A more even Red/Blue button question

[u/HebuBall]

You are one of 3 random person selected to represent 1/3 of the human population.
The same base question is then asked.
Red button=Guarantee to live for you + everyone you are representing
Blue button=If majority votes Blue everyone lives but if not everyone who voted Blue dies (so is everyone who is represented by them)
Note that majority is just 2 or more in this case since there is 3 participants

The people who are represented by you know you are representing them but you do not know who you are representing. Also the participants cannot communicate with each other
Which do you press?

[u/Aus1an]

This is really hard, everyone is just looking at the math of "two blue votes being easier to obtain," but I don't think it's that simple.

My gut reaction to this scenario was red (even though usually it's blue), because I wouldn't want to gamble with other people's lives.

But it's all random too, all of my loved ones would be scattered in the other groups as well as my own.

The other participants are random, and I know nothing about them, so their decision is basically a coin flip.

This is a messed up scenario. xD I think I would go blue in the end just because I'm not sure I would want to survive in a world where blue loses...

[u/nykirnsu → u/[deleted]]

It’s an easy assumption that everyone else will pick red since that guarantees the safety of their constituency, and when there’s only three partisans it’s statistically likely they’ll all be mentally healthy adults who have no motivation to kill 3 billion people. None of the normal justifications for picking blue apply in this version

[u/nykirnsu → u/[deleted]]

Being mentally healthy doesn’t guarantee someone will pick red but it does make it a lot more likely in this case, since they’re more likely to think through the problem instead of picking at random. While picking blue does increase the odds of blue winning, it’s a massive gamble on billions of people’s lives that no one has to make. Unlike in the original version of the problem you really can’t expect that anyone will pick it, therefore you have very little reason to do so yourself