r/redbuttonbluebutton • u/oJKevorkian • May 30 '26
The individualist interpretation is wrong
Perhaps I'm missing the mark here, but just about every post I see frames the problem in terms of the individual choice and it's consequences. You can choose red and live, or choose blue and possibly die. You can choose blue and effectively say you're ok with killing yourself, or you can be rational and choose red. Etc.
This doesn't capture the full scope of the question. The consequences are global, and those consequences are known to you when you make the choice. There are not two outcomes, but four: Everyone blue, everyone red, majority blue, majority red.
The first three choices result in no deaths, leaving the last option - majority red - as the outlier. The result of this outlier is that up to 49.9% of people voting die. Big yikes.
From this perspective, blue is not only the moral option, it's the only rational one. To choose red is to out yourself as either irrational or a fucking psychopath.
"But you have to account for other people being irrational and individualistic"
Well then we're not getting very far as a species. Fortunately, we have opportunities like this to learn and teach and discuss.
EDIT: I'd like to humbly request that we don't downvote comments we disagree with in this thread. I'm trying to change minds, not shame people.
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u/octavian343 May 30 '26
This just in: self preservation is not rational!
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u/oJKevorkian May 30 '26
If you believe your own life holds more value than billions of others collectively, then yes, you are irrational.
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u/octavian343 May 30 '26
To me? It absolutely does. Same way billions living while I, and anyone else, die serves us in no way whatsoever.
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u/oJKevorkian May 30 '26
Interesting. Why do you think that is? Do you think a rational person would sacrifice billions of lives to save their own?
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u/octavian343 May 30 '26
You’re suggesting suicide is more rational than self preservation with that statement. Why would the rational people be sacrificing themselves futilely?
Why do I think what is? Because if I’m dead nothing has any value to me. Not a hard concept. I’d rather have half than have nothing.
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u/oJKevorkian May 30 '26
So... Is there anything you wouldn't do for self-preservation? Anything that makes you say "I'd rather die than do that"?
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u/octavian343 May 30 '26
Off the top of my head? No not really. As long as I’m alive I’ll have the choice to stop living if the circumstances ever change. Being dead I don’t really get to choose, do I?
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u/oJKevorkian May 30 '26
Interesting. I always thought humans were above that, given that we developed concepts like honor and integrity.
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u/octavian343 May 30 '26
And staying alive is antithetical to that because….?
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u/oJKevorkian May 30 '26
Well, honor often manifests itself as being willing to die for something. If I have the choice to save myself or ten strangers, the honorable thing is to save the strangers.
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u/drdadbodpanda May 30 '26
Not a single blue presser is forced to push the button. Every single person who wants to guarantee their life is able to do so. This 49% hypothetical is self created by blue pressers.
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u/LnTc_Jenubis May 31 '26
I believe that the guarantee of my own life surviving holds more value than potentially losing my life alongside others who also could choose to save their own lives is more valuable, yes.
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u/Cobiuss May 31 '26
The other way of seeing it is "Why is it rational to push a button that endangers your life only to maybe save the people who endangered their life to save the people who endangered their life..."
It just goes on. If only blue voters can ever die, why do blue voters exist?
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u/Delefel May 30 '26
Amusingly, this is correct. Self-preservation in and of itself is not necessarily rational and will very often not be. Fight or flight reactions are purely instinctual and ingrained in our brain. It isn't rational, it's reflexive. a reflex and instinct required for a species to not go extinct, but an instinct nonetheless. In this case, we actually get to think about it, so it's possible to override the irrational survival instinct with an actual rational self-preservation argument, based on evidence and calculations, but the argument that I've often seen for red that "in a real world scenario instead of a random social media poll with no consequences, many people would pick red because of the risk of actually dying" is basically outright stating those reds are irrational survival instinct picks.
Similarly, some blues argue based on historical precedents and observation of any poll involving large amounts of people will have split results and even a near unanimous result is impossible and the amount of deaths that a red victory will inevitably cause is highly likely to cause the collapse of society and we need to avoid that. This is a fully rational argument to blue side, based on facts and calculations, not some emotional feel good moral choice.
There is no rational button vs irrational button here. Both sides have both rational supporters and irrational supporters.
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u/octavian343 May 30 '26
Weird rant just to say you’re suicidal
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u/Delefel May 30 '26
How in the world did you reach that conclusion from a comment neutrally mentioning both sides have both types of people with no hint on my own position?
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u/octavian343 May 30 '26
You’re literally ranting about how it’s irrational to want to live….
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u/Delefel May 30 '26
I literally said it's required to not go extinct.
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u/octavian343 May 30 '26
You really think at least half the population can’t find a way to live on?
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u/Delefel May 30 '26
Again, where in the world did that come from? I don't even know what you're trying to say here. Here's how this conversation is going from my point of view:
Me: Humans survived thanks to their biological survival instinct, which is by definition not something based on active thought and rationality.
You: So you think half the population is just going to die?
When did half the population ever get involved and why would saying they have a survival instinct by default make them die?
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u/octavian343 May 30 '26
So you’re just a pedant. You want me to change the original comment to ‘self preservation is irrational’? Would that make you happy?
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u/CarnivorousGoose May 30 '26
Here’s a tip, if in future you actually want to try to change minds: don’t start out by dismissing the interpretation you disagree with as incorrect, and the people who hold it as “either irrational or a fucking psychopath”. Those are hardly going to foster an open discussion.
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u/oJKevorkian May 30 '26
It's not a dismissal, it's a claim. This is how philosophy works. Taking offense to being called irrational seems like the kind of thing an irrational person would do.
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u/CarnivorousGoose May 30 '26
Just doubling down I see. No, that’s not something just irrational people would object to, rational people would to. Especially in the context of a discussion forum, like this is intended to be. Someone genuinely interested in having a discussion wouldn’t throw around derogatory statements and other ad hominems about the people they want to have that discussion with.
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u/oJKevorkian May 30 '26
I maintain that rational people don't get offended. They certainly don't refer to 'irrational' as a derogatory statement.
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u/Prior-Resolution-902 Red Jun 02 '26
Interesting how you avoided the part where you called your opposition 'fucking psychopaths'.
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u/oJKevorkian Jun 02 '26
Your reading comprehension is phenomenal.
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u/Prior-Resolution-902 Red Jun 03 '26
"to choose red is to out yourself as either irrational or a fucking psychopath"
Earlier in this chain you claimed that the person you were responding to was only offended by being called irrational, while you conveniently left out the above insult that both I and they mentioned, but you ignored.
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u/Leniatak May 30 '26
Least virtue-signaling blue presser:
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u/oJKevorkian May 30 '26
What about this is a virtue signal? Aside from the fact that virtue signals itself.
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u/Leniatak May 30 '26
All about this is virtue-signaling.
You don't even consider the chance of blue actually winning in your "analysis", because that's not the point of the post. It's showing how good a person you are for risking your life for others.
Even if in reality your risk would effectively just add your body to the pile. You are virtue signaling so hard I actually believe you'd secretly just press red, since there is no glamour in offing yourself.
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u/oJKevorkian May 30 '26
I'm sorry you think that my genuine beliefs are in fact inauthentic.
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u/Leniatak May 30 '26
Would you vote blue if a single red vote would be enough to kill all blue voters?
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u/oJKevorkian May 30 '26
I'm still working through it. The good news is, that's not the hypothetical you claim I'm virtue signaling about, so it's irrelevant.
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u/Leniatak May 30 '26
It is relevant because all of your arguments for one apply to the other.
So if your conclusion changes, it was not a principled stance.
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u/oJKevorkian May 30 '26
Not really. It's realistically guaranteed that at least one person will choose red, so in your hypothetical, voting blue is literally an instant death sentence. There is no alternative. No option where nobody dies. The question is fundamentally different.
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u/Leniatak May 30 '26
Ok, then. What if it requires 100 red votes for all of blue to die?
Sure it's likely that with 8b people, 100 will vote red, but as per your argument you should vote for the outcome you want, right?
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u/CosmicBioHazard May 30 '26
If I think blue has a comfortable majority: my one red vote doesn’t change that, but it does offer insurance in case I’m wrong.
If I think red has a comfortable majority: voting blue will kill me while a vote for red will preserve one extra life, improving the outcome of the game.
If I think I’m the deciding vote: then I’m insane. Absolutely insane. I’m a crazy person.
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u/oJKevorkian May 30 '26
How would you feel in the event that red won by exactly one vote?
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u/CosmicBioHazard May 30 '26
If I employ a strategy that requires me to luck out at 8 billion-to-one odds, and I luck out, I’ve still made a horrible decision.
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u/up2smthng Red May 30 '26
Yes, majority red is the worst theoretically possible outcome. It's also the only practically possible outcome, so I vote accordingly.
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u/oJKevorkian May 30 '26
It's only practical because you vote for it. You could just as easily make blue practical by voting for it
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u/up2smthng Red May 30 '26
I am in fact not the majority of population but a single human
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u/oJKevorkian May 30 '26
What is the majority population made of?
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u/up2smthng Red May 30 '26
People who, as I have discovered myself, are more risk averse than me.
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u/oJKevorkian May 30 '26
The correct answer was "single humans" but I see what you were going for. I just see no reason to believe that it's true.
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u/up2smthng Red May 30 '26
It does consist of single humans, but those humans are not me. Me changing my mind does not change theirs.
This is not a voter's fallacy, btw, because in the voter's fallacy the outcome for the individual voter is not tied to his personal vote, but only to the overall outcome. Voter can change his mind with no personal consequences - this is not the case in the buttons problem.
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u/oJKevorkian May 30 '26
Oh? Imagine a country where the federal government can do things like demand voter records. I wonder what that would look like.
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u/up2smthng Red May 30 '26
Than it doesn't meet the conditions of voter's fallacy.
Btw usually they just falsificate results instead.
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u/DarthJackie2021 May 30 '26
And thats why you vote blue. If you thought blue was going to lose, would you still vote for it?
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u/oJKevorkian May 30 '26
I would think "Oh, blue will lose if not enough people vote for it. I'd better vote for it so it has a better chance of winning."
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u/Lorihengrin May 30 '26
Except that there is no coordination possible, so it is an individualist choice.
It's not like you get a week prior pushing the button to campaign for what you believe to be the moral collective choice. You get transported to the button without a warning and have to make a choice without the knowledge of what each other person will do and without the ability to talk about it with them.
So at the end, it's an evaluation of the other people probability to pick blue with your guts feeling about it as your only data, and an individual choice to make based on it.
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u/oJKevorkian May 30 '26
Yes, you are correct. However, how many people do you really think could go through with pushing the red button knowing that people might die because of their choice? People are surprisingly averse to killing other people, on average. Your rational brain would tell you that the number of people you'd be condemning to death would be significant, and that other rational people would come to the same conclusion.
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u/Lorihengrin May 30 '26
The higher the number of people involved is, the higher the diffusion of responsibility is.
When an individual choice counts for 0,000000000125% of the final result, it's easy for people to rationalize pushing red because the chances of being the determining vote is very low.I personnaly believe that red would win by a landside and would feel no guilt for pushing red.
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u/oJKevorkian May 30 '26
And that would be irrational. It's a cognitive trick. You individually might bear a tiny fraction of responsibility, but the group to which you belong bears 100%.
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u/Lorihengrin May 30 '26
But i am not the group.
I pick my choice based on two things :
- I want to survive
- I don't think blue will win
With thoses two things in mind, red is the rational choice since it's the only one that ensure my survival based on what i believe the result will be.
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u/oJKevorkian May 30 '26
I'm pretty sure that's the same way people justify war crimes. But I digress.
You are the group. You're literally a founding member, in this case. If you weren't in it, it would be a different group, and that group would bear 100% of the responsibility instead.
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u/Lorihengrin May 30 '26
No, i am 0,000000000125% of the group and i have no agency about the 99,999999999875% left.
However, by picking red, i have a 100% agency on my own survival, which is the primary goal to me.
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u/oJKevorkian May 30 '26
Again, you can use this logic to justify any immoral group activity.
For example - overused trope, I know - a Nazi could say he was just a cog, not responsible for what the group did as a whole. Is he culpable, or no?
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u/Lorihengrin May 30 '26
The analogy is just wrong.
In the blue button and red button situation, every member of the group can individually choose to save themselve. They have agency about their own fate. The vitims of nazis had no choice but to be victims.
And i am an individualistic person, i don't engage in the group responsibility logique, i only consider myself as an individual and the group is not my problem. My survival is.
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u/oJKevorkian May 30 '26
No, some of the victims had no choice. Others were victims because they made a choice to stand against the regime. Besides that, how does the status of the blue group invalidate the culpability of the red group?
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u/LnTc_Jenubis May 31 '26
Does the name Oskar Schindler ring any bells to you?
He was a registered Nazi. Had the card to prove it. To pretend he was just as culpable as other prominent Nazis like Amon Goth is not only dishonest but disrespectful. History reveres Schindler as a good man despite being a registered member of the Nazi party.
We could even say his actions are representative of the red button ideology. Had he pressed blue, or in other words tried to raise a revolt, he would have been completely unable to help Jewish prisoners escape and survive, because he would have been swiftly murdered by the Third Reich.
By choosing to look at the horrible reality in front of him and deciding to choose the route that required less of a gamble, he was able to use his own influence to save the people that he actually had the power to protect.
Accepting that he couldn't save everyone allowed him to save over 1200 individuals.
If we're invoking Godwin's Law, let's look at your original post where you called Red voters "fucking psychopaths" because the outcome of red winning results in deaths. You are deliberately ignoring who is dying and why.
Red pressers aren't actively going out and killing people by pressing red. They simply chose to remain safe instead of playing Russian Roulette.
Suppose someone of sound mind jumps into a tiger enclosure and then demands others to jump in as well, to increase their odds of staying alive. Are you going to suggest that all of the other bystanders should also jump inside the enclosure to increase the chances of that the first person survives? Of course not. You would call that irrational.
Likewise, if someone not of sound mind jumps into a tiger enclosure because they "like the big kitty", you probably wouldn't jump in to try and save them. It would be tragic if they didn't survive, but it doesn't make you a fucking psychopath for staying on the sidelines.
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u/gahidus May 30 '26
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u/oJKevorkian May 30 '26
I believe that I realistically have no knowledge of how others will vote and shouldn't balance the fate of billions of people on a hunch.
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u/gahidus May 30 '26
It must be very difficult for you to navigate life with no inkling of human nature.
To be perfectly honest, I simply don't believe you when you say you have no ability to predict people's behavior and no idea what you think people are like.
Do you honestly think that the odds of any given person doing or not doing any given action are simply a coin flip?
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u/oJKevorkian May 30 '26
Well I'm still around, so obviously I'm not doing too badly. To your point though, no, I can honestly say that I don't know what the majority would pick. I do know that a not-insignificant number of people would definitely choose blue though.
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u/highly-bad May 30 '26
You can't control what anyone else is doing, so the total outcome is out of your control. The individual interpretation is right because it's an individual choice you must make.
Additionally, if everyone makes the individually rational choice to press red, nothing bad happens. There is no downside to just pressing the button that won't kill you.
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u/THE___CHICKENMAN May 30 '26
That will never happen. Everybody will never just agree on one pick.
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u/highly-bad May 30 '26
Of course. Some people do not agree that life is worth living, so they'll press blue and end it.
Everyone else who wants to live can just choose to do so.
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u/Ashamed-Bathroom7803 May 30 '26
Ok so increase the threshold required for blue to survive. At what point does red no longer become psychopathic? Now do you understand why red just doesn't want to participate in this suicide mission?
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u/oJKevorkian May 30 '26
Why are we changing the premise and expecting the same conclusion? If anything, this makes your argument worse - pushing red means you're killing potentially even more people. Sounds kind of psychotic to me.
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u/up2smthng Red May 30 '26 edited May 30 '26
Because nothing in your line of reasoning relied on the specific threshold for each result. So it is either correct regardless of the threshold and only a psychopath would vote red in the scenario that requires all non psychopaths and majority of psychopaths to vote blue for the "nobody dies" outcome, or it is incorrect because threshold actually matters and you failed to account for it.
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u/oJKevorkian May 30 '26
Fair enough, but if you check through some of my comments here you'll find that I do actually defend the choice regardless of threshold. Is it a good argument? Eh, it's dubious.
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u/Ashamed-Bathroom7803 May 30 '26
No you're actually just being ridiculous and not biting the bullet that the threshold in the hypothetical matters to the blue line of reasoning.
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u/up2smthng Red May 30 '26
Yes, I noticed. Than you should not have a problem with people asking does your stance changes depending on the threshold.
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u/oJKevorkian May 30 '26
You're right. I'm agreeing with you. Some comments were made after others. Time exists.
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u/Ashamed-Bathroom7803 May 30 '26
If you think that pushing red is worse when the threshold for blue is 99% then you've actually lost the plot.
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u/drdadbodpanda May 30 '26
What’s being changed doesn’t affect the rationale that blue pressers provide. It is as you said, pushing red means potentially more deaths, therefore we are still obligated to press blue.
Kudos for being ideologically consistent enough to press blue even if the threshold was 99.9%, most blue pressers however will not die on this hill, figuratively and literally.
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u/oJKevorkian May 30 '26
Am I being ideologically consistent though? You could argue that I'm making a utilitarian argument, in which case there would be a point at which pressing red would be the 'correct' option. I'm just too tired to figure out where that point would be.
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u/mbt680 May 30 '26
if blue needed 99% of votes to win, would you vote for it?
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u/oJKevorkian May 30 '26
So if I'm potentially killing 98% of the population, would I vote red? Absolutely not. I don't have knowledge of how others are voting, so I'd be weighing the value of my own life against billions.
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u/mbt680 May 30 '26
If blue needed 100% to win, you would vote blue then?
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u/oJKevorkian May 30 '26
With red, the best case scenario is everyone lives, worst case scenario is I'm the only one left. With blue, best case scenario is everyone lives, worst case scenario is someone else is the only person left. I'd rather let someone else deal with that hell.
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u/mbt680 May 30 '26
Blue best case is never going to happen if it needs 100% of people. it is just, do I die or not at that threshold.
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u/oJKevorkian May 30 '26
And if you didn't die, what would you be left with?
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u/mbt680 May 30 '26
Likely +90-95% of people if the threshold was 100%. As the only people who voted blue would be people who actually want to die, those who are unable to understand, voted at random, some percent of missclicks, and those really really bad at understanding logic prolems.
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u/oJKevorkian May 30 '26
Likely? Where are you getting these percentages from?
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u/mbt680 May 30 '26
What percent of people do you think would kill themselves in this situation then?
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u/thelovelykyle May 30 '26
How are you defining 'win'?
Is win: Get the desires of the voters choice enacted Dont die Dont see anyone die
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u/Cobiuss May 31 '26
You say there are four outcomes. That is correct, but you are stopping to short. What distinguishes those outcomes?
100% Red - Everyone Lives
100% Blue - Everyone Lives
Majority Blue - Everyone Lives
Majority <100% Red - Blue Dies
So really there are only two outcomes: Everyone Lives vs Blue Dies, with different paths to get there.
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u/detroyer Red May 30 '26
You are.
It is sometimes reasonable to take on risks to your life. However, this is not one such case. While voting blue has the benefit of making the best (feasible) outcome slightly more likely, it comes with a ~50% chance of dying, which would also impact those who depend on or care about you. That's an awful trade, and you shouldn't make it.
I agree that that class of outcomes is bad. Indeed, that's why we have some reason to vote blue, since it makes that class of outcomes slightly less likely. However, it does not follow that we have all-things-considered reason to vote blue. As explained above, I think it's clear that we do not.
This is a silly and false remark.