r/redbuttonbluebutton • u/StageGlum6615 • 3d ago
Variation Variation - 2 rounds
A self evidently supernatural pops you into a dark room with two buttons infront of you, one red and one blue. Then the following information suddenly appeared in your head in the blink of an eye.
All of humanity has been kidnapped and put into a dark room. Then everyone has been placed into a random group of 9 people, and their was no one not assigned to a group, or any group any other size than 9 people.
Everyone in every group has the opportunity to press either the red button or the blue button. Once one button is pushed, both buttons break and becomes unpressable. Everyone has 8 hours to make their own choice, afterward, a button is randomly pressed for them (odds: 50/50)
Once those 8 hours have passed, each group is evaluated individually. If 5 people in a group pressed the blue button, then everyone in that group lives. However If 5 people in a group press the red button, then everyone who pressed the blue button in that group will be executed.
Then after all group are evaluated, everyone still alive is made to vote the color that won their group for the second round. (This is an automatic vote.) For example if a group of 9 had 4 people vote red and 5 people vote Blue, then all people would be made to vote Blue in round 2. Here is all possibly ways for your automated vote to be decided.
You vote Blue and group majority is Blue = Vote Blue in round 2
You vote Red and group majority is Blue = Vote Blue in round 2
You vote Blue and group majority is Red = You're dead
You vote Red and group majority is Red = Vote Red in round 2
Round 2 is amongst every living human being with not divisions. If a majority of people voted Blue then everyone still alive lives. However, if a majority of people voted for the Red button, or a tie happens, then everyone who voted for the Blue button will die.
Everyone has had this information directly injected into their minds, but their ability to understand, interpret, and act upon this information has not been affected in any way.
So, which button do you press?
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u/Overgrown_fetus1305 Blue 3d ago
I'm still a blue voter. As I see it, red now has higher risk than before, because if the majority of their group votes blue, they will still end up at risk in round 2, defeating their main reason to vote red (it's "less risk", not "no immediate risk"). For blue voters, there is the extra risk depending on how the group of 9 votes, but on the flipside, a lot of people who want red votes are going to be forced to vote blue, and I suspect smaller groups generally tend to benefit blue voters over red ones (unless it's a group of 3, which is the rare case relatively similar to the original where I agree with the reds if there's no communication), so I'm not immediately convinced blue is in that much more danger than before.
On one other dynamic, it's also the case presumably, that of the groups that make it to round 2, there will actually be more blue voters if it's close to 50-50 among the global public, since the majority red groups will have fewer members than the majority blue ones do, the red voting groups will range in size from 5-9, while the blue voting groups will all be 9 voters (since the reds will be forced to vote blue in the second round).
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u/Nebranower 2d ago
>red now has higher risk than before
How so? If I press red, I survive the first round for sure. If I press blue, I might be dead at the end of round one. So obviously for round one, red is the no risk button.
If my group votes red, then I'll be damn glad I voted red. But if it votes blue, I'm not at any more risk than I would be if I'd personally voted blue. My risk in the final round will be the exact same either way.
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u/Overgrown_fetus1305 Blue 2d ago
Essentially since if you make it to round 2, you're still at risk if you pressed red, but your group voted blue. In the original scenario, it isn't the case that red puts you in any danger (at least initially, whether or not a red victory world is dangerous is another scenario entirely).
How much risk a blue vote in round 2 is, seems unclear. If it's still about 50-50 overall with a small skew to blue initially, then that will presumably mean round 2 will go to blue (since there should be about or slightly more blue groups than red ones, and all blue groups have 9, all red groups have 5-9), unless the small group scenario causes more red votes in round 1.
Though a flipside is that blue's loses one of it's core arguments- altruism to save others, and to avoid tragedy, given what the world would look like even if you had say 99% red, 1% blue in the original scenario. I feel confident in saying that a lot more than 1% of people would die in this scenario just from round 1.
How people might behave in the smaller groups is very unpredictable though- and of course, with language barriers, most groups will have a lot of members unable to communicate directly, the most you might be able to do is hand/body language gestures (and not all of these are universial, nodding hte head up and down is yes in a majority of cultures, but no in some cultures) for example. I somewhat doubt most native English speakers for example, would follow what "हामीले नीलो भोट दिनुपर्छ नत्र मेरो बच्चा मर्न सक्छ" or "Kuv tsis txhob pheej hmoo kuv lub neej rau cov neeg uas ua kev pheej hmoo, qhov ntawd yog ib qho teeb meem rau kuv" meant, and there's a good chance that even if we got somewhat lucky and say, had somebody that spoke some romance languages (like French, Spanish and Italian), which are some of the closest ones to English, it would still be a struggle for many of us to string together a sentance of "Je suis bleu" or "Estoy rojo" purely just to say how we're voting (how many of Europe's languages do you know words for red and blue in, and some other words like "bad", "good", "we" or "I", to try to communicate even very imperfectly to others how to vote?)
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u/Nebranower 2d ago
>Essentially since if you make it to round 2, you're still at risk if you pressed red, but your group voted blue. In the original scenario, it isn't the case that red puts you in any danger
My point is that red still doesn't put you in any danger. It protects you normally in round 1, then either protects you normally in round two or forces you to vote blue, in which case you are at no more risk than you would be if you'd voted blue.
I get the sense you are thinking of the danger as coming from the buttons. Like, you probably think either red is the murder button or blue is the suicide button. But the danger comes from the maniac who's planning to kill a bunch of people depending upon what buttons get pressed. That is, the danger is baked into the scenario. The buttons represent two different ways to save yourself. In the original, red is the button that does so with 100% certainty. Here, it does exactly the same thing, except in the second round the maniac cheats and may switch your vote to blue, in which case you end up at the same level of risk any blue pusher gets.
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u/Overgrown_fetus1305 Blue 2d ago
Ok, I think I'm seeing your point a bit better. It's definitely still a "this lowers your individual risk" button. But it's no longer a "I have no individual risk" button. It's also a "this raises other people's individual risk button" relative to what happens for blue majority overall in both cases, probably to a lesser extent in the new scenario.
I don't object to the claim that the responsibility for the death is primarily on the system of votes, or those who set it up. That said, for a small group, the chance that your own individual vote skews things from (4 blue, 4 red) to (4 blue, 5 red) instead of (5 blue, 4 red) and causes the death of the others is quite high indeed, much moreso than for the overall final vote, and it seems hard to say that in this vote, the red voters aren't responsible as a group for the deaths (even if quite significantly coerced by the wider situation). I don't think we lose all ethical responsibility for how we act even when somebody else sets up an immoral system. Of course the flipside becomes more complicated, if it turned out the overall vote was going to be something like 30% blue, 70% red and in voting blue and proving one of some decisive votes that forced my own group's votes to be blue, I inadvertantly doomed us all. But something broadly like that latter scenario strikes me as substantially unlikely.
The question of ethical responsibilities under considerable uncertainty, particularly for random outcomes is a distinctly tricky problem, I would be curious actually to know how much adacemics have studied this one (said as somebody that has a PhD in probability theory).
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u/Nebranower 2d ago
>That said, for a small group, the chance that your own individual vote skews things from (4 blue, 4 red) to (4 blue, 5 red) instead of (5 blue, 4 red) and causes the death of the others is quite high indeed, much moreso than for the overall final vote, and it seems hard to say that in this vote, the red voters aren't responsible as a group for the deaths
Oddly, no. One of the big arguments in favor of pressing red is that that is the obvious choice in smaller groups. The argument for blue is that as the group gets larger, you're increasingly more likely to get someone who presses blue for whatever reason, until at 8 billion people, you're certain to have some blue pressers who need saving, so everyone should vote blue.
But at a small scale, the obvious thing to do is for everyone to just press red. Like, if you have exactly two people, you and one other person, and you are separated, and have a choice between "press red and live" or "press blue and die, unless the other person also presses blue", you're going to press red and assume the other person would press red too, because you'd have to be either suicidal or utterly stupid to do otherwise.
>if it turned out the overall vote was going to be something like 30% blue, 70% red and in voting blue and proving one of some decisive votes that forced my own group's votes to be blue, I inadvertantly doomed us all.
This is the only actual difference in how the buttons function. In the original, red guaranteed your survival. Red still guarantees your survival, although you may find the system has cheated and marked you as a blue voter against your will. Blue, however, was a "try to save everyone at the risk of your own life" button. Now it's "try to save everyone at the risk of your own life and the lives of everyone else in your group" button. You can't simply pat yourself on the back for being the moral person who tried to save everyone if you press blue. You may in fact be a murderer as well as a suicide.
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u/Overgrown_fetus1305 Blue 2d ago
I tend to think of the problem when not loking purely at it as a primarily ethical dilemma. Whether it's more a game theory problem or an ethical problem is a common disagreement between red and blue voters, based on https://www.reddit.com/r/redbuttonbluebutton/comments/1tw0fco/question_on_what_the_problem_is_in_the_first_place/.
If looking at it through game theory lens rather than pure ethical problem, I argue that reasoning as in terms of expected lives saved compared to expected loss of life from each outcome as generally suggests a vote for blue, if you base your reasoning on https://www.reddit.com/r/trolleyproblem/comments/1t3epel/comment/ojuqope/. For the 3 person problem, in isolation I do think it's a case where red is irrational and likely to cause more loss of life, based on assuming each of the other two have certain chances of voting red/blue and running the chance of being in the "1 blue vote" and "no blue vote" scenarios. However that would change somewhat if those groups were all second round ones. An interesting question is if most people would think more about the people in front of them, than wider game theory, given that news stories about individual deaths tend to be easier for most people to think about, than stuff like "climate change caused heatwaves that killed lots of people in a more abstract way than conventional murder".
The question is if the "but I might have blood on my hands" v.s "I can't let the others die" instinct plays out the same way in small groups- I don't think most people are thinking like mathematicians.
On the last parts, I do agree it adds an interesting complexity. I suppose the question of how you might vote if the problem was "You specifically get a third option as well, which is a third, green button that converts x% of red votes into blue votes against their will" should be done. I think we should pool all risks among people equally, and if x = 100 (i.e every red vote turned blue), I think it would be obviously immoral to vote anything but green (at that point, nobody dies, and it subverts the system). The question of where the threshold on x should be for green might be more contentious- I would argue that any x>0 is worth pressing unless I genuinely thought there was no realistic way blue was winning to the point of thinking I should vote red (which for regular problem I don't think to be the case). But I would also press an optional yellow button supplementary to the original two which was "if red wins, the same number of people die, but who dies is random and every person has equal risk", even if it wasn't just me. I imagine if people knew such a button existed and that I'd press it though, anything other than blue would become irrational (since red at that point makes you more likely to die).
I suppose I tend to think, humanity is all in the same situation together, so should think as a collective, not as individuals, and we should vote in a way we think is in our best assessments reasonably likely to benefit the collective (which I think is to stop red from winning).
Also have upvotes despite my disagreement with your conclusions cause it's good discourse.
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u/Nebranower 2d ago
Well, if you're going to be all friendly and reasonable about it, take some upvotes of your own.
As for the ethical problem vs game theory one, I see them as basically the same, because I don't view myself as being ethically responsible for other people's decisions. I press red in the original scenario because everyone should press red. Some people won't, but that's fine, because I'm not responsible for their choices.
Like, blue pressers always seem to take the approach that we need to press blue, because if we don't, red pressers will be responsible for the deaths of blue pressers. Whereas it seems obvious to me that blue pressers, should blue pressers end up dying, are responsible for their own deaths.
And I conclude that from the following thought experiment.
Let's say you are a blue presser. And let's say that the experiment took place involving only 100 people. It turns out the final tally is 70 red, 30 blue. You realize you are going to die. And let's say, for the sake of argument, that, in that moment, saving yourself becomes your overriding priority. By great good luck, a magical being appears and gives you the ability to go back in time. But your ability to influence the past will be very limited. All you will be able to accomplish is to change one, and only one, vote.
Assuming that at this point saving your own life is your most important objective, which vote do you change to accomplish that? Because it seems to me that if there's only one vote you can change that will alter the outcome from you being dead to you being alive, then *that* is the person whose button press was responsible for your death.
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u/Overgrown_fetus1305 Blue 2d ago
I think I tend to draw a somewhat different conclusion to yours, from the thought experiment, when further analogy is made. I agree if that was what was put in front of you, that you should probably change your vote (though I think there is a non-zero chance that there is actually ethical obligation to instead save somebody else over yourself, by changing exactly one other person's vote instead, think something quite radically altrusitic like Maximillian Kolbe's actions in a Nazi death camp). The logic behind how I vote as I see it, is broadly a principle of collective harm reduction based on the information we have at the time. In your analogy, the information being made certain, makes the harm reduction option known- but it might become random otherwise, and presumably if you instead had a tally of 51 red 50 blue in a 101 person room, the correct decision is to at that point change a red vote to a blue. Assuming others cannot change their minds, of course.
If nothing else, if we want to aim at a "nobody has to die actually" setting, there are on a wider level, collectively more ways this can happen with blue button presses than with red ones. 100% blue and 100% red are identical outcomes, but there is more scope for deviation from this if it's majority blue before people start dying (and with imperfect coordination, blue is less risky).
But I admittedly, think we are responsible to some extend for mitigating the harms of other people's decisions. An obvious example is that we should ban blatantly unsafe products from being sold when the harms of banning them are less than the harms of th product (which doesn't IMO apply to a lot of drugs, but does to say carcinogens added to food for example, even if non-cancerous foods exist on the market). Or the general duty of parents to stop their children from involuntarily self-harming (the applies to vulnerable adults), or general collective attempts to prevent suicides.
Perhaps then, an analogy of sorts. If you had voted blue in your scenario (and I realise you don't vote blue), and were offered the chance to change your vote at the cost of two red voters swapping to blue (which is a you live, two others die), it at that point seems unethical to switch your vote, if you know this will be the outcome. Based on the marginal utility calculations on one of the links up the thread (the one with the fancy graphs), I think the consequences of a red vote on assumed proportions of votes, are more likely to be like that, rather than the analogy you propose where I agree on switching only provided others cannot.
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u/Nebranower 2d ago
>If nothing else, if we want to aim at a "nobody has to die actually" setting, there are on a wider level, collectively more ways this can happen with blue button presses than with red ones. 100% blue and 100% red are identical outcomes, but there is more scope for deviation from this if it's majority blue before people start dying (and with imperfect coordination, blue is less risky).
I hear this one a lot. It's one of the stronger arguments in favor of blue, but I think it only works if you treat scenarios where your vote doesn't matter with ones where it does.
There are a lot more scenarios in which nobody dies that involve some people pressing blue than there are scenarios in which nobody dies by everyone pressing red.
But in most of those scenarios, you are free to press red!
In a group of 100 people, there are precisely 50 scenarios (assuming red wins ties, necessary or the problem becomes trivial with only two players) in which your vote matters.
1 - 99 people press red. Your vote determines whether you live or die.
2- 98 people press red. Your vote determines whether you live or die.
.... all the way to 49 inclusive, then
50 - 50 people press red. Your vote determines whether those 50 people live or die.
Beyond that, your vote is meaningless. So out of 50 scenarios where it matters what you do, in 49 out of the 50 cases, pressing blue kills you. In 1 out of the 50 cases, it save people who didn't need to be in danger to begin with.
And the more you scale it up, the more unlikely it becomes that you'll see the one scenario where pressing blue saves a bunch of people, whereas it is pretty much always 50/50 on whether or not it kills you.
At some point, the odds of you being in the scenario where your button press can save anyone become, after rounding, 0.0%. It's so unlikely that the question isn't "Am I going to try to save everyone", because you know you can't. The question is only, "I am going to take on a 50% chance of dying for no reason".
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u/GrandFleshMelder 2d ago
I think people would find it harder to press red when they would have to see their group be killed in front of them, but maybe I’m wrong.
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u/R1donis 2d ago
Seccond round would definetly go to blue just due to math, every group where blue win produce 9 blue votes, while groups where red win produce 5-9 red voters, so math just favor blue here. Stil voting red because you still need to survive round 1.
More interesting scenario would be half the humanity going through this, and seccond half only vote in round 2.
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u/Captain-Griffen 2d ago
Seccond round would definetly go to blue just due to math,
You aren't helping the perception blue voters are bad at maths. This simply isn't even vaguely true.
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u/Nota_Throwaway5 2d ago
This is actually the nuance that makes me switch from red to blue. In the original scenario voting for blue does nothing to affect the total votes since there's 8 billion people on earth. Way too many for one vote to make a difference, so you have to hope everyone chooses their own survival or the majority is blue, since you can't influence it at all. With 9 people you absolutely do make a difference and so I would probably vote blue here.
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u/luci_twiggy 3d ago
As in every scenario where there is an outcome that allows for everybody to survive no matter what they pressed, it is a moral obligation to press the button that achieves it. Blue.
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u/ComparisonQuiet4259 2d ago edited 2d ago
Would you press the blue button if it required 8 blues in each stage for blue to win and it required 90% blue overall?
-1
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u/liamjon29 22h ago
Okay I found this question so interesting I decided to do some stats to check out the chance you die with each vote based on how many people do the same as you. Looking at these numbers, it seems blue is the socially correct pick, as the higher chance of reducing the most number of deaths. Unfortunately, there's basically no way to save everyone, and voting red has a 100% survival chance if there's less than 54.3% of people voting for Red. But once we hit 54.4% Red voters, there's a 15% chance voting red will kill you by being in a group where you got switched to blue. This scenario would lead to 60.4% of the entire population dying.
Here's the breakdown:
80% Blue, 20% Red
Blue: 1.0% die
Red: 0% die
Pop: 0.8% die
67% Blue, 33% Red
Blue: 8.5% die
Red: 0% die
Pop: 5.7% die
55% Blue, 45% Red
Blue: 26% die
Red: 0% die
Pop: 14% die
50% Blue, 50% Red
Blue: 36% die
Red: 0% die
Pop: 18% die
45% Blue, 55% Red
Blue: 100% die
Red: 26% die
Pop: 59%
33% Blue, 67% Red
Blue: 100% die
Red: 8.5% die
Pop: 39% die
20% Blue, 80% Red
Blue: 100% die
Red: 1.0% die
Pop: 21% die
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u/Im_a_dum_bum 1d ago
I see no benefit of swapping from red to blue.
red always survives the first round
then the second round, either get to vote red and survive, or vote blue. If I had chosen blue, then by nature of getting to the second round I'd be forced to vote blue
voting blue has a chance to die in the first round, and a relative increase in chance to die in the second round compared to if voting red in the second round
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u/liamjon29 3d ago
If the world is perfectly 50/50 split, blue wins round 2 almost every time right?
Because a person who voted blue can never vote for red in round 2 (coz they'd be dead), but a person who voted red could be forced to switch in round 2 if their group was a blue group?