If the majority votes blue, that’ll work. But if the majority votes red, it’ll be clear who voted which way. There’s no realistic way to hide M&M distribution in an elementary classroom.
There are three ways of interpreting that rule actually:
- If anyone presses the button everyone dies including the presser. Which makes it a completely irrational choice, but also dooms the entire world, as someone in 6 billion people is guaranteed to press the button.
- If anyone presses the button they live and everyone else dies, as long as no one else pressed the black button, which case the pressers are included in “everyone else”. In theory this makes it a rational choice but in practice it’s no different to option 1, the odds of less than two people in 6 billion pressing the button is not meaningfully less than one person.
- All the black button pressers are saved, all the red and blue pressers die (if one or more black buttons are pressed). This basically is just a more extreme version of the red-blue case. Interestingly it’s probably closer to the “everyone does better if they are selfish” case beloved of libertarians. Because your odds of surviving without pressing the black button are obviously so tiny, almost everyone presses the black button and survives.
- Edit: there is a fourth interpretation that it’s just the first person to press the button that survives. Though that again is no different to option 1 except you have one very lonely quick witted libertarian surviving until they die of disease from living amongst 6 billion decomposing corpses
Another variation that might be interesting is to compare the result with your version, to another almost identical one where everyone starts with M&Ms but they are taken away based on the red-blue rules, and see how that is different (though I suspect that would only prove that most kids would have eaten their M&M before you are done explaining the rules )
But it’s not really the same. Getting an M&M is a reward, it’s the thing everyone wants to get, while being killed is a punishment, and a severe one, it’s the thing everyone wants to avoid. Voting Blue with death on the line is a much bigger thing than just an M&M. As is voting Red, you’re essentially saying, “Kill anyone but me!”, that’s a pretty big leap for some people.
But also, “Give me an M&M, but screw that other guy, he doesn’t deserve an M&M” is pretty selfish. You don’t gain anything you couldn’t have had voting Blue, you just deny that reward to the other group, to no real benefit to yourself. Sure, you risk not getting an M&M by voting Blue, but that’s no great loss. And if you know they’re going to run it again, you know you can switch your vote if the other kids are a bunch of selfish pricks, so you’ll get at least one M&M.
Now, you really want to see chaos? Have the number of M&Ms equal the number of kids. If everyone votes Blue, everyone gets an M&M, but if some vote Red, the Reds split all the M&Ms between them. 30 kids, 10 vote Red? They get 3 each. So what happens? Everyone votes Blue, everyone gets one, everyone votes Red, everyone gets one. Perfect altruism and perfect selfishness produce the same results! But even one selfish person ruins it. And if there’s only one altruistic person? Well, then it gets absurd, as you try to split one M&M into 29 pieces so that all the Reds get 1 and 1/29th of an M&M each. That one kids laughs their ass off as they watch 29 selfish brats arguing about how their piece wasn’t exactly 1/29th of the M&M!
That’s exactly my point. The game theory maths has no way to represent that. The expectation of “1.0” that results in pressing red, could mean you get an M&M or you survive. Those are not the same thing.
It is a little but not agreigiously so IMO. It’s only an M&M and you aren’t forcing them to choose blue and put their M&M in jeopardy (maybe they don’t like M&Ms). Of course that highlights another issue with game theory , it assumes everyone has perfect knowledge of the results of their choices and how everyone elses choices affects theirs. In the real world that is about as about as realistic as simulating cows as perfect spheres in a vacuum. If someone loses an M&M because they chose blue it’s more likely to be that they didn’t understand the rules and the implications rather than anything else.
Now your into zero sum game theory which is a whole different set of maths,.which is what gave us Mutually Assured Destruction IIRC
Everyone picks red = everyone lives with zero risk to anyone. Picking blue means risk of death to someone. The logical choice is to pick red. There’s no need for anyone to die.
The OP says that in polls as much as 60% choose red. I suspect that if the scenario were real and death a real possibility, it would be closer to 90%. I would feel horrible for the 10% (in my estimation) that would pick blue in a real world scenario but there is no benefit to throwing away my life when I’m positive that my single vote won’t tip the scales to > 50% blue.
Which is another way of saying that the outcome of the experiment probably shifts enormously depending on whether everyone is individually going in blind, or whether any prior discussion takes place. As many sociologists have noted, historically cash economies were almost never preceded by strict tit-for-tat barter economies; what’s recorded are networks of mutual trust in which “sweetheart deals” and willingness to extend the benefit of the doubt were the rule. Rather like a larger version of the mental calculations people perform to decide whom among their acquaintances gets how lavish a Christmas present.
The problem is that this can’t reasonably extend beyond a Dunbar’s Number of trading partners. Beyond that trade and contract with strangers involves either strict cash on the line, or else trust in a civil order that will punish and make restitution for fraud and theft. The great failure of 20th century command economies was the forced one-way “trust” mandated by the Party.
So actually was just watching an interesting Veratasium on this (who I generally enjoy and does some good science explanations, though is only just inside my limit for smug white dudes explaining stuff to me on the Internet:) )
When you model this mathematically using the the theory that people just choose to betray people who betray historically, and cooperate with people who cooperate, the whole thing works well. When you have clusters of approximately Dunbar number sized groups of people, who are all interconnected with the odd “connector” individual who links different clusters. You are generally exposed to people you trust and hence tend to cooperate, the odd betrayal is not enough to flip the whole system, while still connecting everyone on the planet within the “Kevin Bacon number”. This is basically how the human race has worked since at least the industrial revolution.
However when everyone is connected to everyone else, that’s no longer the case. You are connected to a whole bunch of random people, and much more likely to choose betrayal because you don’t know the people your connected to, who are in turn more likely to choose betrayal themselves, and so on. It only takes a few betrayers in this system to turn everyone into betrayers. Its postulated that this is what social media does to us 
If I’m honest with myself, yes.
Choosing blue is a fool’s choice. Choosing red is the most logical option.
And doing everything you can to explain that to as many people as possible is the altruistic part. Some people won’t understand the logic of Red by themselves, and we need to help them.
I guess I’m naive, but my first thought was “Why would anyone press red (besides people who are sadistic or psychotic)”?
Except the people who would die would be the blue-pushers. After the first push, the only people left would be the ones who pressed red the first time, and so why wouldn’t they keep on doing so?
Everyone picks blue = everyone lives with zero risk to anyone. Picking red means risk of death to someone. The logical choice is to pick blue.
So that’s another interesting question in this hypothetical. Assuming we are given some warning that this is going to happen. What should the governments of world do (besides dropping a few ICBMs on the button/mass-death control building )
Do they launch a blanket state then PR campaign trying to convince everyone to press blue, or press red?
Red and Blue have such political connotations now that the colors are no longer useful. If one button were green and the other black, would your response be the same?
That’s assuming no one in our society is an evil prick. Do you want to bet your life on that? The evil pricks would be delighted to live in a world without people who keep pointing out that they’re evil pricks.
Green = Environmentalists
Black = Black people
Are there any colors that can’t be linked to some social or political entity?
Except picking blue requires the cooperation of others whom you can’t count on, so your noble stance may be nothing but a useless doomed gesture, like voting for a third party in a presidential election. Whereas everyone picking red is a no-lose situation except for those who inexplicably chose to put themselves in harm’s way.
Really, this thought experiment is logically the opposite of the Prisoner’s Dilemma: the Prisoner’s Dilemma is set up explicitly so that seeking a local minima produces the worst outcome for all involved and the best outcome can only be had by altruism. That’s not the case here.
It’s not the opposite. The main premise of the prisoners dilemma still holds. If everyone cooperates, everyone ends up better off. It’s just that if literally everyone also betrays then the result is the same. Oh and also rather than a couple of people it’s the entire population of the globe.
This is the best answer so far. There are no wrong answers, just different values. I’d pick blue, fully aware of the risk. To me, choosing red is selfish and immoral. Surviving by putting others at risk is not worth it. If I die, so be it.
We’re all gonna die. The important thing is to live well.
I disagree. I want what’s best for everyone as well, but I’m also a realist. I think there are enough selfish people—combined with those who are fearful, or distrustful of others, or who are realists—to make it much more likely that the majority will pick the red button. There just aren’t enough people who are that altruistic.
Extending this to the political realm, picking blue in this exercise is not so much emblematic of the U.S. Democratic Party, but that of a hypothetical pure Communist system (that has never existed) that only works when everyone truly puts in their best effort and takes no more than they need. But at a country level—several orders of magnitude larger than Dunbar’s number—this doesn’t take into account human nature, and this is why pure communism simply doesn’t work at the nation-state level.
Similarly, expecting more than half the population (at a nation-state level with hundreds of millions of people involved) to put other’s welfare above their own is as unrealistic as expecting a pure communist political system to work.
Which is why even the center-left U.S. Democratic Party is in favor of capitalism (leavened with welfare capitalism). And capitalism works because it is built on a foundation of self-interest.