How do 3.3 billion people die if no one votes BLUE?
So put this other way, if you are given a couple of hours to discuss your decision with your next of kin, what are you recommending to your loved one who is erring towards pressing blue ? Are you ok with that or are you convincing them to press red? If you do are you still pressing blue?
Or vice versa ? What are you saying to your loved one who’s tending to towards pressing red?
Extreme disappointment. By bringing up loved ones I was trying to circumvent the enthusiastic disregard some people seem to have for their fellow human beings who are mere strangers. I’m not pushing the red button because the only thing that sounds worse than death is living in a world populated solely by the kind of people who press the red button.
And you’d be ok if that changes their mind and the reds end up in majority? Bear in mind there is effectively zero chance your loved one’s red press is the one that gives the reds majority (just as there is effectively zero chance of no one pressing blue), all it would mean is your loved one dies.
Well, at least they wouldn’t be living in a world of…well, this isn’t the pit. Let’s just say there are some things worse than death.
By pressing red I kill nobody except in the extremely unlikely event that it gets decided 3,500,000,000 to 3,499,999,999. In practice pressing blue is a 100% suicide action as there is no way blue is getting over 50%
This certainly of an untested result seems nearly religious among the red button pushers. If you are wrong and everybody lives, are you even capable of regretting your decision?
If I play Blackjack and have a hard 20, should I regret my decision to stand if it turns out that the next card out the deck is an ace, and the dealer ends up getting 21? I made the right decision based on the realistic info to hand, I can’t second guess that if the world moves irrationally.
If that is the case, then you are all but committing suicide if you pick blue too. You are adding one more to the list of victims
In an attempt to convince you, let me present two scenarios.
In the first, you and a number of other people are on a seagoing ship that has foundered and started to sink. None of you can swim. The captain comes on the loudspeaker and says that a rescue ship is already on the way, but, as things currently stand, will not arrive before the ship sinks. The good news is that they have exactly the number of life jackets as the number of people on board. Everyone can line up and receive their life jacket. Alternately, he says, people can decide to donate their life jackets to put in the cargo hold to try to keep the ship afloat. If at least 50% of the people decide to do so, enough buoyancy can be created to keep the ship afloat until the rescue ship arrives. Unfortunately, if even one few makes that decision, the ship will sink before help arrives, taking everyone who has donated their life jacket with it. Everyone should step up to the desk to either receive their life jacket and be helped into the water, or state their intention to donate their life jacket, in which case it will be put into the hold. Unfortunately, the captain says he cannot make the decision for anyone and, due to privacy concerns, cannot reveal anyone else’s decision to anyone.
So, what decision do you make? What decision do you encourage others to make? Does that change if you have loved ones on board? (please disregard any perceived advantages of waiting for the rescue ship in the stricken ship vs in the water with a life vest, they are the same)
Don’t you pick taking the life jacket and encourage everyone else to? Why would you introduce uncertainty when the option to take the life jacket so clearly ensures that everyone survives?
Second, consider the scenario from the OP but but a blue button is not an option. So, the situation essentially is everyone is going to die, except that anyone pushing the red button will not. Everyone has the option to push the red button. You are given the perfect solution to a terrible problem. There is no moral gray area here, there is no less than ideal solution. Everyone survives. No one is harmed by your pushing of the button.
After considering this, and as each person is about to push the red button, a new condition is suddenly added, the choice of the blue button. The introduction of the blue button choice thus introduces complexity and the perception of moral choice into a problem that already has a perfect solution. We already know that we should push the red button and that everyone else should as well. The blue button is a less perfect choice (because it adds the possibility of death for those that choose it).
The blue button introduces the potential for unnecessary and misguided altruism. No one needs your help. They are perfectly capable of helping themselves! This is the opposite of the Tragedy of the Commons. Everyone “selfishly” helping themselves results in the best collective outcome. You should choose red and encourage everyone else to choose red as well.
At this point I’m repeating myself, so I’m just going to do this one last time:
Where in the world are you getting the idea that everyone would push the red button? That is absolutely unrepresentative of reality. I understand why you say anyone COULD press the red button – it assauges your guilt that you’re willing to kill 3 billion people to assure your own safety – but you don’t actually believe that everyone is going to press the red button, right? People are going to push the blue button thinking it’s the right thing BECAUSE IT IS the right thing. It’s a low bar that we can all use where no one gets hurt. I think all of you people who keep harping on “everyone can press the red button” like that’s a real possibility of happening are being dishonest at this point. Pushing the red button is not a “perfect solution” because THERE IS NO WAY every single person on Earth makes that decision.
Not a single one of you has actually given your best guess as to how many people would actually press the blue button. You just keep repeating “everyone CAN press the red button” over and over again, convinced that you’re doing the right thing by killing millions of people.
Pushing the red button kills at least a billion people. Probably several. Acting like there are no consequences to it is absolutely crazy pants. Meanwhile pushing the blue button actually gives us a “perfect scenario.”
Only if you sincerely believe that 8 billion people can independently all make the red decision. Which you KNOW is impossible. How in the world is most people pressing the red button and billions dying better than the outcome of NO ONE DYING? You’re saying that billions of deaths is a better outcome than no deaths. I don’t think I’m missing anything, and yet you’re all so confident that somehow a scenario where billions of people will absolutely without a doubt die is a better scenario than one in which no one would die.
It’s bizarre to me how simultaneously confident you all are that you are correct, and yet none of you will actually give your best prediction of the actual outcome of what you propose.
That’s a really great point. In “community comes before me” nations like those, I’d guess a significant majority pick blue. And that’s lots of people.
Yes, exactly. The best decision, the moral one, is not always the one that guarantees your survival. Heck, sometimes it guarantees your death.
I will point out that I went back and read the OP and it does say “everyone in the country”, so that does change the odds. I thought I remembered it as everyone in the world. I suppose we’d have to agree on what country we’re talking about to give a realistic projection of how people might vote, but I guess we’d probably go to US defaultism on this one. I don’t think the OP actually meant to make what country we’re talking about the important part – really, the hypothetical works just as well with the entire world – but differences in culture would make a difference as to how people would vote and how relevant these half-remembered psychological studies where 60% of people choose red are.
I do think if it’s worldwide, blue would win more than 50%. If it’s just the US I’m not sure, but I suspect it would be, especially if there was no one to communication and no one to explain to you why they feel like red is a better strategy.
I’m still pushing blue, even if it’s US only. Fuck it, kill me, and then pat yourselves on the back about how smart you were to kill 40% of people when you could’ve killed 0.
Again, except in an extremely unlikely scenario where exactly 50%+1 of the population pressed red nobody who presses red is killing ANYBODY.
That’s not a very useful way to think. Every person that votes red is equally guilty. You’re essentially saying that no vote is worth anything unless it’s the tie breaking vote, but that’s a shallow and inaccurate way to view it. By that logic, no one is responsible for Donald Trump being president, because there was no exact tie that was tie broken by one vote, and therefore no single vote decided he’d become president. You don’t have to be the tie-breaking vote or for the vote to come down to one vote to have voted for something to happen.
If you want me to guess, I’d estimate that 15-20% of the population would die. An unavoidable* fate, I can’t do anything to stop them dying, the red train has already left the station.
*unavoidable from everybody else’s perspective, completely avoidable on an individual level by themselves.
Of course, some of those others may be people you care a great deal about. You’d be voting for them to die. Maybe your much loved partner, parent, child, grandchild, long term best friend. Going to have a happy life, knowing that you chose to kill them?
There’s this, too. Rational self interest, if it’s really rational, should include the fact that you’re extremely likely to need some sort of help at some time in your life. If red wins, all the people who might have provided it will be gone. And no, don’t just count on paying for it; if red wins, certainly enough people will die all at once to bring on massive financial disruption in every country.
If there’s no discussion, as is postulated, you won’t get the chance.
If there is discussion, blue is very likely to win, and your argument falls apart.
As postulated, it’s only necessary to postulate that no more than 49% of us are evil pricks. And if that’s not true we’re screwed anyway.
Hah!
Anyway, I say it’s rational to vote blue. Reasons above.
The time to decide isn’t specified. No discussion is specified.
No, because nobody has to go swimming at all, let alone in the unnetted area.
In this hypothetical nobody can leave the game.
What do you think that world will be like, in the immediate aftermath, with three or four billion dead including some of just about everyone’s loved ones?
In the long run, it might possibly be better, for ecological reasons: though only if the immediate results don’t cause massive damage (and bear in mind that a lot of the people trying to protect the environment will be among the dead.) But in the long run, you and all those other people who thought they were saving their lives by pushing red will be dead. You’re going to die. You can die well or badly. Pushing red, logically, drastically increases your chances of dying badly.
Absolute nonsense. Are you seriously under the dual delusions that everyone makes decisions based on pure logic, and that everyone’s use of logic leads them to the same conclusions?
I think your own arguments show that isn’t true. There is no logical process that can look at the historical record of human behavior and conclude that either part of it is how humans actually behave. Therefore you aren’t arguing from a logical basis.
How about responsible for the state of the world they’ll wind up living — and, certainly eventually, quite possibly very soon — dying in?
Whether or not there is discussion is not specified. It’s not explicitly stated there can’t be discussion. The description of the dilemma in the OP is…
That could cover the case where you have 10 seconds to decide and no time to even say the dilemma out loud, up to the entire world having months to debate, the aid (or hindrance) of governments and big businesses and everyone else and their dog, campaigning for their preferred choice.
I have to agree with this way of thinking. I don’t consider voting red to be the less ethical choice, because anyone that wants to live will vote red. The only reason to vote blue is because you are either hoping to die or because you think other people that want to live are too stupid to vote red.
There is a circumstance where I can understand that thinking. Does every human get to vote? Are there going to be 2 month old babies who vote and their fate is determined by whichever button they happen to touch first (without having any idea what the result would be)? In that case, yes, vote blue. There are literally innocent people without the competence to make an informed choice and they need you to save them.
But most of the time that isn’t the case. The blue party often infantilizes adult members of society by acting like they have to protect them from their own incompetence. In this case, people that want to live will push the red button and if everyone that wants to live pushes the red button, no one that wants to live will die. That is a positive outcome. If no one is trying to force their life choices on anyone else (by forcing them to live even though they picked blue so they could die) then all people that want to live will live. The only people that die in this game are people that think they need to push their pro-life choice on others by picking blue and “protecting” the people that didn’t want to live from getting what they wanted.
I’ll repeat, if this experiment is full of truly incompetent people (like babies) then I understand the need to vote blue. But if it is full of intelligent people that understand the rules of the game (like people on this message board) I know I could vote red with a clear conscious because all of you understand that we all live if we simply all vote red (which is the color of the “I want to live” button).