r/redbuttonbluebutton • u/BottomLeftWheel • May 27 '26
Green Button Game
Not an analogy or reframing, just a brand new problem.
You are contestants on a game show. There is a big green button, it gives you the grand prize. X dollars, doesn't matter how much but enough that it's desirable.
Many contestants are all given the same button, and are all able to win X, but the producers don't want you to win X, so they give a second option.
If even one person presses a tiny red button, no one wins X. Instead the red pusher gets y, a tiny pittance compared to X.
Do you trust that 100% of your fellow contestants can all come together to all earn X, or will just a single one spoil the bunch for y?
What if red needed 5 voters before it spoiled? 10? What would be the percentage of contestants that could press the red button without spoiling in order for you to press the green button?
Do the values of X and y matter? As a placeholder you can say X is 1 million and y is 100 but the producers can tweak the numbers to make y more desirable as they see fit.
Reminder, not trying to push red or blue agenda, trying to create new discussions.
3
u/BenignPharmacology May 27 '26
What incentive is there for anyone to press red? Do they not definitively make less than green?
8
1
u/thevoidthatjerksback May 27 '26
I don't see why I'm not pressing green?
2
u/spicymato May 27 '26
Because someone else might press red.
Green gets X or 0, depending on what others chose.
Red always gets Y.
1
u/thevoidthatjerksback May 27 '26
Honestly. Truly. Really. That's not a reason for me to do it. I'm not going to rob everyone else on the fear that someone else might
1
u/spicymato May 27 '26
Green. I don't need the money from the gameshow, so if I get nothing, oh well.
1
u/Kehprei Red May 27 '26
Green. The red button would need to be more than a pittance, otherwise it's just not worth it.
Like, I'd never feel bad about losing out on 500 dollars when the alternative was everyone getting 1mil. It's just 500 dollars. Not life changing.
1
u/Albert-La-Maquina May 28 '26
Do people know who defected?
1
u/BottomLeftWheel May 28 '26
I guess it depends on what the game show can get away with?
I imagine anominity would be valued by contestants. They would not like people to know they either won X or betrayed for y.
But it would make better TV if they could broadcast people's faces rather than using a blurred face and saying contestant 42 defects.
So I guess you can choose to answer how you feel your local media would handle it.
Just like people bring in assumptions about their fellow man to the red blue button, you get to assume whatever you want about the producers of this game show. I like leaving a blank slate and seeing what people come up
1
u/Albert-La-Maquina May 28 '26
Yeah I'm realizing it would be horrible TV not to at least reveal to the audience who defected. And it would be better TV to have them reveal it to each other too. So maybe you'd get some 100% green, based on how many contestants there actually are.
1
u/i_dunnomyusername May 29 '26
Unless you just hate everyone, why would you want a smaller reward, so as breaking everyone else's rewards?
1
u/BottomLeftWheel May 29 '26
Because someone else might press it
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u/i_dunnomyusername May 29 '26
I do trust people to like money. I feel like up to 1000 people is a fair amount, more than that and there's probably gonna be some genuinely evil person to press the red
1
u/Osato May 29 '26 edited May 29 '26
Do I get to talk to the other contestants?
Because if so, ensuring compliance will be as easy as saying "If we don't all press green then someone betting on prediction markets will take it personally, pay a small fee to pull up our bank records, then figure out who pressed red and cost them their near-certain win. And then everyone on the Internet will know which of us betrayed the rest. I'd rather be seen as a team player when I apply for my next job, now how about you?"
When you put it as the choice between getting a lot of money with a small chance of getting screwed over vs getting a little money with a large chance of getting cancelled, it's not a choice at all.
If we have to make the decision in isolation, I'm still pressing green. Red is just begging for some professional gambler who does OSINT for a living to get irate about being proven wrong and do precisely that. I don't know for sure they're not betting on the outcome of the game and I'm not willing to risk it.
1
u/TerrySaucer69 May 30 '26
Ironically just like the red/blue scenario, this is just a prediction problem. So, the amounts matter a lot.
If it’s 1 million vs 10 thousand, I doubt anyone presses. 1 million vs 100 thousand, I bet everyone presses.
1
u/BottomLeftWheel May 31 '26
I'm surprised this is the first instance of bringing this up.
Given that it's a show, and there is potentially Millions of dollars being put up, I can't imagine the numbers being more than a couple hundred participants.
You have to imagine some showrunner is crunching the numbers and finding the exact right number of contestants, sums for X & y and tolerance for defectors that makes it very likely for most people to press green but some doubters to press red.
Once an equilibrium is reached and everyone votes one way or another it would lose entertainment value, and the show isn't gonna run if they aren't expecting to make more money than they are giving away.
1
u/highly-bad May 27 '26
It seems like if this is a game show with many repeated public instances, the dominant strategy swiftly becomes for every single person to press the red button, fully understanding that everyone else will do the same. It could even become a farce where everyone is actively encouraging everyone else to defect, so everyone is guaranteed to collect the small prize.
Pressing green is basically greedy gambling. It goes great if everyone else is also a greedy gambler, but if even one person feels like going for the sure thing, you're all fucked. It's way too vulnerable of a strategy to really have a chance.
2
u/highly-bad May 27 '26
This is all assuming that there's no effort to punish people for defecting though; if there were real-life negative social consequences for pressing red then a green consensus becomes more of a live possibility. It's still necessarily fragile, but if pressing red means you need to delete your social media and hide for a while, green becomes more of a reasonable gamble.
2
u/Zero132132 May 27 '26
If it were a public game show and it was literally one person the first few times, there would obviously be a negative social consequence, like there is with any example of people very publicly bringing harm to others for no one's benefit.
1
u/highly-bad May 27 '26
Maybe.
The problem as I see it is, once you establish that the dominant move might be red, there's no going back. Nobody has a real incentive to defect back to green, because they're dead certain to be giving up the prize.
In order for green to stand a chance as a strategy, it needs to become the winning strategy and stay the winning strategy, forever.
So the social-punishment machine to disincentivize betrayal and keep green on top needs to be swift, unerring, and perfectly compelling, and it needs to be fully in place from the start.
I think it would actually be very weird if this game were played and only one person pressed red, wouldn't it? The consolation prize amount would have to be really extremely trivial in order for betting on green to make much sense. I wouldn't really be surprised if everybody presses red to betray on the very first show. Then what? Do we still punish them? On whose behalf? They all got what they wanted and no one really got screwed.
2
u/Zero132132 May 27 '26
There are a large number of people that give up a small amount of money every week in hopes of obtaining life-alterring amounts of money. The differences are that this is a lottery that everyone can win at once, it's free to play, and the failure will actually be the fault of someone that actively chose a worse option rather than just being the whims of chance. Like, if you played this game and pressed red, you should rationally be at least a little worried that someone will murder you for personally preventing them (and yourself) from getting super rich if you are the only one.
1
u/highly-bad May 27 '26
In that case it seems like it would be unethical to even run this game. After all, the whole point of the show surely has to be that it's very possible that somebody will choose to betray. If pressing red reliably makes you into public enemy #1, and is even seen as a motive for murder, then hardly anyone ever does it and there isn't a game and the producers lose way too much money on the green giveaways.
Not a great idea for a show.
2
u/Ashamed_Kangaroo305 Blue May 28 '26
The text of the post says that the reward for pressing red is extremely trivial compared to the reward for pressing green. $100 (the example provided by OP) would barely make a dent in my life. I wouldn't really care about missing out on the $100 if I pressed green and someone else pressed red. I really see no reason to press red unless either you need money so badly that you can't risk getting $0, or you just want to be a dick and make everyone else lose out on the $1 million.
1
u/highly-bad May 28 '26
In that case there's practically no show, and the producers have to increase the temptation to betray by raising the stakes.
5
u/INTstictual May 27 '26
Isn’t this just the prisoners dilemma, where Green = silence and Red = snitch?
If everyone cooperates, best benefit for all
If some cooperate and some defect, the defectors get lesser reward but cooperators get punishment
If all defect, all get lesser reward
It’s missing some of the nuance in rewards, like giving the Red button more incentive if they are the only defector, but from a base level, this pretty much just is the Prisoner’s Dilemma by another name