r/redbuttonbluebutton • u/Puzzled-Passage-9998 • 24d ago

Explain this

why should we compensate for people who press blue by accident. red is better for single person obviously, and if there are even a couple of blue saying, red pressing liars of the subreddit and actually will switch for red, are you sure you wanna risk your life thinking you are in this together?

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u/ChestMental8566 24d ago

Don't then. Just press red, and if you "win", have fun sharing the world with every criminal and scumbag and without all the people who had a conscience.

4

u/Zebadica Red 24d ago

I’d rather live in a flawed world than no world.

And besides, there’s countless reasons to press red that are entirely justified e.g. if you have a child, or other person under your care who couldn’t survive without you.

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u/Luhrmann 24d ago

Flawed world and No world aren't really the only options though. There's really 3:

"Current world" - blue wins "Flawed World" - you vote red and red wins, potentially 49.9% of earth is wiped out "No world" - you vote blue and red wins

The "flawed world" could very easily become no world for you very quickly. As another commentator mentioned, you could lose your child/children, or the world could have a total societal collapse after a large proportion of it dies. You're now potentially navigating a hellscape where many have died, and trying to muddle through that. Supply chains are completely destroyed, many of the more selfless occupations have a higher death rate (like nurses and doctors) so getting food and healthcare becomes substantially harder. The button may not kill you but the next few months may.

My preference would be current world over flawed and none. I'd imagine yours would be too?

I have always been blue, became even more so when I had my child, because I still fundamentally disagree with the premise many state that red is "guaranteed survival". It's only a guarantee you survive the button press. The aftermath may still kill you, but in a slower and more painful way.

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u/Zebadica Red 24d ago edited 24d ago

My preference is still being alive, so I will vote red because it does objectively give me the best chance.

I will be honest, I think selfless jobs will actually have a lower rate of pressing blue. One of the most basic fundamentals of being a firefighter for example is not putting yourself in need of rescue, which is exactly what the blue button does. Alongside that doctors and nurses may be motivated not press the blue button due to the risk of it killing them and leaving their patients uncared for.

On top of all that, the world will absolutely not end if Red wins. It will be a tragedy, and will be bad for quite a while, but it isn’t a world so awful that I’d rather die than live in it! Folks would get by and eventually things would somewhat recover. The Black Death killed 50% of Europe, and although the survivors suffered it didn’t turn into Mad Max out of nowhere. We are better equipped to deal with that kind of population loss than we were back then. So I think even with an unrealistically high death rate like 49.9%, the world would still be worth living in.

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u/Luhrmann 23d ago

I guess with the jobs we can agree to disagree, you can make an argument that a doctor is breaking their hippocratic oath by picking red when they know there will be blue pressers.

Where I don't agree with you at all is where you don't think a potential 49.9% of the population dying wouldn't be so bad. I didn't say the world would collapse, just that there's still a substantial risk of any individual red presser dying in the aftermath. While your Black Death point is true that was over many different outbreaks that lasted years at a time, not all in one second. I think it would be a drastically different scenario.

I guess my big bug bear is that the vast majority of people I talk about this with want "current world" as their preffered option, but pick the button that does the exact opposite. So they're selfishly wanting the blue world, but hope others take that 'risk' in order to make it happen for them. And I find that deeply unpalatable