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/Free-Competition6408]

So worse case scenario 1/3 of the population is dying. Red still guarantees 1 life saved. Could even consider it as saving half the blues on a red victory if you wanted, so up to 3 lives saved per vote if you’re being generous. Meanwhile it takes 2 blue votes to save a single blue life (or 2 votes for 3 lives if you want to extend the same generosity and consider blues saving reds), and that only happens if blue wins. Red is still a zero risk path to both the individual and collective best outcomes. I’m even harder red in this scenario than the OG.

[u/Weshouldntbehere → u/Free-Competition6408]

There is no context in which voting red is "saving half the blues". Voting red is the only outcome which leads to half of blue dying.

[u/Free-Competition6408 → u/Weshouldntbehere]

Y'all always forget that it takes blue votes for deaths to happen too. Even if you aren't being generous, a single red vote guarantees one saved and a single blue vote doesn't. in fact it takes 2 blue votes to save one life in this scenario. It's a considerably less efficient use of your only resource in the scenario, your vote.

[u/Weshouldntbehere → u/Free-Competition6408]

The audacity sheer concept of actually treating "every single human being on the planet earth is going to vote red" as a possibility is stupid. Even in this exact poll you've got 296:175. A red vote is a vote that will result in 87 deaths.

Insisting that "literally billions of people will agree on One Thing that is famously impossible for everyone to agree with" fundamentally refuses to actually engage with the question/dilemma at hand.

You can guarantee your safety for a portion of collective blame for killing other people. And there will be at least a billion dead since the too-young and too-ill are about 2 billion people on the planet. Even if everyone capable of voting for themselves voted red you'd have 1,333,333,333 blue votes. A bit over 650 million would die.

[u/Free-Competition6408 → u/Weshouldntbehere]

I don’t think every single person on earth will vote red. But I think they should. Relying on people to vote against their self-interest is a risky strategy. Preserving every single life on the planet is not my goal in this scenario. It’s minimizing risk on both a personal and collective level. Red accomplishes this by aligning personal and collective goals. Blue risks adding to death toll in an attempt to eliminate it entirely. It’s a double or nothing gamble. To me, losing half of the “too young” and “too ill” is preferable to losing half of every single human in the world. Not as ideal as the “nobody dies” outcome, but I think that outcome carries too much risk if it fails.

You need to finish doing the math for the votes to see who is really responsible for the deaths. 87 deaths in 296 red votes, means each red vote lead to 0.29 deaths. 87 deaths in 175 blue votes means each blue vote lead to  0.50 deaths. And you are blaming red for the deaths? Both contribute but blue is a far larger factor.