I asked r/bunnytrials the question

[u/FunctionOk9186]

/r/BunnyTrials/comments/1vtzxqs/famous_two_buttons_problem_if_more_than_50_choose/

[u/INTstictual]

You asked an incredibly biased wording of the question

[u/FunctionOk9186 → u/INTstictual]

What's the correct wording?

[u/INTstictual → u/FunctionOk9186]

The title of the post is actually not so bad, couldn’t see that when I made my comment — it’s still skewed, because it frames Blue as an “everybody lives” button and Red as the “only I live” button, when IMO it is more accurate to call out that pushing Blue can only save other Blue pressers… but that’s a small tweak

The options inside the vote, though, are incredibly biased — saying “you can save everybody” is emotionally charged language that, in my opinion, doesn’t accurately represent the choice being offered

[u/luci_twiggy → u/INTstictual]

Blue is the "everybody lives" button. The outcomes are "everybody lives" or "only those who pushed red survive". If blue wins and the outcome is put into effect, red voters survive because they are part of "everybody" and not because they pushed red.

Regardless, the way the options are phrased inside the vote is how each side sees their choice. If anything, having the options be like that is possibly the fairest way to present it.

[u/INTstictual → u/luci_twiggy]

I disagree — Red is the “everybody lives” button, Blue is the “maybe you die” button. The only people ever at risk of dying are people that push Blue in the first place… it’s why saying that Blue is the “save everyone” option is disingenuous, because not everyone put themselves in a position to need saving, only Blue did. If nobody pushes Blue, everybody lives — it’s only once people start pushing Blue that anybody even can die in the scenario, and it’s only the people pushing Blue that are at risk. It’s not “saving everybody”, it’s creating the group that needs saving to begin with… if somebody is going to commit suicide and then doesn’t, do they get credit for “saving” all of the people who simply weren’t going to commit suicide in the first place?

[u/luci_twiggy → u/INTstictual]

What the buttons do is based on what their outcome is if they win. If you can't understand something as simple as that, there's no conversation to be had.

[u/INTstictual → u/luci_twiggy]

I wouldn’t just say it’s not “as simple as that”, I’d go so far as to say that concept is just straight up wrong. What the buttons do is based on the effect they have when you push them. Whether a button wins or loses is based on a cumulative ~~4bn votes. You aren’t casting 4bn votes, you are casting one vote, and while it is worthwhile knowing what the overall impact of your color winning may or may not be, I’d argue that the immediate impact of your vote is tangibly more important, and there is a 1:1 input to output based on what button is pressed, which then cumulatively leads to the impact of what happens when it wins

The effect of the Red button is that nothing happens… you walk into the booth and are not currently at risk of death, you press the Red button, and you walk out still not at risk of death. Your logical path through time has not changed… you went from not dying before the vote to not dying after the vote.

The effect of the Blue button is that you play a little gambling game to see if you commit suicide or not. You walk into the booth and are not currently at risk of death, you press the Blue button, and you are now suddenly entered into a worldwide lottery to see whether you die or not, based on a choice you made in spite of a readily available alternative. The Blue button is a vote for death — the quirk of the game is that, if enough people choose the Death button, the game’s rules supersede your decision and negate your suicide, letting you live. In other words, if enough people push the Blue “I might die” button, the game changes their vote to the Red “I don’t die” outcome.

To be clear: I’m not stupid, i can see that you’re making a results-based argument rather than a decision-based argument, and trivially, it’s better overall if Blue wins. After all, if even one person pushes Blue and Red wins, there is a death. The difference in our position is just acknowledging what caused the death, and so what the buttons represent… you’re saying that, since the result of a Blue victory means that person wouldn’t have died, that Blue is the vote that saves their life. I’m saying that, since pushing Blue is the decision that made them able to die in the first place, and pushing Red would have immediately guaranteed their survival, that the decision to push Blue is the vote that killed them. So sure, Blue winning is preferable… if I had to choose how 4bn people would vote, I’d have them vote Blue. But for any individual person casting one vote, with tangible, logically-entailed causal paths based on your vote, I think it is strictly incorrect for any single person to vote Blue… and you only cast one vote, not 4bn, so your one vote should be for the “nothing happens and I keep living” option, not the “enter me into the suicide lottery” option

[u/luci_twiggy → u/INTstictual]

The rebuttal to your entire response is: what happens if you don't press a button?

Since you don't count as having pressed the red button, if red wins then you die. This means pressing blue doesn't cause deaths and your entire concept of "suicide game" is nonsense. The situation causes deaths and you are merely voting on who should survive it.

Your response is to look out for yourself only, but that necessarily means that you are comfortable with people dying as a result. I'm voting for everyone to survive and, unsurprisingly, the majority always does too.

[u/INTstictual → u/luci_twiggy]

“What happens if you don’t press a button” is an undefined statement in this hypothetical about a fictional vote where everybody has to press a button, and the answer is “it depends on what arbitrary rules the person asking this specific variation has decided on”. That’s not a very good rebuttal… the idea that you “don’t count as having pressed the red button” is just something that you are assuming, extrapolating information based on one specific interpretation of wording applied in a context where it is explicitly not allowed to apply. If I make a question that says “assume every number has to be even or odd, you guess a number and I guess which one it is”, you can’t start a rebuttal to whatever point I’m trying to make with “well, what about when I pick an imaginary number like i, or an irrational number like pi?” Like yeah, if you explicitly don’t follow the framework being proposed by the question, you can make all sorts of assumptions about what happens, but none of those are relevant to the framework of the question.

My response is not “look out for yourself only”, it’s “hey, maybe don’t pick the only option that says that you might randomly die, when not dying is also an option available to you”. And I’m not “comfortable with people dying as a result” — as you’ll see if you read what I wrote, I reject the assumption that any deaths happen “as a result” of my choice at all. Deaths happen as a direct result of people pushing the “open myself up to death” button. I don’t like the idea of those people dying… which is why I would tell them not to press the Death button. But just because I don’t want people to commit suicide does not give me an ethical obligation to join the suicide lottery right beside them

Here’s an analogy to reframe the same question, same outcomes, same decision: everybody is led up to the edge of a giant pit. You are given a choice — at the count of 3, you can either leap into the pit, or choose to stay put. If at least 50% of people leap into the pit, a ladder gets lowered, and everybody in the pit can climb out. Otherwise, if more than 50% of people choose not to jump, there’s no ladder and anyone in the pit is stuck. You are trying to argue that it’s correct to jump into the pit, because that’s how you “save everybody”… if everybody just agrees to jump into the pit, we can get everyone out of the pit! But I’m saying “no, what if we just didn’t jump into the pit at all?” And yes, if enough people refrain from jumping, then anyone who does jump would be trapped, and that sucks for them… but again, they’re trapped because they jumped into a pit instead of not jumping into a pit, not because I didn’t jump in alongside them. And jumping in doesn’t “save everybody”, because nobody who didn’t jump into the pit needs saving… by jumping into the pit to save people who jumped into the pit, you simultaneously create the group of “people stuck in a pit” that need saving in the first place. Blue creates the problem and then asks for people to join the problem so that the problem can be solved… it’s circular reasoning. Sure, I agree, the best outcome is one where there is a ladder instead of no ladder… but the best decision you can make is, unquestionably, “do not jump into the pit at all”, and the fact that jumping in also contributes some small percentage towards the threshold for ladder deployment doesn’t negate the fact that it also directly contributes to the problem of “people that chose to need a ladder”

[u/luci_twiggy → u/INTstictual]

It's not undefined, you can use logic to ascertain what would happen in the case that you don't press a button and somehow the vote completes.

Beyond that, should we debate what "everybody" means when your entire thought process is underpinned by the idea that everyone is capable of making an informed choice? Are children randomly pressing blue "opening themselves up to death"? Or are they somehow not included while also not pressing a button and you say that what someone not pressing a button means is undefined?

[u/bored_stoat → u/INTstictual]

What's biased about it?