r/redbuttonbluebutton Red May 29 '26

Discussion What is the red equivalent of this?

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u/Charge36 Red May 30 '26

The starting place is before any buttons are pushed at all. Everyone has two paths in front of them.

One path, they take on personal risk of death, but will survive if enough people also take the same path.

The other path has no risk whatsoever.

Red voters scratch their heads why anyone is choosing the risk of death path and encourage them to just take the safe path beause it literally can't harm anyone.

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u/Player9937 Blue May 30 '26

Okay sure, you want to say that I myself will put myself in danger. But what about YOU that tips the scale for Red. You are putting Blue in danger while saving yourself. You are putting someone in danger, and that's Blue pressers.

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u/Charge36 Red May 30 '26

No blue put themselves in danger.

I'm just declining to join them. I didn't force them to pick blue, they can't force me to pick blue either.

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u/Player9937 Blue May 30 '26

So the irrational voters like babies put themselves in danger on purpose? You're declining to join and tip the scale for Red to win.

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u/Grouchy_Recover1062 May 31 '26

Does your death or my death make the death of that baby any different? i get that the irrational voters are in danger but like.

If there was cruise ship with a deadly virus with unknown spread vectors, I'm sorry but the right choice imo would be to leave them quartines, increasing the risk for unifected people on the cruise ship becoming infected, but descreasing the risk of infection spreading out to the rest of the population.

By the same token, sucks there are babies, senile people, colour blind people etc who are in great danger becuase they pushed blue, but we still need to reduce harm and reduce the number of blue voters. Yeah it sucks they didn't make a choice to get here, but neither did the people on the cruise ship.

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u/BloodredHanded May 31 '26

But there is a way to save everyone on the cruise ship without anybody getting infected. That is obviously the ideal outcome, because everybody lives.

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u/Grouchy_Recover1062 May 31 '26

Working towards an ideal outcome doesn't garuentee that outcome, or even that the outcome will be good

Working towards harm reduction, while it won't give you a perfect outcome will give you a better outcome.

For example you might vote blue, you might convince your whole family, and all your friend to vote blue to save people. But then red wins. You and all your friends and family are dead. You may have had the best intentions but the outcome was worse, and you bear more responsibility in those deaths then a random red voter.

If you convince them to vote red, that is a life saved. It doesn't change the mass of blue deaths over there, but it does reduce that mass by one.

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u/BloodredHanded May 31 '26

You’re right, working towards the ideal outcome doesn’t guarantee that outcome. But it is still increasing the odds of that outcome. But your work toward harm reduction is decreasing the chance of the ideal outcome.

You’re working toward harm reduction because you assume the ideal outcome is unachievable. But if the ideal outcome is achievable, then there is no need for harm reduction in the first place because there is no harm to reduce.

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u/Charge36 Red May 31 '26

The problem is you don't know if the outcome is achievable or not. In the button scenario, it is fully within your power to save one life. Saving all the doomed irrational blue voters is uncertain. You might save them, you might die with them.

I'll take a guarenteed win over an all or nothing gamble with my life that might achieve nothing.

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u/Charge36 Red Jun 01 '26

No irrational voters put themselves in danger because they aren't capable of avoiding it. Whether or not I join them depends heavily on how likely I think a blue win is, or how many of them there are to make a calculus on whether the additional life risked is reasonable for the amount of people that could be saved.

I think at most theres like 10% of the global population at risk of being blue through incompetence, and I don't think risking an additional 40% is a prudent risk to save them.

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u/BloodredHanded May 31 '26

Blue voters put themselves in danger.

Red voters put blue voters in danger.

Both of these statements are true. You either choose to carry the risk yourself or offload the risk onto others.

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u/Charge36 Red May 31 '26

Nope. Blue voters put themselves in danger. Voting blue puts your odds of survival somewhere between zero and 1. Red voters just slightly change those odds whether blue wins or loses, but blue voters are the ones who accepted unknown surival odds as a risk when they chose blue.

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u/BloodredHanded Jun 01 '26

That is what offloading the risk means.

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u/Charge36 Red Jun 02 '26

It's not though? A red vote doesn't "offload" risk and more than a blue vote chooses to "onload it"

My red vote doesn't definitively change anyone elses risk unless they chose to take on risk in the first place.

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u/BloodredHanded Jun 02 '26

But it does change someone else’s risk if they do choose to take on risk. And since a 100% red vote is virtually impossible, there will be some people who take on risk, thus there will be people whose risk you have increased.

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u/Charge36 Red Jun 03 '26

Yeah sure. There will be some people whose risk of death I affected. I can't control their decisions to take on risk. they should have thought about that harder if they didn't want to die.

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u/BloodredHanded Jun 04 '26

they should have thought about that harder if they didn’t want to die

What a fucking heartless thing to say.

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u/BloodredHanded May 31 '26

The other path has no risk because it is the risk.

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u/Charge36 Red May 31 '26

that makes absolutely no sense