I do vote, because voting and not voting has the same level of power (either way I do not impact the outcome, but I do allow my tiny voice to be heard). In this experiment, however, the blue button has the power of voting, while the red button has real power. If I press the blue button there will be no change in the end result. If I press the red button, I definitely will not die. If given the choice between the ability to vote normally for Harris, or to press the red button and guarantee that Trump would not win, people would obviously pick the red button because it actually does something meaningful.
And no, the other example is not the same choice. In the new example pressing the red button is a vote for death. In this thread, pressing the red button is to save a life. They are completely different. It is the blue button that causes death as the person that pushes it is choosing to be added to the kill list. Yes, there is a technicality that says the experimenter doesn’t want the population to be cut by more than half and will scrap the entire experiment if the majority of the population volunteer to have themselves killed, but that doesn’t change that the blue button is the button of volunteering to die and the red button is the button of saving a life.
I swear people are confusing this experiment with a different experiment where something bad is definitely going to happen and people need our help to save them. At the start of the experiment, no one has pushed the blue button. No one is set to die. No one needs you to save them. All we need is people to not volunteer to be needlessly killed. In such a circumstance it is incredibly easy to save everyone by simply having no one volunteer to die. It is a big request to ask that someone volunteer to possibly die in order to save me. It is a very reasonable request for them to take no risk to save themselves and allow me to save myself. No one needs to be a martyr in this experiment because no one is as risk until they decide to needlessly put themselves there.
You have to consider though, asking for blue is a lot to ask, while asking for red is nothing. Imagine an experiment where, if you press the red button you get a million dollars, and if you press the blue button you get nothing unless half the people press blue, and if half the people do press blue then everyone gets exactly 1 million dollars.
If I ask you to press blue I am asking you trust me (and risk your million dollars) for absolutely no gain. You would get the exact same amount of money if you pressed red as if you press blue. There is no advantage in taking this risk. So, if prior consultation is possible, it should be an easy sell to convince everyone to pick red because it is risk free and the reward is just as good as picking blue.
That is the fundamental flaw with this experiment. I struggle to understand why so many people are picking blue when there is no advantage to anyone in doing so. If this thread were the exact same except everyone gets a million dollars if half the population picks blue (and you get no money if most of the population picks red), then I would at least understand why so many people would be risking their lives for blue (and I would probably risk my life for blue in that case as well because there is now a group benefit for picking blue). But in this thread experiment there is simply no reason for anyone to ever pick blue to begin with. Everyone should pick red because it is the same as blue with no risk.
There are two things as work, first people like to pretend they are better people than they are. They say they will do altruistic things when they really wouldn’t (i.e. fewer people will actually push the blue button than are claiming they would).
Second, death is by far the easiest sacrifice because you don’t have to live with your choice. The blue button is the easy choice. You either get to live in a world where everyone you know and love is still alive or you are dead and it isn’t your problem. It’s far more difficult to live in world where one-third of everyone you know died yesterday. If we had this same experiment but the penalty for less than half picking blue was that all the blue voters had their arms and legs removed, we would get far fewer people picking blue. Death is any extremely easy penalty to live with (because you don’t have to live with it). Giving up all your possessions (or your limbs) is a bigger sacrifice that far fewer people would make.
I’d argue thats a feature not a bug. It shows how even in the one off case (where there is no history and no future rounds with the same players to consider) people behavior is not even remotely close to that predicted by rational actors.
It’s a really good thought experiment with lots of nuance
Yes, obviously anyone who understands the consequences of pushing the blue button understands that it could result in their death.
I was pointing out the fact that several people have also stated that this would still be their preference even if they knew it would result in their deaths—including yourself.
I see no reason to think this at all. I would think it’s implied that we take in to account all of the ramifications of our choice before we choose a color.
I don’t think this hypothetical assumes we live in a vacuum. In other words, if there were 3 people locked in a room and if, after the experiment was over they all went back to their lives, red might be the obvious choice. In a game. But if it were a real world choice, and it affected the world you lived in, for me, blue is the obvious choice. I live with enough selfishness as it is - I’d hate to up the percentages.
Ideally, it would be great if I got to keep every last cent I earned. But there is value in infrastructure. There is value (to me) to help the less fortunate. So I pay taxes and donate to worthy causes. And I’m OK with the government spending some of my tax on programs for the mentally ill and extremely poor.
There is real value in working for the common good of mankind. Color me blue.
People really need to rethink how “selfish” the survivors would be in a red button scenario.
Let’s make this smaller and more reasonable. You and your romantic partner are faced with a 2-person version of this situation. If you both press red you both live. If you both press blue you both live. If one pressed red and one blue, then the blue one dies. What do you do?
It comes down to how well you can guess your partner’s behavior (let’s assume you actually like your partner and want them to live). Obviously, if you know your partner is definitely picking blue you would pick blue as well so they don’t die, but would your partner pick blue? You can both pick red and be safe the entire time. Or you can pick blue in an attempt to save your partner from a misguided attempt to save you (I say misguided because you were never in any danger because you had the ability to pick red all along).
Picking blue puts your partner at risk. Your partner would never even have to consider picking blue (and potentially dying if you don’t pick blue as well) if they didn’t think you might do the needlessly risky thing and pick blue to begin with. I repeat, there are absolutely no advantages whatsoever in picking blue. No one should be picking blue. I understand it is viewed as the selfless choice, but really, by picking blue you are forcing other people to either offer to sacrifice themselves to save you or to endure your death. Those are selfish requests, not selfless ones.
It reminds me of those girlfriends you hear about that start a fight with some big guy to see if their boyfriend will save them. That is not altruistic. It is a selfish act as is voting blue and making people come save you. It is attention-seeking behavior at best. It would be far better to keep yourself safe, so your partner doesn’t have to risk his/her life to come save you.
The 2-person partner version of this is an interesting one because you have to know your partner well enough to know if they would do the smart thing and keep themselves safe (so you could also keep yourself safe) or if they would throw themselves into danger (thereby requiring you to throw yourself into danger to save them) because they somehow think it is more noble to put both your lives at risk than it is to keep them both safe to begin with.
No, not sure how you parse “if I’m wrong” to equate with “even if I’m certain I’ll die.” I’m not reading anyone’s comments to say what you’re interpreting, mine included (and I’m sure I know what I meant ).
Granted, there is a small leap in logic here, but I am reading your comment as you saying you would not change your decision even if you’re wrong and this decision will result in your death—and that you are okay with that.
(Indeed, you are explicitly saying you are okay with going to your death because you will have “chosen not to place others at risk.”)
There’s not much of a leap here to say this equates to your being okay with your decision even if you knew it would result in your death.
What else could a statement like this possibly mean?
And to answer my own question …it could mean that you are okay with risking your life but not okay with your decision if you were certain it would result in your death. So then it comes down to how certain you are that the majority will pick blue. (Personally, I’m fairly certain that while many people will indeed pick blue, the majority will not.)
My belief is that most people will choose blue, but I accept the fact that I could be wrong and end up a goner. Not in any way saying whether or not I’d choose blue if I knew for certain it would be a losing cause. Hope it’s clearer. And I think you may be making similar incorrect inferences about the other posters you quoted.
Certainly possible; and if I saw that happening — better yet if after discussion we could all see the vote as it happened and could see, as someone came close to suggesting below, that no one had pressed blue and everyone was pressing red — then under those circumstances I’d press red too, after watching the votes add up for a while.
But I think assuming that really removes the whole dilemma from the situation and makes it not worth positing.
I think what you’re missing is that everyone, including most at least of those in this thread who say they’d press red, agrees that at least without discussion a whole lot of people are going to press blue.
They’re all thinking of those other people who are going to press blue. Many of them assume that of course you mustn’t vote for those people to die; it’s a pure reflex of horror at the idea. (Some will probably think that God is testing them, and voting red is a failure of the test and will damn them. But you don’t have to have that kind of religion, or any kind of religion, to feel at the core of yourself that voting for all those people to die is just Wrong,) Some of them are torn, but between their certainty that huge numbers of people will die if not enough choose blue and their hope that enough will do so, they think it’s worth the gamble.
Are you assuming, unlike just about everyone else in the thread, that even without discussion almost nobody will press blue, possibly because you really can’t believe everyone else’s mind doesn’t work like yours?
The two person version is just classic Prisoners Dilemma, as there is no majority of two people, it’s either one betray or all betray/cooperate. The only difference is the reward for all betray is identical to all cooperate (as opposed to being more for all cooperate in the usual Prisoners Dilemma rules)
The obvious rational choice (defined by Nash Equilibrium but also common sense) is to choose red (aka betray), there is no upside to choosing blue
It was a direct reply to you talking about a scenario with communications and how hard it would be to get 100% red. I was pointing out with communications it would very easily make the leap from bare majority red, (a situation it would never get to, as it would start at significant majority red) to almost unanimous red as soon as it was clearly communicated that red was going to win.
Even without communication, red is going to win, pressing blue doesn’t save anyone.
I think what is different is that I don’t see the red button as a vote for people to die. Quite the opposite, I think the red button saves a life (your own) and the blue button discards a life (also your own) at least potentially. If I could see any benefit to people by voting blue, I would consider it. But blue helps no one unless someone already decided to throw their life away voting blue (and then I would have to consider why they didn’t want to live and whether I should really interfere).
The assumption I struggle with is this idea that “a whole lot of people are going to press blue.” Why? What is causing them to make this clear mistake? Are they confused and think that the red button is a vote for people to die (it clearly isn’t, as all it does is save your own life). Do they think that massive numbers of people are going to risk their lives to save people that were never at risk until they decided to needlessly risk their own lives? Are they control freaks that are so pro-life they will not allow people to purposely kill themselves by choosing the suicide option? Voting blue for an even remotely altruistic reason requires believing that there are massive numbers of people that will risk their lives for no good reason. No one benefits by pressing blue. Blue doesn’t come with a cash prize or any benefit of any kind (other than death, if you view that as a benefit). There should not be an assumption that massive numbers of people need you to save them because there is no reason for people to put themselves at risk to begin with. When you pass a massive hole in the ground you don’t need to hurl yourself into it to save the people that fell in before you because there is no reason to assume anyone fell in prior to your arrival (unless you hear them calling you).
I genuinely don’t understand where this idea that people need saving from themselves even comes from. Do we live in such a nanny state that we assume people cannot possibly make intelligent decisions themselves and we, the masses, need to save these people from their own terrible choices because we cannot imagine a world where massive numbers of people are not constantly making terrible choices that will definitely get them killed if we don’t save them?
There are so many circumstances where blue could be made to be the more desirable choice (literally any circumstance where 50%+ voting blue results in something better than 100% voting red), but in this case blue comes with no advantages, only excess risks, so we don’t need to worry that people need us to save them because there is a not a compelling reason to believe that a massive number of people that truly understand the terms of the experiment would pointlessly add their name to the kill list.
Yes, I see you’ve thrown the ‘potentially’ disclaimer in there but several people here have taken this to be a fact. The outcome of the voting is not known. No one to date (that I’m aware of) has done a scientific study.
That would be impossible to set up because nobody is going to believe they are at genuine risk of death.
Whilst I won’t accuse any particular poster of lying or self-deceit, I would be confident that all the “red pushers” in this thread would do exactly what they said, but some or most of the “blue pushers” would not. This can never be shown outside of a scenario where immediate risk of death is believed to be real though, so can never be demonstrated.
).