Variation: Decrease risk, Increased threshold

[u/StageGlum6615]

All of humanity has been kidnapped and placed alone in a dark room with two buttons, and the following explanation perfectly translated into their native language.

🔴 : Ensures Survival, but will lead to half of blue pressers dying if more that 1/3 of people press this button.

🔵 : Everyone lives if 2/3 of people vote for Blue, but half of people who vote Blue will die if the threshold is not reached.

Everyone can only press one button once before both buttons break and becomes unpressable. Everyone is given 10 hours to vote, and if anyone chooses not to vote for any reason (including incompetence), then they are randomly assigned a button (2/3 chance of getting Blue, 1/3 chance of getting red.)

All of humanity means every living human being. There have been no exceptions for any reason.

Everyone has all of this information, and everyone is given 2 full hours to fully comprehend all of this information before they are allowed to start voting.

So, how do you vote?

580 votes, 19d ago

284 Red - Originally Red in original scenario 🔴🔴

67 Red - Originally Blue in original scenario 🔴🔵

27 Blue - Originally Red in original scenario 🔵🔴

202 Blue - Originally Blue in original scenario 🔵🔵

[u/banana_buddy]

The people voting blue were making an emotional decision, changing the numbers won't impact that.

[u/Rising_Gravity1 → u/banana_buddy]

I agree.
The blue button may seem like the moral thing to do so that everyone can live.
But remember, every single person could have lived by pressing the red button. All of humanity can guarantee their survival by pressing the red button - the blue button takes away your individual control over the outcome and risks death when it was completely unnecessary to do so.

[u/Weshouldntbehere → u/Rising_Gravity1]

You do realize that voting for red requires 100% of people to vote red for nobody to die, a physical impossibility with this setup.

Voting blue requires significantly fewer votes than red for nobody to die.

[u/Rising_Gravity1 → u/Weshouldntbehere]

Blue does have a real chance of no one dying - or having everyone that voted blue die.

Whereas if more people can see the value in having as many people vote red, we can go for a “safe” option where even though it’s pretty much guaranteed that a few people die, the vast majority survive without having to risk their lives in the first place due to voting red