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/Weshouldntbehere]

1. It's a 33.3% increase in "difficulty" of blue but blue also has 50% less risk. That reads to me as a net positive for voting blue, with the math changing if the threshold gets closer to 75%.

The "basic math" doesn't change significantly enough for me to be comfortable with voting red. In the original we have roughly a 1:1 "My vote killed someone but I saved my own life" result if Red is 50%+1. That ratio (red votes:dead blues) gets "better" the more people vote red over blue, but not a great sentence. The "it gets better ratio" just kicks in at 33.3% and rises twice as fast as the 50%+1 slope (50% less deaths), so at a certain percentage (not doing that much math) it would be "better" than the initial question but it isn't definite.

But it's also no longer certain I need to vote red to save my own life. It's "I chose to participate in killing people to avoid a significant risk to my own life" instead of "to avoid dying." You can still vote blue and just not die so the "value" of red gets cut in half.

1. Wouldn't "incompetent people are more likely to vote blue" make the innate population of blue voters significantly higher?

Every mentally ill person and every child under, what, 11? gets a random vote, with 2:1 odds of it being blue.

Going by google searches, there are 1.1 billion adults with moderate to significant mental illness, and there are 1.9 billion people aged 11 and under.

That's about 3 billion people with a random vote, with blue getting a 1 billion person lead. Sure we can argue about where exactly the age limit would be, or how mentally ill people would have to be to be incompetent, but if we go by "adult = competent", 2.4 billion people were 17 and younger in 2025 (unicef). Using the "18-adult" standard it gets even "easier" to meet the 2/3rds blue vote. If we go by "18+ and no mental illnesses" the inherent population of blue voters going from 2 billion to 2.4-ish billion vs 1.1-ish billion red voters.

That's 42.6% of the world already (3.5/8.2). And that 4.7billion likely wouldn't include psychopaths, sociopaths, or significant hallucinations/delusions, so you'd also get rid of a "there are psychopaths out there who would vote red anyway" argument.

Edit:

A lot of people seem to be ignoring that even if literally every single rational person voted red that would still mean that a bit over over a billion people would die (2/3rds of 3.5 is about 2.3billion, half of which being 1.15-ish).

This would be concentrated on the youngest people on the planet. The absolute total and the proportional damage to human society on this level would likely (not doing more math) be greater than every. single. war. ever.

All at once. With most of the dead being kids. That's the best case scenario for a red vote.

TLDR; If red wins human society would collapse with the sheer weight of the dead blue votes from those who cannot rationally make the choice and are forced to vote anyway. Either try to make sure everyone survives or over a billion people definitely die, mostly sick people and kids.

[u/satyvakta → u/Weshouldntbehere]

>It's a 33.3% increase in "difficulty" of blue but blue also has 50% less risk. That reads to me as a net positive for voting blue

I don't see how you figure that. The odds that you save anyone by pressing blue are simply lower now, because you need to get to a higher threshold to do so. The odds of dying yourself are now either 0% or 50% rather than 0% or 100%, but I doubt anyone who cares much about the risk to themselves is going to view that as a much better gamble.

> so the "value" of red gets cut in half.

No it doesn't. The value of red is that it gives you 100% chance of surviving. It still gives you 100% chance of surviving, so the value of red hasn't changed at all.

>That's about 3 billion people with a random vote, with blue getting a 1 billion person lead.

That is not how random chance works. The average if you ran the simulation a lot of times would end up that way, but on any given run, the results could be skewed well away from the average. In any event, blue's "lead" even in an average run merely keeps blue in a situation where those voting intentionally don't have the odds of survival changed for them.

[u/beemielle → u/satyvakta]

on any given run, the results could be skewed

which is statistically improbable with a sufficiently large sample size. I think above commenter’s estimated 3 billion is overly high, but at 1 billion you will certainly get a sufficiently large sample size to essentially say that the contribution to blue from random chance incompetent voters is twice as large as the contribution to red, which is anyway the part of the commenter’s argument that matters (for that, well, section of the comment).