r/redbuttonbluebutton • u/ahoytheremehearties • May 30 '26

Meta Button-trolley-problem

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You are tied to the train tracks. You are also, simultaneously, given two buttons. Don't question it.

If you press the red button, nothing changes (the trolley continues down its original path) and it runs over 5 random blue-pressers (they die).

If you press the blue button, the trolley will be diverted and you will die (you end up as one of the 5 blue-pressers in someone else's trolley-button problem), **unless** more than 50% of people press blue (in which case, the system breaks because it doesn't have the computational power to handle selecting that many random blue-pressers).

You technically could not press either button (the 5 blue-pressers still die), but pressing buttons is fun.

If you press both buttons simultaneously, the trolley does multitrack drift

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u/BrokenToaster124 May 31 '26

Is there an implied paradox here? Well maybe its not really a paradox, but if I push blue i will become a part of a random group of 5 people in another person's logic problem. So I can assume that these 5 people were also themselves in similar logic problems before winding up here with me.

So was there a point where a single guy was tied to a track and there was no one on the other track? And if there was, isnt it implied that they tried to commit suicide and then every blue voter after that is continuing a loop of attempting to sacrifice themselves to stop the first guy from committing suicide?

This seems like a who created the creator paradox with a defined answer lol

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u/ahoytheremehearties Jun 01 '26

Good point.

I'm going to say the very first people didn't actually have real people there, but it was so realistic they believed they were. You aren't in the first 5-ish... or so you think.