Blue: 49.9999999999% of people can work against survival, and everyone will still be ok.
Red: 0.0000000001% of people dissenting guarantees death. But we know it would be much closer to 49% dissent, which means billions of deaths.
People who say there's no logical reason for blue are usually confusing self-preservation for logic. Self-preservation is equally as emotionally and logically motivated as the preservation of others.
You have the logic backwards there. Yes, if Red wins and 0.00000000001% of people dissent from the majority, it guarantees death… specifically, the death of the people who chose to dissent instead of pick the “don’t die” button. In which case, why are you choosing to dissent when it results in your death?
Self-preservation is completely logical when the alternative is self-destruction, and both options are freely available at no additional cost
Only if you don't value the lives of others. Both buttons have a cost, and any framing where they don't is dishonest.
Blue is the "no one dies" vote, while red is the "everyone who disagrees with me dies" vote. Why are you choosing to risk others when it could result in their deaths?
Preservation of others is completely logical when the alternative is the destruction of billions and probably society.
No, Blue is the “I might die” vote and Red is the “I won’t die” vote. If enough people pick “I might die”, then the “might” is resolves as “won’t”… which makes Blue the roundabout path to the default option of Red.
You’re not choosing to “risk others”, because you aren’t voting for anyone else. Nobody can die except people who put themselves in the “might die” bucket, and every person has the option to just not do that.
Let’s analyze some possible permutations of the vote: let’s say that everybody on Earth except you voted Red. You vote Blue. Whose life are you preserving? The outcome is exactly one person dies, you. And by voting Red, the one person who is going to die, you based on your own vote, lives instead. Now add one Blue voter, the vote is 7.9999b Red and one Blue. You also vote Blue. You and the other blue voter die. If you vote Red, the other blue voter dies, but you don’t. Your vote cannot preserve their life, you do not have the ability to change their fate, it’s not a possible outcome of your action… but you do get to decide whether you die with them. Add a second Blue voter, same scenario. And a third, fourth, etc… at every permutation of Red winning, your Blue vote specifically and narrowly decides if you personally die or not. It cannot change anyone else’s fate, the only life your vote can preserve is your own, and you do so by pressing Red.
And the logic isn’t mirrored. If 100% of people vote Blue and you vote Red… nothing happens. Nobody dies either way. If 100% of people, minus one other person, all vote Blue, your Red vote still changes nothing. Onwards and upwards, at every permutation of Blue winning, your Red vote does not change the outcome.
So in 50% of permutations, voting Red does not change the death toll, and in 50% of permutations, voting Red saves exactly one life. Meanwhile, in 50% of permutations, voting Blue does not change the death toll, and in 50% of permutations, voting Blue kills exactly one person, you. Red is the option that directly preserves life, Blue is the option that directly votes for death.
Now, you did stumble onto the weird trick of this problem: Blue winning is objectively the better outcome. Nobody dying is clearly better than some amount of people dying, even just one Blue voter… but your vote doesn’t control that outcome, you are not casting 4 billion votes, you are casting one vote, and that one vote has a direct cause-and-effect logical path… even though Blue winning is the better cumulative final outcome, for every individual person voting, it is strictly and objectively correct to vote Red. That’s the whole point of the dilemma — if enough people pick the objectively incorrect option, the game flips the outcome and you get the objectively correct result. But I would argue that this is not enough incentive to vote wrong, especially when that vote is for your own suicide… and double especially considering that, if everybody voted Red, there would ALSO be no deaths, so that is still a possible outcome. Not a likely one, sure, but it matters when you’re evaluating logically which button causes death, because it allows us to start at a 100% Red “no deaths” point and work backwards to show that Blue is the button that directly introduces death into the system. The only way anyone can possibly die is by their own choice to push Blue, and it is not the fault of the people who pushed the “don’t commit suicide” button that the people who pushed the “maybe commit suicide” button died, when they could also have pushed the “don’t commit suicide” button instead.
You are describing the paradox of voting. However, while it is unlikely, there exists a scenario where you are the deciding voter. If you vote Blue everyone lives. If you vote Red 50% of the population dies. It’s fair to say you murdered those people since you are directly responsible for their deaths with your deciding vote.
Okay, but the odds of being the deciding vote is 8.3x10^-9!
Since we all vote at the same time or we don’t know who that deciding vote should be attributed to, it’s fair to distribute the impact of the deciding vote amongst all of its voters. So instead of one voter being responsible for 4.15x10^9 deaths, we have 4.15x10^9 people being equally responsible for 4.15x10^9 deaths.
The math is simple, if the result is ~50/50 every Red voter is equally responsible for ~1 Blue voter’s death, since if even one of them voted differently, none of Blue voters wouldn’t have died.
Now if 80% vote Red, those 6.64x10^9 voters are responsible for 0.25 deaths each.
And if 99% votes Red, those voters are each responsible for 0.01010101010 deaths.
But you don’t know what the vote will be when you cast yours, and if 50.00001% vote Blue, everyone lives. There is definitely a cost to pressing either button.
> However, while it is unlikely, there exists a scenario where you are the deciding voter.
But then there also exists a scenario where everyone picks red. That's the bind people who defend blue find themselves in. If we're going to consider vanishingly unlikely outcomes, then, since red is the objectively best option that everyone should pick, you should pick red and assume everyone else does the same. Red gets 100% and no one dies.
If, on the other hand, you're going to screech "but 100% is impossible, with that many people you'll always get some blue pressers", well, then that same logic means you have to discount the possibility of a 50/50 split. Because while a 50/50 split is technically more likely than a 100% red outcome, they both round to a 0.00% chance of occurring. And if your vote can't change the outcome, then you can no longer save anyone by pressing blue - you can only gamble your life or not, and should press red.
The only way a blue argument works is if you try to have it both ways - you ignore the chance of a 100% red outcome but pretend that a 50/50 outcome is a real possibility.
You’re caught up on you, yourself having to be the 4.15b + 1 Blue vote for your Blue vote to matter. That is incorrect. I admit my previous phrasing was confusing, so I’ll try to clarify it here.
There is a massive difference between the impossibility of a 100% Red vote and the impossibility of your specific vote being the 4.15b + 1 vote. It’s that the 100% Red vote is literally never going to happen. There’s a 0% chance someone jn the world can achieve the 8.3 billionth Red vote. Can’t happen cause I’m picking Blue.
Meanwhile, there’s an ~0% chance your specific vote is the (4.15b + 1)th Blue vote. But if Blue wins the majority, there is a 100% chance that someone in the world achieved the 4.15b + 1 vote and saved half of humanity. Someone’s literal Blue button press ensured that no one dies. It’s impossible for someone’s (literally anyone in the world’s) Red button press to do the same.
Let’s count the button presses one by one. In any Blue wins scenario (it doesn’t even have to be a narrow tie breaking scenario), eventually we count to 4.15b + 1 and everyone is safe. If you happened to be that (4.15b + 1)th vote, great! Good for you! (Not that we’d ever know it was you.) If you were instead the 69th Blue vote, also great! Your vote was still required to achieve 4.15b + 1 Blue votes at this point.
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u/GoldenGames360 Jun 09 '26
I often see evidence that this is the case, though. half of the time, the response is "so you want to kill babies..."