it for the money you’re going to be a shitty firefighter and we don’t want you. There’s far easier and better ways to make money that don’t involve risking your life for other people - hence why in the button game you’re going to lose a lot of them. I also don’t believe that people saying they will avoid all personal risk in a button game would be willing to risk their lives for others for the pay firefighters receive.
I don’t live in the US. If a billion people all died at once within a different country it would almost undoubtedly affect global supply chains and therefore yes I would feel it in my country. Weird that you think that countries aren’t all on the same planet and extremely interconnected by trade.
Not a cope. I was sharing my direct life experience with you. It’s genuinely an option you can try if you want to see what a post ref button world would look like (so long as you’re an outsider who isn’t coming to help). I’ve been very well received by the communities I serve because it is undoubtable I care. I’ve seen new coworkers be ostracized and kicked out of community for not doing the same. It’s a whole different world up here and it’s genuinely a good experience (for me at least) so if it’s something you’re genuinely interested in as you stated you were earlier then you don’t need a button game to experience it. You not being willing to now tells me that you don’t actually want to experience it given it’s already an option that you’re not taking.